Quotes About N.T. Wright

The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation. Now

The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.

The Psalms do not, that is, offer us an answer for "the problem of evil." But they are clear where the answer is not to be found. It is not to be found where the pantheist wants to find it, suggesting that "evil" is merely a matter of our perception and that the world just is the way it is and we should get used to it.

This meant, inevitably, that the victory would have to be implemented in the same way, proceeding by the slow road of love rather than the quick road of sudden conquest. That is part of what the Sermon on the Mount was all about.

As C. S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.3

And it left, and leaves, the way open for the Nietzschean response that has once more come to the fore in our own day: who needs love when you can have power?

Far too much traditional church has consisted of too much tradition and not enough church.

Combining apocalyptic visions of God's coming kingdom, and public service within the present one, appears shocking to the Enlightenment mindset.

One way and another, all three synoptic gospels are clear: in telling the story of Jesus they are consciously telling the story of how Israel's God came back to his people, in judgment and mercy.

suggestion that "sin" does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain.

Sin," then, is not simply the breaking of God's rules. It is the outflowing of idolatry.

The best guess has him a little younger than Jesus of Nazareth; a birth date in the first decade of what we now call the first century is as good as we can get. As for

without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken.

So, many have concluded, if Jesus was wrong we must find a way of salvaging something from the wreckage. This is the point at which many writers have turned Jesus into either a moralist (the route Wilson takes) or an existentialist (Bultmann's route). That is a way of having your cake and eating it: of having Jesus, without the embarrassment of his rather odd views about the immediate future.

But for him the incarnate Son is also Israel's Messiah.

The point is that the resurrection, if it had occurred, would undermine not only the Enlightenment's vision of a split world but also the Enlightenment's self-congratulatory dream of world history reaching its destiny in our own day and our own systems.

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them.

in the Bible we are saved not simply so we can go to heaven and enjoy fellowship with God but so that we can be his truly human royal priesthood in his world.

In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world?

The question Paul faces in 3:21–26 is then the double problem of human sin and idolatry, on the one hand, and the divine faithfulness, on the other.

Forgiveness doesn't mean "I didn't really mind" or "it didn't really matter.

The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise. "I will sing praise to my God while I have being." The glory of God, said the theologian Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive.

The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last.