Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the world’s true Lord.”

— N. T. Wright

52. “Jesus himself, as the gospel story goes on to its dramatic conclusion, lives out the same message of the Sermon on the Mount: he is the light of the world, he is the salt of the earth, he loves his enemies and gives his life for them, he is lifted up on a hill so that the world can see.”

— N. T. Wright

53. “When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven’t yet really understood who he is or what he’s done.”

— N. T. Wright

54. “True worship doesn’t keep looking at its watch.”

— N. T. Wright

55. “Part of Christian belief is to find out what’s true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.”

— N. T. Wright

56. “The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton.”

— N. T. Wright

57. “I feel about John’s gospel like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn’t claim to understand her.”

— N. T. Wright

58. “Resurrection means bodily life after ‘life after death,’ or, if you prefer, bodily life after the state of ‘death’”

— N. T. Wright

59. “God’s kingdom is coming in and through the work of Jesus, not by taking people away from this world but by transforming things within this world, bringing the sphere of earth into the presence, and under the rule, of heaven itself.”

— N. T. Wright

60. “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.”

— N. T. Wright

61. “When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.”

— N. T. Wright

62. “If you’re a Christian you’re just a shadow of your future self.”

— N. T. Wright

63. “There’s all the difference in the world between humbly saying “I want to find more light from Scripture than we have yet had” and saying “I’m going to prove the rest of the Church wrong and do something totally new!””

— N. T. Wright

64. “You can’t reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.”

— N. T. Wright

65. “God’s plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was “very good.” Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.”

— N. T. Wright

66. “God made humans to reflect his glory, his love, his wisdom into the world, and in the new creation God will not revoke this vocation. He will gloriously fulfill it. We will become more human, not less.”

— N. T. Wright

67. “The Holy Spirit in enabling the already-justified believers to live with moral energy and will so that they really do please God again and again.”

— N. T. Wright

68. “The line between good and evil runs, not between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but down the middle of each of us.”

— N. T. Wright

69. “I’m not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols – money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol – you become like what you worship. That’s one of the basic spiritual laws.”

— N. T. Wright

70. “Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.”

— N. T. Wright

71. “Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.”

— N. T. Wright

72. “The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.”

— N. T. Wright

73. “That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain.”

— N. T. Wright

74. “Swords don’t glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all.”

— N. T. Wright

75. “Being saved’ doesn’t just mean, as it does for many today, ‘going to heaven when they die’. It means ‘knowing God’s rescuing power, the power revealed in Jesus, which anticipates, in the present, God’s final great act of deliverance’.”

— N. T. Wright

76. “Jesus didn’t really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he’d defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.”

— N. T. Wright

77. “Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project.”

— N. T. Wright

78. “The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.”

— N. T. Wright

79. “Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn’t come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what’s required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.”

— N. T. Wright

80. “According to the book of Revelation, Jesus died in order to make us not rescued nonentities, but restored human beings with a vocation to play a vital part in God’s purposes for the world.”

— N. T. Wright

81. “The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.”

— N. T. Wright

82. “Heard in full sound, the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy, and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.”

— N. T. Wright

83. “It isn’t that God basically wants to condemn and then finds a way to rescue some from that disaster. It is that God longs to bless, to bless lavishly, and so to rescue and bless those in danger of tragedy – and therefore must curse everything that thwarts and destroys the blessing of his world and his people.”

— N. T. Wright

84. “Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn’t. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him – but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction.”

— N. T. Wright

85. “The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It’s a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus’s kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.”

— N. T. Wright

86. “Now love doesn’t stop at death – or if it does, it’s a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of nothingness. But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved in prayer before God.”

— N. T. Wright

87. “The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.”

— N. T. Wright

88. “God’s justice is a saving, healing, restorative justice, because the God to whom justice belongs is the Creator God who has yet to complete his original plan for creation and whose justice is designed not simply to restore balance to a world out of kilter but to bring to glorious completion and fruition the creation, teeming with life and possibility, that he made in the first place.”

— N. T. Wright

89. “People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified – in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they’ve never realized that the word ‘resurrection’ simply didn’t mean that.”

— N. T. Wright

90. “The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.”

— N. T. Wright

91. “Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins.”

— N. T. Wright

92. “When you’re writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you’ve deliberately missed something out.”

— N. T. Wright

93. “When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted and so on.”

— N. T. Wright

94. “Since sin, the consequence of idolatry, is what keeps humans in thrall to the nongods of the world, dealing with sin has a more profound effect than simply releasing humans to go to heaven. It releases humans from the grip of the idols, so they can worship the living God and be renewed according to his image.”

— N. T. Wright

95. “Indian leaders are saying, “You don’t understand our caste system. It’s really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on.” I don’t think that’s quite fair.”

— N. T. Wright

96. “What we have at the moment isn’t as the old liturgies used to say, ‘the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,’ but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.”

— N. T. Wright

97. “Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.”

— N. T. Wright

98. “The fact is that when we forgive someone we not only release them from the burden of our anger and its possible consequences; we release ourselves from the burden of whatever it was they had done to us, and from the crippled emotional state in which we shall go on living if we don’t forgive them and instead cling to our anger and bitterness.”

— N. T. Wright

99. “The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost.”

— N. T. Wright

100. “What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.”

— N. T. Wright