Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2023 Update)
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51. “The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.”

— N. T. Wright

52. “One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

54. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

56. “The work of the kingdom, in fact, is summed up pretty well in those Beatitudes. When God wants to change the world, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the mourners, those who are hungry and thirsty for God’s justice, the peacemakers, and so on.”

— N. T. Wright

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance.”

— N. T. Wright

60. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

72. “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

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. “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

75. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

78. “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

79. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

81. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?”

— N. T. Wright

91. “It’s partly that I’m an extrovert and that I like being with people. If you shut me up in a library with nothing else around for weeks on end, I’d go mad! I have to sort of go out...”

— N. T. Wright

92. “To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.”

— N. T. Wright

93. “The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.”

— N. T. Wright

94. “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

95. “Certainly Paul shares the view of the Old Testament prophets that God will one day flood the world with justice and joy – and that this has begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

97. “Scripture is, at its heart, the great story that we sing in order not just to learn it with our heads but to become part of it through and through, the story that in turn becomes part of us.”

— N. T. Wright

98. “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

99. “Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God’s plan to put his whole world right. That is how the revolution works.”

— N. T. Wright

100. “Right answers to difficult questions are better than wrong answers to difficult questions.”

— N. T. Wright