Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance.”

— N. T. Wright

52. “Justice never means “treating everybody the same way”, but “treating people appropriately”.”

— N. T. Wright

53. “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

54. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

57. “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

58. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

66. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

72. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

74. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

77. “Hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

79. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

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

— N. T. Wright