N. T. Wright Quotes
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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. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

55. “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

56. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

58. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

61. “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

62. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

65. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

68. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

70. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

78. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

84. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

95. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

97. “Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.”

— N. T. Wright

98. “I’m very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

100. “We have to train ourselves to use words accurately. And there’s so much loose Christian talk, for which I’ve no doubt been as guilty as any.”

— N. T. Wright