Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Death is a monster; death is horrible.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

105. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

107. “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

108. “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

109. “When we say, “Jesus died for our sins” within a message about how to escape this nasty old world and go to heaven, it means one thing. When we say, “Jesus died for our sins” within a message about God the creator rescuing his creation from corruption, decay, and death, and rescuing us to be part of that, it means something significantly different.”

— N. T. Wright

110. “Sometimes people have come to a crisis of conscience, perhaps having lived much of their lives without any time for God, and have then tried to twist God’s arm to be nice to them after all. That’s a poor substitute for genuine worship and love of God – though God remains gracious and merciful, and ready to welcome people however muddled they may be.”

— N. T. Wright

111. “First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart.”

— N. T. Wright

112. “At the individual level, the great controlling myth of our time has been the belief that within each of us there is a real, inner, private ‘self’, long buried beneath layers of socialization and attempted cultural and religious control, and needing to be rediscovered if we are to live authentic lives. When we ‘discover’ this ‘true authentic self’, we must do whatever it dictates, even if it means ignoring the norms of the ‘unenlightened’ society all around us.”

— N. T. Wright

113. “When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God.”

— N. T. Wright

114. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

116. “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

117. “Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.”

— N. T. Wright

118. “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

119. “The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be “orthodox” or “conservative” Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract “atonement” that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it.”

— N. T. Wright

120. “14And the Word became flesh, and lived among us. We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

— N. T. Wright

121. “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

122. “God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?”

— N. T. Wright

123. “In God’s kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.”

— N. T. Wright

124. “So instead of suggesting that we could escape the earth to go to heaven, Jesus’s good news was about heaven coming to earth.”

— N. T. Wright

125. “Fortunately, Paul is much more interesting than most of his interpreters, myself included.”

— N. T. Wright

126. “What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil – what it is or why it’s there – but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.”

— N. T. Wright

127. “One of the things I find depressing about some of the upper echelons of Anglicanism on both sides of the Atlantic is that it’s sort of taken for granted that we all basically know what’s in the Bible, and so we just glance at a few verses for devotional purposes and then get on to the real business.”

— N. T. Wright

128. “My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another.”

— N. T. Wright

129. “The author extols the power of having significant portions of God’s Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature through window from across the room. But by taking in more lengthy passages of Scripture, we are like someone who, intrigue, gets right next to the window to take in more of the view that it offers, basking in more of the arc of the whole the whole narrative.”

— N. T. Wright

130. “All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.”

— N. T. Wright

131. “The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.”

— N. T. Wright

132. “Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.”

— N. T. Wright

133. “In many churches, the good news has subtly changed into good advice: Here’s how to live, they say. Here’s how to pray. Here are techniques for helping you become a better Christian, a better person, a better wife or husband. And in particular, here’s how to make sure you’re on the right track for what happens after death. Take this advice: say this prayer and you’ll be saved. You won’t go to hell; you’ll go to heaven. Here’s how to do it. This is advice, not news.”

— N. T. Wright

134. “Creation is good, but it is not God. It is beautiful, but its beauty is at present transient. It is in pain, but that pain is taken into the very heart of God and becomes part of the pain of new birth.”

— N. T. Wright

135. “The dreams we have that refuse to die – dreams of freedom and beauty, of order and love, dreams that we can make a real difference in the world – come into their own when we put them within a framework of belief in a God who made the world and is going to sort it out once and for all, and wants to involve human beings in that process.”

— N. T. Wright

136. “All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.”

— N. T. Wright

137. “What the Bible offers is not a “works contract,” but a covenant of vocation. The vocation in question is that of being a genuine human being, with genuinely human tasks to perform as part of the Creator’s purpose for his world.”

— N. T. Wright

138. “Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it.”

— N. T. Wright

139. “I have never been to India and I am not a specialist on Indian culture, and I would not wish to be heard to be taking swipes at a culture which I’ve never experienced and where I’ve never lived.”

— N. T. Wright

140. “Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.”

— N. T. Wright

141. “New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. “The ruler of this world” has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus’s triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the.”

— N. T. Wright

142. “Israel isn’t chosen in order to be God’s special people while the rest of the world remains in outer darkness. Israel is chosen to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Israel is chosen so that, through Israel, God can bless all people. And now Jesus is calling Israel to be the light of the world at last. He is opening the way, carving a path through the jungle towards that vocation, urging his followers to come with him on the dangerous road.”

— N. T. Wright

143. “The New Testament says the Word became flesh. Sacramental theology is all about discovering, in fear and trembling, how to allow that Word to go on becoming flesh.”

— N. T. Wright

144. “The line between justice and injustice, between things being right and things not being right, can’t be drawn between “us” and “them.” It runs right down through the middle of each one of us.”

— N. T. Wright

145. “I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.”

— N. T. Wright

146. “As Bob Dylan once said, “‘I am the Lord thy God’ is a fine saying, as long as it’s the right person who’s saying it.”

— N. T. Wright

147. “When Jesus’s followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn’t tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.”

— N. T. Wright

148. “Of course there are people who think of ‘heaven’ as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that’s a problem as old as the human race.”

— N. T. Wright

149. “While some who downplay Christ’s divinity have imagined Jesus as a great social worker ‘being kind to old ladies, small dogs and little children,’ orthodox Christianity has not wanted Jesus to have a political message.”

— N. T. Wright

150. “The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now.”

— N. T. Wright