Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

105. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

107. “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

108. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

110. “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

111. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

114. “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

115. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

130. “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

131. “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

132. “Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.”

— N. T. Wright

133. “Having lots of members of my family who were in ministry in one form or another, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that at quite an early age, I was very, very conscious personally of the love of God.”

— N. T. Wright

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.”

— N. T. Wright

138. “It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to “fix” the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn’t a mistake there’s no way back.”

— N. T. Wright

139. “By all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church’s original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy.”

— N. T. Wright

140. “Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.”

— N. T. Wright

141. “Sing these songs, and they will renew you from head to toe, from heart to mind. Pray these poems, and they will sustain you on the long, hard but exhilarating road of Christian discipleship.”

— N. T. Wright

142. “So what does Paul mean here? Doing it declares it: breaking the bread and sharing the cup in Jesus’s name declares his victory to the principalities and powers.”

— N. T. Wright

143. “Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.”

— N. T. Wright

144. “As C. S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.3.”

— N. T. Wright

145. “The phrase “spiritual journey” is one that I’ve only become familiar with comparatively recently. We wouldn’t have put it like that when I was a kid.”

— N. T. Wright

146. “But the failure of Christianity is a modern myth, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of telling the proper story of church history, which of course has plenty of muddle and wickedness, but also far more than we normally imagine of love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope. To.”

— N. T. Wright

147. “We applaud patience, but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”

— N. T. Wright

148. “God’s kingdom” in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming “on earth as it is in heaven.”

— N. T. Wright

149. “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

150. “Life after death, it seems, can be a serious distraction not only from the ultimate life after life after death, but also from life before death.”

— N. T. Wright