Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times – of our time and God’s time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet – is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God’s presence.”

— N. T. Wright

156. “The question of “canon and creed,” which underlies quite a bit of this book, has become quite urgent and controversial and needs to be addressed from the point of view of those of us who are actually working with the biblical canon itself rather than using the word “canon” as shorthand for the systematic theology they already possess.”

— N. T. Wright

157. “The resurrection declared that Jesus was not the ordinary sort of political king, a rebel leader, that some had supposed. He was the leader of a far larger, more radical revolution than anyone had ever supposed. He was inaugurating a whole new world, a new creation, a new way of being human. He was forging a way into a new cosmos, a new era, a form of existence hinted at all along but never before unveiled.”

— N. T. Wright

158. “I’m a people person. I like being with people. So I like being a teacher, and so on.”

— N. T. Wright

159. “God has committed himself, ever since creation, to working through his creatures – in particular, through his image-bearing human beings – but they have all let Him down.”

— N. T. Wright

160. “Take away the stories of Jesus’s birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well.”

— N. T. Wright

161. “The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God’s future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.”

— N. T. Wright

162. “The good news that Jesus announced, like the good news that his first followers announced about him, was not a piece of advice, however good. It was about something that had happened, about something that would happen as a result, and about the new moment between those two, the moment in which people were in fact living, whether they realized it or not.”

— N. T. Wright

163. “But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold – and yet if you’d never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn’t believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.”

— N. T. Wright

164. “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

165. “Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.”

— N. T. Wright

166. “I really don’t care too much what the different later Christian traditions say. My aim is to be faithful to Scripture.”

— N. T. Wright

167. “For me, actually, being a bishop in a bishopric where there’s an academic tradition gives me this fascinating, challenging, but open invitation to say, “We want you to be a scholar. We want you to go on doing this. But do it as a bishop!””

— N. T. Wright

168. “Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word.”

— N. T. Wright

169. “A ‘conservative believer’ must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.”

— N. T. Wright

170. “I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

172. “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

173. “We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one – or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.”

— N. T. Wright

174. “I have met many Roman Catholic theologians who will emphasize as much as any good Protestant preacher that everything comes from the love and grace of God.”

— N. T. Wright

175. “Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath.”

— N. T. Wright

176. “Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.”

— N. T. Wright

177. “Death is the last weapon of the tyrant; the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated.”

— N. T. Wright

178. “When it became clear that in fact my father was saying, “It will be interesting to see what you want to do when you grow up,” I realized that there was no pressure on that front. And I remember huge relief: Hey, I can go and do what I really know I have to do!”

— N. T. Wright

179. “Human” is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.”

— N. T. Wright

180. “Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.”

— N. T. Wright

181. “If Luke and John were simply constructing narratives to combat Doceticism, they surely shot themselves in the foot with both barrels when they spoke of Jesus appearing through locked doors, disappearing again, sometimes being recognized, sometimes not, and finally ascending into heaven.”

— N. T. Wright

182. “I accept the historical challenge, and with that, I accept the essentially Christian position that God always has more light to break out of his holy Word.”

— N. T. Wright

183. “The gospel is not itself about you are this sort of a person and this can happen to you. That’s the result of the gospel rather than the gospel itself.”

— N. T. Wright

184. “Your calling may be to find new ways to tell the story of redemption, to create fresh symbols tat will speak of a home for the homeless, the end of exile, the replanting of the garden, the rebuilding of the house.”

— N. T. Wright

185. “Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.”

— N. T. Wright

186. “The garden is far less likely to grow weeds if we have been planting flowers.”

— N. T. Wright

187. “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

188. “The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We.”

— N. T. Wright

189. “What we hope for includes the wise human leadership and initiative which will, like that of Joseph in Egypt, bring about fresh and healing policies and actions.”

— N. T. Wright

190. “Looking back to the earlier centuries of the church, most of the great teachers were also bishops and vice versa. It’s only fairly recently that the church has had this great divide.”

— N. T. Wright

191. “It’s very easy for a church just to slide along from week to week, taking it for granted that we do our services like this and that, and we celebrate the sacraments like this and that.”

— N. T. Wright

192. “The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.”

— N. T. Wright

193. “The great monotheistic faiths declare, in full view of the apparently contrary evidence, that the present world of space, time, and matter always was and still is the good creation of a good God.”

— N. T. Wright

194. “If you ask people in England where does Tom Wright sit on the theological spectrum, they say, “Well he’s an evangelical of course,” as though, come on, get used to it.”

— N. T. Wright

195. “In a sense, learning to follow Jesus is simply learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer.”

— N. T. Wright

196. “The power of the bleeding love of God is stronger than the power of Caesar, of the law, of Mars, Mammon, Aphrodite and the rest. This is the point that Paul grasped. And that is the reason for the Colossians’ gratitude. The battle has been won.”

— N. T. Wright

197. “I knew that I had to be a preacher. I had to be a minister, which was a puzzle to me because my dad was a businessman. It was a family company and I assumed that I would take it on from him.”

— N. T. Wright

198. “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

199. “Our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.”

— N. T. Wright

200. “A piety that sees death as the moment of “going home at last,” the time when we are “called to God’s eternal peace,” has no quarrel with power-mongers who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends. Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God’s justice and of God as the good creator. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it.”

— N. T. Wright