Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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. “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

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. “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

157. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

159. “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

160. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God.”

— N. T. Wright

168. “What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is differentthe End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah.”

— N. T. Wright

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

184. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

186. “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

187. “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

188. “The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God’s wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can’t cope with this. They make their own ‘truth,’ creating ‘facts on the ground’ in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.”

— N. T. Wright

189. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

191. “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

192. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

194. “As St. Paul says, what matters isn’t so much our knowledge of God as God’s knowledge of us; not, as it were, the god we want but the God who wants us. God help us, we don’t understand ourselves; how can we expect to understand that Self which stands beside our selves like Niagara beside a trickling tap?”

— N. T. Wright

195. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

197. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

199. “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

200. “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