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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

159. “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

160. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

162. “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

163. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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 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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

189. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

191. “In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.”

— N. T. Wright

192. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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