Top 250 N. T. Wright Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The most important decisions we make in life are not made by post-Enlightenment left-brain rationality alone.”

— N. T. Wright

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.”

— N. T. Wright

210. “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

211. “The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods:.”

— N. T. Wright

212. “How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom!”

— N. T. Wright

213. “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

214. “If the Bible is not simply “revelation,” neither is it simply a devotional aid, even the primary devotional aid.”

— N. T. Wright

215. “I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.”

— N. T. Wright

216. “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

217. “If you believe in the Bible, you’ve got to do business with it and not just screen it out.”

— N. T. Wright

218. “In fact, like most things in life that really matter – love, beauty, justice – you can’t prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras’s theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.”

— N. T. Wright

219. “The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.”

— N. T. Wright

220. “The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that’s what I think has happened.”

— N. T. Wright

221. “Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.”

— N. T. Wright

222. “Saul of Tarsus, in other words, had found a new vocation. It would demand all the energy, all the zeal, that he had devoted to his former way of life. He was now to be a herald of the king.”

— N. T. Wright

223. “The Gospel is not meant to make people odd or less than fully human; it is mean to renew them in their genuine, image-bearing humanness.”

— N. T. Wright

224. “Perhaps even “his own people” – this time not the Jewish people of the first century, but the would-be Christian people of the Western world – have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a “religious” leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus’s contemporaries did.”

— N. T. Wright

225. “I work in a very tough area of Britain. There is not much hope sociologically where I live and work, they’re all sorts of conditions of poverty and deprivation and so on, I really do believe that the message of the kingdom of God is for places like this.”

— N. T. Wright

226. “We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can’t be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.”

— N. T. Wright

227. “The gospel by which individuals come to personal faith, and so to that radical transformation of life spoken of so often in the new Testament, is the personalizing of the larger challenge just mentioned: the call to every child, woman, and man to submit in faith to the lordship of the crucified and risen Jesus and so to become, through baptism and membership in the body of Christ, a living, breathing anticipation of the final new creation itself.”

— N. T. Wright

228. “And with all this we lift up our eyes and realize that when the New Testament tells us the meaning of the cross, it gives us not a system, but a story; not a theory, but a meal and an act of humble service; not a celestial mechanism for punishing sin and taking people to heaven, but an earthly story of a human Messiah who embodies and incarnates Israel’s God and who unveils his glory in bringing his kingdom to earth as in heaven.”

— N. T. Wright

229. “Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you’ve got to believe to be a good sound Christian.”

— N. T. Wright

230. “Human was simultaneously the bearer of God’s wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience.”

— N. T. Wright

231. “Trying to jump from an earthquake, a tsunami, a pandemic or anything else to a conclusion about ‘what God is saying here’ without going through the Gospel story is to make the basic theological mistake of trying to deduce something about God while going behind Jesus’ back.”

— N. T. Wright

232. “Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato’s safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it’s in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.”

— N. T. Wright

233. “News is an announcement that something significant has happened. And good news is what Jesus and his first followers were all about.”

— N. T. Wright

234. “Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.”

— N. T. Wright

235. “One of the great gains of biblical scholarship this last generation, not least because of our new understanding of first-century Judaism, is our realization that the temple was central to the Jewish worldview.”

— N. T. Wright

236. “29“I’ll tell you the truth,” replied Jesus. “No one who has left a house, or brothers or sisters, or mother or father, or children, or lands because of me and the gospel 30will fail to receive back a hundred times more in the present age: houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and lands – with persecutions! – and finally the life of the age to come. 31But plenty of people at the front will end up at the back, and the back at the front.”

— N. T. Wright

237. “Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history.”

— N. T. Wright

238. “But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive.”

— N. T. Wright

239. “The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus’s first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament.”

— N. T. Wright

240. “Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend “who is still liable to surprise us.”

— N. T. Wright

241. “The only reason the death of Jesus was ever thought of as good news was because of what happened next.”

— N. T. Wright

242. “When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn’t.”

— N. T. Wright

243. “We could cope – the world could cope – with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples’ minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God’s new creation right in the middle of the old one.”

— N. T. Wright

244. “I didn’t write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.”

— N. T. Wright

245. “All this means that we are called to be people who learn to hear God’s voice speaking today within the ancient text, and who become vessels of that living word in the world around us.”

— N. T. Wright

246. “The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were all written within two generations of the time of Jesus – in other words, by the end of the first century at the latest – though most scholars would put most of them earlier than that.”

— N. T. Wright

247. “Jesus wasn’t just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news – something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.”

— N. T. Wright

248. “But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God’s kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God’s kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.”

— N. T. Wright

249. “Jesus’s message to his contemporaries, and the church’s message about Jesus, never fit what people expect. Often enough, they don’t fit what the church itself expects.”

— N. T. Wright

250. “It has forgotten that the gospels are replete with atonement theology, through and through – only they give it to us not as a neat little system, but as a powerful, sprawling, many-sided, richly revelatory narrative in which we are invited to find ourselves, or rather to lose ourselves and to be found again the other side.”

— N. T. Wright