N. T. Wright Quotes
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201. “The garden is far less likely to grow weeds if we have been planting flowers.”

— N. T. Wright

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

— N. T. Wright

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “In God’s kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.”

— N. T. Wright

216. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

218. “What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil – what it is or why it’s there – but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.”

— N. T. Wright

219. “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

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. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

231. “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

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

— N. T. Wright

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul’s world is that kind of exercise.”

— 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. “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

244. “Following Christ in the power of the Spirit means bringing to our world the shape of the gospel: forgiveness, the best news that anyone can ever hear, for all who yearn for it, and judgment for all who insist on dehumanizing themselves and others by their continuing pride, injustice, and greed.”

— N. T. Wright

245. “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

246. “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

247. “When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father’s purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.”

— N. T. Wright

248. “Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.”

— N. T. Wright

249. “Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep.”

— N. T. Wright

250. “In many churches, the good news has subtly changed into good advice: Here’s how to live, they say. Here’s how to pray. Here are techniques for helping you become a better Christian, a better person, a better wife or husband. And in particular, here’s how to make sure you’re on the right track for what happens after death. Take this advice: say this prayer and you’ll be saved. You won’t go to hell; you’ll go to heaven. Here’s how to do it. This is advice, not news.”

— N. T. Wright