The Christian is prepared to say, 'I don't like the sound of this, ... but if this is what it really means, I'm going to have to pray for grace and strength to get that into my heart and be shaped by it.'
N. T. WrightIn the New Testament outside the Gospels and the beginning of Acts, again and again, the fact of Jesusโ resurrection is closely linked to our own ultimate resurrection, which isnโt life after death โ itโs life after life after death.
N. T. WrightJesus' death was seen by Jesus himself ... as the ultimate means by which God's kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.
N. T. WrightDeism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.
N. T. WrightMy proposal is not that we understand what the word โgodโ means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross-and that we take our courage in both hands and allow our meaning for the word โgodโ to be recentered around that point.
N. T. WrightThe only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present.
N. T. Wright