N. T. Wright Quotes

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.

It is a matter of glimpsing that in God's new creation, of which Jesus's resurrection is the start, all that was good in the original creation is reaffirmed. All that has corrupted and defaced it--including many things which are woven so tightly in to the fabric of the world as we know it that we can't imagine being without them--will be done away. Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.

Right answers to difficult questions are better than wrong answers to difficult questions.

True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.

The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.

The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.

To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance.

problematic within post-Reformation dogmatics. Is faith something I `do' to earn God's favour, and, if not, what role does it play? Once we release Paul's justification-language from the burden of having to describe `how someone becomes a Christian', however, this is simply no longer a problem. There is no danger of imagining that Christian faith is after all a surrogate `work', let alone a substitute form of moral righteousness. Faith is the badge of covenant membership, not something someone `performs' as a kind of initiation test.

All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

For the Deist ... prayer is calling across a void to a distant deity. This lofty figure may or may not be listening. He, or it, may or may not be inclined, or even able, to do very much about us and our world, even if he (or it) wanted to ... all you can do is send off a message, like a marooned sailor scribbling a note and putting it in a bottle, on the off-chance that someone out there might pick it up. That kind of prayer takes a good deal of faith and hope. But it isn't Christian prayer.

Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.

God will himself one day hold all humans, and all human governments, to account, but the church has the responsibility in the present to speak words of truth and judgment in advance of that final holding-to-account.

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.

When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

the word 'justification' has itself had a chequered career over the course of many centuries of debate. As the major historian of the doctrine has noted, the word has long since ceased to mean, in ecclesial debates, what it meant for Paul himself - which is confusing, since the debates have gone on referring to Paul as though he was in fact talking about what they want to talk about. It is as though the greengrocer treated you to a long discussion of how onions are grown, and how best to cook with them, when what you had asked was how much he would charge for three of them.

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Jesus himself, as the gospel story goes on to its dramatic conclusion, lives out the same message of the Sermon on the Mount: he is the light of the world, he is the salt of the earth, he loves his enemies and gives his life for them, he is lifted up on a hill so that the world can see.

I have always taken the view that sometimes war may be justified, as police action can be justified, to protect the weak and vulnerable (a major preoccupation in scripture). But this is an old and difficult question and very wise people take different views.

True worship doesn't put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn't forced, isn't half-hearted, doesn't keep looking at its watch, doesn't worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.

Worship will never end; whether there be buildings, they will crumble; whether there be committees, they will fall asleep; whether there be budgets, they will add up to nothing. For we build for the present age, we discuss for the present age, and we pay for the present age; but when the age to come is here, the present age will be done away.

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

When people with power see things happen of which they disapprove, they drop bombs and send in tanks. When people without power see things happen of which they disapprove, they smash store windows, blow themselves up in crowded places, and fly planes into buildings. The fact that both methods have proved remarkably unsuccessful at changing things doesn't stop people from going on in the same way.

I'm not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols - money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol - you become like what you worship. That's one of the basic spiritual laws.

I'm very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.

Justice never means "treating everybody the same way", but "treating people appropriately".

There's all the difference in the world between humbly saying "I want to find more light from Scripture than we have yet had" and saying "I'm going to prove the rest of the Church wrong and do something totally new!"

God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.

Of course there are people who think of 'heaven' as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.

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.

Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.

Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.

God is the Creator God, he doesn't want to say, "Okay, creation was very good, but I'm scrapping it." He wants to say, "Creation is so good that I'm going to rescue it."

Jesus didn't really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.

Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

Genesis 1...was designed to reflect God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship.

If you don't have properly constituted civic authorities you will encourage vigilantism and solo efforts at retributive justice - which is anarchy, and God doesn't want his world to be anarchic.

I feel about John's gospel like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn't claim to understand her.

It shouldn't be difficult, then, to make the transposition at this point into the early Christian vision of Jesus and the Spirit and the way in which the material world is both celebrated and renewed through their work. The Jewish basis for the early Christian patterns of belief and behavior is clear. It is important that God's people are embodied, because God made this world and has no intention of abandoning it. The material of creation is a vessel made to be filled with God's new life and glory, even though the transformation may involve suffering, persecution, and martyrdom.

Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are but also to the way things will be, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of G-D as the waters cover the sea. That remains a surprising hope, and perhaps it will be the artists who are best at conveying both the hope and the surprise.

Heard in full sound, the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy, and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.

The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.

Without God's Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit, the church simply can't be the church.

When Jesus's followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn't tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.

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.

Hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once.