N. T. Wright quotes
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“The closer you get to the truth, the clearer becomes the beauty, and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That's why theology and worship belong together.”
-- N. T. WrightSource : N. T. Wright (2014). “For All God's Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church”, p.12, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
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“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.”
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“From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn't see things in this horribly oversimplified way.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what grief is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you’re not just a spectator, but you’re actually part of the drama which has him as the central character.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“The point of justice and mercy anyway is not ‘they deserve it’ but ‘this is the way God’s world should be’, and we are called to do those things that truly anticipate the way God’s world WILL be.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“People often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“Jesus doesn't give an explanation for the pain and sorrow of the world. He comes where the pain is most acute and takes it upon himself. Jesus doesn't explain why there is suffering, illness, and death in the world. He brings healing and hope. He doesn't allow the problem of evil to be the subject of a seminar. He allows evil to do its worst to him. He exhausts it, drains its power, and emerges with new life.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“The rule of love, I say again, is not an optional extra. It is the very essence of what we [Christians] are about”
-- N. T. Wright -
“The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“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. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“The whole point of the kingdom of God is Jesus has come to bear witness to the true truth, which is nonviolent. When God wants to take charge of the world, he doesn't send in the tanks. He sends in the poor and the meek.”
-- N. T. WrightSource : "N.T. Wright: On Jesus and Writing". Interview with Marcia Z. Nelson, www.publishersweekly.com. November 23, 2011.
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“The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“My proposal is not that we understand what the word ‘god’ 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 ‘god’ to be recentered around that point.”
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“When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“To pray 'your kingdom come' at Jesus' bidding meant to align oneself with his kingdom movement.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“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.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world”
-- N. T. Wright -
“God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.”
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“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.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“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.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.”
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“It is central to Christian living that we should celebrate the goodness of creation, ponder its present brokenness, and, insofar as we can, celebrate in advance the healing of the world, the new creation itself. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, and many other expressions of human delight and wisdom, can all be explored in new ways.”
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“That is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises to God the creator and God the rescuer from the creation that recognizes its maker, the creation that acknowledges the triumph of Jesus the Lamb. That is the worship that is going on in heaven, in God's dimension, all the time. The question we ought to be asking is how best we might join in.”
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“If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.”
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“Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion...”
-- N. T. WrightSource : "The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is". Book by N. T. Wright, 1999.
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“The whole point of what -Jesus was up to was that he was doing close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term in the future. And what he was promising for that future and doing in the present was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing -people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose — ​and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that large project.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“When Jerusalem is destroyed, and Jesus' people escape from the ruin just in time, that will be YHWH becoming king, bringing about the liberation of his true covenant people, the true return from exile, the beginning of the new world order”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.”
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“The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.”
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“The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating thet God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven." "The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“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 -
“We cannot worship the suffering God today and ignore him tomorrow. We cannot eat and drink the body and blood of the passionate and compassionate God today, and then refuse to live passionately and compassionately tomorrow. If we say or sing, as we so often do, 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit', we thereby commit ourselves, in love, to the work of making his love known to the world that still stands so sorely in need of it. This is not the god the world wants. This is the God the world needs.”
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“The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world ... The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow, challenges to take up, and urgent tasks to perform. This is all part of what is known loosely as fellowship.”
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“Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“Worship is love on its knees before the beloved; just as mission is love on its feet to serve the beloved”
-- N. T. WrightSource : N. T. Wright (2014). “For All God's Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church”, p.12, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
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“As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infant, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother. "If God is our father, the church is our mother." The words are those of the Swiss Reformer John Calvin ... it is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“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 -
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“[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“It's not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.”
-- N. T. WrightSource : N. T. Wright (2004). “Luke for Everyone”, p.200, Westminster John Knox Press
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“Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”
-- N. T. Wright -
“To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.”
-- N. T. Wright -
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“The church isn't simply a collection of isolated individuals ... we need to learn again the lesson that a hand is no less a hand for being part of a larger whole, an entire body. The foot is not diminished in its freedom to be a foot by being part of a body which also contains eyes and ears. In fact, hands and feet are most free to be themselves when they coordinate properly with eyes, ears, and everything else. Cutting them off in an effort to make them truly free, truly themselves, would be truly disastrous.”
-- N. T. Wright
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