N. T. Wright Quotes

God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?

The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.

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

One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.

As we are set free by that love from our own pride and fear, our own greed and arrogance, so we are free in our turn to be agents of reconciliation and hope, or healing and love.

Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.

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

Blessed are the pure in heart; how will people believe that, unless we ourselves are worshipping the living God until our own hearts are set on fire and scorched through with his purity?

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

The resurrection gives you a sense of what God wants to do for the whole world.

I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

First-hand acquaintance with the actual texts is always the best way.

I accept the historical challenge, and with that, I accept the essentially Christian position that God always has more light to break out of his holy Word.

Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God's saving, sovereign kingdom.

We have to train ourselves to use words accurately. And there's so much loose Christian talk, for which I've no doubt been as guilty as any.

But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

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.

Resurrection means bodily life after ‘life after death,’ or, if you prefer, bodily life after the state of ‘death’

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

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.

The power of the gospel lies[...] in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God's new world has begun.

To pray 'your kingdom come' at Jesus' bidding meant to align oneself with his kingdom movement.

I have never been to India and I am not a specialist on Indian culture, and I would not wish to be heard to be taking swipes at a culture which I've never experienced and where I've never lived.

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.

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.

Death is a monster; death is horrible.

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.

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.

A 'conservative believer' must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.

It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

[Albert] Schweitzer thus carved out his own path through the first half of this century, a lonely and learned giant amidst the hordes of noisy and shallow theological pygmies.

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.

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.

The phrase "spiritual journey" is one that I've only become familiar with comparatively recently. We wouldn't have put it like that when I was a kid.

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

I'm a people person. I like being with people. So I like being a teacher, and so on.

The gospel is not itself about you are this sort of a person and this can happen to you. That's the result of the gospel rather than the gospel itself.

My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another.

Fortunately, Paul is much more interesting than most of his interpreters, myself included.

Rest you well, beloved Jesus, Caesar’s Lord and Israel’s King, In the brooding of the Spirit, in the darkness of the spring

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

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.

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.

What many people today assume Christianity to be is basically Plutarch plus Jesus.

I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.

I've had to do all kinds of jobs to pay the rent. I've even worked in a Cornish tin mine.

When I look at some of my old work, the pieces I find most interesting are the ones with people in them.

You could always go on changing things but there comes a time when you have to decide to stop.

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.