N.T. Wright Quotes

72 Sourced Quotes

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

N.T. Wright
Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all.

N.T. Wright
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.

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
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
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.

N.T. Wright
The point of following Jesus isn't simply so that we can be sure of going to a better place than than this after we die. Our future beyond death is enormously important, but the nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We're called, here and now, to be instruments of God's new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched by Jesus and of which Jesus's followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents.

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.

N.T. Wright
[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

N.T. Wright
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.

N.T. Wright
The 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
What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is differentthe End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah

N.T. Wright
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.

N.T. Wright
Left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

N.T. Wright
Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

N.T. Wright
Many of the questions we ask God can't be answered directly, not because God doesn't know the answers but because our questions don't make sense. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, many of our questions are, from God's point of view, rather like someone asking, "Is yellow square or round?" or "How many hours are there is a mile?

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

N.T. Wright
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.

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

N.T. Wright
Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.

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
Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.

N.T. Wright
Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.

N.T. Wright
Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, exciting and worthwhile though that is, but thought through and relished, planned and prepared -- an ultimately better way for the relationship to grow and at the same time a way of demonstrating what the relationship is all about.

N.T. Wright
I believe we face the question: if not now, then when? And if we are grasped by this vision, we may also hear the question: If not us, then who? And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?

N.T. Wright
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?

N.T. Wright
We will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.

N.T. Wright