Quotes from NT Wright

has made, and particularly to and within his people Israel.

Exile" wasn't just geographical. It was a state of mind and heart, of politics and practicalities, of spirit and flesh. As long as pagans were ruling over the Jews, they were again in exile.

The old idea that the goal of Christian existence is simply "going to heaven" doesn't, in fact, do very much to stimulate the fully fledged virtue we find advocated in the New Testament.

The Christian role, as part of naming the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on territory presently occupied by idols, is to speak the truth to power and especially to speak up for those with no power at all.

There are temptations to idolatry at every level, and the greater the good the greater the temptation.

And it left, and leaves, the way open for the Nietzschean response that has once more come to the fore in our own day: who needs love when you can have power?

There was no template of expectations out of which, granted the crucifixion of Jesus, one might have anticipated the sophisticated range of interpretation that the early Christian movement in fact produced, understanding the death of Jesus as a messianic victory and connecting it with the long-awaited divine return.

Connecting the dots of Paul's journeys, actual and planned, is like mapping a royal procession through Caesar's heartlands.

The spiritual starvation diet offered by secularism made people so hungry that they now eat anything.

A fully Christian view of the Bible includes the idea of God's self-revelation but, by setting it in a larger context, transforms it. Precisely because the God who reveals himself is the world's lover and judge, rather than its absentee landlord, that self-revelation is always to be understood within the category of God's mission to the world, God's saving

Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.

To begin with, you have to grasp the fact that Christian virtue isn't about you—your happiness, your fulfillment, your self-realization. It's about God and God's kingdom, and your discovery of a genuine human existence by the paradoxical route—the route God himself took in Jesus Christ!—of giving yourself away, of generous love which constantly refuses to take center stage.