Quotes from NT Wright

Most revolutions breed new tyrannies; not this one. This is the Father's revolution. It comes through the suffering and death of the Son. That's why, at the end of the Lord's Prayer, we pray to be delivered from the great tribulation; which is, not surprisingly, what Jesus told his disciples to pray for in the garden. This revolution comes about through the Messiah, and his people, sharing and bearing the pain of the world, that the world may be healed.

those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.

The divine purpose through Israel for the world is the subject of the passages both before and after 3:21—26. There is every reason, therefore, for taking "God's righteousness" in 3:21 in its normal biblical sense of "covenant faithfulness.

within the institution, breaking out into new worlds, leaving behind the shrine which had become a place of worldly power and resistance to his purposes.

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

There is every reason too to understand the display of that "righteousness" as connected with God's somehow rescuing the world from idolatry and sin, through Israel, in order to create a single worldwide family for Abraham. The actual arguments Paul advances on either side of our passage, in other words, strongly support a reading of dikaiosyn? theou and cognate ideas in 3:21—26 as "covenant faithfulness.

That vision of the future—an ultimate glory that has left behind the present world of space, time, and matter—sets the context for what, as we shall see, is a basically paganized vision of how one might attain such a future: a transaction in which God's wrath was poured out against his son rather than against sinful humans.

Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive, and harsh and unjust words, when released into the wild, rampage around and do real damage. And as for the practice of saying mean and untrue things while hiding behind a pseudonym—well, if I get a letter like that it goes straight in the bin. But

The story of Acts, even after Jesus's ascension, is about what Jesus continued to do and teach. And the way he did it and taught it was—through his followers.

Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement . We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended.

Virtue, after all, isn't just about morals in the sense of "knowing the standards to live up to" or "knowing which rules you're supposed to keep." Virtue, as we have already seen, is about the whole of life, not just the specifically "moral" choices.

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.