Quotes from NT Wright

Redemption," as we saw, is an Exodus term.

those who worship that which is not God will inevitably produce distortions in the world. The point of "injustice" is not just that it means "wrong behavior" (for which the perpetrator would be culpable), but that it means introducing powerful rogue elements into God's world.

A voice may whisper that it was no image, but only imagination; it was a mirage, a fantasy. But as the water settles, with gentle ripples still visible where the arrows went in, the image will return. We will gaze at it once more, and know that in the Lord our labour is not in vain.

Sin," for Paul, is therefore not simply the breaking of moral codes, though it can be recognized in that way. It is, far more deeply, the missing of the mark of genuine humanness through the failure of worship or rather through worshipping idols rather than the true God.

Think of the kingdom agenda of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5—7), which itself points ahead to the cross: Jesus himself loves his enemies, goes where the Roman soldiers force him to go, and turns the other cheek before being set like a city on a hill, like a light on a pole. To

A major part of our inquiry, then, must be to look at the emerging Christian movement and to ask: what caused it? Even if our eyewitnesses disagree in detail, something must have happened.

Something has happened, clearly, that has unleashed this new kind of power into the world. That something is the chain-breaking, idol-smashing, sin-abandoning power called "forgiveness," called "utter gracious love," called Jesus.

What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things?

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 sovereignty let loose through Jesus and the Spirit and aimed at the healing and renewal of all creation.

So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America's leading politicians.

When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission.

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.