Quotes from NT Wright

So for Jesus "going to heaven" isn't a matter of disappearing into the far distance. Jesus is like somebody who has two homes. The homes are right next door to each other, and there is a connecting door. One day the partition wall will be knocked down and there will be one, glorious, heaven-and-earth mixture.

That is why, in accordance with the Bible, the message of freedom from all "powers" (the Passover message) is directly connected to the message of "forgiveness of sins" (the message of the end of exile).

the life of Jesus recapitulates key elements in the earlier story of Israel.

the church has unhesitatingly privileged the creed and let the canon fend for itself—

That's part of the complex task the gospel writers are accomplishing: describing something as both the fulfillment of the vocation of Israel and divine judgment on the mess and the muddle that Israel's story had become. Matthew, then, is telling his story in such a way as to say: "This is it! This is what we've been waiting for—even though we would never have thought it would be like this!

The Christian churches in general have always been subject to the temptation to use the Bible to annotate the story we want to tell for ourselves, rather than allow the Bible to tell its own story and invite us to join in.

Justification" is the covenant declaration, establishing in a single family all who share the messianic pistis.

Because of God's call and promise, Abraham is the beginning of the truly human people. He is the one who, in a faith which Paul sees as the true antecedent of Christian faith, allows his thinking and believing to be determined, not by the way the world is, and not by the way his own body is, but by the promises and actions of God.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love.

Since the Bible has quite a lot to say about truth—and since it also has plenty to say about how particular individuals relate to that truth—it has become easy to imagine that its claims can and should be reduced to particular, and highly relative and situational, angles of vision.

God's creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.

As our world shudders like a plane suddenly hitting a flock of geese, we badly need people who will learn that sense, and learn it quickly, not simply or even primarily for their own benefit but because our world, God's world, needs people at the helm in whom courage, good judgment, a cool head, and a proper care for people—and, if possible, faith, hope, and love as well—have become second nature.