Quotes from NT Wright

Who, after all, was it who didn't want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant's last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews.18

The only way we can get to the heart of understanding the moral challenge Jesus offered, and offers still today, is by thinking in terms not of rules or of the calculation of effects or of romantic or existentialist "authenticity," but of virtue. A virtue that has been transformed by the kingdom and the cross.

Like so many other early Christians and in line with Jesus himself, Paul interprets the cross in relation to Passover: a new Passover, a new Exodus.

His point is that the cross has liberated people from sin, so that they can be God-reflecting, image-bearing, working models of divine covenant faithfulness in action.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture. This

It took not only genius but considerable [70] chutzpah to see, and to say, that the symbol which spoke of the horrible 'justice' of Caesar's empire could now speak of the restorative justice of the true God.

The story told by all four gospels is the story of 'how God became king': not by the usual means of military revolution, but by the inauguration of sovereignty during Jesus' public career, and the strange but decisive victory on the cross itself.

in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God's dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21—22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.

but at its heart we find this message: that the true signs of apostolic ministry are to be found in the things that show that the apostle is formed by the Messiah himself, the Messiah whose death overturned all cultural expectations as well as all forms of power.

heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God's good creation.

especially when you add in his apparent fondness for parties, on the one hand, and prayer, on the other, and his remarkably shrewd ability to sum up situations, people, and problems in a pithy phrase or to tease out fresh meaning with a neat, telling story. What a man, we say to ourselves.

But every step away from the Jewish narrative, in this case the Jewish narrative as reaching its focal point in Israel's Messiah, is a step toward paganism.