Quotes from NT Wright

My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.

Tarsus, a noble city in Cilicia, ten miles inland on the river Cydnus in the southeast corner of modern Turkey

The church is never more at risk than when it sees itself merely as the solution bearer and forgets that every day it must say, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner," and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility even as it stands boldly before the world and its crazy empires.

This uncertainty in turn, of course, begets a new and anxious eagerness for certainty: hence the appeal of fundamentalism, which in today's world is not so much a return to a premodern worldview but precisely to one form of modernism (reading the Bible within the grid of a quasi-or pseudoscientific quest for "objective truth

So it has proved in the long term, as the de-Judaized story had to find another narrative framework and eventually came up with the "works contract," in which the history of Israel was merely an example of people getting things wrong, even though it also contained a few detached promises pointing into the long-distant future.

The "covenant of vocation"—Israel's vocation to be the light of the world—was fulfilled.

make sure we are doing justice and honour to scripture itself, rather than simply using it within schemes of our own making.

We don't know how long his family had lived in Tarsus. Later legends suggest various options, one of which is that his father or grandfather had lived in Palestine but had moved during one of the periodic social and political upheavals, which, in that world, always carried "religious" overtones as well. What we do know about them is that they belonged to the strictest of the Jewish schools. They were Pharisees.

The divine rescuing purposes and Israel's vocation come rushing together in the same human being, the same event.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one. And—supposing someone came forward out of the fog to meet us? That, of course, is the central though often ignored Christian belief.