Quotes from NT Wright

They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

What drove Paul, from that moment on the Damascus Road and throughout his subsequent life, was the belief that Israel's God had done what he had always said he would; that Israel's scriptures had been fulfilled in ways never before imagined; and that Temple and Torah themselves were not after all the ultimate realities, but instead glorious signposts pointing forward to the new heaven-and-earth reality that had come to birth in Jesus.

We have failed to realize that the four canonical gospels (as opposed to the non-canonical ones) see Jesus' kingdom-work as completed on the cross and see the cross as the ultimate kingdom-bringing moment.

The problem is that humans were made for a particular vocation, which they have rejected; that this rejection involves a turning away from the living God to worship idols; that this results in giving to the idols—"forces" within the creation—a power over humans and the world that was rightfully that of genuine humans; and that this leads to a slavery, which is ultimately the rule of death itself, the corruption and destruction of the good world made by the Creator.

We sometimes have the impression that the coronavirus is providing people with a megaphone with which to say, more loudly, what they were wanting to say anyway.

When you're jolted, what spills out is whatever is filling you." When you're suddenly put to the test and don't have time to think about how you're coming across, your real nature will come out. That's why character needs to go all the way through: whatever fills you will spill out. And it's up to you to do something about it.

What I want to suggest, with great temerity, is that in the resurrection one is given the beginning of a new knowing, a new epistemology, a new coming-to-speech, the Word born afresh after the death of all human knowing and speech, all human hope and love, after the silent rest of the seventh-day sabbatical in the tomb. I

God's intention is not to let death have its way with us. If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.

But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

Genesis 1 and 2 are about the construction of a temple, namely, the heaven-and-earth creation in which God wants to dwell, with humans as the 'image' in the temple.

That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us ("vote for us and things will get better!") have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment.

Conservative churches have spoken of miracles, in the sense of a god normally outside suddenly reaching in, doing something dramatic, and then going away again.