Quotes from NT Wright

How, then, can the Temple be cleansed so that humans, with the polluting smell of death upon them, can nevertheless come into God's Presence? The answer supplied by the levitical rituals is that the sacrificial blood is the sign of God-given life, a life more powerful than death, a life therefore that purifies both sanctuary and worshipper.

Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this.

The reign of the crucified Jesus only had to be announced for it to become effective.

There were no other groups in the ancient world going around claiming to be the human race.

The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel's Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven.

There are good things going on in the wider world, and we must join in while always remaining on the lookout for the point where we will be asked to do something that goes against the grain of the gospel. There are wicked things going on in the wider world, and we must stand out against them while always remaining on the lookout for the point where we become mere dualists, retreating from the world, which is already charged with the grandeur of God.

The gospel was—and is—the powerful announcement that the world has a new lord and the summons to give him believing allegiance.

The more oppressed a group perceives itself to be, the more it will want to calculate when liberation will dawn.

God loves the world so much that he will not allow it forever to wallow in the corruption and decay into which the rebellious human race has plunged it.

One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief.

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order. And with that failure many other things have been lost as well.

What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather "Sin" together into one place, so that it could then be condemned.