Quotes from NT Wright

One day the whole creation will be flooded with his presence. Then they will look back and realize that they, like the Temple itself, had been a small working model, an advance blueprint, of that renewed creation.

Old soldiers sometimes say, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (A foxhole, in military slang, is a shallow pit in a dangerous place on the battlefield.)

Theology, after all, was made for the sake of the church, not the church for theology.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings.

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from teh dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticism of various sorts have long been hiding.

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.

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.4 But

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object.

the ultimate future hope and the way it is anticipated in the present, and of course the nature of the church. Failure to pay attention to all of these in discussing how scripture functions is part of the problem, as we can see when people, hearing the word "scripture," instantly think of a rule-book—and then, according to taste, either assume that all the rules are to be followed without question or assume that they can all now be broken.

THIS BRINGS US NICELY to the third speaker in our sound system. Like the second one, this third one has often been turned up far too loud. This has meant both that the music it is quite properly trying to play has itself been distorted and that the music coming from the other speakers (apart from the equally distorted second one) has been overwhelmed. In much modern biblical scholarship, in fact, this one has often drowned out all the others.

But to call that statement 'dualistic' (or to regard a belief in the existence of hostile powers as 'dualistic') can mislead us into forgetting that most Jews, Paul included, regarded the present world as, none the less, the good creation of the good creator, and the present time as under the creator's sovereign providence. Part of the point of many actual apocalypses is to affirm this very point, in the teeth of apparently contradictory evidence.