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Famous N.T. Wright Quotes

“Creation is good, but it is not God. It is beautiful, but its beauty is at present transient. It is in pain, but that pain is taken into the very heart of God and becomes part of the pain of new birth.”

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Book:Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
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“The beauty of creation, to which art responds and which it tried to express, imitate, and highlight, is not simply the beauty it possesses in itself but the beauty it possesses in view of what is promised to it: back to the chalice, the violin, the engagement ring. We are committed to describing the world not just as it should be, not just as it is, but as—by God's grace alone!—one day it will be. And we should never forget that when Jesus rose from the dead, as the paradigm, first example, and generating power of the whole new creation, the marks of the nails were not just visible on his hands and his feet. They were the way he was to be identified. When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission.”

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Book:Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
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“We are like a frightened bird before him, shrinking away lest his demand crush us completely. But when we eventually yield—when he corners us and finally takes us into his hand—we find to our astonishment that he is infinitely gentle and that his only aim is to release us from our prison, to set us free to be the people he made us to be. But when we fly out into the sunshine, how can we not then offer the same gentle gift of freedom, of forgiveness, to those around us?”

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Book:Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
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“What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting rosed in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are -- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself -- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings and for that matter one's fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and make the name of Jesus honored in the world -- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.”

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Book:Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
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“Our task is to announce in deed and word that the exile is over, to enact the symbols that speak of healing and forgiveness, to act body in God's world in the power of the Spirit. Luther's definition of sin was homo incurvatus in se, "humans turned in on themselves." Does the industry in which you find yourself foster or challenge that? You may not be able to change the way your discipline currently works, but that isn't necessarily your vocation. Your task is to find the symbolic ways of doing things differently, planting flags in hostile soil, setting up signposts that say there is a different way to be human. And when people are puzzled at what you are doing, find ways - fresh ways - of telling the story of the return of the human race from its exile, and use those stories as your explanation.”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“Our task, as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“If you are to shape your world in following Christ, you are called, prayerfully, to discern where in your discipline the human project is showing signs of exile and humbly and boldly to act symbolically in ways that declare that the powers have been defeated, that the kingdom has come in Jesus the Jewish Messiah, that the new way of being human has been unveiled, and to be prepared to tell the story that explains what these symbols are all about. And in all this you are to declare, in symbol and practice, in story and articulate answers to questions, that Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and Marx, Freud and Caesar is not; that Jesus is Lord and neither modernity nor postmodernity is. When Paul spoke of the gospel, he was not talking primarily about a system of salvation but about the announcement, in symbol and word, that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, the true light of the world.”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ, shaped according to his messianic vocation to the cross, with arms outstretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world an to the love of God. Paul, we should note carefully, is quite clear about one thing: as we embrace this vocation, the prayer is likely to be inarticulate. It does not have to be a thought-out analysis of the problem and the solution. It is likely to be simply a groan, a groan in which the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ, groans within us, so that the achievement of the cross might be implemented afresh at that place of pain...”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even, heaven help us, biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way into the postmodern world with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom.”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“We live, therefore, between Easter and the consummation, following Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and commissioned to be for the world what he was for Israel, bringing God's redemptive reshaping to our world. Christians have always found it difficult to understand and articulate this, and have regularly distorted the picture in one direction or the other. [ ... ] When God does what God intends to do, this will be an act of fresh grace, of radical newness. At one level it will be quite unexpected, like a surprise party with guests we never thought we would meet and delicious food we never thought we would taste. But at the same time there will be a rightness about it, a rich continuity with what has gone before so that in the midst of our surprise and delight we will say, 'Of course! This is how it had to be, even though we'd never imagined it.”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“This means that the church, the followers of Jesus Christ, live in the bright interval between Easter and the final great consummation. Let's make no mistake either way. The reason the early Christians were so joyful was because they knew themselves to be living not so much in the last days (that that was true too) as in the first days - the opening days of God's new creation. What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climatic event and fact of cosmic history.”

ResurrectionEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit. And when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done - whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies - will stand, will last. The fact that we live between, so to speak, the beginning of the End and the end of the End, should enable us to come to terms with our vocation to be for the world that Jesus was for Israel, and in the power of the Spirit to forgive and retain sins.”

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Book:The Challenge of Easter
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“Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement. We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended.”

ResurrectionVocationEastertideN T Wright
Book:The Challenge of Easter
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