Quotes from Christopher Wright

An Israelite could not have sung the familiar song 'God is so good, God is so good, God is so good, he's so good to me' (though the words echo the Psalms) without being reminded also of its ethical consequence: 'God asks me to show that goodness to others.

It is vitally important that we pay attention to the narrative framework in which the Old Testament laws are set.

This understanding [of the image of God] turns our supremacism upsidedown, for if we resemble God in that we have dominion, we must be called to be "imitators of God" (Eph. 5:1) in the way we exercise it. Indeed, far from giving us a free hand on the earth, the imago Dei constrains us. We must be kings, not tyrants — if we become the latter we deny, and even destroy, the image in us. Huw Spanner

I wanted them to see not just that the Bible contains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavor but that the whole Bible is itself a "missional" phenomenon.

The God who walks the paths of history through the pages of the Bible pins a mission statement to every signpost on the way.

The order of the commandments thus gives some insight into Israel's hierarchy of values. Roughly speaking, the order was God, family, life, sex, property. It is sobering, looking at that order, that in modern society (in its debased Western form at least) we have almost exactly reversed that order of values. Money and sex matter a lot more than human life, the family is scorned in theory and practice, and God is the last thing in most people's thinking, let alone priorities.

It is a mistake to suggest that the difference between the Old and the New Testament is that the Old Testament taught that salvation came by keeping the law whereas in the New Testament it comes by grace. That is precisely the distortion of the Scriptures that Paul was combating.

God's revelation was not a mystic secret for the initiated, but a light to guide every member of God's community.

At the heart of Deuteronomy stands chapter 15, with its laws on the release of debts and slaves.

The invisible God makes himself visible in the love that Christians have for one another.

Words matter deeply to the authors of Proverbs, for they see words as powerful vehicles of good or evil, just as much so as actual deeds.

The tragedy of polytheism and idolatry is not the arithmetic (many gods instead of one), but that they exchange the only true source of salvation for lifeless and powerless substitutes, and in doing so, introduce injustice, bondage, and cruelty into human life (cf. Rom. 1:21—32).