Quotes from NT Wright

When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal.

the victory of the cross will be implemented through the means of the cross.

The beauty of creation, to which art responds and which it tries 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

Saul came from a family who knew what that meant. It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a "religion" called "Judaism" in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.

The garden is far less likely to grow weeds if we have been planting flowers.

Ah, we think, God's kingdom is simply the sum total of all the souls who respond in faith to God's love. It isn't a real kingdom in space, time, and matter. It's a spiritual reality, "not of this world." John, though, will not collude with this Platonic shrinkage.

there is no such thing as a god's-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god's-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human's point of view.

Even when theologians and preachers have seen this danger and have insisted that what was achieved on the cross was the direct result of the Father's love, when the goal is Platonized ("going to heaven") and the human role is moralized ("good and bad behavior"), the structure of the implicit story will still run in the wrong direction.

the death of Jesus, reconciling people to God, generates the renewal of their human vocation.

only when we see Jesus's death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant.

Suppose a cannibal eats a Christian, and suppose the cannibal is then himself converted. The Christian's body has become part of the cannibal's body; who will have which bits at the resurrection?

those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.