Quotes from NT Wright

When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we knew better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.

Never before have so many people tripped over one another in their eagerness to get rich and thereby impaled themselves on the consequences of their own greed. The greatest irony of it all is that it's done in the name of contentment

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

that God's call of Abraham and his family was designed to put right what was wrong with the world.

Private spiritual growth and ultimate salvation come rather as the byproducts of the main, central, overarching purpose for which God has called and is calling us.

Everything possible had to be done to stamp out a movement that would impede the true purposes of the One God of Israel, whose divine plans Saul and his friends believed were at last on the verge of a glorious fulfillment—until, on the Damascus Road, Saul came to believe that these plans had indeed been gloriously fulfilled, but in a way he had never imagined.

Any gospel which does not embrace both 'evangelism' and 'social action' is a counterfeit, offering either an escapist's dream, which leaves power structures of the world untouched, or a mere social reform which leaves the soaring spiritual dimension of reality out of consideration, and thereby dooms itself to compromise and failure.

we recognize that the world as a whole needs, longs for, aches and yearns and cries out for forgiveness—for that collective, global sigh of relief that means that nobody need seek vengeance ever again; that nobody will bear a grudge ever again; that the million wrongs with which the world has been so horribly defaced will be put right at last;

the church doesn't exist in order to provide a place where people can pursue their private spiritual agendas and develop their own spiritual potential. Nor does it exist in order to provide a safe haven in which people can hide from the wicked world and ensure that they themselves arrive safely at an otherworldly destination.

The New Testament, with the story of Jesus's crucifixion at its center, is about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.

So, many have concluded, if Jesus was wrong we must find a way of salvaging something from the wreckage. This is the point at which many writers have turned Jesus into either a moralist (the route Wilson takes) or an existentialist (Bultmann's route). That is a way of having your cake and eating it: of having Jesus, without the embarrassment of his rather odd views about the immediate future.