Quotes from NT Wright

We have portrayed God not as the generous Creator, the loving Father, but as an angry despot. That idea belongs not in the biblical picture of God, but with pagan beliefs.

The reason we commit "sins" is because, to some extent at least, we are failing to worship the one true God and are worshipping instead some feature or force within the created order. When we do that, we are abdicating our responsibilities, handing to the "powers" in question the genuine human authority that ought to be ours.

people were affirming the divinity of Jesus—which I also fully and gladly affirm—and then using it as a shelter behind which to hide from the radical story the gospels were telling about what this embodied God was actually up to.

The purpose of an open mind, [Chesterton] said, is like the purpose of an open mouth: that it might be shut again on something solid. Yes, we must be free to ask questions. But when we hear a good answer we must be prepared to recognize it as such, and not be so keen on keeping all the questions open that we shy away from an answer because we so like having an open mind. That is the way to intellectual, as well as spiritual, starvation.

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice and of God as the good creator.

I think "tolerance" is being seen for what it is, a low-grade post-Enlightenment version of "love." It is often remarked that those who hail the word "tolerance" regularly become intolerant of all other views, just as those who champion "inclusivity" regularly become increasingly exclusive toward worldviews other than their own.

Paul is not only urging and requesting but actually embodying what he elsewhere calls 'the ministry of reconciliation'. God was in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself, he says in 2 Corinthians 5.19; now, we dare to say, God was in Paul reconciling Onesimus and Philemon.

Second, I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus. Those who persist in denying this obvious point will probably not want to read a book like this anyway.

The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise. "I will sing praise to my God while I have being." The glory of God, said the theologian Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive.

Israel's hopes were not for the demise of the space-time universe, but for the earth to be full of God's glory. It

The Bible is a kind of spiritual Rorschach test: if you find you're cutting bits out, or adding bits in, it may be a sign that you're capitulating to cultural pressure.

The point is this. Paul's letters are highly energetic. Filling translations of his works with stodgy, chewy words and phrases will give the reader indigestion. They may be 'accurate' in one sense, but they are inaccurate in another. Such challenges mean that translation remains exciting, demanding and never-ending.