Quotes about Belief
Jesus wasn't just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news—something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.
— NT Wright
Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.
— NT Wright
Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, 'Don't imagine that because we don't check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don't check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists.
— NT Wright
if it is true that Jesus ultimately fits no known pattern within the first century,51 it is more or less bound to be true that he fits none within the twentieth.
— NT Wright
It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.
— NT Wright
Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history.
— NT Wright
It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.
— NT Wright
Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.
— NT Wright
It is not about "life after death" as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: "life after 'life after death.
— NT Wright
When the women went to the tomb they met someone else and in the half light they thought it was Jesus himself. Answer: they would have noticed soon enough.
— NT Wright
Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.
— NT Wright
In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can't prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras's theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.
— NT Wright