Quotes about N.T. Wright

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

Combining apocalyptic visions of God's coming kingdom, and public service within the present one, appears shocking to the Enlightenment mindset.

One way and another, all three synoptic gospels are clear: in telling the story of Jesus they are consciously telling the story of how Israel's God came back to his people, in judgment and mercy.

But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God's kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

suggestion that "sin" does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain.

The best guess has him a little younger than Jesus of Nazareth; a birth date in the first decade of what we now call the first century is as good as we can get. As for

The first thing that is missing from the usual line of thought, then, is any attempt to show how Paul deals not just with "sin" itself, but with the idolatry that lies behind it and the ensuing loss of "glory.

without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken.

Agendas are what get people, even historians, out of bed in the mornings, though one might hope that, once at the desk, they allow the data to challenge the hypotheses they have dreamed up overnight.

But for him the incarnate Son is also Israel's Messiah.

The point is that the resurrection, if it had occurred, would undermine not only the Enlightenment's vision of a split world but also the Enlightenment's self-congratulatory dream of world history reaching its destiny in our own day and our own systems.

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them.