Quotes about New Testament

The old idea that the goal of Christian existence is simply "going to heaven" doesn't, in fact, do very much to stimulate the fully fledged virtue we find advocated in the New Testament.

This is typical of what the New Testament declares: God is king, and the kingdoms of the world are thereby demoted.

But over against this downplaying or mocking we also see, from the earliest documents of the New Testament right on through the first five or six centuries of church history, the resolute affirmation of the cross not as an embarrassing episode best left on the margins, but as the mysterious key to the meaning of life, God, the world, and human destiny.

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

Though many Christians in the Western world have imagined that the aim or goal of being a Christian is simply "to go to heaven when you die," the New Testament holds out something much richer and more interesting.

There, again and again, we find the New Testament writers emphasizing instead love, agap?, as the highest activity, the one that binds everything else together-

The tabernacle, and then the Temple in Jerusalem, are designed as a microcosmos, a little creation, a small working-model of creation as a whole which functions as a signpost to YHWH's intention to renew the whole world. The New Testament declares in a hundred different ways that this is precisely what's happened in and through Jesus:

In whatever way the New Testament tells the story of the cross, it is always the story of self-giving divine love.

We may only be reading from the New Testament one paragraph of Paul, but as we get close to that reading and look not only at it but through it we can see the entire sweep of Paul's vision, of the biblical narrative focused now on Jesus and his messianic death and resurrection.

It ignores the New Testament's emphasis on the true human vocation, to be "image-bearers," reflecting God's glory into the world and the praises of creation back to God.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of "penal substitution," this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a "works contract," not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of "going to heaven," but of God's vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence:

The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God's purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos.