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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.
N. T. Wright -
Whatever life after death is, being with Christ which is far better, being in Paradise like the thief, etc, the many rooms where we go immediately... that is the temporary place. The ultimate life after life after death is the resurrection in God's new world.
N. T. Wright
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What we are seeing in America is the creaky old age of an eighteenth-century settlement, deemed at the time to be the new flowering of humankind-come-of-age (the 'Enlightenment') and so deemed to be above revision. At this point the urgent need is for prayer and prophecy.
N. T. Wright -
Funny but, for me, the Bible was a hobby before it was a serious study. It was the thing I'd sneak off and do on the side, feeling rather guilty because I wasn't doing my real school homework or whatever... and never thinking I would make it a life's work.
N. T. Wright -
Certainly Paul shares the view of the Old Testament prophets that God will one day flood the world with justice and joy - and that this has begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus.
N. T. Wright -
The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.
N. T. Wright -
Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.
N. T. Wright -
What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.
N. T. Wright
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The point of justice and mercy anyway is not ‘they deserve it’ but ‘this is the way God’s world should be’, and we are called to do those things that truly anticipate the way God’s world WILL be.
N. T. Wright -
One of the things I really respect about Doug Moo is that he is constantly grappling with the text. Where he hears the text saying something which is not what his tradition would have said, he will go with the text. I won't always agree with his exegesis, but there is a relentless scholarly honesty about him which I really tip my hat off to.
N. T. Wright -
think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.
N. T. Wright -
Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.
N. T. Wright -
God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.
N. T. Wright -
There is all the difference in the world between the nonviolence that the ordinary Christian should embrace and the duty of civic authorities to police their communities. The end of Romans 12 is quite clear about the first; the start of Romans 13 is quite clear about the second.
N. T. Wright
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If you don't have properly constituted civic authorities you will encourage vigilantism and solo efforts at retributive justice - which is anarchy, and God doesn't want his world to be anarchic.
N. T. Wright -
All human governments are intended by God to do justice and mercy - to look after, in particular, the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.
N. T. Wright -
I grew up in a church-going family, a very sort of ordinary, middle-of-the-road Anglican family where nobody really talked about personal Christian experience. It was just sort of assumed like an awful lot of things in the 1950's were just sort of taken for granted.
N. T. Wright -
The phrase "spiritual journey" is one that I've only become familiar with comparatively recently. We wouldn't have put it like that when I was a kid.
N. T. Wright -
For now we see the beauty of God through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; now we appreciate only in part, but then we shall affirm and appreciate God, even as the living God has affirmed and appreciated us. So now our tasks are worship, mission, and management, these three; but the greatest of these is worship.
N. T. Wright -
To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.
N. T. Wright
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When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.
N. T. Wright -
Christ's resurrection doesn't mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus's lordship over the world.
N. T. Wright -
God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, the yearning for beauty. And God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, the world's true Lord.
N. T. Wright -
the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.
N. T. Wright