N. T. Wright Quotes
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think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.
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I'm fortunate in that I've grown up in a worshipping tradition which is quite rich musically (and music is very important to me) and has a wonderful resource of hymns from all sorts of different parts of the Church... and to go to church and be able to sing that stuff and listen to a Bach motet or indeed some charismatic choruses.
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Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.
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The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.
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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.
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Jesus didn't really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.
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Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.
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All human governments are intended by God to do justice and mercy - to look after, in particular, the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.
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The word "salvation" denotes rescue. Rescue? What from? Well, of course, ultimately death. And since it is sin that colludes with the forces of evil and decay, sin leads to death. So we are rescued from sin and death.
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Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.
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Having lots of members of my family who were in ministry in one form or another, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that at quite an early age, I was very, very conscious personally of the love of God.
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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.
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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.
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God will himself one day hold all humans, and all human governments, to account, but the church has the responsibility in the present to speak words of truth and judgment in advance of that final holding-to-account.
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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.
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It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.
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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.
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The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.
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At the heart of Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.
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Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.
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We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle of the old one.
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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.
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God has committed himself, ever since creation, to working through his creatures--in particular, through his image-bearing human beings--but they have all let Him down.
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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.