N. T. Wright Quotes
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It's partly that I'm an extrovert and that I like being with people. If you shut me up in a library with nothing else around for weeks on end, I'd go mad! I have to sort of go out.
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But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold - and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.
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It is central to Christian living that we should celebrate the goodness of creation, ponder its present brokenness, and, insofar as we can, celebrate in advance the healing of the world, the new creation itself. Art, music, literature, dance, theater, and many other expressions of human delight and wisdom, can all be explored in new ways.
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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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When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done.
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It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.
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We British say "to put the world to rights." I've discovered that that's not the way Americans say it and people scratch their heads and say, "Funny... what does he mean by that?" It means to fix the thing, to make it all better again.
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Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are but also to the way things will be, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of G-D as the waters cover the sea. That remains a surprising hope, and perhaps it will be the artists who are best at conveying both the hope and the surprise.
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Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.
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Jesus himself, as the gospel story goes on to its dramatic conclusion, lives out the same message of the Sermon on the Mount: he is the light of the world, he is the salt of the earth, he loves his enemies and gives his life for them, he is lifted up on a hill so that the world can see.
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The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.
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The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.
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Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it.
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You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.
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Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you've got to believe to be a good sound Christian.
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What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is differentthe End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah
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Looking back to the earlier centuries of the church, most of the great teachers were also bishops and vice versa. It's only fairly recently that the church has had this great divide.
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The gospel is not itself about you are this sort of a person and this can happen to you. That's the result of the gospel rather than the gospel itself.
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Jesus' death was seen by Jesus himself ... as the ultimate means by which God's kingdom was established. The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.
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There's all the difference in the world between humbly saying "I want to find more light from Scripture than we have yet had" and saying "I'm going to prove the rest of the Church wrong and do something totally new!"
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Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance.
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For me, actually, being a bishop in a bishopric where there's an academic tradition gives me this fascinating, challenging, but open invitation to say, "We want you to be a scholar. We want you to go on doing this. But do it as a bishop!"
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We have to train ourselves to use words accurately. And there's so much loose Christian talk, for which I've no doubt been as guilty as any.
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I'm very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.