{"author":"N.T. Wright","author_id":"N.T.+Wright","total_quotes":75,"quotes":[{"text":"Within biblical theology it remains the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. At its height, which according to Genesis 1 is the creation of humans, it was designed to REFLECT God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship. But this image-bearing capacity of humankind is not in itself the same thing as divinity. Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward a pantheism within which there is no way of understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of evil.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["creation","divinity","evil","god","humanity","pantheism"],"id":3359,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit. And when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done - whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies - will stand, will last.The fact that we live between, so to speak, the beginning of the End and the end of the End, should enable us to come to terms with our vocation to be for the world that Jesus was for Israel, and in the power of the Spirit to forgive and retain sins.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["eastertide","forgiveness","n-t-wright","resurrection"],"id":15293,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"...Left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...Is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["eschatology","hope","missions","resurrection"],"id":20226,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"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.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["salvation"],"id":25793,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God's gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and should become one of the places where, and the means by which, heaven and earth interlock and God's future purposes arrive in the present.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["bible"],"id":36001,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"The 'word' did not 'offer itself' in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, any more than Caesar's heralds would have said, 'If you'd like a new kind of imperial experience, you might like to try giving allegiance to the new emperor.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["gospel","humorous"],"id":64954,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace: but, precisely because it is freedom FOR as well as freedom FROM, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our cooperation, but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["christianity","god","jesus","justification","paul"],"id":68452,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"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.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["easter","heaven","jesus","resurrection"],"id":75927,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"It is not about 'life after death' as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: 'life after 'life after death.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["christianity","life-after-death"],"id":76736,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"},{"text":"The power of the bleeding love of God is stronger than the power of Caesar, of the law, of Mars, Mammon, Aphrodite and the rest. This is the point that Paul grasped. And that is the reason for the Colossians' gratitude. The battle has been won.","author":"N.T. Wright","tags":["colossians","discipleship","gratitude","jesus-christ"],"id":80313,"author_id":"N.T.+Wright"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":75,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}