by N.T. Wright
(Harper, 2006)
The nature of the Christian hope is such that it plays back into the present life. We’re called, here and now, to be instruments of God’s new creation, the world-put-to-rights which has already been launched in Jesus and of which Jesus’s followers are supposed to be not simply beneficiaries but also agents.
Page xi.
You don’t have to teach children about fairness and unfairness. A sense of justice comes with the kit of being human.
Page 4.
Rebuking someone on the other side of the world (while ignoring the same problems back home) is very convenient, and it provides a deep but spurious sense of moral
satisfaction.
Page 7.
The Christian faith endorses the passion for justice which every human being knows, the longing to see things put to rights. And it claims that in Jesus, God himself has shared this passion and put it into effect.
Page 12.
Most people in the Western world are not Christians, and most Christians in today’s world do
not live in “the West.”
Page 13.
God’s passion for justice must be come ours, too. When Christians use their belief in Jesus as a way of escaping form that demand and challenge, they are abandoning a central element in their own faith.
Page 13.
In Jesus we glimpse a God who loves people and wants them to know and respond to that love.
Page 24.
Part of the Christian story (and for that matter the Jewish and Muslim stories) is that human beings have been so seriously damaged by evil that what they need isn’t simply better self-knowledge, or better social conditions, but help, and indeed rescue, from outside themselves.
Page 25.
Saying “It’s true for you” sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it’s twisting the word “true” to mean, not “a true revelation of the way things are in the real world,” but something that is genuinely happening inside you.” In fact, saying “It’s true for you” in this sense is more or less equivalent to saying “It’s not true for you,” because the “it” in question - the spiritual sense or awareness or experience - is conveying, very powerfully, a message (that there is a loving God) which the challenger is reducing to something else (that you are having strong feelings which you misinterpret in that sense).
Pages 26-27.
How is it that we ache for each other and yet find relationships so difficult?
Page 29.
Without human society, they don’t know who they are anymore. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the
shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation. When we describe someone as a “loner,” we’re not necessarily saying the person is bad, simply that he or she is unusual.
Page 31.
When human beings relate to one another, they relate as male and female; maleness and femaleness are not identities which we only assume when we enter into one particular kind of relationship (namely, a romantic or erotic one).
Page 33.
All human relationships involve an element of gender identity.
Page 34.
Relationship was part of the way in which we were meant to be fully human, not for our own sake, but as part of a much larger scheme of things. And our failures in human relationship are thereby woven into our failures in the other large projects f which we know in our bones that we are art: our failure to put the world to rights in systems of justice, and our failure to maintain and develop that spirituality which, at its heart involves a relationship of trust and love with the Creator.
Page 37.
One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.
Page 38.
The world is full of beauty, but the beauty is incomplete. Our puzzlement about what beauty is, what I means, and what (if anything) it is there for is the inevitable result of looking at one part of a larger whole.
Page 40.
The beauty of the natural world is, at best, the echo of a voice, not the voice itself.
Page 43.
Both in the Old Testament and in the New the present suffering of the world - about which the biblical writers knew every bit as much as we do - never makes them falter in their claim that the created world really is the good creation of a good God. They live with the tension. And they don’t do it by imagining that the present created order is a shabby, second-rate kind of thing.
Page 47.
We should expect the world and our relation to it to be at least as complex as we are. If there is a God, we should expect such a being to be at least as complex again.
Pages 48-49.
We honor and celebrate our complexity and our simplicity by continually doing five things. We tell stories. We act out rituals. We create beauty. We work in communities. We think out beliefs.
Page 49.
The sort of thing we could and should mean by “truth” will vary according to what we’re talking about.
Page 50.
“Heaven” … is God’s space as opposed to our space, not God’s location within our space-time universe. The question is then whether God’s space and our space intersect; and if so how, when, and where.
Page 59.
The problem with pantheism … is that it can’t cope with evil.
Page 61.
This sense of overlap between heaven and earth, and the sense of God thereby being present on earth without having to leave heaven, lies at the heart of Jewish and early Christian theology.
Page 65.
For the pantheist, God and the world are basically the same thing: the world is, if you like, God’s self-expression. For the Deist, the world may indeed have been made by God (or the gods), but there is now no contact between divine and human. The Deist God wouldn’t dream of “intervening” within the created order; to do so would be untidy, a kind of category mistake. But for the ancient Israelites and the early Christians, the creation of the world was the free outpouring of God’s powerful love. The one true God made a world that was other than himself, because that is wheat love delights to do.
Page 65.
Because God’s personal name was not to be spoken, the ancient Israelites developed a technique for avoiding dong so when reading their scriptures. Then they came to the word YHWH, they would say ADONAI (which means “my Lord”) instead. As a way of reminding themselves that this was what they had to do, they would sometimes write the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of ADONAI. This confused some later readers, who tried to say the two words together. With a bit of stretch (and because some letters were interchangeable, including Y with J and W with V), they created the hybrid JEHOVAH. No ancient Israelite or early Christian would have recognized this word.
Pages 67-68.
From very early times (indeed, according to the gospels, since Jesus’s own lifetime) Christians have referred to Jesus himself as “the Lord.” In early Christian speech this phrase carried at least three meanings: (a) “the master,’ “the one who e servants we are,” “the one we’ve promised to obey”; (b) “the true Lord” (as opposed to Caesar, who claimed the same title); and (c) “the Lord” that is, YHWH - as spoken of in the Old Testament.
Page 68.
It is when we understand Jesus, I shall suggest, that we begin to recognize the voice whose echoes we have heard in the longing for justice, the hunger for spirituality and relationship, and the delight in beauty.
Page 69.
Sometimes God is described as the father, and Israel as the firstborn son; sometimes God is the master, Israel the servant. Sometimes, hauntingly, the covenant is spoken of in terms of a marriage, with God as the bridegroom and Israel as the bride.
Page 74.
It is the story of going away and coming back home again: of slavery and exodus, of exile and restoration. It is the story which Jesus of Nazareth consciously told in his words, in his actions, and supremely in his death and resurrection.
Page 75.
Israel’s multiple exiles and restorations are ways of re-enacting that primal expulsion and symbolically expressing the hope for homecoming, for humankind to be restored, for God’s people to be rescued, for creation itself to be renewed.
Page 86.
The need which the Christian faith answers is not so much that we are ignorant and need better information, but that we are lost and need someone to come and find us, stuck in the quicksand waiting to be rescued, dying and in need of new life.
Page 92.
Christianity is all about the belief that the living God, in fulfillment of his promises and as the climax of the story of Israel, has accomplished all this - the finding, the saving, the giving of new life - in Jesus.
Page 92.
We know a good deal more about Jesus than about most people in the ancient world.
Page 94.
He wasn’t healing the sick just for the sake of it … the healing was a dramatic sign of the message itself. God, the world’s creator, was at work through him, to do what he had promised, to open blind eyes and deaf ears, to rescue people, to turn everything right side up.
Page 101-102.
The whole point of Jesus’s work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there.
Page 102.
Resurrection was something which, in Jewish belief, would happen to all God’s people at the very end, not to one person in the middle of history.
Page 107.
God’s plan to rescue the world from evil would be put into effect by evil doing its worst to the Servant - that is, to Jesus himself - and thereby exhausting its power.
Page 108.
He would fight the messianic battle - by losing it. The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil that stood behind human arrogance and violence, powers of evil with which Israel’s leaders had fatally colluded.
Pages 109-110.
The time had now come when, at last, God would rescue his people, and the whole world, not from mere political enemies, but from evil itself, from the sin which had enslaved them. His death would do what the Temple, with its sacrificial system, had pointed toward but had never actually accomplished. In meeting the fate which was rushing toward him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would be the place where God’s future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence.
Page 110.
The best explanation by far for the rise of Christianity is that Jesus really did reappear, not as a battered, bleeding survivor, not as a ghost (the stories are very clear about that), but as a living, bodily human being.
Page 113.
It seems that the gospel writers were trying to explain something for which they didn’t have a precise vocabulary. Jesus’s risen body had many of the same properties as a n ordinary body (it could talk, eat and drink, be touched, and so on), but it had others, too. It could appear and disappear, and pass through locked doors.
Page 113.
His body seems to have been transformed in a way for which there was neither precedent nor prophecy, and of which there remains no second example.
Page 113.
Faith can’t be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus’s resurrection.
Page 114.
Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying “going to heaven when you die.” 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 post-mortem life: “Life after ‘life after death.’”
Page 114-115.
Something has happened in and through Jesus as a result of which the world is a different place, a place where heaven a d earth have been joined forever. God’s future has arrived in the present.
Page 116.
Not to diminish the full incarnation of Jesus but to explore its deepest dimension, is that Jesus was aware of a call, a vocation to do and be what, according to the scriptures, only Israel’s God gets to do and be. That, I believe, is what it means to speak about Jesus being both truly divine and truly human. And we realize, once we remind ourselves that humans were made in God’s image, that this is not a category mistake, but the ultimate fulfillment of the purpose of creation itself.
Page 118.
The closer we come to the cross, the clearer the answer we get to the question, Who did Jesus think he was?
Page 118.
Jesus’s followers were clearly puzzled by his resurrection as they had been by much of what he had been saying to them.
Page 121.
The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present.
Page 124.
God offers us, by the Spirit, a fresh kind of relationship with himself - and, at the same time, a fresh kind of relationship with our neighbors and with the whole of creation.
Page 136.
God wants to anticipate now, by the Spirit, a world set right, a world in which the good and joyful gift of justice has flooded creation.
Page 136.
Christian spirituality normally involves a measure of suffering.
Page 137.
Those who follow Jesus are called to live by the rules of the new world rather than the old one, and the old one won’t like it.
Page 137.
It is precisely when we are suffering that we can most confidently expect the Spirit to be with us.
Page 138.
God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationship, and the yearning for beauty.
Page 138.
We are invited to share in this inner and loving life of God, by having the Spirit live within us.
Page 139.
It is because he, a human being, is now with the Father in the dimension we call “heaven” that Christians came so quickly to speak of God as both Father and Son. It is because he remains as yet in heaven while we are on earth (though the Spirit makes him present to us) that Christians came to speak of the Spirit, too, as a distinct member of the divine Trinity.
Page 140.
When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have tat reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven’t yet really understood who he is or what he’s done.
Page 143.
Worship means, literally, acknowledging the worth of something or someone. It means recognizing and saying that something or someone is worthy of praise. It means celebrating the worth of someone or something far superior to oneself.
Page 144.
God has committed himself, ever since creation, to working through his creatures - in particular, through his image-bearing human beings.
Page 145.
You become 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.
Page 148.
Because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what I means to be fully alive.
Page 148.
Worship of God as redeemer, the lover and rescuer of the world, must always accompany and complete the worship of God as creator. This means, of course, telling the story of the rescue operation as well as of creation.
Page 149.
Reading scripture in worship is, first and foremost, the central way of celebrating who God is and what he’s done.
Page 150.
When Jesus died or our sins it wasn’t so he could fill our minds with true ideas, however important they may be, but so he could do something, namely, rescue us from evil and death.
Page 151.
Christianity is something people do together.
Page 157.
God himself is groaning from within the heart of the world, because God himself, by the Spirit, dwells in our hearts as we resonate with the pain of the world.
Page 162.
Living as a Christian means living in the world as it’s gen reshaped by and around Jesus and
his Spirit.
Page 164.
Pressure on the church to firm up its list of authoritative books didn’t come as is sometimes said today, from a desire to present a socially or politically acceptable theology; these debates were going on through periods of fierce, if intermittent, persecution. Rather, the impetus came from those who offered rival “canons.”
Pa 179.
The Bible does indeed offer plenty of information, but what it offers in a more primary way is energy for the task to which God is calling his people.
Page 182.
The Bible is breathed out by God (the word for “inspired” in this case is theopneustos - literally, God-breathing”) so that it can fashion and form God’s people to do his work in the world.
Page 182.
It is no accident that this Protestant insistence on biblical infallibility arose at the same time that Rome was insisting on papal infallibility, or that the rationalism of the Enlightenment infected even those who were battling against it.
Page 183.
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.
Page 184.
The Bible, in fact, is not simply an authoritative description of a saving plan, as though it were just an aerial photograph of a particular piece of landscape. It is part of the saving plan itself.
Pages 185-186.
The Bible does indeed contain lists of rules (the Ten Commandments, for instance, in Exodus 20), but as it stands, as a whole, it doesn’t consist of a list of dos and don’ts. It’s a story, a grand, epic narrative that runs from the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve look after the animals, to the city which is the Bride of the Lamb, out of which the water of life flows to refresh the world.
Page 186.
We read scripture in order to hear God addressing us.
Page 188.
Hearing God’s voice in scripture isn’t simply a matter of precise, technical expertise. It’s a matter of love
- which … is the mode of knowing required for living at the intersection between heaven and earth.
Page 189.
What the Christian believes about Jesus generates a narrative within which one is called to live; that living within that story generates a call to a particular vocation within the world; and that the Bible is the book through which God sustains and directs those who seek to obey that vocation as intelligent, thinking, image-bearing human beings.
Page 190.
The bible isn’t simply a repository of true information about God, Jesus, and the hope of the world. It is, rather, part of the means by which, in the power of the Spirit, the living God rescues his people and his world, and takes them forward on the journey toward his new creation , and makes us agents of the new creation even as we travel.
Page 191.
The God of whom the Bible speaks is … the creator of the world. Part of the point of the whole story is that he loves that world and intends to rescue it, that he’s put his plan into operation though a series of concrete events in actual history, and that he intends this plan to be worked out through the concrete lives and work of his people.
Page 195.
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.
Page 197.
Unity generates diversity.
Page 200.
“The body” is more than merely an image of unity in diversity; it’s a way of saying that the church is called to do the work of Christ, to be the means of his action in and for the world.
Page 201.
Through the church God will announce to the wider world that he is indeed its wise, loving, and just creator.
Page 204.
The church exists … for what we sometimes call “mission” to announce to the world that Jesus is its Lord.
Page 204.
People who are called to be agents of God’s healing love, putting the world to rights, are called also to be people whose own lives are put to rights by the same healing love. The messengers must model the message.
Page 204.
Waking up offers one of the most basic picture of what can happen when God takes a hand in someone’s life.
Page 205.
“Sleep” was a regular way of talking about death in the ancient Jewish world. With the resurrection of Jesus, the world was being invited to wake up.
Page 205.
Ultimately, believing that God raised Jesus from the dead is a matter of believing and trusting in the God who would, and did, do such a thing.
Page 207.
The church is first and foremost a community, a collection of people who belong to one another because they belong to God, the God we know in and through Jesus.
Page 210.
The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world … The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two: to encourage one another, to build one another up in faith, to pray with and for one another, to learn from one another and teach one another, and to set one another examples to follow.
Page 211.
As with any family, the members discover who they are in relationship with one another.
Page 211.
Ideally every Christian should belong to a group that is small enough for individuals to get to know and care for each other, and particularly to ray in meaningful depth for one another, and also to a fellowship large enough to contain a wide variety in its membership, styles of worship, and kingdom-activity.
Page 212.
The point of Christianity isn’t “to go to heaven when you die.”
Page 217.
The great drama will end, not with “saved souls” being snatched up into heaven, away from the wicked earth and the mortal bodies which have dragged them down into sin but with the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, so that “the dwelling of God is with humans” (Revelation 21:3).
Page 217.
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 peoples to new bodily life to live init. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.
Page 219
For the devout first century Jew, the Torah wasn’t the arbitrary decree of a distant deity, but the covenant charter which bound Israel to YHWH. It was the pathway along which one might discover what genuine humanness was all about.
Page 221.
Precisely because God cares passionately about the weak and the poor, he intends that there should be governments and authorities who can keep in check those who through greed and force would otherwise exploit them.
Page 227.
Kindness is a primary way of growing up as a human being, of establishing and maintaining the richest and deepest relationships.
Page 229.
Sexual activity has become almost completely detached from the whole business of building up communities and relationships, and has degenerated simply into a way of asserting one’s own right to choose one’s own pleasure in one’s own way. To put it starkly: instead of being a sacrament, sex has become a toy.
Page 232.
The implicit religion of many people today is simply to discover who they really are and then try to live it out - which is, as many have discovered, a recipe for chaotic, disjointed, and dysfunctional humanness.
Pages 233-234.
“Sin” is not simply the breaking of the law. It is the missing of an opportunity.
Page 236.
Christian holiness is now (as people often imagine) a matter of denying something good. It is about growing up and grasping something even better.
Pages 236-237.