Ian Packer > Ian's Quotes

“Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what's going on in the world and getting in tune with it. It isn't a matter of doing things to earn God's favor. It is not about trying to obey dusty rulebooks from long ago or far away. It is about practicing, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God's new world.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Christian

“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference . . . . Nature knows no ethics. There is no right and wrong in nature; the controlling realities are power and fertility.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth

“for God, doing justice means particularly attending to the needs of the weak and poor, it makes us question whether the traditional understanding of justice as ‘strict impartiality’ is really at all appropriate in the biblical context. On the contrary, it is so clear that the LORD is especially attentive to the needs of the marginalized (see Deut. 10:18–19) that it would seem to be the very nature of justice, on God’s terms, for humans also to have such a prioritized concern.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Failure to honour God in the material realm cannot be compensated for by religiosity in the spiritual realm.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“The jubilee then is about restoring to people the capacity to participate in the economic life of the community for their own viability and society's benefit.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative