Bob

“We know what the power of the world looks like. When push comes to shove, as it often does, it is the power of violence, using the threat of pain and death. It is, yes, the power of tanks and bombs, and also of guns and knives and whips and prisons and barbed wire and bulldozers. Weapons to destroy people’s lives; machines to destroy their homes. Cruelty in the home or at work. Malice and manipulation where there should be gentleness, kindness, and wisdom. Jesus’s power is of a totally different sort, as he explained to the Roman governor a few minutes before the governor sent him to his death—thereby proving the point. The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“But the bigger picture, throughout Paul’s letters, is about Jesus establishing his rule. His death is a vital and central part of how that is done. We cannot bypass it. We cannot downplay it. We cannot underemphasize it. But it makes the sense it makes within this picture: of the love of God, the covenant of God, the plan of God for the fulfillment of the whole of creation, not its abolition, and above all, the coronation of Jesus as the world’s rightful king and lord. Many times, when people preach the gospel and talk of Jesus dying in our place, you would never guess at any of these things. And you would be left clinging to a fragment of the biblical witness, supposing that the fragment belonged in a quite different story.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good

“The widespread (heretical) idea in many evangelical circles that the only important reason Jesus came was to die for our sins is one of the most glaring examples of failure to embrace the full biblical Christ. Tragically, other Christians seem to affirm the (equally heretical) idea that it is only Jesus’s teaching (especially his call to love enemies) that is finally important. If we believe with the church through two millennia that the teacher from Nazareth is God incarnate, then we must embrace the full biblical Christ.”
― Ronald J. Sider, If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence

“Jesus’s resurrection falls into a different category. Not because it wasn’t a historical event in the sense of something that actually happened in history. But because if it did happen, it set a new standard for our understanding of the way the world is. Lots of events do that in smaller ways. Splitting the atom. Space travel. The discovery of America. Everything looks different once those have happened. After them, you can’t fit new discoveries into your previous picture of the way the world is. Jesus’s resurrection is like that, only much, much more so.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good