Paul Quotes

“For Paul this was of course the ultimately shocking and ultimately glorious thing: that in becoming human to fulfil his own promises, Israel’s God, the creator, had chosen to die on a cross. The cross became, for Paul, the fullest possible revelation of both the love and the justice of God, and then, in its outworking, the extraordinary saving power of God, defeating the powers that held people captive in pagan darkness and breaking the long entail of human sin.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives: Fresh approach to Paul from a well-known scholar

“so it became natural for him to speak of Jesus as ‘God’s son’ with the meaning, not just of God’s messianic agent for Israel and the world, but of God’s second self, God’s ultimate self-expression as a human being.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives: Fresh approach to Paul from a well-known scholar

“What has happened in, to and through Jesus has convinced Paul that hidden within the divinely intended meaning of Messiahship was God’s determination not just to send someone else to do what had to be done but to come himself to do it in person.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives: Fresh approach to Paul from a well-known scholar

“But resurrection is more than defeat of an enemy. It is the inauguration of God’s new world, the new creation which has already begun to take over the present creation with the unstoppable power of the creator God.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives: Fresh approach to Paul from a well-known scholar

“Precisely as Messiah, he offers God that representative faithfulness to the plan of salvation through which the plan can go ahead at last, Abraham can have a worldwide family (chapter 4), and the long entail of Adam’s sin and death can be undone (5.12–21) through his obedience, which as we know from 1.5 is for Paul very closely aligned with faith, faithfulness or fidelity.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives: Fresh approach to Paul from a well-known scholar

“Romans 8.11: if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead – the historical Jesus of Nazareth – dwells within you, then the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through the indwelling Spirit.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: Fresh Perspectives: Fresh approach to Paul from a well-known scholar

“The shallow social and political alternatives bequeathed to contemporary western society by the Enlightenment and its aftermath, in which every issue stands either to left or to the right on some hypothetical spectrum, and every political question can be answered in terms of ‘for’ or ‘against’ – this trivialized world of thought cannot cope with the complexities of real life either in the first or the twenty-first century.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul: In Fresh Perspective