The Challenge of Acts Quotes

“Some Christians have been so afraid of idolatry that they never notice the altars to the unknown God, leading them to warn against any attempt to see the true God in the sunrise or the smile of a child. Others have been so eager to embrace and affirm anything that looks vaguely ‘religious’ that they ignore or forget the real problem of idolatry, of religion ‘gone bad’. That either/or – lurching from nervous fear to over-eager embrace and back again – represents a major fault line.”
― N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“The god Mammon is alive and well. Millions make daily pilgrimages to his shrine. He demands sacrifices. Some of those sacrifices are human. And if you suggest we should stop worshipping him, that there might be more important motives than sheer financial profit, people look at you strangely,”
― N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“Now of course: prayer remains a mystery. We don’t understand why sometimes new things happen through prayer while often they seem not to. We don’t understand why the church prayed for James and Herod still killed him, and the church prayed for Peter and he got out of jail free.”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“the Samaritan believers are seen and known as part of the same family. The outpouring of the spirit makes that clear. This is what Paul is driving at, in letter after letter. The unity of the church across traditional lines of class, culture, ethnicity, gender, whatever: that, and only that, is the God-given sign that the new creation has been launched.”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“The Jesus who was right then interceding for Stephen (as in Romans 8:34) had taught him that intercession, rather than cursing, was the way of the new, fulfilled, law and Temple.”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“We still have to address two outstanding questions that have emerged from the book so far. What exactly is the relationship between ‘obeying God’ and living under human authority? And what exactly were the early Christians thinking about the Temple – granted that they were constituting themselves as the real Temple, worshipping Jesus as the one who holds heaven and earth together, and so on, and yet were continuing to worship in the present Temple and meet in one of its large porticos?”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“We notice already that, though the Twelve were clearly all men, the women were included in the new gathering from the start.”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“And this, as we shall see, raises the big question that haunts much of the narrative, and ought to be carefully pondered by all readers of Acts today: how does obedience to God, and the following through of this missionary mandate, play out in relation to human authorities?”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is

“One particular note about usage: I have moved towards saying ‘Judean’ rather than ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’. This enables us, I believe, to think historically about the way the ancient world saw the Judean Diaspora, rather than subtly importing particular modern meanings of ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’.”
― N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts: Rediscovering What the Church Was and Is