The Case for the Psalms Quotes

“When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God's world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God's role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we know better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

“It shouldn’t be difficult, then, to make the transposition at this point into the early Christian vision of Jesus and the Spirit and the way in which the material world is both celebrated and renewed through their work. The Jewish basis for the early Christian patterns of belief and behavior is clear. It is important that God’s people are embodied, because God made this world and has no intention of abandoning it. The material of creation is a vessel made to be filled with God’s new life and glory, even though the transformation may involve suffering, persecution, and martyrdom.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“In part, this will happen simply because people who pray the Psalms will be worshiping the God who made them, and one of the basic spiritual laws is that you become like what you worship. More particularly, however, it will happen because people who pray the Psalms will be learning (whether they necessarily think it out like this or not) to live in God’s time as well as in their own, in God’s space as well as in their own, and even in and as God’s “matter”—the stuff of which we’re made—as well as in and as our own. The”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“But my present point is this: what looks to the flattened-out imagination of late Western modernity like “lifeless” matter is in fact a world throbbing with God-given life. That life is constantly praising its maker by being, particularly and peculiarly, what it is.”
― Wright, N. T., The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“To recognize that the Psalms call us to pray and sing at the intersections of the times--of our time and God's time, of the then, and the now, and the not yet--is to understand how those emotions are to be held within the rhythm of a life lived in God's presence.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

“The Psalms do not, that is, offer us an answer for “the problem of evil.” But they are clear where the answer is not to be found. It is not to be found where the pantheist wants to find it, suggesting that “evil” is merely a matter of our perception and that the world just is the way it is and we should get used to it.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“The Psalter forms the great epic poem of the creator and covenant God who will at the last visit and redeem his people and, with them, his whole creation.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Paul speaks at one point of Christians as “God’s poem,” God’s “artwork.” We are his “workmanship,” say some of the translations of Ephesians 2.10. The Greek word Paul uses there is poiēma, the very word from which the English word “poem” is derived. God gives us these poems, the Psalms, as a gift, in order that through our praying and singing of them he may give us as a gift to his world. We are called to be living, breathing, praying, singing poems.”
― Wright, N. T., The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Part of the strange work of the Psalms is to draw the terror and shame of all the ages together to a point where it becomes intense and unbearable, turning itself into a great scream of pain, the pain of Israel, the pain of Adam and Eve, the pain that shouts out, in the most paradoxical act of worship, to ask why God has abandoned it. And then of course the Psalms tell the story of strange vindication, of dramatic reversal, of wondrous rescue, comfort, and restoration.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“To write or read a poem is . . . to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

“The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Our confidence in the future restorative justice of God may even give us confidence to do justice ourselves in the present. We are called then, to stretch out the arms of our minds and hearts and to find ourselves Christ shaped, cross shaped, at the intersection of the past present and future of God’s time and our own time. This is a place of intense pain and intense joy, the sort that perhaps only music or poetry can express or embody.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

“The Psalms are not only poetry in themselves; they are to be the cause of poetry in those who sing them, together and individually. They are God’s gifts to us so that we can be shaped as his gift to the world.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“the story the Psalms tell is the story Jesus came to complete. It is the story of the creator God taking his power and reigning, ruling on earth as in heaven, delighting the whole creation by sorting out its messes and muddles, its injuries and injustices, once and for all.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“I find it impossible, therefore, to imagine a growing and maturing church or individual Christian doing without the Psalms. And that is why (to be frank) a fair amount of contemporary Christian music has worried me for some time. The last generation in the Western churches has seen an enormous explosion in “Christian music,” with hundreds of new songs written and sung, often with great devotion and energy. That is wonderful; like all new movements, it will no doubt need to shake down and sift out the wheat from the chaff, but one would much rather have all these new signs of life than the sterile repetition of stale traditions. Until very recently, though, the kind of traditions from which this new music has emerged, traditions that think of themselves as “biblical,” after all, would always have included solid doses of psalmody. If that has changed, the sooner it changes back the better, with, of course, all the resources of fresh musical treatments upon which to draw. To worship without using the Psalms is to risk planting seeds that will never take root.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Sing these songs, and they will renew you from head to toe, from heart to mind. Pray these poems, and they will sustain you on the long, hard but exhilarating road of Christian discipleship.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent nonpsalmic “worship” based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Now, at last, we come to the central point. Here is the larger framework: God calls humans to be his rulers over creation, and though humans have distorted this vocation into ugly parodies, treating God’s creation as if it were a mere toy to play with or resource to exploit, God has not rescinded the project or the vocation.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Here is the ecstasy and the agony of the Old Testament: the rich, breathtaking vocation of Israel and the dark, tragic fact that this vocation, this rescue mission, was to be undertaken by a people who were themselves in sore need of the very same rescue.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“It goes something like this: God created humans in the beginning to be his vice rulers over the world. That is part, at least, of what it meant that humans were made “in God’s image.” The “image” is like an angled mirror, reflecting God’s wise and caring love into the world, bringing order and fruitfulness to the garden where the humans were placed. That project was, of course, tragically twisted with human arrogance and sin. But it has never been rescinded.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Haven’t these psalms, and the others like 149 that go with them, been used and abused to justify tyranny and wickedness? Yes, of course—just as the soft and meditative psalms have been used to justify quietistic retreat from God’s world; the penitential psalms have been used to justify endless overscrupulous navel-gazing; and the celebrations of creation have been used to express a soggy, romantic pantheism. The abuse doesn’t remove the use. But what is “the use” in this case? What are these royal psalms celebrating? How can we sing them today?”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“It may be impossible to “sing YHWH’s song” in this foreign land, but this particular psalmist turns this impossibility itself into yet another of “YHWH’s songs,” thus making a psalm out of the fact that one can’t sing psalms here. If that reminds us of Israel’s greatest prophet sensing himself utterly abandoned by God and yet still able to ask God why he has abandoned him, that is probably part of the point.)”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“Make us, in other words, to be people who know how to stand at the threshold of human time and God’s time, and there to learn both humility and hope. Our time is not worthless, but any worth it may possess will come from God’s goodness, not our control of our circumstances: Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands! (90.15–17)”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“One final word before we press on. Paul speaks at one point of Christians as “God’s poem,” God’s “artwork.” We are his “workmanship,” say some of the translations of Ephesians 2.10. The Greek word Paul uses there is poiēma, the very word from which the English word “poem” is derived. God gives us these poems, the Psalms, as a gift, in order that through our praying and singing of them he may give us as a gift to his world. We are called to be living, breathing, praying, singing poems.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

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― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“When humans take up their divinely appointed role, looking after God’s world on his behalf, this is not a Promethean attempt to usurp God’s role. It is the humble, obedient carrying out of the role that has been assigned. The real arrogance would be to refuse the vocation, imagining that we knew better than God the purpose for which we have been put here.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“. . . those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential

“Dedication   Chapter 1 - Introduction Chapter 2 - Pray and Live Chapter 3 - At the Threshold of God’s Time Chapter 4 - Where God Dwells Chapter 5 - All the Trees of the Forest Sing for Joy Chapter 6 - At Home in the Psalms Afterword - My Life with the Psalms Acknowledgments Scripture Index   About the Author Also by N. T. Wright Credits Copyright About the Publisher Chapter 1”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“When we sing, the sound made even by small-scale earthbound creatures such as us rings around the rafters that we cannot otherwise reach.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential

“God creates “that which is not God” out of generous love in order that he may then, in the end, fill it, flood it, drench it, with his love and his glory.”
― N.T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms: why they are essential