Paul and the Faithfulness of God Quotes

“The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage,”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“You can’t get on with the rest of your life if you are forever taking your spectacles off and inspecting them; indeed, one of the problems with spectacles is that if you break them you may not be able to see properly in order to mend them yourself. So it is with worldviews: when you are questioned about some or all of your worldview, and you have (as it were) to take it off and look at it in order to see what’s going on, you may not be able to examine it very closely because it is itself the thing through which you normally examine everything else. The resulting sense of disorientation can be distressing. It can lead to radical change. It shakes the very foundation of persons and societies. Sometimes, it seems, it can turn persecutors into apostles …”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“Paul the Jew, whose controlling story had always included the narrative whereby the living God overthrew the tyrant of Egypt and freed his slave-people, had come to believe that this great story had reached its God-ordained climax in the arrival of Israel’s Messiah, who according to multiple ancient traditions would be the true Lord of the entire world. In being faithful to his people, God had been faithful to the whole creation.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“Paul is not only urging and requesting but actually embodying what he elsewhere calls ‘the ministry of reconciliation’. God was in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself, he says in 2 Corinthians 5.19; now, we dare to say, God was in Paul reconciling Onesimus and Philemon.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“Humans are worshipping creatures, and even when they don’t consciously or even unconsciously worship any kind of god they are all involved in the adoring pursuit of something greater than themselves. Worship transforms humans, all of us, all the time, since you become like what you worship: those who worship money, power or sex have their characters formed by those strange powers, so that little by little the money-worshipper sees and experiences the world in terms of financial opportunities or dangers, the power-hungry person sees and experiences the world and other humans in terms of chances to gain power or threats to existing power, and the sex-worshipper sees the world in terms of possible conquests (that word is interesting in itself) or rivals. Those who consciously and deliberately choose not to worship those gods still have a range of others to select from, each of which will be character-forming in various ways.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God

“Paul developed something we can appropriately call his ‘theology’, a radical mutation in the core beliefs of his Jewish world, because only so could he sustain what we can appropriately call the ‘worldview’ which he held himself and which he longed for his churches to hold as well.”
― N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“At the heart of Pharisaic Judaism, as with their putative successors the rabbis, stood prayer; at the heart of daily prayer stood the Shema (‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One!’); and one subsequent way of referring to someone saying the Shema, as in the memorable and moving description of Akiba’s death, was to say that he was ‘accepting upon himself the kingship of heaven’, in other words, was declaring that Israel’s God alone was the true king of the world.31 That is what the rebels had shouted under Herod: ‘No king but God’.”
― N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“humans finding themselves called to play a vital role in the larger purposes of the creator for the creation.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“Whatever precise reconstruction we offer of the situation Paul envisages in Rome, the point is clear: at the heart of his work is the yearning and striving for messianic unity across traditional boundaries, whether it be the unity of Jew and Gentile in the Messiah (the main point of Galatians), the unity of the church under the lordship of the Messiah in a pagan and imperial context (part of the main point of Philippians, coming to memorable expression in 2.1–4), or, as here in Philemon, the unity of master and slave, expressing again what it means to be en Christō.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set

“the word ‘justification’ has itself had a chequered career over the course of many centuries of debate. As the major historian of the doctrine has noted, the word has long since ceased to mean, in ecclesial debates, what it meant for Paul himself – which is confusing, since the debates have gone on referring to Paul as though he was in fact talking about what they want to talk about. It is as though the greengrocer treated you to a long discussion of how onions are grown, and how best to cook with them, when what you had asked was how much he would charge for three of them.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two Book Set