Surprised by Scripture Quotes

“What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil—what it is or why it’s there—but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Death is the last weapon of the tyrant; the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“the line between good and evil does not lie between “us” and “them,” between the West and the rest, between Left and Right, between rich and poor. That fateful line runs down the middle of each of us, every human society, every individual.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“We have a thousand machines for making war but none for making peace. We have computers and iPhone apps that can make millions out of a tiny change in exchange rates, but none that can rescue the poorest countries from their plight. We know how to make Internet pornography, but not how to repair marriages. The very objectivity or neutrality of scientific knowledge as commonly conceived has played into the hands of the gods we secretly worship.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the mode of knowing that is necessary if we are to live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world’s true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Not only was the theory of evolution not invented by Darwin himself; it wasn’t invented by his Enlightenment predecessors either. It was invented by Epicurus (looking back to Democritus and others) and popularized by Lucretius.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Not only was the theory of evolution not invented by Darwin himself; it wasn’t invented by his Enlightenment predecessors either. It was invented by Epicurus (looking back to Democritus and others) and popularized by Lucretius. It wasn’t and isn’t a new, modern discovery. It is simply one part of one ancient worldview.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“One of the great gains of biblical scholarship this last generation, not least because of our new understanding of first-century Judaism, is our realization that the temple was central to the Jewish worldview.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods:”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“though the Western tradition and particularly the Protestant and evangelical traditions have claimed to be based on the Bible and rooted in scripture, they have by and large developed long-lasting and subtle strategies for not listening to what the Bible is in fact saying. We must stop giving nineteenth-century answers to sixteenth-century questions and try to give twenty-first-century answers to first-century questions.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Take away the stories of Jesus’s birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Here is the challenge, I believe, for the Christian artist, in whatever sphere: to tell the story of the new world so that people can taste it and want it, even while acknowledging the reality of the desert in which we presently live.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“heaven is undoubtedly important, but it’s not the end of the world.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Being male and being female, and working out what that means, is something most of creation is called to do and be, and unless we are to collapse into a kind of gnosticism, where the way things are in creation is regarded as secondary and shabby compared to what we are now to do with it, we have to recognize, respect, and respond to this call of God to live in the world he has made and as the people he has made us. It’s just that we can’t use the argument that being male-plus-female is somehow what being God’s image bearers actually means.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Far too much traditional church has consisted of too much tradition and not enough church.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Conservative churches have spoken of miracles, in the sense of a god normally outside suddenly reaching in, doing something dramatic, and then going away again.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“God grant us grace to be so filled with that love that we may work in our own day with mature, Christian, sober intelligence to address the problem of evil, to implement the victory achieved on the cross, and to be agents, heralds, and living embodiments of that new creation in which the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“The church is never more at risk than when it sees itself merely as the solution bearer and forgets that every day it must say, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility even as it stands boldly before the world and its crazy empires.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Perhaps this is why the resurrection of Jesus is so hard for us to believe, as it was always hard—and not just hard, actually, but impossible. We all know that death is irreversible; people in the ancient world knew that just as we do. But that’s because our world is bounded by the old creation, and Easter is the beginning of God’s new creation. In the same way, we find it hard to believe that we have been loved utterly and completely by the God who made the world. We know the frailty and fickleness of human love, and we find it hard, even impossible, to imagine a love that will go all the way, that will last the course.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“Rules of faith and creeds are like the guard rails on the side of the highway, which prevent you from skidding off into the path of oncoming traffic. They do not themselves tell you everything you need to know about your journey and destination, nor do they put fresh gas in your tank. Only the scriptural message about God’s kingdom in Jesus Christ will do that.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to the United Nations in April 2008, the language of rights is borrowed from the great Christian tradition, but if you cut off those Christian roots, you get all kinds of abuses, each claiming the postmodern high ground of victimhood but only succeeding in debasing the coinage of rights itself.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“but his agenda of dealing with sin and its effects and consequences was never about rescuing individual souls from the world but about saving humans so that they could become part of his project of saving the world.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“the point about God’s authority is that the whole Bible is about God establishing his kingdom on earth as in heaven, completing (in other words) the project begun but aborted in Genesis 1–3.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief that rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply—which would be much safer!—a belief that inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which is like all modes of knowledge defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who has promised to put all things to rights at the end, the God who (as the sharp point where those two come together) has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving as I said evidence that demands an explanation from the scientist as well as anybody else.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples’ minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God’s new creation right in the middle of the old one.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“One of the wonderful things about the Bible is the way no generation can complete the task of studying and understanding it. We never get to a point where we can say, “Well, the theologians have sorted it all out, so we just put the results in our pockets or on the shelves, and the next generation won’t have to worry—they can just pull it out and look it up.” No, the Bible seems designed to challenge and provoke each generation to do its own fresh business, to struggle and wrestle with the text.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“One Corinthians 15, one of Paul’s longest sustained discussions and the climax of the whole letter, is about the creator God remaking the creation—not abandoning it, as Platonists of all sorts, including the gnostics, would have wanted.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues

“But from the start the early Christians believed that the resurrection body, though it would certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object, would be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, would have new properties. That is what Paul means by the “spiritual body”: not a body made out of nonphysical spirit, but a physical body animated by the Spirit, a Spirit-driven body if you like: still what we would call physical but differently animated.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues