Interpreting Scripture Quotes

“Thus, whether on the large scale – where Jesus as Messiah stands in for Israel, and hence (because of Israel’s representative status in God’s purposes) for the world – or on the small scale, with individual moments, the point is rammed home by all four gospels. It is not either ‘victory’ or ‘substitution’. The victory is won by Jesus dying the death of the unrighteous.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Jesus chose Passover to do what had to be done. He did not choose the Day of Atonement. It is striking, indeed, that though the gospels, particularly John, mention many of the Jewish holy days, Yom Kippur is conspicuously absent. This relates to something my colleague David Moffitt has stressed in various places: when in the grip of exile – as many Jews believed they still were – what is required is not another regular sacrifice, but a fresh rescuing divine action. And the obvious model for that is not the Day of Atonement but the rescue from Egypt: Passover, in other words.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“This is where the Platonizing of our eschatology has led not only to bad atonement-theology but to the twin dangers of rationalism (imagining that being Christian is a matter of figuring out and then believing a true set of ideas) and romanticism (supposing that being a Christian is about people [122] having their hearts strangely warmed).”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Among many reasons for this there is one which sometimes gets overlooked, and which I wish to highlight: that the central point of it all for Jesus was not a theory but an action. When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a set of ideas. He gave them a meal. And the meal is more than a mere visual aid, because the reality to which it points (and in which it partakes rather as the grapes brought back from the promised land in Numbers 13 partook of the reality which they symbolized) is not a set of true beliefs or – back to Plato again! – an abstract ‘spiritual’ reality. The reality to which the eucharistic bread and wine point is the reality of new creation, creation set free from its slavery to decay.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“And it left, and leaves, the way open for the Nietzschean response that has once more come to the fore in our own day: who needs love when you can have power?”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“There are temptations to idolatry at every level, and the greater the good the greater the temptation.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“The king builds the Temple so that God’s glory will fill it; the king does justice in the world, putting everything right in society, so that God’s glory may fill the whole earth. Heaven and earth are the true and ultimate Temple, with humans as the ‘image’, dwelling in the holy, hallowed place.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“I have often summarized the doctrine of justification by saying that God intends to put the whole world right in the end, and having launched that project in Jesus he puts people right in the present so that they can be models and agents of his putting-right project for the world. You could equally say that God intends to renew the whole creation and fill it with his loving presence, and that having launched that project in Jesus he fills people with his spirit in the present, not so that they can escape the world but so that they can be models and agents of God’s plan for all creation.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“But we should not be surprised when the spirit leads us into this place of birth-pangs and wordless groanings. The church is called to stand at the place where the world is in pain precisely in order that the spirit, the living presence of the loving God, may be there, groaning to the father from within the depths of the world’s pain, of our own pain, of the puzzles of the birth-pangs of the new world. This is what it looks and feels like when the powerful breath of new creation is given to us by the father of Jesus the crucified Messiah and risen lord.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“People sometimes speak as if the spirit were given to make us happy and relaxed. Well, that may sometimes happen, but this expectation looks suspiciously like an attempt to get the spirit to endorse [14] our modern western aspirations. In the New Testament, the spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness after his baptism,34 and the spirit drives the church into the places of pain and danger so that new creation may happen right there, where it is most needed.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Heaven and earth are not to be split apart; they are to be brought together; and the spirit is the sign and means in the present by which that future becomes real in advance. The spirit is the powerful breath of that new creation, bringing signs and foretastes of the heaven-and-earth reality to birth here and now.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“The answer is that the kingdom of God has been launched ‘on earth as in heaven’, and that, by the Messiah and the spirit, the creator God has renewed the original image-bearing vocation.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“God’s mission in the world is not a matter of God doing everything and us just watching from the sidelines. But nor is it a matter of us doing it ‘in our own strength’, with God in the background as a mere spectator. The powerful breath of the spirit means both that God is doing it and that we are doing it, precisely because as God’s image-bearers there is a natural fit between what God wants to do in and through us and what, when we are in tune with God, we ourselves want to do and find we can at least start to do.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“When it comes to the whole Bible, I believe we should not only be reading right through the Bible individually at least once a year – for clergy I’d say twice a year at least, and perhaps the gospels four times a year, and if this means reworking your personal schedules then fine, do it – but that we should make it possible for our congregations to try creative experiments for how to experience the whole Bible.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“We need to encourage one another that, in addition to whatever Bible-reading scheme we use for our daily devotions (and if we’re not doing daily Bible-reading we should start at once), we should take time, perhaps once a week or once a month, to set aside an hour or two and read right through a book at a sitting. That is what they were designed for, after all. And actually with some of the harder books – I think of Leviticus as an obvious example – it’s much easier to read them straight through at a run.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“My fourth starting-point towards a fresh approach is to insist on some kind of lectio continua, both personally and publicly. There are, to be sure, many times and occasions when we need to choose special readings to suit a particular moment or challenge. But the church’s staple diet ought to be to work through the books of the Bible on a more or less continuous loop.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“We may only be reading from the New Testament one paragraph of Paul, but as we get close to that reading and look not only at it but through it we can see the entire sweep of Paul’s vision, of the biblical narrative focused now on Jesus and his messianic death and resurrection.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Actually, the public reading of scripture in the course of the church’s worship is not about ‘teaching’; it’s not there to impart information. It is part of the worship and praise of God; it is a way, a central way, a more central way even than the best hymns and worship songs, of praising God for his mighty acts. We rehearse the story of what God has done, not primarily to remind ourselves of it (though that happens as it’s done, of course), but so that we can acclaim and celebrate God’s mighty acts. We praise him for creation itself, and within creation”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Actually, the public reading of scripture in the course of the church’s worship is not about ‘teaching’; it’s not there to impart information. It is part of the worship and praise of God; it is a way, a central way, a more central way even than the best hymns and worship songs, of praising God for his mighty”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“The tabernacle, and then the Temple in Jerusalem, are designed as a microcosmos, a little creation, a small working-model of creation as a whole which functions as a signpost to YHWH’s intention to renew the whole world. The New Testament declares in a hundred different ways that this is precisely what’s happened in and through Jesus:”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Genesis 1 and 2 are about the construction of a temple, namely, the heaven-and-earth creation in which God wants to dwell, with humans as the ‘image’ in the temple.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“We have failed to realize that the four canonical gospels (as opposed to the non-canonical ones) see Jesus’ kingdom-work as completed on the cross and see the cross as the ultimate kingdom-bringing moment.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“make sure we are doing justice and honour to scripture itself, rather than simply using it within schemes of our own making.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“The Christian churches in general have always been subject to the temptation to use the Bible to annotate the story we want to tell for ourselves, rather than allow the Bible to tell its own story and invite us to join in.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“I have been rebuked this last year by watching my own grandchildren, at quite an early age, wrestling with the large issues of Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings or with the seven Harry Potter books, and I realize that actually we humans are hard-wired, from an early age, not only to ‘get’ what a large and complex story is about, but also to be able to think through its characters and its plot, its twists and turns, with considerable sophistication. Why shouldn’t we do that with the Bible, starting as young as we can?”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“My first note is that the older I get, the more I see the larger story of scripture as a whole: of the gospels as wholes, of the Pentateuch as a whole, and so on. It’s then all the more frustrating when I realize that few churches see this; few in their worship consciously find themselves within this larger narrative. Instead it seems as though western Christianity as a whole lives within its own narrative, either the regular going-to-heaven narrative or the ‘Jesus-the-social-worker’ narrative, or something in between, rather than the full-on, full-blooded heaven-and-earth narrative of scripture.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“One of the quiet scandals of much modern church life is the poor quality of public reading of scripture. This applies as much, if not more, in churches that think of themselves as ‘biblical’ as in the so-called ‘mainstream’ denominations”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“We are his poiēma’, his ‘poem’, his ‘workmanship’, wrote Paul (Ephesians 2.10), ‘created . . . in King Jesus for the good works that he prepared’ – not simply ‘good works’ of moral behaviour, but the fresh creativity whose rich variety reflects the lavish creativity of God himself, thereby offering a sign to the powers of the world that Jesus is lord and they are not (Ephesians 3.10–11).”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

“Most ancient Jewish apocalypses [127] were decidedly political, offering symbolic narratives about the divine plan which gave coded encouragement to the oppressed, enabling them to see apparently chaotic and horrifying events within a different framework, and predicting the downfall not just of ‘cosmic’ powers (in the sense of ‘suprahuman’ entities), but of the actual pagan empires and their rulers.”
― N.T. Wright, Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics