N. T. Wright

People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified - in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that.

A 'conservative believer' must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.

God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?

Christ's resurrection doesn't mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus's lordship over the world.

Scripture is, at its heart, the great story that we sing in order not just to learn it with our heads but to become part of it through and through, the story that in turn becomes part of us.

I believe we face the question: if not now, then when? And if we are grasped by this vision, we may also hear the question: If not us, then who? And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?

The point of justice and mercy anyway is not ‘they deserve it’ but ‘this is the way God’s world should be’, and we are called to do those things that truly anticipate the way God’s world WILL be.

Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.

The rule of love, I say again, is not an optional extra. It is the very essence of what we [Christians] are about

But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.

True worship doesn't keep looking at its watch.

The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.

Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.

All our language about the future ... is like a set of signposts pointing into a bright mist ... the New Testament image of the future hope of the whole cosmos, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, gives as coherent a picture as we need or could have of the future that is promised to the whole world, a future in which, under the sovereign and wise rule of the creator God, decay and death will be done away with and a new creation born, to which the present one will stand as mother to child.

It's not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.

Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.

When Jerusalem is destroyed, and Jesus' people escape from the ruin just in time, that will be YHWH becoming king, bringing about the liberation of his true covenant people, the true return from exile, the beginning of the new world order

I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God's own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us and new possibilities to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.

The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.

The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.