How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels QUOTES

1 " ...It Isn't actually much of an encouragement to me to read the stories about Jesus. I might as well take encouragement from watching a great athlete run a four-minute mile. Sure, it's a fine sight, but at my age and with my weight I would be lucky to do a mile in 10 minutes, let alone four. I can watch a ballet dancer on stage with great delight, not because I can copy him, but precisely because I know I can't. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

2 " The point [of the gospels] is not whether Jesus is God, but what God is doing in and through Jesus. What is this embodied God up to? "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

3 " When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories) "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

4 " New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. “The ruler of this world” has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus’s triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

5 " It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus’s “divine” status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

6 " And of course the reason the Enlightenment has taught us to trash our own history, to say that Christianity is part of the problem, is that it has had a rival eschatology to promote. It couldn’t allow Christianity to claim that world history turned its great corner when Jesus of Nazareth died and rose again, because it wanted to claim that world history turned its great corner in Europe in the eighteenth century. “All that went before,” it says, “is superstition and mumbo-jumbo. We have now seen the great light, and our modern science, technology, philosophy, and politics have ushered in the new order of the ages.” That "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

7 " But the failure of Christianity is a modern myth, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of telling the proper story of church history, which of course has plenty of muddle and wickedness, but also far more than we normally imagine of love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope. To "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

8 " The question of “canon and creed,” which underlies quite a bit of this book, has become quite urgent and controversial and needs to be addressed from the point of view of those of us who are actually working with the biblical canon itself rather than using the word “canon” as shorthand for the systematic theology they already possess. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

9 " The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

10 " Jesus himself is the new Temple at the heart of the new creation, against that day when the whole earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. And so this Temple, like the wilderness tabernacle, is a temple on the move, as Jesus's people go out, in the energy of the Spirit, to be the dwelling of God in each place, to anticipate that eventual promise by their common and cross-shaped life and work. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

11 " In fact, what we call “politics” and what we call “religion” (and for that matter what we call “culture,” “philosophy,” “theology,” and lots of other things besides) were not experienced or thought of in the first century as separable entities. This was just as true, actually, for the Greeks and the Romans as it was for the Jews. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

12 " Part of John’s meaning of the cross, then, is that it is not only what happens, purely pragmatically, when God’s kingdom challenges Caesar’s kingdom. It is also what has to happen if God’s kingdom, which makes its way (as Jesus insists) by nonviolence rather than by violence, is to win the day. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

13 " The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus’s first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

14 " The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that’s what I think has happened. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

15 " How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom! "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

16 " When the soldiers dress Jesus up in a purple robe, they do so in order to mock him, but John tells us of it in order to declare that Jesus is indeed the one in purple, the one before whom the nations will bow. Pilate circles around the possibility that Jesus is in some sense “king of the Jews,” but without realizing that, according to the Jews’ own ancient traditions, their king is to be king of the whole world. John knows that he is telling a story of someone dying the death of a criminal. He is determined that his readers will “hear” the story also as the death of the rightful king. Jesus’s kingdom will not come by violence (18:36). It will come through his own death. When he is lifted up from the earth, he will draw all people to himself (12:32). "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

17 " To speak of Jesus’s divinity without speaking of his kingdom coming on earth as in heaven is to take a large step toward the detached spirituality—almost a form of Gnosticism—that the first two centuries of the church firmly rejected. Only recently did the awful realization dawn on me that a certain stance was not only possible, but actually occurring: people were affirming the divinity of Jesus—which I also fully and gladly affirm—and then using it as a shelter behind which to hide from the radical story the gospels were telling about what this embodied God was actually up to. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

18 " Our questions have been wrongly put, because they haven’t been about the kingdom. They haven’t been about God’s sovereign, saving rule coming on earth as in heaven. Instead, our questions have been about a “salvation” that rescues people from the world, instead of for the world. “Going to heaven” has been the object (ever since the Middle Ages at least, in the Western church); “sin” is what stops us from getting there; so the cross must deal with sin, so that we can leave this world and go to the much better one in the sky, or in “eternity,” or wherever. But this is simply untrue to the story the gospels are telling—which, again, explains why we’ve all misread these wonderful texts. Whatever the cross achieves must be articulated, if we are to take the four gospels seriously, within the context of the kingdom-bringing victory. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

19 " a great deal about what Jesus did between the time of his birth and the time of his death. In particular, they tell us about what we might call his kingdom-inaugurating work: the deeds and words that declared that God’s kingdom was coming then and there, in some sense or other, on earth as in heaven. They tell us a great deal about that; but the great creeds don’t. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels

20 " To this day, whenever people take it upon themselves to explore the divinity of Jesus, there is at the very least a tendency for the theme of God’s kingdom, coming on earth as in heaven, to be quietly lost from view. It is as though a young man spent all his time proving that he really was his father’s son and left no time or energy for working with his father in the family business—which would, actually, be one of the better ways of demonstrating the family likeness. The gospels don’t make that mistake. It is by his inaugurating of God’s kingdom, in his public career and on the cross, that Jesus reveals the father’s glory. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels