Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " The spiritual starvation diet offered by secularism made people so hungry that they now eat anything. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

6 " This is typical of what the New Testament declares: God is king, and the kingdoms of the world are thereby demoted. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

7 " Here we must take a step back once more, because it is not as well known as it ought to be that in the world of second-Temple Judaism there was a strong sense, not just that Israel’s fortunes needed to change, but that Israel’s God needed to come back to his people, to the Temple. Ezekiel had described the divine glory leaving Jerusalem, and had prophesied that it would return to a rebuilt Temple, but nobody ever said they’d seen it happen. There is no scene anywhere in the literature of the period to correspond to Exodus 40, where the divine glory fills the newly constructed tabernacle, or 1 Kings 8, where the same thing happens to Solomon’s Temple. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

8 " Jews may face martyrdom (not least because they refuse to privatize their faith), but they are committed to being good [162] citizens even under a regime at best penultimate and at worst blasphemous. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

9 " The four gospels, again in their very different ways, are all written to tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel’s God, reaching their proper climax, so as thereby to tell the story of how Israel’s God becomes king of the whole world. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

10 " Or we could say, with the dispensationalists, that though Rome may have been John’s model he was in fact writing history in advance – the history, in fact, of our own day. The fact that this has been tried unsuccessfully again and again for a thousand years is, of course, not of itself enough to disprove it. False dawns do not mean that no such thing as a dawn exists. No: the main argument against the dispensationalists is their failure to take seriously the nature of John’s symbolism. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

11 " Combining apocalyptic visions of God’s coming kingdom, and public service within the present one, appears shocking to the Enlightenment mindset. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

12 " Or we could say that, though John certainly envisaged Rome’s fall, he saw it as encapsulating and embodying the disastrous and self-destructive way of life of all human empires, or all human empires of a certain type. This is the power of using ‘Babylon’ as symbol, rather than merely as code – a key hermeneutical point in several parts of the book. The Cain-and-Babel narrative, in which humans grasp at the eschatological city-gift but inevitably corrupt it and use it as an instrument of their own self-aggrandizing power, reaches various climactic moments, of which Rome is the obvious foreground for John. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

13 " The closest echoes to this double command are found in 1 Maccabees 2.68. Mattathias is telling his sons, especially Judas, to get ready for revolution. ‘Pay back to the gentiles what is due to them,’ he says, ‘and keep the law’s commands. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

14 " Another part of the problem is that exegetes have for years simply not been trained in the political thinking of the ancient world, so that just as we have exported sixteenth-century theology back into ancient Galatia and made Paul’s letter address our post-Reformation concerns in their own terms, we have exported modern political assumptions back into ancient Asia Minor and made Revelation, and Paul too for that matter, address our political anxieties in their own terms. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

15 " These questions need to be worked out in other contexts, but it would be unwise to leave the central chapters of Revelation with the impression that bestial regimes are only and always non-democratic tyrannies. They may be closer to home than we like to think. Perhaps this is why the western church, so comfortable now within its present world, is not persecuted. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

16 " The church is to live as the alternative polis, not by separating itself into sectarian isolation but by bearing witness, like Daniel and his friends, before kings and rulers. The aim is not to damn, but to redeem; the leaves on the tree are for the healing of the nations, and the gates stand open for the kings of the earth to bring their treasures. Only if we keep that goal before us will we avoid the isolation which is the mirror image of collusion. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

17 " In particular, the story Revelation tells is the same story that all four gospels tell, though the church, which has done its best to hush up this fact about the gospels, has not usually recognized the similarity. The four canonical gospels (unlike the so-called gnostic ‘gospels’!) tell the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, conquered the power of evil through his death and became the lord of the world. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

18 " And the Christian who knows what he or she is about will constantly reflect that the most natural modes of God-talk are adoration, thanksgiving, confession, supplication and proclamation, not theorization. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

19 " is simply a reminder of what the greatest systematic theologians have always known and recognized – that theology is a matter of loving God with our minds and that loving does not mean merely admiring or ‘being intellectually interested in’. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics

20 " Even when Polycarp is on trial for his life, he is content to say, like Jesus before Pilate in John 19.11, that God has appointed the pagan governor who is about to [165] pass sentence. "

― N.T. Wright , Interpreting Scripture: Essays on the Bible and Hermeneutics