RESURRECTION

'Proposing that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead was just as controversial nineteen hundred years ago as it is today. The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The historian who wishes to make such a proposal is therefore compelled to challenge a basic and fundamental assumption - not only, as it is sometimes suggested, the position of eighteenth-century scepticism, or the "scientific" worldview" as opposed to a "pre-scientific worldview", but also of almost all ancient and modern peoples outside the Jewish and Christian traditions.'

Tom Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p.10.

GOSPEL MOTIVATION

'Tell someone to do something, and you change their life - for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.'

Tom Wright in Michael R Emlet, CrossTalk: Where Life & Scripture Meet, in p.62.

EASTER

'Easter week itself ought not to be the time when all the clergy sigh with relief and go on holiday. It ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with loads of Alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don't throw our hats in the air?'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.268.

IDOLATRY

'The proper response to idolatry is therefore not dualism, the rejection of space, time or matter as themselves evil or dangerous, but the renewed worship of the Creator God, which sets the context for the proper enjoyment and use of the created order without the danger of worshipping it.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.223.

WORK

'...what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to fall over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are - strange though it might seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself - accomplishing something which will become, in due course, part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings, and for that matter one's fellow non-human creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed which spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies hoiliness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world - all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation which God will one day make.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.219.

IDOLATRY

'Those who worship money define themselves in terms of it, and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners or customers rather than human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat people as actual or potential sex objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it, and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors or pawns. These and many other kinds of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and the lives of those they touch.'

Tom Wright, Surpised by Hope, p.195.

RESURRECTION

'What Paul is asking us to imagine is that there will be a new mode of physicality which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body is more substantial, more touchable, than a disembodied spirit. We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a 'shadow of their former self.' If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self they will be when the body which God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one - or over the self which will still exist after bodily death.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p. 166.

RATIONALISM

'We are a puzzled and confused generation embracing any and every kind of non-rationalism that may offer us a spiritual shot in the arm while lapsing back into rationalism (in particular, the old modernist critiques) whenever we want to keep traditional or orthodox Christianity at bay.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.133.

JUDGMENT

'We have rediscovered what the Psalmists knew: that for God to 'judge' the world meant that he would, in the end, put it all to rights, straighten it out, producing not just a sigh of relief all round but shouting for joy from the trees and the fields, the seas and the floods.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.133.

REDEMPTION

'Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try and suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil which is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.108.

FAITH

'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 which rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply - which would be much 'safer'! - a belief which inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which like all modes of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who has promised to put all things to right at the last, the God who (as the sharp point where these two come together) has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving evidence which demands an explanation from the scientist as well as everybody else.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.83.

JESUS

'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 within the middle of the old one.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.80.

RESURRECTION

'Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow, and with that the overthrow of those whose power depends on it. Despite the sneers and slurs of some contemporary scholars, it was those who believed in the bodily resurrection who were burned at the stake and thrown to the lions. Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that. It was the gnostics who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology; thereby more of less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading The Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and regularly did.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.62.

THEOLOGY

'...good theology is never a matter of majority voting...'
Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.15.