Christopher J.H. Wright > Quotes

“the whole Bible is itself a missional phenomenon. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God. The Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, "life, the universe and everything," and with its centre, focus, climax, and completion in Jesus Christ. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, "what it's all about.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright

“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission. Chris Wright”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“The jubilee then is about restoring to people the capacity to participate in the economic life of the community for their own viability and society's benefit.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative

“our mission is nothing less (or more) than participating with God in this grand story until he brings it to its guaranteed climax.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“for God, doing justice means particularly attending to the needs of the weak and poor, it makes us question whether the traditional understanding of justice as ‘strict impartiality’ is really at all appropriate in the biblical context. On the contrary, it is so clear that the LORD is especially attentive to the needs of the marginalized (see Deut. 10:18–19) that it would seem to be the very nature of justice, on God’s terms, for humans also to have such a prioritized concern.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“Lament is missional because it keeps the world before God, and it draws God into the world – with the longing that God should act, and the faith that he ultimately will.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Message of Lamentations

“Failure to honour God in the material realm cannot be compensated for by religiosity in the spiritual realm.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“The power imbalance between male and female, the fear between God and humans and the enmity between humans and nature, are all described in Genesis 2 and 3 as originating not in the nature of things as God intended them to be, but rather in the collusion of Adam, Eve and the serpent, who together deny the goodness and sufficiency of the garden and distrust the good intentions of the creator.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It is well known that great art, great music and great literature can emerge out of great pain. This does not lessen the reality of the suffering of the artist, composer or writer, but it points to something creative and redemptive in the human person, made in the image of God, which can bring forth a thing of beauty in the midst of surrounding ugliness, brutality and evil. Nowhere is this more true than in the book of Lamentations.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Message of Lamentations

“There should be no theology that does not relate to the mission of the church – either by being generated out of the church’s mission or by inspiring and shaping it. And there should be no mission of the church carried on without deep theological roots in the soil of the Bible. No theology without missional impact; no mission without theological foundations.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“If our mission is to share good news, we need to be good news people. If we preach transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church's Mission

“Mission is not ours; mission is God's. Certainly, the mission of God is the prior reality out of which flows any mission that we get involved in. Or, as has been nicely put, it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission-God's mission.14”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative

“Evil and sin weave their way into every aspect of God’s creation and every dimension of human personhood and life on earth.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“Mission arises from the heart of God himself, and is communicated from his heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“To dwell in love with saints above— Oh that will be glory! But to dwell below with saints we know— Ah! That’s a different story!”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit: Growing in Christlikeness

“The reality is, of course, as soon as you think seriously about it, that the mission field is everywhere, including your own street – wherever there is ignorance or rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“This feature of Israelite law stands in sharp contrast to many ancient law codes where certain thefts by certain people were punishable by death. Indeed, it contrasts with British law until fairly recent times (people were hanged for sheep-stealing in Britain until the nineteenth century). On the other hand, as mentioned above, theft of a person for gain (kidnapping) was a capital offence in Israel (21:16; Deut. 24:7). Stealing a human life was different from stealing property.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It is a mistake to suggest that the difference between the Old and the New Testament is that the Old Testament taught that salvation came by keeping the law whereas in the New Testament it comes by grace. That is precisely the distortion of the Scriptures that Paul was combating.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“So then, we must not read Lamentations without the rest of the Bible. But equally, we should not read the rest of the Bible without Lamentations (as Christians have habitually tended to do).”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Message of Lamentations

“Treating all this great collection of texts merely as the expendable container for independent universal principles we can express more simply and tidily denies the character of the Bible as God has given it to us, and might even seem to render Bible reading a waste of time. Regarding the biblical texts about Israel as providing us with a paradigm preserves their historical particularity and forces us to observe all the non-reducible hard edges, all the jarring tensions and all the awkward corners of earthy reality within them.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“relationship between God and Old Testament Israel. In fact, as Jeremiah and other prophets pointed out, the catastrophe of 587 BC was not a denial of that covenant relationship, but the proof of it. It demonstrated that God meant what he said, that YHWH was as faithful to his threats as to his promises. At its inception the covenant had included sanctions – the notorious curses that would come on the people for persistent disloyalty to their covenant Lord (Lev. 26; Deut. 28).16 In 587 BC, they came.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Message of Lamentations

“Science, according to Kuhn, has not actually followed the classic myth of steady evolution of accumulating theories based on deeper and deeper probing of the evidence. Rather, science has sometimes made huge transitions as one paradigm, which may have stood for centuries, is found to be inadequate and crashes to the ground, to be replaced by another.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It does appear, then, that what you find in the landscape of the Old Testament when you ‘get there’ very much depends on whom you take with you and through whose eyes you view it.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“the economic sphere is like a thermometer that reveals both the temperature of the theological relationship between God and Israel (angle A), and also the extent to which Israel was conforming to the social shape required of them in consistency with their status as God’s redeemed people (angle B).”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

“It is important to understand that Paul is not just using Abraham as an illustration of the gospel or of his teaching about justification by grace through faith. No, Abraham is the beginning of the gospel.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Old Testament in Seven Sentences: A Small Introduction to a Vast Topic

“Kindness can be as simple as a pleasant word, or a caring smile. But more importantly, being kind means being willing to do something, or to take some action, that helps somebody else even if it might be inconvenient to myself. When others are willing to use some of their precious time to help me out of some difficult or confusing situation, they are being kind. Kindness goes beyond duty—it means doing something you don’t have to do, but just choose to do. Kindness goes beyond reward—it means doing something you won’t get paid to do. In fact, real kindness usually costs something and doesn’t expect any reward.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit: Growing in Christlikeness

“the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God's People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission

“The God who walks the paths of history through the pages of the Bible pins a mission statement to every signpost on the way.”
― Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative

“Since we seem to have lost the willingness, the vocabulary, or even the capacity, to engage in authentic biblical lament (at least in public worship and certainly in the West), what use have we for a book with such a name? We hardly know how to use the numerous psalms of lament, let alone a whole bookful of (almost but not quite) unrelieved grief and protest. Ironically, by giving no attention to the book of Lamentations, we join those within the book itself who passed by Lady Zion, shaking their heads but offering no comfort to the desolate suffering city and people.”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, The Message of Lamentations

“This means we do not ignore the particularity of biblical commands (and apply them to our own day as if they were timeless universals). Nor are we paralysed by their particularity (and thus unable to apply them to our day at all). We rejoice in their particularity because it shows us how the will of God was expressed in their context, and we take them as our paradigm for our own ethical construction.21”
― Christopher J.H. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God