N. T. Wright is the subject of this month’s Christianity Today cover story. Tuesday they opened up the lead article online. From the opening editor’s quote from Wright, you get a good sense of some quality, trust-worthy thinking:
When you really do business with the Bible at the fullest historical and theological level, then it is passionately and dramatically relevant, life changing, and community changing.
I wholeheartedly agree. And few people besides the pastors and youth workers I have loved the most have helped me understand the story God is telling through the Bible and through life as well as N. T. Wright has. Thankfully, though, the article (which you can find here) doesn’t skirt some of the very real concerns of Wright’s views. The article’s author, Jason Byasse, catches it: according to Wright, “the church has misread Paul so severely, it seems, that no one fully understood the gospel from the time of the apostle to the time a certain British scholar started reading Paul in Greek in graduate school.” Is it possible that one man sees the truth that so many Christians have missed for almost all of church history? It’s a good question that I can admit to wondering myself.
Controversies aside, Wright has really helped me build some quality historical context for the New Testament. His thinking has also helped me find ways to better articulate the Old Testament’s connection to the New. It’s a “big picture” view that has helped me see parts in connection even as they remain parts. And he does it with a tone (at least in the books of his that I have read, which are not necessarily his larger or more encyclopedic tomes) that really is pastoral (which the interview brings out as well). The words of Byasse on Wright:
He insists that any theory advanced about Paul must be tested with actual exegesis, and he reads the Scriptures as someone happy to be doing so. Most scholars talk about other scholars. Only a blessed few talk about the Bible. Fewer still talk about God.
There are a dozen things I want to say about loving God and reading the Bible and talking well about Scripture, and Wright has helped me hold onto the Bible in a Christian culture that seems to get along well without it (or doesn’t get along well because it doesn’t know what to do with it). I encourage you to give the article a look. You don’t have to agree with everything it says (I’m still undecided on some of his views myself), but I think you’ll find the article’s perspective and its subject at least a little enlightening.
Space Enough, and Time 