J. RICHARD MIDDLETON

J. Richard Middleton is Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Northeastern Seminary and Roberts Wesleyan University in Rochester, NY.

He has been President of the Canadian-American Theological Association (2011–2014) and President of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (2019–2021).

Middleton has a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in a joint-degree program with the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. His other degrees include: M.A. in Philosophy, University of Guelph (Canada), and B.Th., Jamaica Theological Seminary. He has done additional graduate studies in the Old Testament at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and in religious studies and philosophy at Syracuse University.

His most recent book is Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Baker Academic, 2021). It is being translated into Korean.

He has authored The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos Press, 2005), which is translated into Korean, and A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic, 2014), which won the 2014 Word Guild Award — Biblical Studies Category. It has been translated into Korean and Spanish.

While in Canada he coauthored (with Brian Walsh) The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview (InterVarsity,1984) and Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (InterVarsity/SPCK, 1995). The former book has been published in Korean, French, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The latter book received a Book-of-the-Year award (1996) from Christianity Today magazine and has been published in Korean.

Middleton has co-edited two volumes of essays, A Kairos Moment for Caribbean Theology (Pickwick, 2013) and Orthodoxy and Orthopraxis (Pickwick, 2020).

He is currently working on three writing projects: Portrait of a Disgruntled Prophet: Samuel’s Resistance to God and the Undoing of Saul (Eerdmans); a rewrite of The Transforming Vision tentatively titled Shaped by God’s Story: Christian Worldview in a Global Key (IVP Academic); and God’s Prism: The Imago Dei in the Biblical Story (Baker Academic). He will then work on two books for Cascade: Life and Death in the Garden of Eden: A Theological Reading of Genesis 2–3 and 1 Samuel (in the Cascade Companions series).

Before beginning at Northeastern Seminary in 2011, Middleton taught at Roberts Wesleyan University for ten years, and before that at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (Rochester, NY), the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in Kingston, Jamaica, Redeemer University (Ancaster, ON), and the Institute for Christian Studies (Toronto, ON).  He has also served as campus minister at two universities in Canada (the University of Guelph and Brock University) and two in the United States (Syracuse University and the University of Rochester).

Richard is married to Marcia, his teenage sweetheart, and they have two sons, Andrew and Kevin. Due to their mixed cultural and national heritage, they consider themselves “Jamericadians.”