Category Archives: Biblical study

A Bunch of “Shout Outs” from Wright: The Tom Wright Connection, Part 3

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This is part 3 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar. For part 1, click here. For part 2, click here.

A Bunch of “Shout Outs” by Wright

Back in 1992, before Wright had achieved his present international stature, Brian Walsh and I were already excited by his work and quite taken with his newly-released The New Testament and the People of God, which he conceived as the first volume of a project entitled “Christian Origins and the Question of God.” We were therefore honored that Wright used our four worldview questions from The Transforming Vision as a tool for his analysis of first-century Judaism in that book (pp. 122-23). Brian is also mentioned in the preface, where Wright thanks him for his extensive feedback on the manuscript (p. xix).

We repaid the honor when we used Wright’s conception of the biblical story as a five-act drama (and added a sixth act) in the last chapter of our book Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (1995). In fact, our book is indebted to Wright’s ideas at numerous points. Wright then wrote an appreciative blurb for the cover of the British edition of the Truth is Stranger book (published by SPCK).

With the second volume in Wright’s project, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996), he again thanked Brian (also p. xix). This time Wright added a fifth worldview question (p. 138, n. 41) and used the five questions to structure an entire chapter (chap. 10: “The Questions of the Kingdom,” pp. 443-74).

More recently, in the fourth and final volume (which is itself two volumes!), Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013), Wright once more acknowledged his debt to the Walsh-Middleton analysis of worldviews (pp. 27-28).

I know this sounds like boasting; but I’m only just getting warmed up.

It was 1992 (or possibly 1993), soon after The New Testament and the People of God had been published. Brian Walsh and I were attending the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). It was lunchtime and we were wondering around one of the big hotels that hosted the SBL meetings. We spotted Tom Wright giving a lecture to a group of scholars seated at tables having lunch. He looked up, interrupted his lecture, and called out: “There are my friends Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton!” Then he went back to his lecture. I was stunned.

Some years later at another SBL meeting (2009, New Orleans), Wright was giving an evening lecture on his new Justification book to a group of about 700 (the hall was packed). I was sitting beside Keith Bodner, an Old Testament scholar from Crandall University in New Brunswick. I had given a paper that afternoon on the role of humanity in Psalms 8 and 104 (plus another paper the previous day in a session Bodner chaired). I was beginning to relax, now that my “duties” were over. To my surprise, near the start of the lecture Wright made mention of my Psalms paper that afternoon and said he would like to have heard it since he was sure it would have been as helpful as my analysis of the imago Dei in The Liberating Image. At that point, Bodner leaned over incredulously and said: “You got a shout out from Tom Wright!?”

But I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. I had come to know Tom Wright as a generous person, who invests his time and energy in the building up of others. This goes well beyond his prodigious writing and speaking. After all, he had accepted my invitation to have dinner with a dozen of my past and current students the previous year, at the 2008 SBL in Boston. He and Maggie graciously spent an evening with our group, eating Italian food and engaging in stimulating and heart-felt conversations about Scripture, theology, and the church.

In part 4 of this post I’ll address the possibility that Walsh and Middleton affected Wright’s views of the redemption of creation.

My Introduction to Tom Wright: The Tom Wright Connection, Part 2

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This is part 2 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar. For part 1, click here.

My Introduction to Tom Wright

I first encountered Tom Wright when he was teaching New Testament at McGill University in Montreal (1981-1986) and I sat under his teaching soon after he moved to Oxford.

I was introduced to Wright by Brian Walsh, my friend and co-author. Brian was a Ph.D. student in philosophy of religion at McGill when Wright taught there, and they became fast friends. Brian later married one of Wright’s doctoral students at Oxford, Sylvia Keesmaat, who is today an accomplished New Testament scholar.

It was through Brian’s friendship with Wright that the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto (where Brian was teaching and where I later did my Ph.D.) invited Wright to give a series of lectures in 1988 and again in 1989. The first was a five-part series on the Gospel of Mark (July 7-8, 1988), and the second was a three-part series entitled “The Quest for the Historical Kingdom” (January 31-February 1, 1989).

These lectures (which predated the 1992 publication of The New Testament and the People of God) were my first exposure to Wright’s innovative thinking on the gospels. These lectures stimulated my excitement about Jesus’ mission and message, especially their connection to the Old Testament and Judaism. I still have audio tapes of the lectures, as well as my copious notes. Wright’s narrative analysis of the Bible during these lectures greatly influenced my own exposition of the plot structure of the biblical story, which first shows up in chap. 6 of Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (1995), then in my essay “A New Heaven and a New Earth” (2006), and as a separate chapter in my eschatology book (2014).

I followed Wright’s publications and career as he later moved from Oxford (1986-1993) to become Dean of Lichfield Cathedral (1994-1999), then Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey (2000-2003), then Bishop of Durham (2003-2010), then Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews (2010-2019) and finally Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford (since 2019).

Wright is now a figure of international importance, both as one of the leading New Testament scholars today and as popular theologian and teacher of the worldwide church. A recent issue of Christianity Today, which has Wright’s picture on the cover, suggests that he is comparable only to C. S. Lewis in the extent of his influence.

In part 3 of this post I’ll comment on a few ways in which Wright has used and acknowledged of the work of Walsh and Middleton.

My Assumptions for Studying and Teaching the Bible

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Here are five assumptions that undergird my own study of Scripture and all my teaching at Northeastern Seminary. I first came up with this list when I was just beginning my tenure at Northeastern in 2011, and I’ve been sharing it with incoming students ever since.

The Bible tells one complex, coherent true story.

The Bible is a complex collection of literature that nevertheless is framed in terms of a coherent story of redemption that is meant to guide our lives. The coherence of Scripture holds true despite many differing theological emphases, and even the presence of dissonant voices. We ignore both the coherence and the complexity of Scripture at our peril.

The biblical story is holistic.

The biblical God is the creator of all and everything that God made is good. While the fall is radical (both deep, to the heart, and broad, affecting every corner of life), Scripture proclaims God’s intent to redeem all creation (human and non-human) and to bring this world to the destiny for which he created it. The biblical worldview acknowledges no sacred/secular split.

The Bible is temporal and contextual.

While the biblical message is applicable to all times and places, revelation is given in particular times and places, and is definitively marked by its historical contexts. Attending to this temporal and contextual character of Scripture is crucial for responsible interpretation.

Humans are granted a significant role in the Scriptures.

Not only is the Bible pervaded by the perspectives of its multiple human authors (through whom revelation has come), but Scripture recounts the decisive role of human characters within the biblical story at every turn as significant contributors to the movement (whether forward or backward) of the story of redemption. We must attend to the complex divine-human relationship in the pages of Scripture.

Serious study of the Bible should itself be a process of transformation and discipleship.

It is not enough to say that studying the Bible should lead to transformation and discipleship. This often means that study about the Bible (or someone else’s summary of the Bible or sermons on the Bible) is substituted for our actual engaged grappling with Scripture. Nor is this reducible to lectio divina, valuable as that practice is, since this can artificially separate our spirituality from our cognitive attempts to understand the Bible, in its full complexity. Rather, it is the process of grappling with the detailed complexity of particular texts (even texts that we find challenging) that draws us into the biblical story as engaged dialogue partners with God and as committed participants in God’s mission to redeem creation.