Category Archives: Eschatology

What’s Dualism Got to Do with It? The Tom Wright Connection, Part 4

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This is part 4 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. For part 3, click here.

What’s Dualism Got to Do with It?

Although I’ve mentioned various two-way influences between Wright and Walsh-Middleton, the connection goes even deeper, and it begins back in 1983. This was when Wright was working on his first book, a commentary on Colossians and Philemon for the Tyndale series (published in 1988).

Wright was writing the Colossians material when Brian Walsh first got to know him at McGill. Based on their friendship, the two would meet regularly to discuss what Wright had written, and Brian would give feedback and critique.

As Brian tells it, he kept challenging the sacred/secular dualism with which Wright was reading Colossians. Wright kept separating salvation in Christ from life in the mundane realm (including the political realm). But according to Colossians 1:15-20, the same Christ through whom all things were created, and in whom all things hang together, is the one whom all things are reconciled. The creator and redeemer are one.

So Walsh and Wright did regular Bible study in Colossians together during the time when Walsh and I were completing our work on The Transforming Vision. And our critique of otherworldly dualism and our framing of salvation as God’s redemption of earthly life managed to impact Wright’s reading of Colossians.

Wright’s own account of how he came to shift from a dualistic worldview to a holistic vision is recounted in his autobiographical essay “My Pilgrimage in Theology,” Themelios, 18/2 (January 1993): 35. There Wright states:

In 1983 I started work on my Colossians commentary. By the time I finished it in 1985 I had undergone probably the most significant change of my theological life. Until then I had been basically, a dualist. The gospel belonged in one sphere, the world of creation and politics in another. Wrestling with Colossians 1:15-20 put paid to that. I am still working through the implications (and the resultant hostility in some quarters): my book New Tasks for a Renewed Church is a recent marker on this route.

Although this article doesn’t mention Brian’s role in the shift, Wright thanks Brian for his contribution at the start of the Tyndale commentary (p. 11).

Now, I’m not going to claim that Tom Wright got his emphasis on the redemption of creation from Walsh and Middleton in any simple or direct sense. But it looks like our early work on worldviews, dualism, and holistic salvation served as a catalyst for Wright at a formative phase of his theological development. At the very least, our work enabled Wright to see what was staring him in the face all along in the text of Colossians.

I started this four-part post with a comment about the similarity between Tom Wright and myself on the eschatological redemption of creation, a point that many have noted. I’ve tried to explain how that similarity may have come about. It is gratifying to think that the early work Brian Walsh and I did on holistic salvation may have made some small contribution to the development of Tom Wright’s powerful and illuminating eschatological vision.

In another post I explore ways in which I’m not quite on board with all of Tom Wright’s eschatology.

You can read about my 2017 visit with Tom Wright at St. Andrews in Scotland here.

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.