This is part 1 of a four-part post on my connections to N. T. Wright, the prolific New Testament scholar.
Many people have observed the similarity between my teaching on eschatology and Tom Wright’s position on the subject. Both Wright and I affirm the redemption of creation (a new heaven and a new earth) as the core biblical teaching on the expected future, in contrast to popular ideas of an otherworldly destiny in an immaterial “heaven.”
Middleton’s “Strange Views”
When I first came to understand the New Testament’s vision of the redemption of creation as the climax of God’s purposes, and then started teaching on the subject, I was an undergraduate theological student in Jamaica. That was back in 1976 and I had never heard of Tom Wright.
There were a number of influences on my thinking at the time, none more important that George Eldon Ladd’s The Pattern of New Testament Truth (1968). Ladd contrasted the dualism of Plato’s worldview (with its goal of ascent to a heavenly world) with the biblical vision of God’s coming from heaven to earth to redeem earthly life. Ladd then illustrated different ways this biblical vision was articulated in the Synoptic Gospels, in the Johannine literature, and in Paul.
Beginning in 1979, soon after I moved to Canada, I began teaching non-credit courses on the topic of a Christian worldview in a variety of campus ministry settings at different Ontario universities. This was an outreach program to Christian university students developed by Brian Walsh through the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. Brian also taught some of these courses.
The point of these courses was to help Christian students live a more integrated life. Through communal reflection on Scripture, theology, western intellectual history, and contemporary culture, along with exploring a sense of vocation in God’s world, many of our students were impelled to be more intentional about their discipleship. They were encouraged to connect their academic studies and participation in society with their Christian faith. This meant breaking down the sacred/secular split that most Christians have internalized, since this unbiblical dualism leads to a compartmentalized faith, which cripples the church’s witness to the coming of God’s kingdom in this world.
Although we had slightly different emphases in our courses, Brian and I were united in grounding all our “worldview” teaching in God’s desire to redeem creation. Our shared approach to the subject led us to co-author The Transforming Vision in 1984, which further developed our views on the subject, especially in Chap. 5: “Transformed by Redemption” and Chap. 6: “The Problem of Dualism.”
After that book, the redemption of creation continued to be a major theme of my teaching in campus ministry settings, not only in Canada, but also in the U.S. And this theme was central to my formal teaching as well, at both undergraduate and graduate institutions, in both countries.
For many years, undergraduate students at Roberts Wesleyan College would refer to my “strange views” on eschatology, as if they were distinctive to me. Although I assigned readings by other authors with a similar point of view, few of these readings were by biblical scholars and the biblical scholars I assigned weren’t that accessible to non-specialists. I was therefore delighted when Tom Wright began publishing his views on the subject, especially his popular Surprised by Hope (2008). Suddenly, my views were no longer quite so idiosyncratic. I was in good (scholarly) company.
In part 2 of this post I’ll explain when I first encountered Wright and how he began to influence my thinking.
CREATION to ESCHATON 