Tag Archives: ethics

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.

Middleton’s “Strange Views” on Eschatology: The Tom Wright Connection, Part 1

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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.

The Imago Dei and Ministry

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I regularly teach a course on the Biblical Worldview at Northeastern Seminary, in which one of the student assignments is to reflect on the implications of humanity created as imago Dei (Latin for “image of God”). Students are asked to think out loud about how understanding their own lives in terms of this biblical doctrine (first articulated in Genesis 1:26-28) might impact their vocation and ministry, whether inside or outside the church. Although the course is addressed to seminarians and is focused theologically and ethically, it is grounded in rigorous study of the Bible in its historical context. So when it comes to the imago Dei, students are asked to move beyond speculative ideas in the history of the church and connect what we know about the imago Dei in the Bible (given its ancient Near Eastern context) with their lives in the contemporary world.

The Seminary has recently published reflections on this topic from three current M.Div. students in their March Newsletter (Resound). The three reflections (on pages 1-2) are collectively entitled “Investigating the Imago Dei—Student Reflections.” These reflections (by Kayleigh, Brian, and Steven) are well worth reading and have relevance far beyond pastoral ministry.

Here is the pdf of the newsletter. Here is the link to read it online.