N. T. Wright Interview: Bible Study, Original Languages, Favorite Books, and More

N. T. Wright Interview: Bible Study, Original Languages, Favorite Books, and More

Tell us about your favorite N. T. Wright quote.

I remember reading Wright's The Challenge of Jesus while I was in Israel in 2000. It had a profound impact on me and directly influenced my time in the Holy Land.

""The key I propose for translating Jesus' unique message to the Israel
of his day into our message to our contemporaries is to grasp the
parallel, which is woven deeply into both Testaments, between the human
call to bear God's image and Israel's call to be the light of the
world. . . . Jesus came as the true Israel, the true Jew, the true
human."—N. T. Wright

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spitzerpl

Loved the interview, thanks! The link at the bottom to the Forum just looped me back to the blog though.

Mark Barnes

Jayson,

I found it really difficult to find the blog post because:

It's not showing up on the home page of http://blog.logos.com/
You didn't link to it in your initial post.

I eventually got to it from a forum sidebar. For others who struggled, here's the link: http://blog.logos.com/archives/2011/02/n_t_wright_interview_bible_study_original_languages_favorite_books_and_more.html

Smithereens

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224631#Comment_224631

Mark,

At first, I had the same issue finding it at blog.logos.com. It looks like there was a cache issue for some reason...on my end, it didn't show up in firefox but did in chrome. When I reset my ff cache it rendered properly. Not sure why it would be a widespread issue though....

spitzerpl

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224641#Comment_224641

When I reset my ff cache it rendered properly. Not sure why it would be a widespread issue though....

I suppose, in these tough days, more people's cache is tight and they don't want to give it up.

TCBlack

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224645#Comment_224645

@Stephen: Same cache issue here - even after some refreshes! It took about the fifth refresh of the day to trigger it.

@Philip: Groan.

Mark Barnes

Tell us about your favorite N. T. Wright quote.

Thought I'd better get back on topic. This from his book on Resurrection:

Jesus’ resurrection was the divine vindication of him as Messiah, ‘son of God’ in that sense, the representative of Israel and thence of the world.… God has done what the Torah could not do, condemning sin in the flesh of the Messiah, as the representative of all his people, and by his Spirit giving life, in the present in terms of a new orientation and mindset ([Romans] 8:5–8), in the ultimate future in terms of bodily resurrection… If, then, Jesus has been vindicated as Messiah, certain things follow at once. He is to be seen as Israel’s true representative; the great turn-around of the eras has already begun; ‘the resurrection’ has split into two, with Jesus the Messiah as the first-fruits and the Messiah’s people following later, when he returns.… ‘Resurrection’ was a key part of the ‘eschaton’; if it had happened to one man whom many had regarded as Israel’s Messiah, that meant that it had happened, in principle, to Israel as a whole. The Messiah represented Israel, just as David had represented Israel when he faced Goliath.

Now all you have to do is figure out why Wright spread those sentences over about 500 pages! (pp 248, 256, 395, 726)

Jayson Bradley

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224674#Comment_224674

God has done what the Torah could not do, condemning sin in the flesh of the Messiah . . .

This line in particular choked me up! Thanks for sharing that Mark.

Mathew Haferkamp

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224677#Comment_224677

The best way to talk about N T Wright is to let him speak for himself:

Farewell to the Rapture
(N.T. Wright, Bible Review, August 2001. Reproduced by permission of the author)

Little did Paul know how his colorful metaphors for Jesus’ second coming would be misunderstood two millennia later.

The American obsession with the second coming of Jesus — especially with distorted interpretations of it — continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre[1]. Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left behind.” This pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of (distorted) faith.

This dramatic end-time scenario is based (wrongly, as we shall see) on Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, where he writes: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout of command, with the voice of an archangel and the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we, who are left alive, will be snatched up with them on clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).

What on earth (or in heaven) did Paul mean?

It is Paul who should be credited with creating this scenario. Jesus himself, as I have argued in various books, never predicted such an event[2]. The gospel passages about “the Son of Man coming on the clouds” (Mark 13:26, 14:62, for example) are about Jesus’ vindication, his “coming” to heaven from earth. The parables about a returning king or master (for example, Luke 19:11-27) were originally about God returning to Jerusalem, not about Jesus returning to earth. This, Jesus seemed to believe, was an event within space-time history, not one that would end it forever.

The Ascension of Jesus and the Second Coming are nevertheless vital Christian doctrines[3], and I don’t deny that I believe some future event will result in the personal presence of Jesus within God’s new creation. This is taught throughout the New Testament outside the Gospels. But this event won’t in any way resemble the Left Behind account. Understanding what will happen requires a far more sophisticated cosmology than the one in which “heaven” is somewhere up there in our universe, rather than in a different dimension, a different space-time, altogether.

The New Testament, building on ancient biblical prophecy, envisages that the creator God will remake heaven and earth entirely, affirming the goodness of the old Creation but overcoming its mortality and corruptibility (e.g., Romans 8:18-27; Revelation 21:1; Isaiah 65:17, 66:22). When that happens, Jesus will appear within the resulting new world (e.g., Colossians 3:4; 1 John 3:2).

Paul’s description of Jesus’ reappearance in 1 Thessalonians 4 is a brightly colored version of what he says in two other passages, 1 Corinthians 15:51-54 and Philippians 3:20-21: At Jesus’ “coming” or “appearing,” those who are still alive will be “changed” or “transformed” so that their mortal bodies will become incorruptible, deathless. This is all that Paul intends to say in Thessalonians, but here he borrows imagery—from biblical and political sources—to enhance his message. Little did he know how his rich metaphors would be misunderstood two millennia later.

First, Paul echoes the story of Moses coming down the mountain with the Torah. The trumpet sounds, a loud voice is heard, and after a long wait Moses comes to see what’s been going on in his absence.

Second, he echoes Daniel 7, in which “the people of the saints of the Most High” (that is, the “one like a son of man”) are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up to sit with God in glory. This metaphor, applied to Jesus in the Gospels, is now applied to Christians who are suffering persecution.

Third, Paul conjures up images of an emperor visiting a colony or province. The citizens go out to meet him in open country and then escort him into the city. Paul’s image of the people “meeting the Lord in the air” should be read with the assumption that the people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade world.

Paul’s mixed metaphors of trumpets blowing and the living being snatched into heaven to meet the Lord are not to be understood as literal truth, as the Left Behind series suggests, but as a vivid and biblically allusive description of the great transformation of the present world of which he speaks elsewhere.

Paul’s misunderstood metaphors present a challenge for us: How can we reuse biblical imagery, including Paul’s, so as to clarify the truth, not distort it? And how can we do so, as he did, in such a way as to subvert the political imagery of the dominant and dehumanizing empires of our world? We might begin by asking, What view of the world is sustained, even legitimized, by the Left Behind ideology? How might it be confronted and subverted by genuinely biblical thinking? For a start, is not the Left Behind mentality in thrall to a dualistic view of reality that allows people to pollute God’s world on the grounds that it’s all going to be destroyed soon? Wouldn’t this be overturned if we recaptured Paul’s wholistic vision of God’s whole creation?

[1] Tim F. Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind (Cambridge, UK: Tyndale House Publishing, 1996). Eight other titles have followed, all runaway bestsellers.

[2] See my Jesus and the Victory of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1996); the discussions in Jesus and the Restoration of Israel: A Critical Assessment of N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, ed. Carey C. Newman (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999); and Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), chapters 13 and 14.

[3] Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

David Paul

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224677#Comment_224677

God has done what the Torah could not do, condemning sin in the flesh of the Messiah . . .

This line in particular choked me up! Thanks for sharing that Mark.

I'm choking on that statement, too.

Larry Heflin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224771#Comment_224771

"The best way to talk about N T Wright is to let him speak for himself"

Different strokes for different folks.
I watched the Wright video and was far more impressed with it than I was with the "Farewell to the Rapture" article/excerpt above. Like some others here I also got choked up, but no doubt in a different sense. Since he doesn't mince words, neither will I. I give him high grades for creative writing, mostly novel thought, and eisegesis. Okay, everybody in the room who, through careful exegesis arrived in the same ballpark of understanding of the Word of God as did Wright, raise your hand. ----Nobody? It's great to have someone finally reconnect with the apostle Paul after nearly two thousand years.
I'm certain Wright is a truly humble man in person in spite of his stature as a theologian and communicator. But if the method that comes across in this article is the model for attaining truth from the Word of God, then the Word is certainly a closed book to the average person and studying the Bible or using Logos software is of questionable value. I'm picking up hints of esoteric knowledge that comes along every two thousand years or so, rather than the fruit of careful exegesis and exposition that should be available to all who seek. Origen would be proud.
The "Left Behind" series is of no interest to me. I dislike if for my own reasons. But, if Wright has really reconnected with Paul is it accurate to call something a misappropriated "obsession" when Paul calls it "the blessed hope" resulting from grace? (Titus 2:11-13) Shouldn't it be acknowledged that the first three centuries of the church were similarly crass "literal"-ists sans the crashing cars? The "God as a Warrior" motiff of the third point has been used by others with a very different understanding. Does biblical truth really come down to who is the best storyteller? I don't think so.
Certainly, old truths can be re-discovered, new-to-you insights happen, and contemporary applications are a necessity. But all should be controlled by the Word rather than using the Word to sanctify esoterica and gnostic type insight. In my humble opinion.
Who was it that said, "God must love the average man because He made so many of them." -?

Michael Miller

N. T. Wright is certainly a brilliant man, but his last few comments seemed typical. First, the United States as a country spends BILLIONS of dollars each year feeding and attempting to care for the poor of the world. And, second, the BIG, medium and small congregations in the United States DO NOT forget those in the world who have less. For instance, my church < 850 supports missionaries, and missions trips to help those in need ALL over the WORLD! Our church spends large sums of money, time, and effort to help support Christians of the world and those who need the help of Christians willing to spread the Gospel. I am sorry but I will not accept anyone from another country to come to America and make blank statements that are contrary to what is going on within U.S. Christian Churches. These people are not inspiring or uplifting, and tare down things that many hard working, and Godly people of the Churches within the United States are doing for the Church of our Lord.

Rev. Steven Poelman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224705#Comment_224705

"The best way to talk about N T Wright is to let him speak for himself:"

Hmmm.

Such as the following comments taken from a number of his books. Some of these ideas are repeated many times throughout most of his works:

"The Gospel is not about how to get saved."

"Future justification is on the basis of a complete life lived."

"First century Judaism had nothing of the alleged self-righteousness and boastful legalism." (Right, and neither does this new covenant people today. sarcasm)

And Wright has stated a number of times in various ways that justification is not about sinners being made righteous or declared righteous, but its simply Gentiles being included in a covenant that formerly only accepted Jews. .He insists that mere covenant membership is justification of the Gentiles. (But what did mere covenant membership do for all Jews who perished throughout Biblical history? They died because they were not justified, even though they had the sign of covenant membership marked on their flesh).

I know that some will insist that these are comments taken out of context, but when I read them in context in Wright's works I don't feel any better about them. Many of us would be put out of the ministry for remarks like this, but Wright has such a witty way about him that he can get away with it, and those who would otherwise be alarmed stay right in the back seat of his car.

There are literally dozens of critiques written about Wright's views, and most of them will point out many other comments that most people who read their Bibles everyday would find dubious or disturbing.

One critique I could suggest is John Piper's, The Future of Justification, which does a good job of analyzing exegetically a long list of disturbing statements by Wright. This is important, because Wright keeps insisting in his books that none of his "opponents" ever answer him with sound exegetical arguments from the Scripture alone, but always base their arguments on the creeds of the Reformation of the 16th century. Actually, however, there are a number of books that analyze Wright's views using Scripture. He seems to refuse to acknowledge their existence in books I've read by him.

You'll find Piper handles Wright's work very kindly and graciously, crediting him often for things he does get right, even thanking him at times. But taking him to the carpet nonetheless for comments that are obvious errors in very important matter like justification, where souls of real people are at stake.

On the other hand, I have often observed Wright writing-off all who argue against him as if their views and exegetical arguments are from the same lump of the old worthless way of thinking, yet refusing to interact directly with them on the specific exegetical issues, and casting a slur on those who disagree with him, as if no one ever understood God's Word, or the gospel, or justification for 2000 years until Wright and other New Perspective on Paul authors came along to reinterpret the entire Bible for all of us who are too blinded by Martin Luther's understanding of justification to see for ourselves what Scripture really means.

There are things that can be learned even from a neo-orthodox author like Wright. But one should read him with a critique written by someone else in hand, someone whose exegesis you have learned to trust over the years. Piper is only one of many who have risen to the task of helping us out on this one.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224850#Comment_224850

For posters in the forums, especially this thread, please read the guidelines (see upper right of the main forum page). I'm not concerned with anything that has been said, merely with where the thread might head.

David Paul

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224863#Comment_224863

I disagree with Wright...and I disagree with those who disagree with Wright. [:P]

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224912#Comment_224912

I disagree with Wright...and I disagree with those who disagree with Wright.

[:D]

And I haven't read Wright enough to have an opinion other than that he must be Wright.

Allen Browne

Tell us about your favorite N. T. Wright quote.

N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), 141-42:

"Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I hope to develop further elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the biblical story as itself consisting of five acts. Thus: 1—Creation; 2—Fall; 3—Israel; 4—Jesus. The writing of the New Testament—including the writing of the gospels—would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. The fact of Act 4 being what it is shows what sort of a conclusion the drama should have, without making clear all the intervening steps. The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion. The church is designed, according to this model, as a stage in the completion of the creator’s work of art: as Paul says in Ephesians 2:10, autou gar esmen poiema, we are his artwork."

Allen Browne

The Logos interviewer asks Wright about which books have influenced him, and he mentions:

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Abingdon, 1996

Any chance of getting this book in Logos?

Brad Fry

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224933#Comment_224933

At 4:40 into the interview Wright says that C.S. Lewis' "view on the historical Jesus is very worrying". Anyone have any idea what in particular he's talking about?

Jayson Bradley

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/224933#Comment_224933

The Logos interviewer asks Wright about which books have influenced him, and he mentions:

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Abingdon, 1996

Any chance of getting this book in Logos?

Sending an email to Suggest@Logos.com is the best and quickest way to put a vote in for a resource you would love to see in our format!

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/225938#Comment_225938

At 4:40 into the interview Wright says that C.S. Lewis' "view on the historical Jesus is very worrying". Anyone have any idea what in particular he's talking about?

I think he's referring to The Screwtape Letters, chapter 23. (See Jesus and the Victory of God, pg 10, fn. 17). As I'm sure you know, the letters are written from the Devil's perspective. Here's a partial extract from that chapter (and it's stirring stuff from my perspective!):

…Now this idea must be used by us to
encourage once again the conception of a "historical Jesus" to be found
by clearing away later "accretions and perversions"… The advantages of
these constructions, which we intend to change every thirty years or so,
are manifold. In the first place they all tend to direct men's devotion
to something which does not exist, for each "historical Jesus" is
unhistorical. The documents say what they say and cannot be added to;
each new "historical Jesus" therefore has to be got out of them by
suppression at one point and exaggeration at another, and by that sort
of guessing (brilliant is the adjective we teach humans to apply
to it) on which no one would risk ten shillings in ordinary life, but
which is enough to produce a crop of new Napoleons, new Shakespeares,
and new Swifts, in every publisher's autumn list.

In the second place,
all such constructions place the importance of their Historical Jesus in
some peculiar theory He is supposed to have promulgated. He has to be a
"great man" in the modern sense of the word—one standing at the
terminus of some centrifugal and unbalanced line of thought—a crank
vending a panacea. We thus distract men's minds from Who He is, and what
He did. We first make Him solely a teacher, and then conceal the very
substantial agreement between His teachings and those of all other great
moral teachers. For humans must not be allowed to notice that all great
moralists are sent by the Enemy not to inform men but to remind them,
to restate the primeval moral platitudes against our continual
concealment of them. We make the Sophists: He raises up a Socrates to
answer them.

Our third aim is, by these constructions, to destroy the
devotional life. For the real presence of the Enemy, otherwise
experienced by men in prayer and sacrament, we substitute a merely
probable, remote, shadowy, and uncouth figure, one who spoke a strange
language and died a long time ago. Such an object cannot in fact be
worshipped. Instead of the Creator adored by its creature, you soon have
merely a leader acclaimed by a partisan, and finally a distinguished
character approved by a judicious historian. And fourthly, besides being
unhistorical in the Jesus it depicts, religion of this kind is false to
history in another sense.

The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact
(the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption)
operating on a sense of sin which they already had—and sin, not against
some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a "great man", but
against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been
taught by their nurses and mothers. The "Gospels" come later and were
written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.

The "Historical Jesus" then, however dangerous he may seem to be to
us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged.

Allen Browne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/225942#Comment_225942

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Abingdon, 1996

Any chance of getting this book in Logos?

Sending an email to Suggest@Logos.com is the best and quickest way to put a vote in for a resource you would love to see in our format!

Done. Thanks Jason

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/226035#Comment_226035

At 4:40 into the interview Wright says that C.S. Lewis' "view on the historical Jesus is very worrying". Anyone have any idea what in particular he's talking about?

I think he's referring to The Screwtape Letters, chapter 23. (See Jesus and the Victory of God, pg 10, fn. 17). As I'm sure you know, the letters are written from the Devil's perspective. Here's a partial extract from that chapter (and it's stirring stuff from my perspective!):

I also posted a reply to this question on another thread (which Brad has now seen, but which I link to here in case anyone else is coming along and reading this thread who doesn't know about the other one): http://community.logos.com/forums/p/30438/226059.aspx#226059

Brad Fry

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/226035#Comment_226035

Thanks, Mark. That was pointed out to me by another friend. Here's a article that Rosie suggested. It is a critique of Lewis by Wright: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=20-02-028-f.

Mike Binks

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/225938#Comment_225938

At 4:40 into the interview Wright says that C.S. Lewis' "view on the historical Jesus is very worrying". Anyone have any idea what in particular he's talking about?

Try here