Learning with N. T. Wright
Here’s a second-year snapshot with Tom—widely known as the theologian N. T. Wright.
Through email exchanges, small group discussions, and one-to-one coffee chats, this man has taught me how to proclaim the news about Jesus, and emphise it as a concrete event rather than an abstract theological formulation. He’s also shown me how to think about the Bible historically and as a story complete with fabulous literary devices that help us apprehend what God was up to in the First Century A.D. and today.
To be completely candid, even as a pastor over the last decade and a half, much of the Bible teaching I had grown up with—prior to Wright’s help—often confused me and felt either philosophical and overcomplicated or assumed and unexplained.
Tom has helped me see that the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection is actually very intuitive in its most basic form. This becomes even clearer as we study the Bible as a God-breathed, human-penned collection of documents that often use powerfully creative rhetorical techniques to explain real miraculous events that were happening in the room.
God simply bodily raised Jesus from a thoroghly confirmed death. And then Jesus was seen in his resurrection body thereafter. Jesus would explain the significance of it all through Israel’s story (Luke 24:27). The Apostle Paul would later affirm Jesus’ description as of ‘first importance’ (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). The big implication was that Jesus resurrection is a precursor to a long-anticipated general resurrection to come—many Jews were already speculating about this possibilty!
In lieu of that hope, and Jesus bodily resurrection from the dead, the world is a different place. All of the Christian scriptures and hope-ethics that followed would then easily arrange themselves around the emerging reality of God’s ultimate future.
We don’t always need a complicated theory, whether those developed by the Church Fathers, those articulated through the medieval period, or even those penned in the Protestant Reformation. We simply need to let the well-documented event of one man’s bodily resurrection from the dead sink in, then begin to ask questions, and then read Jesus’ own explanations of the significance of his vocation and watch the Holy Spirit do his work. It’s a very natural process.
Academic pieces that have really helped me include the first three volumes of N. T. Wright’s Christian Origins and The Question of God Series:
If you’re not interested in getting into the weeds of it all, Tom’s Simply Good News would, I think, be a massive help in grasping the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection and what it all means.
It’s been a total dream working with Tom, his son Olly, and some of his other students at this time. So special to dive into the big questions of my generation while Sarah and I prepare for our next season of ministry.
To know the Word. To make HIM heard!!