The way of imagination

  I first discovered N.T. Wright in 2004, as I was meandering among the library shelves of a Pentecostal Bible School.   As I perused the spines of the many volumes, one title caught my eye: The Resurrection of the Son of God .   As it turns out, I had recently been thinking quite a bit about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection and this book seemed to call out to me.   This was to be the beginning of a now 16-year obsession with the theologian who has been hailed as “the C.S. Lewis of our generation”, “the greatest NT scholar since Bultmann”, and “the most widely read NT scholar in the world today” and, indeed, a “rock star among theologians”.      As it happens, the tome I checked out of the library that day was the third volume of a projected 6-volume project entitled Christian Origins and the Question of God .   This series offers itself as a complete literary-historical-theological account of the NT (Jesus, Paul & the Gospels), result...

  a.       Back to the future: Paul’s gospel for the 21 st century      Ever since writing his doctoral dissertation on the letter to the Romans (1980), N.T. Wright has been a passionate Pauline scholar. [1]   Wright adopts Newbigin’s analysis of the post-Enlightenment western world as being, not a religion-less society, but rather a pagan society. [2]   Wright writes extensively about contemporary (American) imperialism and the resurgence of “Gnosticism” in today’s world. [3]   Paganism, imperialism and Gnosticism – the world of the 21 st century begins to look more and more like that of ancient Rome. [4]   For Wright, Christians in today’s western world face a situation analogous to that faced by Paul in the first century. [5]   Wright has “turned back the clock”; he invites Christians to see their world as Paul saw the world of Rome [6] – as a pagan world desperately needing to be challenged with the re...

a.       COQG as New Testament missiology      In a recent publication, Wright offers an intriguing appraisal of his project ( COQG ): “What I think I am writing is a kind of ‘New Testament Missiology’ [1] .  The New Testament was written to build up and energize the church to be God’s people in God’s world, living between Jesus’ resurrection and the final renewal.  A properly contextualized historical account of the New Testament would therefore give priority to explaining how the text was meant to serve that function…” [2] Once again, we can hear echoes of Newbigin resounding in the beating heart of Wright’s vision: the purpose of the NT (and “theology”) has ever been to serve the church’s mission in the world . [3]   Wright studies the NT, not as a theologian seeking to (re)formulate doctrines, but rather as a missional thinker seeking to contextualize the message of the NT in order to make it intelligible to the post...