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“The Time of Your Visitation” with N. T. Wright

Rev. Dr. N. T. Wright

Rev. Dr. N. T. (Tom) Wright is Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College in the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. His work has established him as the foremost voice among New Testament scholars of the present generation, not least due to his many commentaries, topical studies, and the multi-volume, Christian Origins and the Question of God. Is Jesus’ parable of Luke 19:11-27 teaching that the kingdom of God is going to be delayed indefinitely or that it is arriving at that moment with Jesus’ descent upon Jerusalem? Verse 44 of the same chapter and Jeremiah’s use of a key Greek word, among other things, ominously suggests the latter.

To hear the podcast (10 min) click here.

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The Early High Christology Club with Carey Newman

The Stone Chapel Podcast

The Early High Christology Club (EHCC) was a loose association of scholars from various backgrounds and different religious traditions.

They all  became convinced that the early circles of the Jesus movement regarded their Lord as having “high” or divine status. 

Carey Newman, executive editor at Fortress Press, joins David Capes on “The Stone Chapel Podcast” to talk about the beginning and contribution of the “club” to modern scholarship. 

Both Capes and Newman were founding members of the club, and unfortunately, they are the only surviving  members. 

Over the roughly 25 years the club “met,” it boasted some of the most significant voices in New Testament Studies: Larry Hurtado, Alan Segal, Paula Fredriksen, Donald Juel, April DeConick, Martin Hengel, Pheme Perkins, N. T. Wright, Marianne Meye Thompson, Richard Hays and a host of others. 

As an informal club, it had no membership.  But scholars who heard of the group wanted to become members and own one of the coveted coffee mugs produced by Baylor University Press. 

To be a member, a scholar needed to have written books or articles making the case that the evidence demonstrates that Jesus is worshiped from early moments of the movement and set in such close association with God that he could properly be referred to as divine. 

After relating the “founding myth” of the organization in the mid-1990s Carey Newman situates the club within the stream of scholarship. 

Some regard the worship of Jesus to be a later development in the first century (60-70 years after the execution of Jesus).  Others think it happened much later (hundreds of years).  But members of the EHCC generally make the case that historically it arose for various reasons within the first decade of the movement. 

Several Early High Christology Club members have lectured at the Lanier Library: Larry Hurtado, Richard Hays, Mike Bird, and N. T. Wright.  Among the special collections, the library has the libraries of two of the founding members: Alan Segal and Larry Hurtado.  It also houses many of the books of Peter Davids and David Capes, two key members.

The late Larry Hurtado’s blog is a good source of information about the club as well as all things New Testament:  https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com

The title of the book neither David or Carey could remember was Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity (Baylor University Press, 2007).

To hear the podcast click here.

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The Romans Road with N. T. Wright

Tom Wright

N. T. (“Tom”) Wright, Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, joins David Capes on “The Stone Chapel Podcast” to talk about his June 2022 lecture: “The Romans Road: Through the Dark Valley.”  

After recounting a bit of his early life, Wright describes what many evangelical Christians know as “The Romans Road.”  It is a way of sharing key verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans to help people find salvation.  But Wright thinks “salvation” for Paul means something different than what moderns mean by it, that is, going to heaven when we die.

To read Romans well and in context means that we continue to Romans 8.  For Wright the story of salvation is a truly human story which includes going through the dark valley.

To hear the podcast (20 minutes) click here.

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Tom Holland

Tom Holland is a wonderful historian and writer who you need to know. He cut his teeth on Greek and Roman culture, which of course intersects with the origins of Christianity.

Here is a link to a good article and series of podcast videos that give a bit more information about him. One of those videos features N. T. Wright.

Tom Holland: “I began to realise that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian.”
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The (W)right Way to Read Paul

My coauthors (Rodney Reeves and Randy Richards) and I are working on the second edition of our book Rediscovering Paul: An Introduction to His World, Letters and Theology (InterVarsity, 2007).  It is a substantial rewrite, not just a cosmetic upgrade. Rediscovering Paul cover

Chapter 10 is our chapter on Paul’s theology and, as I’m rewriting, I’m (re)reading N. T. Wright’s two volume Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Fortress, 2013).  At the beginning of the second big volume he lays out his agenda.  His central argument is that Paul’s worldview and his theology must be understood together.  They are interdependent.  When you grasp Paul’s theology correctly and faithfully, you “do justice to the whole and the parts;” you understand the shifting historical contexts in which he lived, the forces and factors that influenced him, and you read his letters a bit more faithfully.

The (W)right way to read Paul holds together and in tension the various themes of his letters which scholars often pit against one another.  There is, he says, an “inner coherence” which emerges when you try to understand the sequence of his arguments. The letters are not a collection of detached sayings; they are robust arguments.  They are grounded in the larger themes and narratives of his Scripture and Jewish heritage.

Wright cites with approval Kasemann (Romans, 1980) when he noted that Paul’s letters do have a central concern, a coherent, inner logic which can be investigated and known.

So Wright builds his project on three platforms:

First, he begins with Paul’s Jewishness as a given, expressed in a framework of three major aspects of second temple Jewish thought: monotheism, election and eschatology.  For Wright, these elements are integrated not detached.  You cannot, for example, understand Paul’s soteriology in isolation from election, theology and eschatology.  These three elements cover the wide, gaping central concern of Paul who remained a thoroughly Jewish thinker.

Second, this framework had to be rethought, reimagined, and recast around Jesus and the Spirit.  Paul had a new understanding of what God had been up to in the Messiah and the gift of the Spirit.  He could no longer continue to think about these central categories in the same way.  The cataclysmic event of the cross and resurrection of the Messiah had changed everything.

Third, Paul’s christologically and pneumatologically redefined categories (monotheism, election, and eschatology) were deployed through the Gentile mission in three ways.

  1. They became the major aims of his letters. His letters were part of his missionary strategy, that is, to establish Jesus-infused and Spirit-directed communities across the Mediterranean.  His letters reflect this radically reworking.
  2. Paul’s own charismatic readings of Scripture were not based on proof-texting; they were grounded in reading large swaths of Scripture and attuning his mind to the great narratives of Israel which reached their appropriate climax in the Messiah. It is Paul’s full intention that his Jesus-infused and Spirit-directed communities inhabit these stories.
  3. Even as Paul’s own theology demands the formation of “churches,” he is also engaging the pagan world of his day (again in three ways).
  • the philosophers’ quest for the good life is upstaged by the good news of the gospel
  • the religious quest of late antiquity for salvation (broadly understood) with its obsession with gods and spiritual powers finds its final destination in the church
  • the imperial quest of empire is outmaneuvered by the acclamation of Jesus’ lordship, Israel’s true Messiah

Paul, according to Wright, draws from paganism everything which he thinks is true.  But pagan idolatry had ruined any chance for the wise of this age to achieve their human potential.  The human-happiness project of pagan philosophy never achieved what it promised.

But the gospel made people more human not less because, among other things, it placed in the center the only human whose life was worth imitating.

In the end Wright believes there is a coherence to Paul’s thought.  It is a coherence which holds together all the parts, uniting the disparate elements of his arguments even thought each letter is written over against a contingent situation.

An early generation of scholars was fond of talking about “the center” of Paul’s theology.  It was identified by some as justification by faith, by others reconciliation, and still by others participation in Christ.  Each of these were different ways of dealing with the broad theological category, soteriology.  Wright does not utilize the language of “center,” but his discussion of what is central, coherent appears to operate along a similar track.