Category: N.T. Wright

“We honor and celebrate our complexity and our simplicity by continually doing five things. We tell stories. We act our rituals. We create beauty. We work in communities. We think out beliefs. No doubt you might think of more, but that’s enough for the moment. In and through all these things run the threads of love and pain, fear and faith, worship and doubt, the quest for justice, the thirst for spirituality, and the promise and problem of human relationship. And if there’s any such thing as ‘truth’ in the absolute sense, it must relate to, and make sense of, all this and more.”
NT Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, p. 49

Many people assume without  question that the final Christian hope is to leave this wicked world of space, time and matter and to go off, as disembodied souls, into heaven‟. That is fine as a statement of what happens to God‟s people immediately after they die, but it won’t do as an account of the great scriptural promises of new creation. There is a further, fuller hope, for a new world in which we shall have new bodies and new tasks to perform, celebrating and implementing God‟s victory over evil, injustice and death itself. –N.T. Wright

My good friend Bill DeJong exposes a fable about N.T. Wright. I have his post in full here:

Recently a friend of mine retold a story he had heard in a lecture (precise date unknown) by Don Carson in which Carson alleged that when Dr. Wrightwas asked what he would say to a person on their deathbed, Wright said that he didn’t know or would have to think about it. The implication, of course, is that Wright has no gospel left to preach to a dying person. That account struck me initially as highly implausible. If you know anything about Wright it’s that he’s rarely at a loss for words. Wright might say some wrong things occasionally, but he always has something to say!

As an admirer of Dr. Wright, I fired off an email to him asking about the origin of this story. Wright responded almost immediately and assured me that though he couldn’t remember the exchange it was obvious that he would not have given such an equivocal answer, since as a long-time pastor he has plenty of experience of speaking with people near the point of death and has never had any hesitation in talking to them about the love of God revealed in Jesus and encouraging them to put their whole trust in that saving gift. He said that he had confronted Don Carson, some years ago, about telling and retelling such a slanted and slanderous tale, and that so far as he knows Carson no longer does so.

I’m posting this on my blog to help put this fable to rest. If you want to critique Wright or any scholar, do so in light of their published works and not anecdotes which may or may not be true.

The systems of this world want to force us into their mold; live in their way, but part of the point of being the Church means we can be the sort of family through whose mere existence the principalities and powers know that Jesus is Lord.–N.T. Wright

Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was  probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity is a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets; you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.[1]