{"id":7177,"date":"2004-06-09T08:19:33","date_gmt":"2004-06-09T08:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html"},"modified":"2004-06-09T08:19:33","modified_gmt":"2004-06-09T08:19:33","slug":"nt_wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html","title":{"rendered":"N.T. Wright"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you don’t know who he is, you should.<\/p>\n

He’s the Anglican bishop of Durham in England, and a New Testament scholar who is one of the leaders in bringing some sense and historical responsibility back into the field, and<\/strong> taking it down to the popular level..as a bishop should!<\/p>\n

His series, Christian Origins and the Question of God<\/strong> includes three hefty volumes at this point, <\/a>which are well worth your time, in my view, particularly if you have an interest both in the subject matter itself as well as in alternatives to the methodology and conclusions of most US New Testament scholarship.<\/p>\n

He’s also, under the name, “Tom Wright” doing an excellent popular-level New Testament study series. I read through the Matthew for Everyone<\/a> volumes yesterday, and they are very good, focusing on the essentials, very nicely and accessibly written.<\/p>\n

Wright has been interviewed recently by both John Allen <\/a> and Dick Staub<\/a>. From the Staub interview:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

More re<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We hear the phrase, “engaging the culture” almost ad nauseam today. What you think it means truly to engage the culture, and what Jesus teaches us about the incarnation, being transforming. What does it mean from Jesus’ life and teaching to engage the culture?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m not sure I would start with Jesus because Jesus was doing something unique and unrepeatable and he was not just being a model of how we should be good Christians. Jesus is not the first Christian in that sense. Jesus is the one who makes possible a way of life which we loosely call Christianity. And his achievement in his death and resurrection was thoroughly enculturated. It meant what it meant within the culture which God had prepared. Paul says, “When the time had fully come.” God prepared that culture so that Jesus, by being thoroughly within the culture and doing what he had to do, would make the sense God wanted him to make.<\/p>\n

We can then see Paul and the others going out and engaging their culture. Look at the Areopagus address in Acts 17. Paul begins by saying, “You’ve got an altar to the unknown god, well I’m going to tell you about this unknown god.” Then he says, “You also have all these temples made with hands, but I’m going to tell you that the true God does not live in temples made with hands. He’s not like that at all.” So he’s saying yes to this and no to that, and then he negotiates his way through stoicism and epicureanism and so on, engaging the culture all the way, quoting their own poets but showing that they might mean something different. Now, that’s wonderful cultural engagement and it’s not a matter of saying no to everything, it’s not a matter of saying yes to everything, it’s a matter of Christian discernment in seeing what is good, seeing what can be redeemed, what can be refreshed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you don’t know who he is, you should. He’s the Anglican bishop of Durham in England, and a New Testament scholar who is one of the leaders in bringing some sense and historical responsibility back into the field, and taking it down to the popular level..as a bishop should! His series, Christian Origins and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nN.T. Wright - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"N.T. Wright - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If you don’t know who he is, you should. He’s the Anglican bishop of Durham in England, and a New Testament scholar who is one of the leaders in bringing some sense and historical responsibility back into the field, and taking it down to the popular level..as a bishop should! His series, Christian Origins and…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-06-09T08:19:33+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"N.T. Wright - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"N.T. Wright - Via Media","og_description":"If you don’t know who he is, you should. He’s the Anglican bishop of Durham in England, and a New Testament scholar who is one of the leaders in bringing some sense and historical responsibility back into the field, and taking it down to the popular level..as a bishop should! His series, Christian Origins and…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2004-06-09T08:19:33+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html","name":"N.T. Wright - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2004-06-09T08:19:33+00:00","dateModified":"2004-06-09T08:19:33+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/nt_wright.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"N.T. Wright"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}