NT Wright

Internal debates about orthodoxy and unorthodoxy inside the Church of England have been going on for centuries. The new contribution this article hopes to make is to provide an outsider's view of these issues which will incorporate personal experiences, historical analyses, doctrinal developments, and diversifications, reflecting on three test cases, engagement with recent voices, and finally, retrospective reflection on key biblical texts which suggest that faithfulness to Scripture should lead to realignment from a dividing Church of England.

A critical review of The Day the Revolution Began by Tom Wright.  Key words:  N T Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, critical review, atonement theology, OT narrative & allusion, propitiation, divine wrath, Gospels, substitutionary atonement, Wright’s treatment of the terms hilastērion and dikaiosynē, and the need for ‘whole Bible theology’.

Chapter Ten returns to a core historical debate: the quest for the historical Jesus. The story of that quest, as it developed over centuries, focuses attention on the development of critical methodologies within the study of Christianity. The historical Jesus has become a touchstone for scholarly research and piqued the popular imagination. The final chapter takes us back to the beginning, opening us again to the fundamental identity of Christianity.

This paper seeks to provide a basic sketch of the debates surrounding the New Perspective(s) on Paul within their historical and exegetical contexts for discussion.  The goal is to provide lay leaders and pastors with an orientation to the key issues in order to help them discern their own leanings while being fair to the major arguments at play.

N.T. Wright's critical realist epistemology has become the foundation for many recent studies of Christian origins. This article argues that New Testament scholars have perhaps too quickly and uncritically adopted this method, when it is out of step with contemporary analytic epistemology. The method Wright employs—and which many have adopted—originates with an internalist epistemic account developed in the 1940s. Since then, key developments in the study of epistemology (beginning with Gettier in 1963) have made Wright's critical realist model irrelevant in many ways. In light of these inadequacies, we tentatively outline some potential components of a more promising historical epistemology for the study of Christian origins.

Summary:  The Gospels are often said to be more concerned with the fact of the atonement than with theories of the atonement.  In the present note, I consider John 18–21 as a case study, and, on the basis of it, I argue otherwise.  The shape and detail of John’s narrative is careful and didactic.  For John, Jesus offers his life up to God as a sacrifice which is (at least) substitutionary, penal, and propitiatory.

Keywords:  Gospel, John, atonement theory, narrative, penal substitution, crucifixion, propitiation.

This missionary-theological investigation takes as its point of departure David J. Bosch’s ecumenical missionary paradigm as a proposal for a holistic understanding of mission with a focus on proclamation and social engagement in a postmodern world. In the search for an eschatology related to history as a foundation and motivating hope for the church in its mission, Bosch refers with some reservation to the salvation historical theology of his teacher Oscar Cullmann. Accordingly, the first part of the work is devoted to a critical engagement with different eschatological conceptions and especially with Cullmann’s eschatology and its implications for the understanding of mission. After this, we then ask whether and to what extent the theology of N.T. Wright can expand the Cullmannian eschatology in the sense of Bosch. It becomes clear in the end that Wright’s eschatological approach represents a more viable foundation for a holistic understanding of mission than that of Cullmann. The study aims to contribute to the debate over eschatology and at the same to present a critical appraisal of Wright’s theology from a missionary-theological perspective.



Vorliegende missionstheologische Untersuchung geht aus von David J. Boschs ökumenischem Missionsparadigma als Vorschlag für ein ganzheitliches Missionsverständnis mit den Brennpunkten Verkündigung und soziales Engagement in einer postmodernen Welt. Auf der Suche nach einer geschichtsbezogenen Eschatologie als Grundlage und motivierende Hoffnung für die Kirche in ihrer Mission, verweist Bosch mit einiger Zurückhaltung auf die heilsgeschichtliche Theologie seines Lehrers Oscar Cullmann. Die Arbeit setzt sich daher in einem ersten Teil kritisch mit unterschiedlichen eschatologischen Entwürfen und insbesondere mit Cullmanns Eschatologie und deren Implikationen auf das Missionsverständnis auseinander. Im Anschluss wird danach gefragt, ob und inwiefern die Theologie von N.T. Wright die cullmannsche Eschatologie in Sinne von Bosch zu erweitern vermag. Es wird schliesslich deutlich, dass Wrights eschatologischer Ansatz eine tragfähigere Grundlage für ein ganzheitliches Missionsverständnis darstellt, als derjenige von Cullmann. Die Untersuchung will einen Beitrag leisten zur Auseinandersetzung mit der Eschatologie und gleichzeitig Wrights Theologie aus missionstheologischer Perspektive kritisch würdigen.

One of the common formulations for understanding Jesus is the priest-prophet-king paradigm. There has been much written on Jesus in regard to him as the great high priest and as king, but it seems that the office of prophet has been largely neglected in popular theology. Perhaps, the most notable discussions of the prophethood Jesus are centered around the historical-critical method and his apocalyptic messaging.  However, it seems that mainstream Christianity has yet to adopt the religious import of the prophetic office. Therefore, this paper hypothesizes that the primary content of Jesus’ ministry is prophetic. Specifically, the prophetic ministry is marked by the announcement of the arrival of the Reign of God and the subsequent bringing of it into being; and, that it is this paradigm that gives understanding to Jesus’ offices as king and priest.
In this paper, I will begin by discussing the historical significance and development of the prophet-priest-king paradigm (i.e., the threefold office of Christ). This will be followed by a discussion of the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament which leads into a discussion of Jesus as a prophet. From here, we will discuss the Reign of God as the central prophetic idea, followed by an analysis of the priestly and kingly offices of Christ as understood through the prophetic lens. Finally, this paper will conclude with a reflection on what this means for the practice of Christian religion today.

This paper seeks to demonstrate the value of a properly comparative approach in discerning the distinctive characteristics of the Christian and Pauline concept of grace as a form of the religious gift.  In so doing, it offers an alternative to the methodology adopted by John Barclay in his recent book Paul and the Gift.  It then locates Barclay’s argument in the context of the recent controversy around the New Perspective on Paul, evaluating its contribution to this debate and the validity of Barclay’s position on the radical ‘incongruity’ of the Pauline concept of grace.

N. T. Wright is one of the foremost New Testament scholars in the world. He is also one of the most prolific proponents of the "New Perspective on Paul". In this very brief essay, his view of the Pauline phrase 'works of Torah' is examined from a few of his most popular books. This essay is only meant as an introduction to Wright's views.

This article outlines some of the theological presuppositions underpinning the argument in “Anglo-Republicanism and the Rebirth of British History.”

To speak of the rebirth of a people calls to mind the prophesies of the resurrection of the dead central to Christian ecclesiastical traditions.  This paper deals with those prophesies as a problem in biblical hermeneutics.

However surprising it may be to ordinary church-goers, the dominant interpretations of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have been filtered through explicitly political interpretations of biblical texts. It is becoming painfully obvious that the "true" meaning of Christ's crucifixion and death cannot be detached from the central political conflict of our time: globalism versus nationalism.

The question then arises: Is biblical hermeneutics a branch of political theology?  When Christian thinkers in the West turn their minds to politics, they generally fall somewhere along a spectrum stretching from cosmopolitan humanism to political realism.  One’s place on that spectrum affects one’s understanding of both the historical Jesus and the resurrection of the dead prophesied in both the Old and the New Testaments.

Some historians maintain that the historical Jesus understood the Jewish hope of salvation as national and corporate rather than individualistic.  Some biblical theologians agree, contending that the resurrection of Jesus was but a shadow or a type of the general resurrection of the righteous remnant of Old Covenant Israel which came with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD 70.

Such a view contrasts sharply with mainstream Christianity.  According to the futurist eschatology central to the creeds, the resurrection of the dead has yet-to-come.  Globalist theologies of hope posit an ontology of peace which, sometime in the future of humankind, will triumph over the currently dominant ontology of violence.

A more realistic political hermeneutic grounded in the covenantal eschatology of the historical Jesus holds out the possibility of distinctive national roads to salvation in the past, present, and future.

RESUMO: o presente artigo tem como objetivo geral mostrar que a repetição do gesto intelectual de Paulo de Tarso é uma das condições privilegiadas para ultrapassarmos a situação de eclipse político em que os governos hodiernos se encontram. Tal objetivo tem dois aspectos particulares. Em primeiro lugar, diz respeito à potencialidade e valor filosófico intrínseco ao próprio texto paulino para a filosofia. Em segundo lugar, refere-se à redescoberta e aos desdobramentos que um pensador contemporâneo empreendeu a partir desses textos. O messianismo paulino pelas lentes de Giorgio Agamben é, ao mesmo tempo, repositório de potencialidades, como também condição de inteligibilidade da própria filosofia que o italiano desenvolveu nos últimos anos.

ABSTRACT: This article has as main objective to show that the repetition of the intellectual gesture of Paul of Tarsus is one of the privileged conditions to overcome the situation of political eclipse in which countries governments today are. This objective has two particular aspects. First, regards to the potential and intrinsic philosophical value to the Pauline text itself to philosophy. Secondly, it refers to the rediscovery and developments that a contemporary thinker undertook from these texts. The Pauline messianism by Giorgio Agamben lenses is at the same time, potential repository, as well as intelligibility condition of philosophy itself that the Italian has developed in recent years.

N.T. Wright's critical realist epistemology has become the foundation for many recent studies of Christian origins. This article argues that New Testament scholars have perhaps too quickly and uncritically adopted this method, when it is out of step with contemporary analytic epistemology. The method Wright employs—and which many have adopted—originates with an internalist epistemic account developed in the 1940s. Since then, key developments in the study of epistemology (beginning with Gettier in 1963) have made Wright's critical realist model irrelevant in many ways. In light of these inadequacies, we tentatively outline some potential components of a more promising historical epistemology for the study of Christian origins.

The first facet of the atonement I will explore is the prophetic. When I speak of the prophetic side of the atonement what I mean is that the atonement is revelatory. That is, the death and resurrection of Jesus reveals the nature of God and his heart for the world. Christ's prophetic ministry climaxes in his death and resurrection, or in other words, it was the event of the atonement that most revealed God in the life of Christ, but that was not the only time when Jesus was revealing God. He does so throughout his entire life and, as I have shown in earlier chapters, Jesus' earthly ministry is part of his atoning work and thus must be included in this essay. Therefore, I will first explore how Jesus' life functioned as a prophetic call for Israel to repent and turn from their sin in light of the coming kingdom, then how his death revealed God's love for the world, and finally how his resurrection vindicated Christ's claim that he is the Son of God. The Revelatory Life of the Messiah Jesus was called a prophet during his earthly ministry. He was called this because he

In this brief paper, I turn to the epistemology section (Lecture 6) of NT Wright's Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology. First, I attempt to clarify what I take epistemology to be and question whether Wright's proposal should count as normative epistemology (I answer, 'No'). However, his proposal does fit within the framework of a Kuhnian applied epistemology, which I attempt to demonstrate next. Finally, I offer some worries facing Wright's applied epistemology, specifically targeted at the theory of concepts to which he is beholden.