FALLS CHURCH — “I am trying to call people back to the Bible they didn't know they had,” declared British theologian N.T. Wright during a lecture sponsored by the John Leland Center for Theological Studies.
Braving rush hour traffic in northern Virginia, an estimated 500 people filled the auditorium of Columbia Baptist Church in Falls Church to listen to a theologian discuss his most recent book.
Dispelling the stereotypes that theologians are dry and boring, Wright took aim at classical liberalism regarding the bodily resurrection of Christ and contended that the kingdom of heaven is on earth as it is in heaven. At the end, he received a standing ovation from the crowd of appreciative Baptists.
Wright's lecture came at the invitation of the Leland administration and faculty through Daniel Dapaah, associate professor of New Testament at Leland, who had studied under Wright at Oxford.
The author of more than 40 scholarly books, Wright used his latest, Surprised by Hope, published this year, as the framework for his remarks.
Wright has gained a reputation as a moderate evangelical, but his writings are hard to categorize. Liberals and conservatives, alike, have been critical of different parts of his writing and have been the targets of his thoughts.
“The heirs of that liberal theology are today keen to marginalize the Bible … because they don't like what it says on other topics such as sexual ethics. But if you push the Bible off the table, you are merely colluding with pagan empire, denying yourself the sourcebook for your kingdom critique of oppression.”
But conservatives also come under his scrutiny. “… [M]uch conservative theology” is characterized by an attitude that “Armageddon is coming, so who cares what state the planet is in?”
Wright contends that Christ's bodily resurrection began the process of creation becoming renewed and that Christians, in whom the Spirit dwells, are both beneficiaries and agents of that process.
“Our task is not to build the kingdom of God by our own efforts. God builds God's kingdom. Our task is to build for the kingdom.”
He likens the work of individual Christians to the task of a stonemason carving figures for a great cathedral. The worker probably has no idea how what he is working on will be incorporated into the whole. But one day the architect will come and say this is how it all goes together.
He stresses that every good deed adds to the contribution of the whole. “If there is a new creation and if that has been launched by Jesus, then what we do does not go to waste. You are not oiling the wheels of a car that is about to drop off a cliff. You are not planting rosebushes that are about being dug up by a bulldozer. You are doing something that will last.”
At the conclusion of the lecture, Leland president Mark Olsen led in awarding an honorary doctorate to Wright in recognition of the contribution he has made to theological thought.
“A biblically-based challenge has been laid at the doorstep of modernism,” reflected host pastor Jim Baucom after the meeting. “He sent everyone here tonight scrambling back to their Bibles. And that's a good thing.”
Currently Wright is the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. He has previously held New Testament professorships at Cambridge, McGill and Oxford universities.