Every once in a while you find a teacher you just can’t stop listening to. For me in recent years, that teacher has been the Anglican Bishop of Durham, better known as N.T. Wright. I mean, the guy’s initials are the same as the Bible’s, so he’s got to have some credibility. From Wright’s recent speech “Shipwreck and Kingdom”:

It is sometimes proposed today that in order to grasp the political meaning of the New Testament, you have to downgrade the theology; as though, for instance, a high Christology would lead you off in the direction of ‘religion’ rather than politics, or as though talk of the bodily resurrection would project you out into the world of ‘pie in the sky when you die’ rather than the hard, real world in which we are called to work for justice and peace.

In fact, as Paul or Revelation would make just as clear as Luke, the opposite is the case. It is because Jesus is bodily risen from the dead, because Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, because he is the one and only Lord of the world, that the Sadducees are worried, Herod is worried, the Athenians are worried, the idol-makers of Ephesus are furious, and ultimately, if he knew his business, Caesar should be making his will.

The point about Jesus going to heaven is not that we’ll go there to be with him one day, away from this wicked old world at last. The point is that from heaven he is ruling the world, ruling it through the faithful lives, the suffering and the witness of his Spirit-driven apostolic followers, calling it to account, demonstrating that there is a new way of living, a way which upstages all Caesar’s pretensions to have saved the world, or united it, or brought it genuine justice, freedom and peace. (All those claims, by the way, are the standard things that all empires have claimed, whether in the first century or the twenty-first.)

It is rare these days that articles I find on the web bring tears to my eyes. It is rare to hear such language of devotion spoken with eloquence and not cheesiness, with scholarship and not narrow-mindedness.

Wright is often regarded as a liberal by Evangelicals in the US, but I have not found a more satisfyingly “conservative” theologian anywhere. I put the c-word in quotes because it’s not quite fair to categorize Wright that way simply because of his strong emphasis on the historical truth of the Christian claims about Jesus; he could also be called a “liberal” because of his emphasis on how Jesus’ kingship and lordship have critical implications for the way we treat the world around us.

If Don Carson and others are looking for a theology to critize, they should leave McLaren and Tony Jones alone and spend a year or two reading Wright’s work (he is prolific enough that it would take that long). Wright is our theologian, and I will sit at his feet as often as I have the opportunity. I think there is a reason they are not attacking Wright’s theology - they know he is out of their league. This is the theology that “funds” the emerging church, and the EC’s critics would do well to spend some time in it.