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AGE
50

POSITION
Dean of Lichfield Cathedral (Staffordshire, England) until May 1999, after which he plans to return to academic life in an unnanounced position

NOTABLE BOOKS
The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992); Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress, 1993); The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (with Marcus Borg) (Harper-SanFrancisco, 1999)

More popular works include The Crown and the Fire (Eerdmans, 1995); Who Was Jesus? (Eerdmans, 1992); The Lord and His Prayer (Eerdmans, 1997); for All God's Worth (Eerdmans, 1997); What St. Paul Really Said (Eerdmans, 1997); and The Climax of the Covenant (Fortress, 1993)

For a very long time, scholars have placed the "Christ of faith" and the "Christ of history" in opposing corners. Historical studies tend to discount claims of God at work on earth, supposing natural, human processes to be more likely explanations. Many have doubted whether the study of history can ever connect with a life of faith.

No evangelical has shown more courage in this contested field than N. T. Wright. He has waded into "ordinary" history to write a thorough, detailed study of Jesus as "The Victory of God," to quote from the title of Wright's principal, 700-page work. Beeson's Timothy George considers Wright "one of the most engaging and articulate New Testament scholars in the world." Greg Jones, dean of Duke Divinity School, notes that Wright has "a preacher's passion" in diving into the study of Jesus, perhaps the most contentious area of biblical study today. "He has shown remarkable courage and vision."

Wright is a big-hearted, friendly bear of a man, who loves to talk, loves to debate on television, loves to preach, and thoroughly enjoys being dean of Lichfield Cathedral near Birmingham, England. (The dean of a cathedral more or less runs the place, and serves as an official Somebody in the district.) By personality and position, Wright does not seem to be a scholar at all. Indeed, the ongoing battle of his life seems to be putting enough days aside to sit at his desk and write the massive tomes he has already plotted out in his mind.

Wright has written an orthodox yet strikingly original account of Jesus that takes into account virtually every word in the synoptic Gospels while engaging fully with the corrosive, skeptical scholarship that has all but erased Jesus as a historical figure in the last century or more. Wright paints on big canvases with brilliant colors; he writes symphonies, not cantatas, calling on the horns and the timpani as well as the strings. He is easy to disagree with but hard to ignore. His work stimulates the imagination. Besides that, he is a trenchant critic of biblical skeptics, assaulting the scissors-and-paste methodology reigning in liberal readings of the gospels since the time of Thomas Jefferson. He works in a way akin to Miroslav Volf's, rendering a whole life (Jesus') in a way that seeks to explain as much of the evidence as possible rather than to start by sifting out half the evidence before he begins. In a thoroughly postmodern way, he deals in narratives—those of Judaism, Jesus, and the early church—rather than individual snippets of sayings.

By e-mail, Wright told me that if I wanted to understand him I should plan to join in worship when I came to Lichfield, since worship so forms his life. My first morning there I got up early and wandered through the stone glories of the twelfth-century cathedral, looking for morning prayers. In a medieval chapel I found a bearded man, clad in a cassock, who patted the seat next to him. (The psalm reading and prayers had just begun.) There were three clerics—one a world-renowned scholar—and myself.

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February 8 1999, Vol. 43, No. 2