Peter SmytheIntelligent Holy Ghost Christianity

“Eat Fresh!”

One name that crops up from time to time in my essays is N.T.(or Tom) Wright’s. Tom is known throughout the world as one of the leading Pauline scholars alive today. He has been called “one of the freshest voices within orthodox evangelical Christianity” and he has caused all kinds of commotion in mainline Christianity with his so-called “new” views.

Early on with The Real Faith I took issue with his treatment of the “sign of Jonah” (if his name crops up I am probably taking issue with him). Surprisingly, I received an email from Tom after posting my essay and had a great exchange with him about that and Jesus’s resurrection on the third day. While we didn’t see eye-to-eye on the sign of Jonah (I think I might have surprised him with the ascension), I really loved his graciousness, even in his emails. I ran across an interview of Tom by Theologia and liked how he analogized his spiritual growth (and ministry) to the movie Pleasantville. I thought you might like it too.

Your work has been called “orthodox yet strikingly original.” We tend to think that orthodox means unoriginal and original is necessarily unorthodox. How can your work be both? How do you respond to critics who say that to the degree that your understanding of Jesus or Paul or early Christianity is new then it must be wrong?

NTW - I do not think orthodoxy is found in a book where you look up all the right answers, like a child learning mathematics. The child knows that all the answers are in the back of the book so he simply checks on whether or not he did the sums right. You really don’t expect that by doing these sums you learn anything new. For me orthodoxy is more like doing research in higher mathematics. It is continually discovering new ways to move forward, while still holding to the accepted affirmations which are themselves central. Putting it back into theological terms, you have to go where the text leads you because the text is the text.

But there are certain massive signposts for an orthodox Christian thinker - the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit - these are the basic ones for orthodox Christians. If ten miles down the road you find that what has been a difficult and murky investigation leads you to break through to the light, and if the light that you then break through leads you to say “My goodness, yes! God really is Father, Son and Spirit and this really helps me to see even more clearly the importance of the truth that Jesus did really rise from the dead on the third day, etc.” then you are seeing the orthodox truth in new light. For me orthodoxy has been like a black and white picture and the hard work of research and scholarship leads me back to the same picture but now it is in color. It’s a little like that film Pleasantville where bits start to get colored in as the film goes along. That’s rather how it’s actually been for me as I’ve done my work over the years. It’s the same picture as always but now I am seeing a flash of color over here, then a bit more over there. This has been wonderfully confirming. If one ended up saying, “Well, shucks, after all the work I’ve done, it really looks as though Jesus didn’t think he was going to die for the sins of the world - in other words, if you end up sounding like Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar - then I would have to say, “Sorry, something has gone wrong somewhere.” And if I found myself seriously believing that, then I hope I would have the guts to say, “This is not the orthodoxy that I grew up in. I have changed.” Maybe I would have to give up preaching. But that is not where I’ve been. Not at all.

Here at The Real Faith, we’re doing much of what Tom is saying - orthodox doctrine, but with a fresh voice.

State of the Blog

Comments - Thank you for all the comments. Blogging is difficult work and sometimes a pat on the back makes the day all worthwhile.

Publishing - One reader commented about our publishing some of The Real Faith essays in book form. I’ve actually thought of that before, but didn’t give it too much serious thought (I’d have to clean them up a bit). Some time in the next few months I plan to look into Lulu.com. While I believe that the blog platform is terrific, small books like Lake’s Spiritual Hunger are also great for study (my five editions are marked to the hilt). From what I’ve read about Lulu.com, it seems to fit in with our philosophy of ministry - decidedly unprofessional.