What to Appreciate About N. T. Wright

The following is an excerpt from John Whittaker’s N. T. Wright: A Theological Appraisal. For the full eBook, click HERE. 

Personally, I am grateful for the teaching of N. T. Wright and appreciative of his work. I first began reading Wright in the 1990s with his academic book The New Testament and the People of God. In the last three decades, I have read more N. T. Wright books than I’ve read of probably any other single author. I have read dozens of articles by him as well. His big commentary on Romans in the New Interpreters set is one I regularly recommend.

So, I write this assessment from a place of appreciation. There is much to be learned from N. T. Wright.

Appreciating the Overall Narrative

In my opinion, one of the greatest benefits of Wright’s teaching is that he drives us back again and again to the overall narrative of Scripture. He keeps reminding us that we must read the New Testament as the culmination of the Old Testament. In fact, he has an entire book exploring this theme titled The Climax of the Covenant.[1] That book was written earlier in his career, and the theme has become the refrain in all of his writings.

Reflecting this theme, in his 1992 academic book The New Testament and the People of God, Wright sums up first-century Judaism this way: a worldview which was focused on a “sense of longing and expectation, of recognition that the present state of affairs had not yet (to put it mildly) seen the full realization of the purposes of the covenant god for his people.…They were waiting for the last chapter in their story to begin.”[2] More than two decades later in a popular book on the gospel, he writes,

Paul’s Bible was the Jewish Bible of the day, what Christians now call the Old Testament. Paul, like many Jews of the time, read this Bible as a single story—but it was a story in search of an ending. It was about how God created the world, called a single people, Israel, to be his people—but not for their own sake. He called them and made them special, so that through them he could rescue the world—the human race and the whole creation—from the appalling mess that had come about.[3]

“One of the greatest benefits of Wright’s teaching is that he drives us back again and again to the overall narrative of Scripture.”

This narrative framework is so fundamental for N. T. Wright’s approach that it shapes everything he writes and says, even when he doesn’t explicitly mention it. Who is Jesus? Well, you can’t really answer that question properly if you don’t understand the story of Israel. What does Romans 9 actually say? If you miss that it’s recounting the story of Israel, you’ll miss the whole point. Even Wright’s argument for the authority of Scripture explicitly entails this narrative framework.[4]

N. T. Wright simply will not let us get away with jumping from Genesis 3 to the New Testament and essentially bracketing out the promise to Abraham and the story of Israel. The tendency to do that, whether accidentally or explicitly, has been present in much Christian preaching and teaching. The result is that the average Christian has little to no grasp of the overall story of the Bible and often looks down on the Old Covenant as “just a bunch of laws that they couldn’t keep which is why God sent Jesus.” Sure, we might cherry-pick a few favorite Old Testament stories for sermons or Sunday school, but grasping the entire narrative and how it culminates in Christ—that has traditionally not been the strength of Protestant preaching (we’re New Testament Christians, after all!). But Wright’s teaching has been a helpful corrective to that. He’s reminded us over and over that the story of the Bible is one story that has Jesus as its goal and climax, and Wright shows us how to read the Bible that way. And that’s a good thing that has been very helpful to faithful Bible reading.

Appreciating the Literary Context

A second benefit of Wright’s Bible teaching, one that particularly shows up in books where he offers commentary on specific passages of Scripture, is attention to the larger context of a passage. I think one of Wright’s distinctive strengths as a Bible commentator is paying attention to the overall flow of thought in which a particular passage appears or even how it fits into the logic of the whole book in which it is found.

Everyone who has studied basic Bible study skills has been taught not to take verses out of context and knows that “context is king.” Wright has a great ability to step back and see how whole sections and even whole books fit together and how they work to communicate their message. In fact, I’d say his best work shows up in books and essays where he’s setting specific passages into the larger context of its Bible book.

One recent example of this is his 2023 book, Into the Heart of Romans. In this book, Wright explores Romans 8 in detail but does so by showing how it fits into the overall argument of the entire letter to the Romans. This sort of thing seems to be what’s occupying his attention at this stage of his career. At the time of this writing, he’s recently authored a big-picture book on Acts,[5] and has a forthcoming book of the same sort on Ephesians.[6]

This strength of Wright’s helps us trace the biblical author’s flow of thought and keeps us from fixating on individual words or verses while missing the context.

“Wright has a great ability to step back and see how whole sections and even whole books fit together and how they work to communicate their message.”

Appreciating the Historical Context

One final thing I’d like to point out by way of appreciation is Wright’s extensive knowledge of and commitment to the original context of the biblical writings, especially the New Testament. His focus since the beginning of his teaching career has been on understanding the world of the first century and how that historical setting affects the meaning of the New Testament documents.

Wright has frequently described himself as a historian because he has spent so much time and energy studying the world of first-century Judaism. Wright has immense knowledge of the Greco-Roman world as well. Two of his earlier academic books grew out of his study of Judaism in the first century (usually referred to as second temple Judaism): The New Testament and the People of God (1992) and Jesus and the Victory of God (1996). But you don’t have to read these dense academic works to benefit from Wright’s historical knowledge. This material has shaped all his understanding of Jesus, the Gospels, and Paul’s writings, so it is scattered throughout his vast array of more popular-level books on the New Testament.

All this historical background material helps us understand the original audience and the original setting of the New Testament. And once again, a key principle of basic Bible study skills is that a passage can’t logically mean to us today what it couldn’t have meant to the original author and audience. Wright’s commitment to the historical context and his vast knowledge of the New Testament world is truly helpful to our understanding of the Bible.

“A key principle of basic Bible study skills is that a passage can’t logically mean to us today what it couldn’t have meant to the original author and audience.”

All of this is to say that in many ways, N. T. Wright has been a gift to the teaching ministry of the church. His writings and teachings drive us back to the text, compelling us to study and learn what the text is actually saying. For this, we can thank God for N. T. Wright.

As knowledgeable as N. T. Wright is and as much as I appreciate his teaching, I don’t think he always gets things right. In fact, I’d like to think that Wright’s commitment to the original meaning of the text means he’d welcome text-based critique of his work.

[1] N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).

[2] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 149.

[3] N. T. Wright, Simply Good News (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 24.

[4] See N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). See also: “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative,” NTWrightpage.com, https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/how-can-the-bible-be-authoritative/.

[5] N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Acts (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024).

[6] N. T. Wright, The Vision of Ephesians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, available November 2025).