Jesus Under Every Rock? Rethinking Christ-Centered Reading & Preaching (Chris Wright) Ep #209

Center For Hebraic Thought (00:00)
Should we read the Old Testament as if Jesus were under every rock or that it’s all about Him?

Join me with my guest Christopher Wright, who is a famous author and Old Testament scholar, now works for Langham Partnership with Majority World Scholars. And we have a discussion about how do you read the Old Testament in light of Jesus and how much Jesus should we put into the Old Testament, some or none or how? Fascinating discussion. You won’t be sorry. And we’ll end talking about how we should think about our sisters and brothers in the majority world who have lots of things to teach us. Stay tuned.

Dru Johnson (00:38)
When you’re speaking to just lay people about the topic of the Old Testament, why it’s important for Christians to read and how to read it better rather than worse, ⁓ what’s a common hurdle that you encounter that you have to overcome just to get people on the bus to have the conversation?

Chris Wright (00:55)
that question has sorted two answers which are almost opposite to each other. On the one hand, there are other kind of people who are often very keen Christians ⁓ and have been taught that basically the Old Testament, it’s all about Jesus. And so,

their first instinct is to want to sort of somehow find Jesus in there. And when you start talking about, say, genres or history or, you know, issues of Israel and Yahweh, they sort of glaze over a bit because all they really want is where’s Jesus, you know. So ⁓ trying to help people for whom that’s often a very deeply held thing. And they think it’s really godly and the right way to read the Bible because everything

be about Jesus, it shouldn’t if you’re a Christian. that’s on the one hand. The opposite of course from that is if I preach from the Old Testament in a church say on a mission Sunday and you preach from a text in Exodus or Deuteronomy, so I didn’t know there was you know anything to do with mission in the Old Testament because they’ve never really thought much about the Old Testament at all, sometimes because their pastor never preaches on it so they never hear it.

Dru Johnson (02:01)
Mm-mm.

Chris Wright (02:11)
and sometimes because the only bits they ever do read they don’t like, you know, all the war and the violence and the so-called nasty God of the Old Testament syndrome and so you’re counteracting something of that. So you’re kind of two opposite extremes, those who don’t really like the Old Testament and those who just want to make it all be about Jesus no matter where you are. Both of those are encountered from time to time.

Dru Johnson (02:36)
Yeah, so when you start unfolding that this is a problem for people, guess you have to, I find you always have to do this delicately. ⁓ But what is the thing that you think people are, what they think they’re giving up by not seeing everything as the cross buried in the ground of every piece of land?

Chris Wright (02:45)
Yeah.

I suppose they’re afraid that ⁓ I might be saying that, you know, somehow or other what they thought was the Old Testament’s all about Christ, that they’re losing that and therefore they’re going to be somehow become liberal or something, you know, and they really want to hold on to a Christ-centred theology, which of course I agree with.

Dru Johnson (03:15)
Mm.

Chris Wright (03:22)
I think that’s what people might fear that they lose. Others possibly have been taught by fairly, what’s the word, maybe not necessarily aggressive, but very emphatic teachers who want to insist, you know, that unless you are making the Old Testament be about Christ, you are really…

selling it short. Sometimes you hear people say, well, if you preach from the Old Testament and you don’t make it about Christ, you might as well be a Jewish rabbi. You’re not going any further than the Jews would go. ⁓ I had that once when I preached from Ezekiel chapter one. ⁓

Dru Johnson (03:46)
you

All right.

Chris Wright (04:02)
on the great vision of Ezekiel. And I tried to sort of fit it into its context of what it meant for Ezekiel, that the Lord God of Israel was there with him. And this is a vision. And I actually did mention that ultimately this feeds into the vision of Christ in the Book of Revelation. But I was pulled up by somebody afterwards in an email that you preach this without Christ. You didn’t preach Christ from this text. I felt like saying, well, I would have preached Christ from that text if he’d been there. ⁓

Dru Johnson (04:23)
Mm.

You

Chris Wright (04:32)
Even someone as good as Ralph Davis will say he doesn’t feel that he should, although the whole Bible ultimately centers on Christ, that he should not try to preach Christ out of text where he really is not present in any significant way.

which isn’t to say that you can’t make links, you can’t connect biblical texts, you can connect them to Christ through, well, the stories, through the promise, through the canon, but that’s not the same thing as sort of finding Jesus in the text everywhere.

Dru Johnson (05:26)
Yeah, and what do you think is lost, not from their perception, but in reality, if people are insisting you have not thought about scripture correctly unless you’ve thought about it through the lens of Christ and whatever that even means, what do they lose when they do that?

Chris Wright (05:42)
Well, they lose a lot. ⁓ First of all, I think… ⁓

First of all, I think they lose the plot because if one thinks of the Bible as this huge canonical narrative from creation through to new creation, as Michael Goheen and others have talked about the drama of scripture, that there is this sense of, and certainly from my own point of view, on a missional reading of the scripture, reading the whole Bible from the perspective of the mission of God, what is God about in his world? If you go into an Old Testament book and you just immediately jump to Jesus,

Dru Johnson (05:49)
Hmm.

Chris Wright (06:17)
in a sense you’re short-cutting the story, you’re not situating this text within the flow of creation, ⁓ the promise of Abraham, of the covenant with Israel, the word of the prophets and so on, and then of course that points you to Christ, no question it points us forward towards Christ, but you can lose the plot.

I think secondly, and I’ve heard this got quite cross about at one time, you can lose what the Old Testament chap is actually talking about. I once heard someone preaching from Amos and they were preaching on the text, you know, let righteousness flow down like an ever flowing stream and all of that wonderful text. they said, they know a little bit about Amos. And then they said, but of course, the only righteousness we can have is through Christ. And so he immediately started.

Dru Johnson (06:48)
Hmm.

Oof.

Chris Wright (07:08)
basically preaching justification by faith. Well, he might as well have been preaching Romans and it would have been better if he had been preaching Romans.

And I think this is not what Amos is talking about. He’s not talking about being justified by faith. He’s talking about social care for the poor and the needy and issues of social justice and so on. And if you just take a word and immediately pin Jesus into it, you effectively gag the Old Testament author. So you’re losing his distinct voice by that. So I think that’s quite serious, both exegetically and hermeneutically, that you’re actually disrespecting what the original author was talking about.

Dru Johnson (07:30)
Hmm.

Chris Wright (07:44)
So you can lose the plot, can lose the point of the text itself. ⁓ Yeah, and also, I think ⁓ you can lose the integrity of the author and his text. mean, surely when we read any text, we should be seeking what is this author talking about and what are they saying about, what are they talking about? So who is this? ⁓

Who is this person who’s given us this book of Deuteronomy or this edited history of Israel or this prophecy of Isaiah? And I want to find out what are they trying to communicate and if I come at their text making the assumption, they must be talking about Jesus Then I in a sense I already know what I’ve

Dru Johnson (08:21)
Mm.

Chris Wright (08:31)
I’ll only find what I’m looking for or I’ll only find what I already think is there. And once I’ve found that or made that connection, well, the rest of what he says, it’s not treating the text with integrity. One of the illustrations I sometimes use of people who, you know, to put it in a crude sort of, I want to find Jesus, as you say, under every rock, Jesus must be in here somewhere.

Dru Johnson (08:33)
Hmm.

Chris Wright (08:57)
It’s a bit like those Where’s Waldo books or Where’s Wally books, you know, where you got a page and it’s a whole massive stuff and somewhere in there, you know, you’re going to find Waldo or Wally. He’s the little guy with the in the red shirt and you’re not looking at anything else. You’re looking for that little figure. And once you find that figure, you go on to the next page. You don’t look at the rest of the picture because the rest of the picture is just purely a distraction. And if we treat the Old Testament text like a sort of Where’s Jesus puzzle,

Dru Johnson (08:59)
Right.

Hmm.

Chris Wright (09:27)
then we’re not treating the original authors, the texts themselves, I think, with due respect and integrity.

Dru Johnson (09:34)
That’s a great illustration. think of, don’t know if this phrase is purely an Americanism, but when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like nails. I know if you’ve heard that one before.

Chris Wright (09:43)
Hmm. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, that’s crossed the Atlantic. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (09:46)
Yeah, or it came one way or the other. Yeah,

it almost sounds like in your answer there that ⁓ maybe it’s too strong to say that we’re dehumanizing the text. Because there is drama, as you say, in the text. mean, real people suffered. Real people suffered the consequences of their own sin. They suffered under the consequences of other people’s sinfulness. And it’s almost as if none of that matters. Everybody’s just a red shirt in a Star Trek episode or a background figure in a Where’s Waldo.

⁓ image and so Go ahead

Chris Wright (10:18)
Yeah, and that, yeah, that I

was going to say that’s also in one of my books, Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament, and the through word is quite important there. It’s knowing Jesus through the Old Testament scriptures, not necessarily in them in a direct way. We can come to that in a minute. Of course, we don’t want to say in what sense is Christ there in the Old Testament? And I do have some thoughts about that. But ⁓

the ways I try to say it is people get this idea it’s all typological it’s all a type or a picture or a foretaste of Jesus which at one level I want to say yes so I think you mentioned like the Exodus did you I can’t remember but certainly if you think of the exit one of us did

Dru Johnson (10:59)
One of us did. ⁓

Chris Wright (11:02)
And I was certainly brought up as a young teenager with the very good and biblical truth that in the Old Testament, Jesus, God, sorry, God rescued the Israelites out of slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt. And thank God, through the cross of Christ, the New Exodus, God rescues us from slavery to sin and so on. And so we can see that clear New Testament use of the Exodus as a picture for what God accomplishes in Christ. And I want to say yes.

to that, but I also want to say that if you then only make it a sort of picture story for Jesus, you then lose, as you described it, the sense these were real people in real slavery, in a real situation of state-sponsored genocide, and God really rescued them out of that and gave them a land of their own. And this is not just figurative, this is real.

And so we therefore need to take something of that dimension of the story, which the Old Testament does repeatedly, and makes it very concrete. You you need to be kind to the poor in your land because God rescued you out of Egypt. And you were slaves in Egypt and God brought you out. That is why I’m commanding you this day. So the Exodus doesn’t just become a picture of something in the future. It becomes a very strong motivation for how the Israelites are to behave in their present.

Dru Johnson (12:24)
Yeah, and even that example is interesting ⁓ because even when Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan, which I take him to be mashing up Leviticus, love your neighbor as yourself, love the stranger as yourself, or love the foreigner as yourself, which is also predicated on the teaching in Exodus as soon as they cross the Red Sea saying, hey, you shall not oppress the foreigner or the orphan or the widow. Strong teaching, or I’ll kill you all, right? ⁓

Chris Wright (12:38)
Yeah, which comes in the same chapter.

Yeah. ⁓

Dru Johnson (12:53)
if they cry out to me. ⁓

And so what Jesus is not doing in that sense is not he’s not going back to those texts and saying, see, these were all about me. However, the big but here is Luke 24 on the road to Emmaus. does, ⁓ which we were talking about this in this workshop, I said, man, it would be great if Luke would have just given us a hint.

Chris Wright (13:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Dru Johnson (13:20)
as to how Jesus used the law and the prophets to explain how all of these things came to be. What is your sense of what is a good, let’s forget about what Jesus did, because we don’t know how Jesus would exegete in that particular example. But what do you think is a better rather than a worse way to think about exegeting? And I say this knowing you wrote this very famous book, or famous in my world.

Chris Wright (13:32)
safe.

Dru Johnson (13:45)
knowing Christ through the Old Testament. I think a lot of us read it in seminary and were very deeply impacted by it. And I know you say it’s not about Jesus in the Old Testament, but Jesus knowing him through the Old Testament. But I think the guardrails are the things that we all worry about, because we’ve all heard people say, what I consider to be crazy things, odd things, or things that just didn’t smell right. So what makes it a better interpretation for you?

Chris Wright (14:04)
Yeah.

Thank you, Dru Yeah, well, think, I mean, the first thing to say about Luke 24 is for me, that is a crucial passage because it’s clear that Luke, because he makes it twice, you know, there’s two Old Testament lectures in the same day. In fact, as an Old Testament professor all my life, I love the fact that if you ask the question, how did Jesus spend the first day of his resurrection life? And he spent most of that day teaching the Old Testament. Only it wasn’t called that. It was just the scriptures. ⁓

Dru Johnson (14:23)
Thank you.

Nice. Yeah, scriptures,

yeah.

Chris Wright (14:39)
you know, all the way to Emmaus and then in the evening in the upper room. And Luke says twice that he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, not to know the scriptures because they knew them already, but it’s as if he’s saying this is how you are to read the scripture, this is what is written. And then the second thing is that…

Dru Johnson (14:50)
Mmm. Mmm.

Chris Wright (14:58)
He’s saying they do all point to the Messiah. Surely this must happen. The Messiah must come and suffer and enter His glory. So there’s no question that for Jesus, the scriptures of what we call the Old Testament point towards Him. There’s a Christ-focused, Christotelic, as some people call it, essence. But also, He says, not only is it written that the Messiah will come and suffer in the third day rise again, but also, He says, that repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations, and you are my witnesses of these things.

Dru Johnson (15:26)
Mm.

Chris Wright (15:28)
So there’s a messianic and a missional thrust to the scriptures. Jesus said the scriptures are programming Not just the coming of the Messiah tick tick tick, you know done that been there got that, you know But is also programming the rest of history That this has got to go to all nations. So it’s in a sense Luke’s version of the Great Commission So those are the things I’d want to say and then a third thing about Luke 24 is that it’s sometimes used to suggest

Dru Johnson (15:51)
Hmm.

Chris Wright (15:58)
that Jesus is saying that sort of every verse of the Old Testament is about me. These are things about me. But that’s not what the text means. It says he showed them in every part of the scripture, the law, the prophets, the writings, the three main sections of the Old Testament canon. And so he says, what he’s saying is wherever you look in the canon,

there are things that will point to Christ. He’s pointed to in the Torah, in the prophets, in the Psalms, the writings. And that’s not saying that every verse is about Jesus. It’s just that every section of the canon is ultimately focused towards him. So what’s a good one and what’s a bad one? think, again, I use illustrations to try to make this, because I want to say,

Dru Johnson (16:38)
Yeah.

Chris Wright (16:49)
If one remembers that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate second person of the Trinity, so we bring our Trinitarian understanding into this issue, then of course I would want to say that when the scriptures of the Old Testament talk simply about God or Adonai, Yahweh, it’s the whole Trinity that’s there.

Dru Johnson (17:15)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Wright (17:17)
I’m not just saying, you know, in those so-called ⁓ pre-incarnation Christophanies, as some people call them, that when it says God appeared to so-and-so, you know, people want to make a big deal that that must have been Christ or that must have been Jesus. And I want to say, well, perhaps, I don’t think we are compelled to say that, you know, if it’s the Holy Spirit who’s with us. It just seems that when God wants to speak to people,

God is quite happy to take human form and to talk with people face to face. That seems to be what’s happening.

Dru Johnson (17:51)
and eat a meal with them.

Chris Wright (17:53)
Yeah, but if that’s the case, perhaps it’s the second person of the Trinity. But so in that sense, I want to say, yes, Christ in the sense of the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity is clearly from a theological point of view, is present from the beginning of time. He’s there from the beginning before creation. So to see the second person of the Trinity involved in all that God is saying and doing in the Old Testament. Fine, I’m happy with that.

My problem is that when people talk about Jesus in the Old Testament, it does several things. First of all, I think it removes the unprecedented uniqueness of the incarnation. When John 1 says that the Word who was there from the beginning, the Word that’s effectively the second person, the Trinity, the Word became flesh. That had never happened before. That’s unique.

You know, so and if you start talking about Jesus back in the Old Testament.

you lose that sense that here’s God entering into human flesh for the first time, genuinely becoming human. And it makes you feel as if all these Old Testament saints were basically just sort of evangelical Christians in togas, you know, they were just sort of, they’re all kind of like us. And Jesus was kind of there. Well, I just don’t think that that’s the way it was. They were looking forward. God may have given them prophetic insight as to what was coming. Peter says that. But Jesus, the name Jesus, I want

say is the name given to the Son of Mary, know, conceived of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, ⁓ born, lived, died, crucified, rose again. Jesus is the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the human Son of God. And in that sense I want to say Jesus is not there in the Old Testament. Jesus is the incarnate Son of God and we need to see this sense of a progress, of a journey, that God is doing something he had not done before.

Dru Johnson (19:38)
Mm.

Chris Wright (19:54)
when he becomes incarnate in Jesus. So that’s one way I try to help people to get both ideas in their heads.

Dru Johnson (20:02)
Yeah, that’s very powerful. And I think I remember reading that. I was a fairly new Christian and coming out of the social sciences when I went to seminary and read your book for the first time. it took me forever to get my head around why history matters. They’d say the historical unfolding of the promises of God matters. And professors were saying this in all kinds of different ways. I was reading it in books like yours. I just couldn’t understand why it mattered so much. It just didn’t ⁓ make sense to me. I think because I thought

Chris Wright (20:10)
Okay.

Dru Johnson (20:32)
God was a blob that had these Aristotelian, even though I wouldn’t have called them that then, these Aristotelian attributes of Omnis, he was just that. And so what does it matter? And when he, again, as the blob called God, he acts in history in certain ways. So what you seem to be indicating here is the necessity of God acting in history and that history unfolds in a particular way, which I don’t think is how most

Chris Wright (20:40)
Yeah.

you

Dru Johnson (21:01)
I think most Christians, if they sat down and thought about it, would come to something like that conclusion, but I don’t think that’s floating around strongly in the church, or least not from my experience of it.

Chris Wright (21:09)
It probably isn’t. mean, to be if they really study the Apostle Paul more carefully. mean, you know, in Galatians he’s quite clear, isn’t it? There was a time when God was dealing with his people and the law was given after the promise and it’s good. God gave them, know, Romans 7, the law is good and holy and meant to give life and so on. So here is that period. But Paul sees that. But we’ve come past that now. The Messiah has come and it’s almost like

Dru Johnson (21:14)
Right.

Chris Wright (21:36)
especially using his image of the sort of the schoolmaster, the pedagogos, you know, the slave who takes the kids to school and looks after them and so on. It’s almost as if, well, we’ve sort of graduated from that. And it’s not that that was unimportant. That was God dealing with his people at that time. But we’re now living like, you know, we’ve moved out of the school into adult life with the Messiah, with the Holy Spirit. And that doesn’t mean we forget everything we learned in school. It just means we now live as mature adults, guides.

Dru Johnson (21:40)
Right.

Chris Wright (22:06)
by what we’ve learned already through the Holy Spirit. But Paul does seem to make a clear temporal distinction between God’s actions and then in the fullness of time, when the time was ripe, he sends his son born of a woman, born of Mary and so on. So I think the sense of progress does matter. Another way I try again, sort of my simplistic sort of way, is to think in terms of a journey.

Dru Johnson (22:08)
Hmm.

Mm.

Chris Wright (22:34)
If the Old Testament is and if the whole Bible in sense is a narrative Which is leading from creation to new creation the Old Testament section is a narrative which is leading ultimately to Christ I mean, this is you Matthew’s genealogy seems very clearly to be saying that ⁓

Abraham through to David, through to exile, through to Christ. It’s a journey. And I sometimes say to people, it might work better in the UK than in the US where you don’t have so many trains, at least not as many as we have here. But I say, if I’m on a train and I get a train from London to Edinburgh, Edinburgh is my destination.

And I’m on this train because I have a purpose that I’m going to accomplish when I get to Edinburgh. I’m going to a conference where I’m going to speak or whatever. So I’m, I’m on the Edinburgh train, which means not that every time I look out the window, I see Edinburgh. What I see is the scenery on this journey to Edinburgh. If I was going to Bristol or Cardiff, it would be different scenery, but I’m not going there. I’m going to Edinburgh is the destination. So the whole of my journey in a sense is governed and shaped ⁓ by

the destination, which is Edinburgh.

That’s the purpose, that’s the destination, that’s what I’m going to get to. And I say, if we think of the Old Testament a bit like that as a journey that is ultimately the Jesus train, it’s the train to Christ, it’s the journey to Christ. It doesn’t mean that every time we look at an Old Testament text, we’re seeing Jesus. What we’re seeing is the scenery en route to Christ, because he’s the destination, he’s the purpose, he’s what will fulfill it. He’s the whole reason why this story is here, is because ultimately God is going to enter human life through his son Jesus.

So that’s another way of trying to help people see the difference between a Christo-telic approach, you know, that this is a journey that points and leads to Christ from a Christo-centric approach, that is everything in here must be about Christ in some way. It’s a slightly different way of thinking.

Dru Johnson (24:32)
Yeah, it’s interesting to me too that I like that you use all these ⁓ metaphors and analogies because even the metaphors that Jesus is using, even in John’s gospel, I’m the way, the truth, the life, it doesn’t say the road stops at Jesus. The kingdom has come and is coming that it’s coming through and going on to this ultimate fulfillment in him as well. So think that’s very helpful. ⁓ Do you think this is slight switch, same theme?

Now variation, different verse. ⁓ Do you think that we lose a little about, you know, in the same way that we try to square peg round hole the Old Testament, that it’s just there to tell us about Jesus and that’s its only function?

where people will take, and I’m a victim of this myself, ⁓ they’ll take what’s happening in the first century with Jesus and they’ll say, well, that’s supposed to be everything today. Everything that happens in the gospels and acts, that’s all supposed to be happening exactly the way it’s So if we’re not seeing, and I’ve talked to pastors who’ve taken this view, if we’re not seeing thousands of people coming to Jesus every day, then we’re not doing something correctly, right? We’re not following God.

Chris Wright (25:42)
Yeah, I don’t see that so much over here in the UK. Maybe I just go to those sort of churches. there is that sort of, it’s almost a wee bit like originalism in relation to the Constitution, isn’t it? know, it’s originalism in terms of the gospels and acts. Everything must be like that or it’s gone astray. It doesn’t seem to me to fit with actually the way Jesus himself talks about, you know, a future in which there will be people falling away, in which there will be persecution and suffering.

Dru Johnson (25:45)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Hmm.

Chris Wright (26:12)
suffering and so on, ⁓ and people who will want to kill you will think they’re doing God a favour. There’s more in the New Testament than just this is what it’s going to be like forever until Christ comes back. And I suppose there’s also the hermeneutical challenge that ⁓ in what way is biblical narrative

also prescriptive as distinct, purely descriptive. So did Luke write the book of Acts in order to tell us this is what the church should look like forever?

Or did he write the Book of Acts to show this is what happened when God comes in power through the Holy Spirit? And this is where God is showing how he’s expanding his gospel through to the very center of the Roman Empire, because this Jesus whom you crucified, God has made him Lord in Christ. He’s now King of the world. And so you need to acknowledge the true King.

you know, if we get a hold of that theology of Acts, it’s almost open-ended. It’s almost… the book of Acts ends with a, gosh, what’s going to happen next? know, where’s the story going to go? It’s obviously not going to stay just the same as it was back in Jerusalem. So I’m not so sure I would want to… Yeah, I would not want to dismiss entirely…

Dru Johnson (27:10)
Mm.

Chris Wright (27:28)
Those who would want to say that the gospels in the book of Acts are there to show us what the kingdom of God is like and what should be happening if God is really at work in power, then we should be seeing people come into faith, we should be seeing the transformation of lives, we should be seeing the salt and light in society, etc. The gospel is evidential, it should be showing itself, but not necessarily it’s all just going to look like the first century.

And God is the God of history. And he’s sovereign today as he was then.

Dru Johnson (28:04)
So on that note, you are an Old Testament professor by training and trade. ⁓ And you’ve spent the last ⁓ couple of decades working with the Langham Partnership, which used to be called John Stott Ministries, or is that correct?

Chris Wright (28:18)
In the United

States it was. In the United States it was called the John Stott Ministries because it was founded by John Stott, who many people in the States would know about, particularly those over 40. But John Stott himself never wanted that name. It’s interesting. was originally called the Langham Foundation in the US way back in 1970s. And then they, the board, decided to change it because nobody knew what Langham was in those days.

Dru Johnson (28:35)
I can imagine.

Chris Wright (28:47)
And so they changed it to John Stott Ministries and he was not best pleased. he wouldn’t even when he would speak about it in a church, I’ve heard him, he would say, you may have heard of the organization that bears some resemblance to my name. And so before he died. Yeah, very, very.

Dru Johnson (29:02)
the very British way of sliding his critique under the door.

Chris Wright (29:07)
Yeah, but

before he died in 2011, he did request that the board of Johnstock Ministries should change it back to Langham Partnership US, which it now is. So globally now Langham is just Langham Partnership US, UK, etc. Whatever.

Dru Johnson (29:24)
Yeah, and so why did that, well what is that work, and then why were you attracted to it as somebody who wants to sink your scholarship into that ⁓ energy?

Chris Wright (29:35)
Well, John Stott travelled a lot in the majority world, as you like to call it. That’s the continents of the global South, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Pacific. He travelled a lot, especially in the 60s and 70s. And what he observed was that the church in many parts of the world is growing very fast evangelistically.

but without depth of resources, discipleship, pastors that were well trained, lack of seminaries, lack of books and so on. And so the ministries of Langham were basically aimed at trying to resource the churches outside the West, the global South Church, first of all with scholarships for people to get doctorates in theology and then return and teach in seminary. So that’s the Langham Scholar Programme. And that has actually helped to transform evangelicals

theological scholarship in the majority world. are now some 400 Langham scholars all over the world. The great majority of them actually teaching in seminaries or principals or deans and so on. And then his second program was literature because he said we’ve got to get books into the hands of pastors because pastors can’t preach if they don’t study and they can’t study if they get no books. And so Langham literature was formed to do that and it’s now also not only

getting books out there, but also publishing books by majority world authors. So there’s now a very large publishing department of Langham literature, bringing books by African, Asian, evangelical, theological writers ⁓ in Bible and theology and making them available, affordable and accessible in the Western world as well as majority world. And then the third program is Langham preaching.

which was because his overall aim, John Stott’s ultimate goal, was to raise the standards of biblical preaching. What can we do, he would say, to help people to preach the Bible better? And so now Langham Preaching is working in about 100 different countries with indigenous movements for… ⁓

biblical preaching of whatever exactly that means. It doesn’t necessarily mean the classic Western style of expository preaching, but preaching which is faithful to the text of the Bible, which is clearly rooted in the text and then which is relevant and applied. So those are the three programs of Langham. Scholars, literature, preaching. Anybody wants to follow it up, there is a website just Langham, L-A-N-G-H-A-M, langham.org ⁓ and they can find out all…

Dru Johnson (31:45)
Right.

And why is, why preaching of all things? ⁓ Why is that so important in the majority world?

Chris Wright (32:11)
Yeah.

Well, it’s important anywhere. mean, it is actually quite sad that preaching has become a bit of a bad word. You know, don’t preach at me in the West. It’s lost that sense of being the vital communication of the Word of God to the ears of God’s people in the world. I mean, the Bible itself is full of the importance of our ears of listening to God, of God’s address, that God has sent his Word into the world. mean, on Sunday evening,

at All Souls Church where I belong, which was John Stott’s church before he died. The sermon was on Isaiah 55 and I was struck again by those words where God says, know, as the rain comes down from heaven and the snow and makes things grow, so will it be with my word which comes forth my wife. It won’t return to me empty, it will accomplish that for which I sent it. And I suddenly thought, actually the Word of God is the first missionary.

Dru Johnson (33:00)
Hmm.

Chris Wright (33:10)
Even before Jesus sends his Son, he sends his word. It is a sent word with a purpose, there’s a of a missional theology of the Bible itself. And so if the Word of God is sent to the people of God, then how is it going to be communicated? And in so many contexts around the world, where people may not be literate or they may not be able to read the Bible easily themselves, the only way they’re going to get it is when they hear somebody preaching it in a church or teaching it.

Dru Johnson (33:39)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Wright (33:40)
in a seminary. And so that element of helping pastors to know how to preach the Bible. ⁓

faithfully, clearly and relevantly is very much the design. And John himself would say it’s because he gave to us what he called the Langham logic. That was his phrase, the Langham logic. And I wish I could imitate his English accent because it was so perfect. But he would say we’ve got three biblical convictions and one inescapable conclusion. That was his kind of language. And the three biblical convictions are one, we know from the Bible that God wants

his church, his people to grow up.

not just to grow bigger, but to grow up in maturity in their mission and their effectiveness in the world. Secondly, we know that God’s people grow up through God’s Word. It’s the Word of God that is given to mature people like food, like nourishment. And thirdly, that the Word of God comes to the people of God mainly through preaching, not exclusively, but for many people mainly. So he said, if these things are true, the logical conclusion is, what can we do to raise the standards of biblical preaching?

Dru Johnson (34:21)
Thanks.

Chris Wright (34:51)
so that it comes to the people of God who then become mature and more effective in their mission and their discipleship in the world. So it’s that sort of through flow of logic that bring the Bible to the people so that people then can change the world under God in their mission and engagement. It’s not just the Bible for its own sake purely academically, it’s the transformative power of the Bible in the lives of believers in their mission in the world. That was John’s vision.

Dru Johnson (35:20)
And it may be the case that more people throughout history and even more Christians alive today are engaging the Bible through their ears, through the preached word, than sitting down with their own personal Bible reading it for themselves. I know when I’ve taught in Kenya that was the case.

Chris Wright (35:35)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yes, and one of the things that Langham Partnership is really working at the moment is orality, cultures of orality.

Dru Johnson (35:44)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Wright (35:46)
or cultures that even though people may well be literate, i.e. they are able to read and write, but their preferred and almost exclusive way of actually learning anything is oral, through what they hear, what they say. It’s that, and how do we, how do you teach good biblical preaching without giving people loads of books to read, you know? ⁓

Dru Johnson (35:55)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Wright (36:07)
if they don’t actually, if that’s not the way they learn. So we are tackling that and yeah, is actually our preacher on Sunday evening said, because he was preaching Isaiah 55 and he says, the feast of God’s word is a feast that we eat with our ears. He kept on saying, we eat with our ears. And it’s a lovely, lovely idiom, I think. ⁓

Dru Johnson (36:10)
Right.

Yeah, and that’s a good plug for our, we do public reading of scripture here with the center on zoom every week. ⁓ Cause we’re convinced that coming in, that’s the natural habitat of scriptures in our ears. And then it can be other places as well as God has gifted us with those things. ⁓ So if I understand you correctly, before we close, just so people know, you could go to langham.org and you could look at, you could find your way to the publishing house and you could today read hundreds of books from

Chris Wright (36:34)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Dru Johnson (36:58)
technical nerdy scholarship on the Bible and on the Bible preaching, even sociology and cultural anthropology. And also just general, I think we’ve interviewed a few Langham authors on here, like Liz Mburu, who’s like a great spokesperson for, ⁓ but just simple things like ⁓ East African hermeneutics, like what’s different about that between ⁓ so-called Western hermeneutics. ⁓

Chris Wright (37:13)
Yeah. yeah, wonderful.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (37:28)
I mean, there seems to be a hidden premise in this that it’s important for people who aren’t in Africa, Asia, South America, the Caribbean, that it might be important for us to listen to our sisters and brothers in those environments. What would be your low-pitched appeal to a Christian at All Souls or in the US as to why they should pick one of these books up and read from these people?

Chris Wright (37:53)
I think the bluntest answer would be, well, for a few hundred years we have thought that the best way for the rest of the world is to learn what we write and publish and print, etc. And perhaps we could do with a bit of humility and realize that God’s church is global and that there are people in Africa, in Asia, Latin America who are as spiritually mature as anybody in the West, in fact more so in many places because they have learned through suffering and through being

a minority through all the things we’re now complaining about in our culture they have lived with for thousands a couple of thousand years in most parts of the world they have got something to tell us they’ve got a story they’ve got a life they’ve got experience and really ⁓

We ought to get away from this feeling that we know best or the West is best, or we’ve got theology, they’ve got contextual theology. All theology is rooted in the context in which it’s born, including in the West.

which is no better or no worse a context than any other. It’s simply a place where the gospel is taken root and where people have done the theology. But that’s also the case now in Africa and elsewhere. And so I think we should simply be humble enough to listen and learn to sisters and brothers who love us and who also in some ways, ⁓ how can I put it, almost pity us Christians in the West because we are, let’s face it, Western Christianity is now pretty marginal.

to global Christianity. We’re only about 25 % of the world’s Christians. ⁓

And sometimes I get this odd feeling that there are still people in the West who believe that we are those who can tell the rest of the church how to do church planting, how to do church growth theory, all that stuff, when they’re doing and experiencing it. maybe one of the ways in which, maybe my last thought, John Stott was moved in the 60s, 70s and 80s to form ministries because he thought it’s our responsibility as a Western church, which

resource rich to step alongside and to help churches in the majority of the world who are resource poor in order to help them, not paternalistically and superior, but simply how can we walk alongside them? I think in the providence of God,

what John’s thought will have accomplished for the majority of church will ultimately be for the survival of the Western Church because it will be the life and the vigor and the spirituality of churches there that will bring

their understanding of the gospel and their spiritual life to a fairly, in some cases, fairly moribund church in some parts of the West. Although God is doing amazing things, it’s not dying out by any means. There’s some amazing church growth happening in Europe, ⁓ even in France, here in Britain.

There are large numbers of young people who are turning away from atheism and exploring the Christian faith. We’re reading about that statistically these days. So God is at work, but he’s at work all around the world. And we should be listening to the voices of the rest of the world.

Dru Johnson (41:03)
It seems to me, having read some of that stuff ⁓ and talked to many of those scholars, that it’s not just that it’s interesting reading, but it’s actually they know things that we can’t know. If you haven’t been raised under government oppression or atrocities, we just can’t know certain things that we need to know even in order to understand our own scripture.

Chris Wright (41:17)
Yes.

That’s right.

Yeah, they see things in the scripture that we just don’t see because it’s not our culture. I remember I was in, if I could finish, I was in Chad one time with Bible translators who were translating the Bible into Chadian Arabic and they’d just finished Genesis and they said what they do is they read the text with a group of native Chadian speakers and then they have a kind of question and answer discussion to see if it’s been understood and they were reading that passage where ⁓ Joseph is reconciled with his brothers

Dru Johnson (41:27)
Yeah.

Chris Wright (41:53)
towards the end of Genesis. And they said, so they read the text, and Genesis 50, and so they were asked, is Joseph now reconciled? Are they okay together? yes, yeah, definitely. Well, why do you think they’re reconciled? Well, was it because of what Joseph says about God? No, well, that’s important, but that wouldn’t have done it. Well, was it because, you know, Joseph said he’d forgiven them? No, no, that wouldn’t have done it. Well, why are you so convinced that Joseph and his brothers are now completely reconciled?

And they well, it’s obvious. Joseph says to his brothers, I will care for your children. And they said, in our culture, that’s what brothers do for brothers. You care for your brother’s children, especially with AIDS and everything else. And so they said, if Joseph is going to care for his brother’s children, they’re reconciled. They’re brothers again. Now, we would never have seen that. It’s almost, we would think, just incidental in the text. But for them,

Dru Johnson (42:28)
Hmm.

Mm.

Chris Wright (42:51)
for their culture, they saw that as highly significant. And they’re probably right, actually, in terms of ancient Near Eastern culture. So, yeah, as I say, sometimes other eyes will see things. It’s not that they’re putting into scripture something that isn’t there. They’re just seeing the diamond from a different angle and seeing a different reflection of God’s light within it.

Dru Johnson (42:59)
Yeah, brilliant.

Chris Wright (43:13)
I don’t know, Dru, I’m just reading a book, Kevin Vanhoozer’s recent book on what’s it called? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, that’s ⁓ Transfiguring. And I’m realizing what he means by that word, that, you know, the physical Jesus that the disciples knew as just a man, a carpenter’s son, flesh and blood like the rest of us. But when he was transfigured, they saw the reality of God’s glory.

Dru Johnson (43:20)
Mere hermeneutics? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Wright (43:42)
in the person of Jesus and then that goes away and they’re still back with the ordinary Jesus but now they know who he really is and I haven’t finished the book yet I’m just reading it but it seems to me that there’s something of that with the text of the scripture as well that we read it as what it was an ordinary text within ancient near Eastern culture written by human beings like us and so it comes out of its culture

Dru Johnson (43:49)
Right.

Hmm.

Chris Wright (44:07)
but it has that power to be transfigured in the way that it also reveals the glory of God, it reveals the person of Christ, even in the Old Testament. It is speaking ultimately about the God whom we know in Christ. And that’s the sort of transfiguring power, I think, of Scripture. We have to deal with it at the level of ordinary human history, but we have to also be prepared to see the God who sent it and who speaks through it.

Dru Johnson (44:11)
Hmm.

Yeah. Well, Christopher Wright, ⁓ you have dozens of books that people could pick up and read. ⁓ But I want to thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Chris Wright (44:46)
Thanks Dru, it’s been good to be with you. I shall get back to my fan here. The London heat is very unusual, but we’re enjoying it while it lasts.