N.T. Wright—acclaimed New Testament scholar, retired Anglican bishop, and prolific author—is sandwiched between two books right now, each timed to the Christian liturgical year. The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God (Zondervan Academic) was published this month, just weeks before Advent, the spiritual lead-up to Christ's birth. And on February 17, the day before Lent begins the solemn anticipation of his death and resurrection, HarperOne will publish Wright's latest title, God's Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal.
PW talked with Wright about his pair of new releases, their importance at this moment, and what Paul would think of Christians today.
You've written, lectured, and taught Bible commentaries, particularly on the writings of Paul, including recently about his letter to the Ephesians. Why The Vision of Ephesians now?
The more I dug into Ephesians, the more fresh stuff I was finding that I hadn't seen before. For a scholar of my age (76), seeing things you haven't seen before is not something you always expect. The danger is that you just go on regurgitating what you knew anyway.
What is one of your fresh insights here?
Chapters 4-6 are just not about ethics, as in "Now that I'm a Christian, how should I behave?" They are about how the church reveals to the world who God is. It's about the outward-facing task of the church to demonstrate to the world a small working model of the new creation, which is a very exciting agenda.
How does The Vision of Ephesians, timed to the 2025 Christmas season, relate to God's Homecoming, which is timed to the 2026 Easter season?
It makes the same point, really. Most Western Christians think the whole point of Christianity is for my soul to go to heaven when I die. Actually, that's not what the New Testament teaches at all. The point of God's kingdom is to come on Earth as in Heaven, with Jesus as the launching of that, and then the church indwelt by Jesus's spirit as the pilot project for a new creation. So, the idea of new creation—God renewing the world and giving us new bodies to inhabit the New World—is mainstream early Christianity that's been forgotten by so much Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, liberal or conservative, charismatic or liberationist, or whatever.
Should Christians read the Bible differently?
People are still stuck with the old paradigm, and not surprisingly, it doesn't make as much sense as they hope it would. We need to be able to read the Bible in terms of what it's actually saying, rather than what the medieval traditions made it say. So, this puts me in an awkward spot, because people may think, Oh, you know, you're one of these crazy liberal bishops who thinks that we can abolish heaven. No, it's just that heaven is supposed to be coming to earth, and it happened with Jesus. It happens through the Spirit, and we are supposed to be people who are living by that, which is a huge challenge in, of course, in all sorts of ways.
God's Homecoming roots the New Testament in the Hebrew scriptures, rather than superseding them. Why stress this?
Most Christians that I have known throughout my life have never really seen this but have insisted on a kind of a huge change from Old Testament to New Testament, as if, That was then this is now. We've now got a different dream. The answer to that is no. It's a Jewish idea in the first century that Jesus is Israel's Messiah, and therefore in him, the promises to Israel are fulfilled.
What are the two promises that you write that tie the Testaments together?
One is that Israel's God will return again after the exile and fill the temple in Jerusalem with his glory. The New Testament says that's who Jesus was. The other great promise—it's in Isaiah 11 and in Psalm 72 and the Book of Numbers—is that one day, the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
What do you think Paul would say about Christians today?
People have often asked me that. In Ephesians, there are two things that Paul is absolutely insistent that the church should be stressing. One is unity, and the other is holiness. Paul would be horrified that we are not united and that we are not holy and that we don't particularly care. We've settled with so-called denominations. Paul knew nothing about denominations. He was constantly encouraging Christians from different ethnic backgrounds to get together, to worship together.
