Review: Tom Wright for Everyone

John P Richardson

Stephen Kuhrt, Tom Wright for Everyone: Putting the Theology of N.T. Wright into Practice in the Local Church (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2011).

There were two reasons why I started reading Stephen Kuhrt’s Tom Wright for Everyone . First, I have found it very difficult to get to grips with Tom Wright’s theology, but secondly I am also intrigued by those who declare themselves enthusiasts for his point of view.

Wright’s output is prodigious, but although I would rather start with his earlier (pre-2000) works — the writing of ‘N T’ rather than ‘Tom’ Wright, as it were — the sad truth is I have yet to get round to it. I was grateful, therefore, that someone else might have done this and was prepared to summarize their findings for the rest of us.

However, the impact of Wright on contemporary evangelicalism interests me almost more than Wright himself. One is conscious of a ‘Wrightean’ atmosphere — a sense of people being passionately ‘for’ or ‘against’, coupled with the more obvious polemic of writers like John Piper, or contributions like Wright’s fierce (and bizarrely intemperate) criticism of Pierced for our Transgressions, included in his online article, ‘The Cross and the Caricatures’.

Here, Wright rallied to the support of the popular writer and speaker, Steve Chalke, expressing his “puzzlement” when he heard assertions that in The Lost Message of Jesus the latter had “denied substitutionary atonement”. After all, Wright said, Chalke had “relied to quite a considerable extent” on Wright’s own Jesus and the Victory of God, “the longest ever demonstration, in modern times at least, that Jesus’ self-understanding ... was rooted in, among other Old Testament passages, Isaiah 53, the clearest and most uncompromising statement of penal substitution you could find.”

Yet of course, as any reader of The Lost Message of Jesus discovers, penal substitution was precisely what Chalke denied. (Chalke’s own approach to Isaiah 53 is also remarkably circumspect.) How did Wright come to miss this and why was he so ‘pro-Chalke’?

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