This MIPodcast Moment is from the transcript of N. T. Wright's interview, now available in full HERE.
BLAIR HODGES: So, a minute ago you mentioned the book series you did on the New Testament, the “For Everyone” series—
N. T. WrightN. T. WRIGHT: Yes, yes.HODGES: —and as a New Testament scholar, have you received any pushback on the idea of “pop scholarship”—things produced for popular audiences?WRIGHT: I’ve done a lot for popular audiences because I’ve always been working in the church. I’ve been active as a preacher and a teacher and I’ve led Sunday school groups and confirmation classes and done that sort of thing. So, I’ve always been aware there’s a need to translate the big academic stuff into popular mode. And for me the vocational moment—though I didn’t realize it at the time—was when I was quite young and I read C. S. Lewis saying that there ought to be a compulsory exam for clergy or theologians which would be to translate a work of academic theology into a popular idiom. And he said, tellingly, if you can’t do that you either don’t understand it or you don’t believe it—HODGES: Right.WRIGHT: —and I thought, oh my goodness! That’s quite a challenge! So simply as responding to that challenge it’s been fascination. But also because I grew up in a family which didn’t consist of theologians, we were church goes, but nobody was reading academic theology. And both at home when I was growing up and then with my own wife and children, none of whom are theologians, if I would say something at the Sunday lunch table about the sermon that we’d heard that day, and if I started using long words, they would say “Come on, dad! You know we don’t talk that silly language. What do you actually mean? Can you say it plainly?”So, I’ve been on the spot. And I enjoy that. I think that’s exactly right. If we can’t say it straight up, then we haven’t thought it through and we’re fudging with artificial fluffy language. That’s not a healthy way to be. So, I’ve done my best to resist that. And as it happens—very nervously when I was quite a young scholar, like about twenty-five or thirty years ago—I started to think “What I’ve been preaching and teaching on this and that, I wonder if that would make a little book!”And then one of the publishers that I’d had conversations with said to me one day, “Tom, you’ve read this, that, and the other, haven’t you?” It was 1992, when the funny books on Jesus by A. N. Wilson and Barbara Thiering and Jack Spong came out. And I said, “Yeah, I’ve read that.” And he said, “Well, why not just write it up, just four or five chapters, and it’ll be a nice little book just before Christmas.” And I thought, “eh, what?” And then I thought, hey that’d be rather fun! And so I had a go, and in its way—I mean, none of us write bestsellers—but as Christian books go it was, for a week or two, a bestseller. So, okay, maybe I can do this.Then I did some journalism and I was asked to write on various topics to the Church Times in London, and then for one or two of the broadsheets—at the Times and The Guardian and The Independent in London—the regular newspapers, in other words. And I found again, that was fun. I enjoyed doing it. And if you can, and if you’ve got something to say and people say, “hey, that was good, I liked seeing what you did” then you carry on doing it. But I’ve never wanted that to take over from the serious side of my work, which is the big chunky tomes like the we’re talking about here.HODGES: Have you received any pushback from more traditional believers within your own tradition about some of the ways that you try to bring scholarship into the conversation?WRIGHT: Well, in my own tradition, which is the Anglican Church, the Church of England, occasionally people say various things about “Oh, well no, we’re not sure we can cope with this.” But in England particularly, we have—surprisingly considering our heritage—we have a very anti-intellectual culture. A lot of people, including people who would be ashamed not to know the basics of nuclear physics or whatever it might be, they see a book of four or five hundred pages on Jesus or Paul or something, and they say, “Oh, no no…that looks, that looks really… that’s a bit much, I mean uh it’s quite expensive, too, uh I think I’ll go for this little one” and they’ll pick up something sort of eighty pages. And I’m thinking, come on, you know, A, the book doesn’t cost you any more than you would pay for a night out at the theater, probably a lot less actually especially if you live in London. And B, you’re perfectly capable of reading quite serious arguments about other things, why not this?So, I’ve had to push against that, really, the sort of sense that we only want the short popular version, the thing we can read on a Friday evening in the bathtub or whatever, rather than the big serious thing. And so it’s been one of my minor missions in life to encourage people in my tradition that actually they can and should read the bigger things. And I’ve tried to write the bigger things in a way which is enjoyable. You know, I don’t believe in writing stodgy tedious prose if I can help it.
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