Grace Lutheran Church

Nicholas Thomas Wright was born1 December 1948, known as N. T. Wright or Tom Wright (at right in photo at right), is an English New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop. He was the bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010. He then became research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary’s College in the University of St Andrews in Scotland until 2019, when he became a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford.  He writes about theology and Christian life and the relationship between them. He advocates a biblical re-evaluation of theological matters such as justification, women’s ordination, and popular Christian views about life after death. He has also criticized the idea of a literal Rapture. The author of over seventy books, Wright is highly regarded in academic and theological circles for his “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series. The third volume, The Resurrection of the Son of God, is considered by many clergy and theologians to be a seminal Christian work on the resurrection of Jesus. (brief bio from Wikipedia).

Michael F. Bird was born 18 November 1974 is an Australian Anglican priest, theologian and New Testament scholar (at left in photo above).  In his teenage years, Bird was an atheist who saw Christianity “as a way of oppressing people, a purely human construct”.  After becoming a Christian he was firstly a Baptist, then a Presbyterian and now an Anglican.^[3] He has been called by the ecumenical media plaform Eternity a “heavy hitter” in the world of New Testament scholarship and Jesus’s divinity.

Bird is vice principal and lecturer in theology and New Testament at Ridley College, having previously taught at the Brisbane School of Theology and Highland Theological College. He studied at Malyon College and the University of Queensland.  He is also Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University.

Bird has written a number of books, including The New Testament in Its World (2019, with N. T. Wright), Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction (2013) and The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus (2014). The Gospel of the Lord won the Biblical Studies section of the 2015 Christianity Today Book Awards.^[7] Bird is also the author of a fantasy novel titled Iskandar: And the Immortal King of Iona.^[8]

Plan to attend this class either in person or via zoom. The biblical narrative will come alive as we explore how the chapters, stories, events, and literary forms all fit together in God’s redemptive story.