I’m used to the fact that the more one is a stranger to the stream of Biblical Theology in the line of Vos, Ridderbos, Gaffin, and others the more strange the work of N. T. Wright will seem to be. Thus, my first thrill of discovery in him was one of confirmation. Here was a guy using Biblical Theology to do apologetics at both the scholarly and popular levels. And he does it great (bad grammar, but I’m sticking with it). It was like discovering that I had powers that I had not hitherto known about.

But Wright has occasionally taught me something new and different that has helped me understand the Bible much better. The chief among these is how Paul uses the term, “the righteousness of God.” What bothers me is how obvious this was in the Bible but how I had simply never even thought about it. I guess an unjustified sense of satisfaction kept me from seeing the evidence. But whatever the cause of the disease, Wright’s intoduction of new ideas helped me see the light. I say “helped,” because he did not exactly show me much. I ran into this in his way to brief What Saint Paul Really Said which simply does not provide enough argument or explanation. Frankly, Wright sounded weird. So I resolved to try to find out what he meant and why he meant it.

Here are the results in sermons and essays:

• The Righteousness of God: A Sermon on Isaiah 45.21-25
• God’s Righteousness & Our Justification
• The Righteous Judge
• The Great Exchange
• Romans & the Role of Israel in the Atonement

This last essay is my favorite and most embarrassing. I need to go re-edit it for misplaced verse references and other mistakes. A search for the term “rightouesness of God,” will turn up great stuff by Rich Lusk and Derrick Ollif. This, however, shows how Wright has helped me. I am very grateful for his mysterious (to my brain) statements in his little book on Paul because they made me go back and study the Bible. I think I am a better expounder of the Scriptures because of his help.

Hopefully this will help others as well.