Charles+ has asked me to write an introduction for our discussion of NT Wright's book, What Saint Paul Really Said.  I'm not certain where to begin other than to give a brief overview of what I think Tom Wright is trying to accomplish.
 
                From my own private correspondence with him, I know about what drives the man.  He was drawn to the Bible from a fairly early age.  Unsatisfied with the answers he was given to his own question, he began to read voraciously.  The works of C.S. Lewis were very influential on him as a teenager, especially the book Miracles.  You can see the influence of Lewis in his new book on the Resurrection.
 
                Academically, he initially pursued the Classics, earning a degree in Classical History and Philosophy.  He, thus, came to Biblical studies from a historical background.  One of the first conversations we had was about the shock we each felt, coming from a historical background, at what passed for historical methodology in Biblical studies.  The methodology would be laughed off the stage in any other field of history.
 
                It is obvious from his various books that Wright has been influenced, as have many others, by the groundbreaking work of E.P. Sanders.  Sanders was the first to attack seriously the scholarly assumption dating back to Luther that Jews were simply Pelagians.  Sanders also proposed that the teachings of both Jesus and Paul could be best understood within their second temple context.  This argument put forward by Sanders began what is now called the New Perspective Movement and is causing old-fashioned Presbyterians all sorts of problems.  I understand that the PCA may very well debate the implications of Wright's arguments concerning justification in the near future.  This is somewhat ironic as the New Perspective Movement is known for attacking Luther rather than Calvin.  
 
                Wright himself is what I would call a sacramental Evangelical.  From his more devotional works, one can see that he has a strong Eucharistic devotion (indeed, he sees the Eucharist as the primary act and event of the inaugurated eschaton), and a high view of the role of Baptism.  But he is in the same camp as Oliver O'Donavan, Alistair McGrath, and Roger Beckwith, or what might be called the "old" school of Church of England Evangelicalism.  One thing that does mark Wright from other Evangelicals is that is professed loyalty is to Scripture rather than to the Reformers.  In one of his essays he attacks those who care more about being faithful to Luther and Calvin than to Scripture.  Like many good Evangelicals, he doesn't have the highest opinion of Roman Catholicism!
 
                Wright's basic premise about Paul is that, as a good Jew and Pharisee, he had a basic worldview shaped primarily by the call of Abraham, the Exodus experience, and the Babylonian exile, except that he found that the long expected climax had occurred in the person of Jesus Christ.  What we see in St. Paul's epistles is his working out of the implications of that belief.  That is basically the thrust of What Saint Paul Really Said.
 
                One final note, Wright believes that St. Paul has been consistently misread since the later period of the Early Church.  In his book on the Resurrection, he tries to show that the Fathers through Origen basically had the same understanding as the NT about the Resurrection and its implications not only for us, but also for the cosmos.  Later Fathers drank more deeply from the Platonic well until finally adopting a basically Platonic reading of Paul entirely.  In terms of eschatology, this, I suppose, would be called amillenialism.   Platonism, of course, held court in Europe throughout the Middle Ages until being challenged by Aristotelianism and the Humanism.  During his lectures at Kanuga he expressed the opinion that Calvin (later ruined by Biza!) came close to restoring the original meaning of Paul, though his humanism kept him from this.  As I've already stated, he considers Luther to have been partly right and partly wrong about Paul.  This faulty understanding, in turn, was further distorted by the rise of Rationalism and then again by the rise of experiential Romanticism and then by existentialism and modernism.  Now, Paul is being read within a postmodernist context. In his view, when most scholars argue about Paul, what they really are arguing about is Platonism vs Humanism vs Rationalism vs Romanticism vs Existentialism vs Modernism vs Postmodernism.  This is why Paul has been so badly misread.  Thus, his attempt to get back to the first-century Jewish worldview.
 
                That in a nutshell is an overview of Tom Wright's approach.  Before we proceed to discuss in more detail What Saint Paul Really Said, are there any general comments or observations that other have had?  I think if we understand Tom Wright's worldview, as it were, we might find the discussion of the details more fruitful.  Also, do you all want to discuss his observations in chapter 1 or proceed immediately to chapter 2?

Fr. Mark Clavier
All Saints Anglican Church, Arden, NC
www.allsaintschurch.us

"Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God must be a rebel as well as a king."
                                                           G.K. Chesterton