N. T. Wright – Not of God?

Val Lee caricatures & demonizes a godly scholar

I was checking out some blogs while researching for my next installment on the Augustinian/Pelagian, Calvin/Arminius debate when I ran across this article on N. T. Wright. Now my motto has always been never throw out the baby with the bath water; if there is any good in an article then keep the good.

But test everything; hold fast what is good. – 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (ESV)

In spite of all the good things on Val Lee’s blog, this article was quite disturbing not to mention inaccurate. I have never disagreed more with an article. Though I may not agree with all that N.T. Wright has to say, to defame his character with false claims and inaccuracies, rather than engage in robust debate is inexcusable. A reprint of the article is found below as it was posted, see what you think.

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N. T. Wright – Not of God by Val Lee

I was asked a question by a theologian of the Messianic sect, why I believe N. T. Wright (Bishop of Durham) is demon persuaded. Here is my answer composed in bits and pieces with quotes:
We know Christians respond to their heavenly Father, hopefully. Christ said of the religious leaders that they were of their father the devil; John 8:44. It also states here that every lie originates with Satan. N. T. Wright continually lies about God and His inerrant Word. We know from 2 Corinthians chapter 6 that either a person follows Christ or Satan, there is no in between. This is why we cannot be bound to unbelievers. Demons listen to their commander, performing his bidding.
Demons were presenting satan’s beliefs through the religious rulers of Christ day. The Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes appeared religious with their long robes, Scriptural teachings, etc. However, they were of their father the devil as false teachers who added their own words and traditions to true beliefs. Satan and the religious rulers were intent on destroying God the Son.
Either people hold to the teachings of the Bible or of Satan and his demons. God gives no in between roadway.
New Perspective (Wright’s movement) uplifts the religious leaders of Christ’s day as actually being the good guys in certain realms. Such beliefs represent the doctrines of demons.
New Perspective on Paul is demonic as it teaches Paul was out for his own militaristic agendas, following his own drummer. The NPP philosophies are filled with heresies straight from the pit of hell. Satan is out to discredit God’s Word and he uses his children to do so.
Wright is called the “theologian for everyone” as he attempts to tickle everyone’s ear with demonic false doctrines approving of every demonic way under the sun. He rewrites the Bible according to Wright. He has created his own false religion whereby he continually speaks out both sides of his mouth. He never makes concrete sense. Much of the time he speaks nonsense—confusion. God is not a god of confusion; Satan and his demons author confusion. It is beyond me why he is considered a great theologian.
Paul was errorless in his teachings, as they were the Words of God. No author of the Bible wrote his own words, only what the Holy Spirit instructed him to write.
We know Christ, who is God, never had to be vindicated by the Father as Wright states below. He, like all false teachers, blends truth with error. You see this all through Calvin’s writings as well and N. T. Wright uplifts Calvin.
From N. T. Wright:
Paul, it should be remembered, is one interpretation and experience of Christianity, and while it has become the dominant view it is, again, one of many threads existing in the earliest times after Jesus. When he’s wrong, he’s wrong. When he’s right, he’s astonishing.
For example, there are a few lines that, for me, should be kept within the soul and heart of every person who finds themselves attracted to the Jesus at the center of all that has been added, chiseled and carved to become Christianity. In 2 Corinthians 4:9, Paul writes:
“We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.”
I maintain that is inspiration at its highest, an example of Paul soaring above the confines of his own more mundane and pointed interpretations of who Jesus (or, for him, the Christ) was as a kind of cosmic figure. Is there anything else we can think of to wish for from a religion? That the world will afflict us cannot be debated. We see it every day in our lives and the lives of others. Yet, says Christianity, we can not be crushed. We read the headlines and are perplexed by what we read, from deaths in Iraq to Russia, from crime at home to the troubles of thousands in stroms. Yet, Paul maintains, in spite of all this we do not have to make the choice to be driven to dispair. Certainly, there are those who are persecuted — for their religion, the color of their skin, their sexual orientation. Then again, those victims will never be forsaken. Finally, we will be struck down by life, but cannot be ultimately destroyed by circumstances and events.
Because if in our mind and through our very body we carry the death of Jesus, we cannot help but carry the life of Jesus as well. We are, as the Episcopalians say in their services, part of the mystical body of Christ which, in itself, includes Jesus and includes the very Mystery that empowered Jesus.
Jesus, I believe, went to his death expecting to be vindicated by God. If the cup could not be lifted, Jesus said, so be it. His validation would come from his death in a way that he did not know based not on dogma but, rather, on belief born out of the exquisite personal relationship he knew with God. Certainly, through Paul we see glimpses elsewhere of the fact that Jesus was a man acted upon by God. His resurrection was a visible indication of an invisible operation in the Universe, one of hope and eventual vindication and victory.
In time, then, the closeness to the Eternal that Jesus invited us to became personified as Jesus himself, the historical person. It is that language we speak today in hymns and creeds, but it points beyond itself (as Jesus demanded again and again) not to the man of Nazareth himself, but to the Transcendent which poured forth through him, the vehicle.
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A lady I once knew attended a Bible-believing church where the leadership claimed to not support NT Wright, but the Sunday she visited, the pastor referred to NT Wright as one of the greatest theologians of our day. Tom Wright is leading many down a road of deception.
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I Know N. T. Wright is of the evil one, as he does not condemn homosexuality and sexual promiscuity. Those who are of God, His born again children, teach that premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, etc; is sinful. The Holy Spirit within a true believer reveals that God’s Word is inerrant. This includes the fact that adulterers and fornicators God will judge, but the marriage bed is undefiled. True aged believers understand Sodom and Gomorra and Romans chapter 1.
In What St. Paul Really Said pgs.155-157 Wright does not in any way condemn pre-marital sex, etc. Wright states on page 156 that it is not to be ignored, denied or repressed according to Paul. But we know that outside of marriage it is vile and not of God. N. T. Wright states a demonic lie.
Wright: …it would be a more authentic position, I think, to say, as an intellectually authentic position to say the New Testament says that homosexual practice is not what Christians ought to engage in but I disagree for these reasons. Now I can understand that position. I can’t actually understand a position which says the New Testament is either silent or open on the subject because, frankly, it isn’t. The other thing which comes up again and again is people say, well, all they knew about was certain types of homosexual phenomena and not at all the sort of thing that we have, to which the answer is just go and read Plato. Plato’s Symposium has a lengthy discussion of homosexual love which includes as one of the options precisely the kind of long, stable partnership that some people now are advocating. And this in fact is not new. Modern homosexuality was not invented my Michael Fuko, you know. There’s a great deal that goes back through the 18th and 19th centuries with which we’re in a continuum. This is a much deeper and harder…
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N. T. Wright is an Anglican bishop at Westminster Abbey—a church that believes most everyone is going to heaven. I have been there. I have heard their demonic false teachings that please every ecumenical ear. If you spend time around these bishops, you can tell they are void of the Holy Spirit. They teach the doctrines of men as the doctrines of God. They are demonic and they are doing Satan’s bidding by sending the masses to hell. They implement New Age doctrines that cause people to question God and His inerrant Word. Wright tears God’s Word apart and replaces its truth with Wright’s mentality. He is an antichrist in every sense of the word.
Wright aligns himself with the bishops in this Abbey and all Anglican bishops. They tell the tourists who come to this abbey, that all the people who buried there are in heaven and visitors must feel so proud to be amongst these great people. They lead prayer in this vein. I know most of the nobility buried here where murderers, adulterers, thieves, tyrants, etc. The bishops state all of Britain’s royalty and noble are in heaven—all the vile of the earth who are buried in this Abbey. (Of course, Wrights view of heaven is not Biblical: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA0NLb0pXGI)
I must also ask, how can a true born again Christian preach in a church that has Mary idols placed about and all kinds of secular stupidity? What born again Christian is going to preach in a building full of crypts that hold the remains of godless people? Who in their right mind is going to uplift kings and queens who murdered Christians? These people are continually exalted by the Abbey bishops. This was where they held Princess Diana’s funeral and countless other vile people who lived sexually promiscuous lives and did not acknowledge Christ as their Savior and LORD. The bishops will say they all went to heaven. This is Westminster Abbey and Wright’s environment that he powerfully upholds.
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Wright definitely is not pro Israel. A true child of God looks toward the removal of Israel’s enemies and Christ world rule in Jerusalem.
From Article:
Just consider Wright’s most recent commentary for Newsweek’s “On Faith,” anticipating the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Remarkably, Wright sees little difference between the ideals of Western democracies and those of Islamic terrorists. “What I wish we could say to terrorists and others: Look, we take our religion seriously too, and it leads us to different conclusions from you. We might be wrong; so might you; but in the name of whichever god you invoke, would it not be a better thing for us all to talk together about the issues at the heart of our respective faiths than to try to achieve dominance by violence?” Adding to the ambiguity, he closes with this line: “Unfortunately, they could quite well come back at us and say, ‘You mean, like you westerners have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last five years?’”
We expect to hear this sophism of moral equivalence from spokesmen at Al Jazeera television or the Arab League. Yet it somehow has emerged as a central argument in Wright’s critique of the war on radical Islam.
In his first major address on terrorism, “Where is God in the War on Terror?” Wright never mentioned the activities and ambitions of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist allies. He failed to cite any government assessments of the international terrorist threat. Al Qaeda and its operatives are plotting violence in 30 to 40 countries, are actively seeking nuclear material to detonate in urban centers, and are responsible for attacks that have killed or injured thousands of civilians in the last year alone–but you’d never know it from a speech approaching 8,000 words in length.
The bishop exudes moral outrage–but not at the extremists. Wright reserves the weight of his scorn for the United States and Great Britain and their foreign policies since the attacks of 9/11.
In the address in Durham, delivered last November, Wright condemned not only the war in Iraq, but also the U.S.-led coalition that toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan–a military offensive unanimously approved by the U.N. Security Council. He compared the United States to a “rogue elephant teased by a little dog,” staggering along on a militaristic rampage and “imposing the will of the West” on hapless populations. A first century historian, Wright can’t help but regard America as ancient Rome, nurturing similar imperial dreams: “All empires claim they possess justice, freedom and peace and that they have a duty to share these things with everybody else.” Imperialism, in fact, is a recurrent theme. “We have relied on the same methods as we used in the nineteenth century,” he said. “If in doubt, send in the gunboats and teach Johnny Foreigner a lesson he won’t forget.” And, as if the imperial metaphor weren’t crude enough, Wright reached for a cartoon reference: “The Superman myth, or the Captain America complex, has been shown to underlie the implicit narratives of generation after generation of American leaders,” he claimed, “generating the belief that the hero must use redemptive violence to restore the town, the country, the world to its proper state.”
Likewise, in his recent book, Evil and the Justice of God, Wright supposedly sets out to offer a sober reflection on evil in the age of terror. Too often, however, he descends into sloganeering, revisionist history, and downright incoherence. He chastises the “dualism” of the “us-and-them disjunction” that supposedly finds no fault with Western democracy. He characterizes the U.S.-led effort against radical Islam as a “knee-jerk, unthinking, immature lashing out” against its enemies, real and imagined. “Just as you cannot eliminate evil by act of Congress or by a philosophical argument,” he writes, “so you cannot do so with high explosives.”
Wright’s straw-man arguments all ignore the character and reach of militant Islam. A serious reading of the U.S. government’s most authoritative study on terrorism, the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission Report, would correct the deficit. “Bin Laden and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: to them America is the font of all evil, the ‘head of the snake,’ and it must be converted or destroyed,” the commissioners concluded. “It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate.” The most recent National Intelligence Estimate of the threat of global terrorism confirms that view. Its authors believe that “the global jihadist movement” is spreading, adapting, and plotting new attacks on civilian targets. “We judge that most jihadist groups will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments.” No wonder, then, that the 9/11 Commission Report summarized the threat of al Qaeda thus: “With it there is no common ground–not even respect for human life–on which to begin a dialogue…
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Wright follows the doctrines of demons. Every belief contrary to the Bible is a doctrine of satan. Wright would not have been accepted 50 years ago within Christendom. People today do not know their Bibles nor own the faith to believe them; they have quenched the work of the Holy Spirit. This is why Wright’s words are being received. We are in the age of the apostasy. Christians must wake up and walk by the Spirit and not the flesh. The flesh, the world and satan all function as one against God’s truths. A very wicked trio.
(Please read John Chapter 10)
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Again, there are many articles on her blog I would heartily agree with but not this one. To say Wright is “demon persuaded” and use (John 8:44) to infer he is of the devil. She goes on to say that “new perspectives” are “doctrines of demons” and that “much of the time he speaks nonsense-confusion” without sighting anything from Wright’s writings to back up her claim. The only place she does refer to a book by Wright “What St. Paul Really Said pgs 155-157 quoting specifically from pg 156 there is nothing there at all about pre-marital sex (see the book). She makes the claim that Wright takes a position “which says the New Testament is either silent or open on the subject (of homosexuals) because, frankly, it isn’t.” Where does Wright take this position? Then she accuses Wright of being an “antichrist in every sense of the word”.
I think I have given enough of my opinion and now the readers can decide for themselves. I do hope opinions that are given will be given in a Christ-like way. To respond with character assassination is not what I want to see because, as I have already said, there are many articles on her blog that I would agree with – but this is just NOT one of them.