Tom Wright Interviewed by 'The Door'

Satirical magazine The Wittenburg Door isn't exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find an interview with the Bishop of Durham, which is no doubt what lies behind the title of their interview with Tom Wright - 'Heavy Theological Dude Mistakenly Talks to Us'.

It's a good interview though: well informed enough to make it interesting, whilst managing to keep things sufficiently engaging for those unfamiliar with N.T. Wright and his chummy alter ego Tom. I particularly liked the bit that follows on the authority of scripture, a phrase which, for me, always seems so overbearing.

In Christian theology, such phrases (as "the authority of scripture") regularly act as "portable stories"—that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the Church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us. Shorthands enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point in doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.

There's also a recent, though less reverential interview with Rob Bell.