Nicholas Thomas Wright was born in Morpeth, Northumberland in 1948 and was raised in the context of middle Anglicanism. From before the age of seven or eight he already felt called to go into Christian ministry. Growing up, Wright had an interest in music and sports, interests that he retains to this day. He is a gifted pianist and also plays other instruments, such as the jazz trombone and guitar. Educated at Sedbergh School, then in Yorkshire, he specialized in Classics. As an undergraduate he studied Classics at Exeter College, Oxford. During that period he heard John Wenham give a talk on the need for Christians committed to the authority of Scripture in the world of theological scholarship. Prior to this point Wright had been heading in the direction of parish ministry. After listening to Wenham’s talk, Wright knew that God wanted him to be an academic.
During this period, Wright was very much operating within the context of theologically Reformed Anglican evangelicalism and he speaks of the way in which he regarded any books not published by very conservative evangelical publishers as suspect. Wright was an office-holder in the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union and, together with three others wrote a book that was published by the Banner of Truth Trust with the title The Grace of God in the Gospel, articulating classic five-point Calvinism. Wright recently commented that he was learning about the compatibility of divine sovereignty and human responsibility at that time, but that he wouldn’t write the same book again today.
After graduating, Wright went on to train for the ministry at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. It was around this time that Wright married his wife Maggie. In 1973 he gained a first class honours degree in Theology and in 1975, an M.A. and was ordained as a deacon. In 1976 he was ordained as a priest.
Wright remarks that, when he began his theological studies, he presumed that he needed to read the right books in order to come up with the correct answers. However, as he immersed himself in the biblical text itself he was ‘so gripped with the excitement of exegesis’ that he began to be less concerned about always coming up with the expected ‘sound’ evangelical answers. He began to come to the conviction that his evangelical background was often characterized by sloppy thinking, despite all of its claims to be biblical and that the questions that the Scripture is primarily concerned with are not always the same as those which have preoccupied the evangelical tradition.
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