“One day, rummaging through a dusty old attic in a small Austrian town, a collector comes across a faded manuscript containing many pages of music. It is written for the piano. Curious, he takes it to a dealer. The dealer phones a friend, who appears half an hour later. When he sees the music he becomes excited, then puzzled. This looks like the handwriting of Mozart himself, but it isn’t a well-known piece. In fact, he’s never heard it. More phone calls. More excitement. More consultations. It really does seem to be Mozart. And, though some parts seem distantly familiar, it doesn’t correspond to anything already known in his works.

. . . What they are looking as it is indeed by Mozart. It is indeed beautiful. But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments. By itself it is frustratingly incomplete. A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue. The piano music is all there is, a signpost to something that was there once and might still turn up one day.”

Like watching Denzel Washington play the role of Malcolm X perfectly. Witnessing Larry Bird shoot a three-pointer or eating my grandmother’s cream corn. Listening to Bruce Springsteen sing We Shall Overcome on his new album. Certain things in life rise up and grab your heart.

That’s how I felt when I first met Kara: we just naturally fell into a holy rhythm.

That’s what the scholarship, work, and writing of N.T. Wright means to me. From his scholarly work (click here here and here) to his more popular work (here and here)—Wright has emerged as the single most important and influential scholar/preacher/story-teller/linguist/theologian of the twenty-first century. Moreover, I get him and I appreciate his voice.

I can’t say that about all scholars. I struggle through much of Kierkegaard, Kant, Wittgenstein, Tillich, Barth, Crossan et al. Their work is hard work. Rewarding, but hard work nonetheless.

However, with Wright, I get it. All of it. Down to the last footnote. He has a way of simplifying the most complex elements of religious scholarship (philosophy, history, theology, textual analysis) without making those things trite, trendy, or commercialized.

His newest book came in the mail this week and I can’t put it down. This work, by the way, is a summary of Jesus and the Resurrection of the Son of God.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work, maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won’t rely on the candles anymore, not because we don’t believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they find a new and larger home, Surprised by Hope (pg. 74).