04/21/2026
I enjoy N.T. Wright a great deal. His New Creation Theology is, I think, largely correct - it rightly places Christians as stewards of a redemption that is cosmic and material, not merely spiritual. So this isn't a dismissal. It's a friendly disagreement about method.
When Wright describes Adam as possibly a "proto-human" figure or suggests Jonah reads like a folk tale, he's trying to relieve pressure - the pressure modern historiography puts on the biblical narrative. I understand the impulse. But I think it concedes too much, and does so on the wrong terms.
Here's the problem. The impulse to ground theological claims in something external to the story is foundationalism, and it produces two versions we should both find unsatisfying:
The conservative version: Historical fact → Theological truth.
The liberal version: Existential experience → Theological meaning.
These look like opposites, but they're doing the same thing. Both are letting something outside the narrative drive the car - archaeology, or personal experience, or historiographical plausibility. Wright, when he reaches for genre analysis to soften the Adam question, is playing this same game. He's negotiating with modernity's terms, just more elegantly than most.
Post-liberalism, the theological tradition running through Lindbeck and Hauerwas, offers a different path entirely. It says the Christian narrative doesn't need external validation because it isn't making the same kind of claims the historians are making.
The story carries its own authority. It forms its own community. It makes its own kind of truth claims, evaluated from within the tradition's practices and grammar, not from a neutral academic standpoint.
Crucially, this isn't the same as saying the story is just fiction. It's saying the narrative is world-creating, not world-escaping. It describes reality truly, but from the inside out, not the outside in.
Which means Adam's reality isn't established by archaeology. It's witnessed to by a church that actually lives as people who know themselves to be the kind of creatures Adam names - bound together in solidarity, prone to grasping at what isn't ours, in desperate need of rescue.
The church confesses Adam not because it can prove he existed, but because the story describes us truly. That is a different kind of claim than historical reportage, and it doesn't need to be defended on historiography's turf. The story's truth is performed, not demonstrated.
So the problem with calling Adam "probably a folk tale" isn't that it's theologically liberal. It's that it's still playing the historian's game- and losing more gracefully is still losing. You've already let the other side set the rules.
I think the better move, the genuinely post-liberal move, is to refuse that negotiation entirely, and ask a different question: Is the church living in a way that makes this story's truth visible? Are we a community of people who know themselves fallen, who practice confession and repentance, who receive rescue in baptism and eucharist, who live as though new creation is actually coming?
That's the only apologetic post-liberalism actually permits. And it's a harder one than genre criticism, because it demands something of us, not just of the text.
Famed New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop Tom N T Wright says he s not sure whether some of the most famous figures in the Holy Bible actually existed
