Is N.T. Wright a Christian?

This is an excerpt of John MacArthurs address to the 2017 Lingonier National Conference

Maybe more subtle and certainly more pervasive is what is currently being called the new perspective on Paul. It’s been propagated by a man by the name of N.T. Wright. You could kind of shift that a little and make it New Testament wrong, and you’d be closer to reality.

But N.T. Wright has written hundreds and hundreds of pages on the gospel, and the more you read of it, the less you understand what he affirms. It is confusing, it is ambiguous, it is contradictory, it is obfuscation of the highest level. Academic slight of hand. But while I cannot figure out what it is that he does believe, even after hundreds of pages, it is crystal clear what he does not believe.

More recently, he has written a book ‘The Day the Revolution Began’ and in that book he says this, “We have paganized our understanding of salvation, substituting the idea of God killing Jesus to satisfy his wrath for the genuinely biblical notion we are about to explore.” So, all of us who believe in the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross have been worshiping a paganized perversion of biblical truth now to be clarified by him.

Another quote, “That Christ died in the place of sinners is closer to the pagan idea of an angry deity being pacified by a human death than it is to anything in either Israel’s Scriptures or the New Testament,” end quote. He’s clear on what he rejects; he rejects substitutionary atonement of Christ, he rejects imputation, he rejects the gospel. He says, “To worship God as one who justifies through sacrifice and by imputation is nonsense.”


Here’s a quote, “If we use the language of the law court it makes no sense whatsoever to say that the judge; imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas which can be passed across the court room. This gives the impression of a legal transaction, a cold piece of business, almost a trick of thought performed by a God who is logical and correct, but hardly one we want to worship.” Christianity Today identified him as one of the five most significant Christian theologians of our day.

He further says, “No one will be justified until he reaches heaven.” One more painfully clear denial is in these words, “I must stress again that the doctrine of justification by faith is not what Paul means by the gospel. The gospel is not an account of how people get saved.”

I have no idea what he believes, but I know what he does not believe. And he says he doesn’t believe the gospel and he doesn’t believe the gospel is an account of how people get saved in spite of the fact that 1 Corinthians 15:1-2 says, “Now, I make known to you brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which you also received in which you stand, and by which also you are saved.”

N.T. Wright has just piled up high sounding words raised up against the knowledge of God, to be smashed by the truth, fortifications to be crushed under the force of the truth. What strikes me though is this, here is a man (and those who follow him) who seem to have no angst about their heresy. Who seem more than content to offer themselves as the ones who have arrived at the solution 2,000 years after the New Testament, and who are happy to propagate it as far and wide as they can, lay down their head on the pillow at night and go to sleep.

- John MacArthur, The Nonnegotiable Gospel,  The Next 500 Years: 2017 Lingonier National Conference