The Bible & Theology Toward Christian Maturity

Biblical Scholar N.T. Wright Speaks on the Psalms

Hymns in the Key of Jesus

By Kathy Henning (kathy@spu.edu)

In SPU’s Royal Brougham Pavilion, N.T. Wright exhorts his audience to listen to the Psalms.

Like a ’60s songbook once belonging to Bob Dylan that has been inscribed with his name and filled with his penciled notations, the Psalms have Jesus’ imprints all over them, says N.T. Wright.

“As we read the gospels and put them together with the Psalms, we can see again and again, metaphorically speaking, the chords that Jesus played, the extra lines that he sometimes sang, the ways that he made them his own.”

On November 13, 2013, Wright spoke to more than 1,600 people in Seattle Pacific University’s Royal Brougham Pavilion on the theme of one of his latest books, The Case for the Psalms: Why They Are Essential.

“I’m here to tell you that these are the songs that Jesus sang, and he wants us to sing them with him,” says Wright.

One of the world’s leading Bible scholars and the former Bishop of Durham, U.K., Wright is the award-winning author of nearly 60 books and chair of New Testament and Early Christianity in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

“We need these songs,” he concludes his lecture, “to be resurrection people who will sing God’s new world into being.”