Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

he realized early on that it was his job not just to teach people what to think and believe, but to teach them how. How to think clearly, scripturally, prayerfully. How to have the mind renewed and transformed so that believers could work out for themselves the thousand things that he didn’t have time to tell them. How to think with “the Messiah’s mind,” especially as it was shaped around the story of the cross: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus.”8 This is the only way in which the church would be either united or holy, and since both were mandatory—but very difficult—it was vital, Paul recognized, that those “in the Messiah” should acquire the discipline of the Christian mind. In that quest, he drew on all the resources he could find, including ideas and phrases from contemporary philosophy. “We take every thought prisoner,” he writes, “and make it obey the Messiah.”9 This, I submit, is part of the reason for the remarkable success of his work.