The young man, no doubt a seminary student, or quite possibly a religion major, glad he doesn’t believe the stuff any more, got up and proceeded to ask the speaker, who up that point had been referred to as your Grace, Immanence, Reverend, Bishop, and Mister, a question.

In your talk you criticized the Enlightenment as having a counter narrative to Christianity and the Christian claim of the resurrection, but you use Enlightenment principals to restore and reread Scripture in the context of a past you have reconstructed.

N. T. Wright responded…

I have no problem with the Enlightenment and the tools of historical investigation and science that came out of the Enlightenment project, I have a problem with the fact that the Enlightenment tries to set itself up as “better than” the past, especially when we as Christians believe that the culmination of history happened 17 centuries after the event that defines our faith.

This, of course, is my faulty memory and hasty transcription of his response. To defend his not having beef with the Enlightenment, he said…

I have always said that I do not want a pre-modern dentist working on me… give me high-modern science… in fact, I’d prefer to be treated by a post-modern dentist either. What ever excesses may be attributed to the Enlightenment project and the belief in science, there are advances that we must recognize…