Welcome to episode fifty-two of New Creation Conversations. In this second episode of this second season of the podcast I’m delighted to have a conversation with someone I have been reading for thirty-plus years and have deeply admired from a distance but have never had the opportunity to meet – Dr. J. Richard Middleton.

Dr. Middleton currently serves as Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Roberts Wesleyan College. He is widely published in religious periodicals and is the author of several books. His special areas of interest include Old Testament theology, the Christian worldview, the doctrine of Creation, and the impact of postmodern culture.

I first encountered Richard’s work through a couple of books he co-wrote with Brian Walsh. The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (published by IVP in 1984) became an important guide to the questions all worldviews ask and answer, and it helped frame the language and practices of Christian universities for the last several decades. They also wrote Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (also published by IVP in 1995). I used this book in colleges classes for many years as I helped students wrestle with the new philosophical realities of postmodernity and the challenges and possibilities those new realities bring for Christian faith.

More recently, Richard has written two excellent and important books. The first is entitled A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (published by Baker in 2014), and the just released Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (also from Baker Academic). I’m delighted that our conversation gets to revisit his formative early work and then move to his important eschatological work and his provocative and challenging work on Abraham and Job. I had a friend who would often say that one of the best things in life is when you get to meet your heroes and they turn out to be great people. I feel that way about this conversation. It is so fun when a name on a worn-out book cover becomes a new friend. And it is fun to get to share that encounter with you.

SBR 29 October 2011