I feel like this is a book I should have read years ago. Still, better late than never. I've especially enjoyed the section on 'Tools for the Task' dealing with things like knowledge, literature, story, worldview, history, meaning, theology, and authority. This isn't just any 'Introduction to the NT' or 'Background to Early Christianity'!

Here's some bits I liked:

Worldviews as stories

Human life, then, can be seen as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another, This runs contrary to the popular belief that a story is there to 'illustrate' some point or other which can in principle be stated without recourse to the clumsy vehicle of a narrative. Stories are often wrongly regarded as a poor person's substitute for the 'real thing', which is to be found either in some abstract truth or in statements about 'bare facts'.

...

As we shall see, worldviews, the grid through which humans perceive reality, emerge into explicit consciousness in terms of human beliefs, which function as in principle debatable expressions of the worldviews. The stories which characterize the worldview itself are thus located, on the map of human knowing, at a more fundamental level than explicitly formulated beliefs, including theological beliefs.

Stories as metaphor

Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying other stories and their worldviews.

(He gives the example of Nathan telling the parable to David)

Tell someone to do something and you change their life - for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors. Metaphor consists in bringing two sets of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so. Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Poems as stories

We are, in fact, drawn irresistibly into the world of a story - and a story, moreover, which... invites us to share its world as much by what it does not say as by what it does. The effect of the poem is more than the sum total of the rhymes, the assonance, the evocative setting. These all fall within the wider effect of the story itself.

Literature as stories

...human writing is best conceived as the articulation of worldviews, or, better still, the telling of stories which being worldviews into articulation

Interesting to note here that the examples Wright gives of literature that articulates worldview include note only novels and poems, but also letters, textbooks, and so on.

And finally for now:

Speaking the truth

If the Christian theologian is committed to speaking true words about the past, he or she is also committed to speaking true words about the present and the future. This means that a proper concern for history will be balanced by a proper concern for justice and peace. Though it is impossible to explore this theme further here, history and justice belong together, as humanse are called to bring the divinely intended order to birth through their speech-acts. Words about the part and the future must all alike be used in the service of truth of every sort.