PHC hired a new theology professor, Dr. Travis Wright, at the beginning of March. Wright's interest in Theology started early in life, and God led him to Seminary and postdoctoral studies at Cambridge.
Then one day, he heard about a job offering at PHC.
Wright's passion for theology started around age seven. He remembers lying in bed thinking about eternity, considering questions of life and death. One day, nine-year-old Wright was rummaging in his closet and found a pocket-sized Gideons' New Testament. Interesting. Is this worth reading? I wonder how it ends? He flipped to the end of the book and began reading somewhere in Revelation.
Shocked and frightened by what he read, he shut it and stashed it away again. If I never touch that book again, what it says will never happen. I don’t have to worry, he thought.
Wright was 14. It was Sunday.
His older brother wasn’t a Christian but liked a girl who went to the First Baptist Church. He told Wright to come to church with him. Sitting there in the service listening to the pastor drone on and on, Wright’s eyes wandered. He saw the Bible in front of his pew. He grabbed it and opened it to Matthew. Well, the red words must be the most important ones, he thought, and started reading the Sermon on the Mount. Wright was held spellbound, shocked at what he read. One question kept running through his mind. Who is speaking? I’ve got to know. He got to the end. Jesus? It was Jesus who was speaking? He felt lied to.
“I had grown up in the suburbs of the Bible-belt outside of Houston. Jesus was sort of a mascot for the political right. But the fact that he was a figure who could command our devotion and that he was our contemporary was something I had never experienced,” Dr. Wright said. “I remember that first experience of realizing that Christ is Lord. He’s not just a figure in the background of our cultural static, the cultural noise of growing up in the Bible belt.”
Not much later, Wright heard that his sister-in-law was going to buy a Bible for his brother, who was in the army in Afghanistan. “Can you buy me one too? I’d like to read it,” Wright said.
With a new NIV Study Bible in his possession, Wright started in Matthew and then read Mark, Luke, and John. Around John chapter 10 or 11, he realized that he needed to give his life over to Christ.
His parents, who said they were Christian but never attended church, took him to church to get baptized. After that, every Sunday, as he requested, they would drop him off at church. During those first couple of months as a new believer, Wright read the Bible from cover to cover. From then on, his ferocious hunger for God’s Word did not diminish.
He taught himself Greek and learned to read the New Testament in Greek. At age 23, after a stint in the military, Wright felt that God was calling him to be a theologian and to build the church up by teaching and protecting it from false teaching.
He first heard of PHC around seven years ago, when he was working as a youth minister. Most of the kids he taught only talked about movies, but there was one family that he really clicked with. They could speak Latin and were very gifted. Several of their children had studied at PHC.
After seminary, he felt called to go to Cambridge. God provided everything for him and his family to go to England. After two years at Cambridge, earning his Ph.D. at Cambridge, he spent another year participating in a research fellowship. He then went on to Oxford for half a year for postdoctoral studies. He and his wife planned to stay in England to raise their family, but due to visa problems, they ended up back in America. That was when he heard about the job position at PHC.
Wright is looking forward to pursuing the ministry of teaching on campus. “It’s really exciting to be a part of watching someone grow in Christ’s likeness. The impact you have on someone's life can be an impact that pays off on 10 other people or 20 other people,” he said.
---------
This story was originally published in PHC's student-run publication The Herald.
Patrick Henry College exists to glorify God by challenging the status quo in higher education, lifting high both faith and reason within a rigorous academic environment; thereby preserving for posterity the ideals behind the "noble experiment in ordered liberty" that is the foundation of America.
