J. Richard Middleton

J. Richard Middleton is Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Northeastern Seminary, located on the campus of Roberts Wesleyan University in Rochester, NY. He also serves as adjunct Professor of Old Testament at the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in Kingston, Jamaica. He served as president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (2019-2021) and president of the Canadian-American Theological Association (2011-2014). A native of Jamaica, Middleton moved to Canada for graduate studies, before settling in the United States. While in Canada he coauthored (with Brian Walsh) "The Transforming Vision" (InterVarsity Press, 1984) and "Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be" (InterVarsity Press/SPCK, 1995). The former book has been published in Korean, French, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese. "Truth is Stranger" received a Book-of-the-Year award (1996) from Christianity Today magazine and has been published in Korean. He holds a B.Th. from Jamaica Theological Seminary, an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Guelph (Canada), and a Ph.D. in Theology from the Free University in Amsterdam (in a joint-degree program with the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto). Middleton has authored "The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1" (Brazos Press, 2005), which has been translated into Korean, and "A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology" (Baker Academic, 2014), which won the World Guild award (2015) for best book in Biblical Studies and has been translated into Korean and Spanish. His most recent book is "Abraham's Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God" (Baker Academic, 2021); it is currently being translated into Korean. He has also co-edited two volumes of essays on biblical and theological themes: "A Kairos Moment for Caribbean Theology" (Pickwick, 2013) and "Orthodoxy and Orthopraxis" (Pickwick, 2020). He is working on a variety of new books: "Portrait of a Disgruntled Prophet: Samuel's Resistance to God and the Undoing of Saul" (Eerdmans); "Shaped by God's Story: Christian Worldview in a Global Key" (IVP); "God's Prism: The Imago Dei in the Biblical Story" (Baker Academic); "Life and Death in the Garden of Eden: A Theological Reading of Genesis 2-3" (Cascade); and "1 Samuel" (Cascade Companions). Published essays address topics such as biblical creation theology, an ecological reading of the imago Dei, "salvation" in the Old Testament, eschatology, the problem of evil, the theology of popular music, and the interpretation of Old Testament narratives and poetry (in Samuel and the Psalms). His essay "Let's Put Herod Back into Christmas" was awarded the Canadian Church Press prize for best theological reflection (1993) and another essay, "Why the 'Greater Good' Isn't a Defense: Classical Theodicy in Light of the Biblical Genre of Lament," received the annual Fall essay award of the Princeton Graduate Theological Forum (1997). Before beginning at Northeastern Seminary in 2011, Middleton taught at Roberts Wesleyan College for ten years, and before that at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (Rochester, NY), Redeemer University College (Ancaster, ON), and the Institute for Christian Studies (Toronto, ON). He has also served as campus minister at two universities in Canada (the University of Guelph and Brock University) and two in the United States (Syracuse University and the University of Rochester). Richard is married to Marcia, his teenage sweetheart, and they have two grown sons, Andrew and Kevin. Due to their mixed cultural and national heritage, they consider themselves "Jamericadians."