For the better part of a dozen years, he has been the principal columnist for The Lutheran, the magazine that is the national voice of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Also, he is a professor at Valparaiso University in Indiana and a frequent speaker at Lutheran gatherings across the nation.

In the past decade Wangerin has developed a new identity for himself as a novelist. But he writes novels with a holy twist. He writes big stories about events in the Bible.

His first, The Book of God, basically told the Bible story as he would relate it to a friend. His second is just out, Paul, A Novel, (Zondervan/Harper Collins), which is more than 500 pages about the life and ministry of the Apostle Paul.

Wangerin is an odd combination. He is a natural storyteller, but also a thoughtful theologian who can rummage around in his mind and come up with a bunch of answers to the thorny questions of life.

“I came at Paul through various visions,” Wangerin said. “I found myself being Barnabas, and at first Barnabas was delighted with Paul. But over the months and years, Paul just wouldn’t stop pushing, and Barnabas got tired — tired of being pushed.”

I asked Wangerin if he knew people in this day and age who are like St. Paul in some significant way. He immediately began talking about the leaders of civil rights movements, particularly those people who called for reparations to pay black people for hundreds of years of suffering.

“When we meet the St. Pauls of today, Americans are very distressed,” Wangerin said. “We’ve seen them in the civil rights movement, for instance, and they distress us because they want to call us out.

“Paul was able to do that with people — call them out — and what sets him apart is, he pulled it off without armies and wars.”

Wangerin says the world needs the witness of faithful Christian people now more than ever.

“Our morality is not just that we can get into heaven because of it,” he said, “but also, what it does to other people.”

That’s where the work of the church happens, in the rough, daily life of ordinary people. Wangerin hopes clergy can continue to make an impact on those lives with their rich presence of morality and theology.

Clark D. Morphew