J. Richard Middleton is Professor of Biblical Worldview and Exegesis at Northeastern Seminary, on the campus of Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, NY. He also serves as adjunct Professor of Theology at Roberts Wesleyan College and adjunct Professor of Old Testament at the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology in Kingston, Jamaica.
He has been President of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association (2011–2014) and is currently Vice-President/President elect of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (2018–2019), becoming President in 2019–2020.
Middleton has a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in a joint-degree program with the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. His other degrees include: M.A. in Philosophy, University of Guelph (Canada), and B.Th., Jamaica Theological Seminary. He has done additional graduate studies in the Old Testament at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and in religious studies and philosophy at Syracuse University.
While in Canada he coauthored (with Brian Walsh) The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview (IVP Academic1984) and Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (IVP Academic/SPCK, 1995). The former book has been published in Korean, French, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The latter book received a Book-of-the-Year award (1996) from Christianity Today magazine and has been published in Korean.
He has authored The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos Press, 2005), which is translated into Korean, and has co-edited a volume of essays, A Kairos Moment for Caribbean Theology (Pickwick, 2013). Both are available as e-books.
His most recent book on eschatology, entitled A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic, 2014), is published in paperback and e-book formats and won the 2014 Word Guild Award — Biblical Studies Category. It has been translated into Korean and Spanish, and is available as an e-book.
He is currently working on a new book, entitled The Silence of Abraham, The Passion of Job: Explorations in the Theology of Lament (to be published by Baker Academic). His next projects after that are two projected volumes: Portrait of a Disgruntled Prophet: Samuel’s Resistance to God and the Undoing of Saul (to be published by Eerdmans) and Life and Death in the Garden of Eden: A Theological Reading of Genesis 2–3 (to be published by Cascade).
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 sons, Andrew and Kevin. Due to their mixed cultural and national heritage, they consider themselves “Jamericadians.”
