As further help-and-insight into NT Wright's latest book, I might suggest Rob Bell's excellent series on the Sermon on the Mount found in the digital archives at Mars Hill Church, Grandville, Michigan (there is a small donation requested for each sermon). These were produced between 2009 and 2010, and when listening to Rob's Kingdom-series I knew immediately that he was purposely heading towards the re-envisioning of a very "earth-bound, heavenly kingdom," in content, speech, and practice.
Statedly, "The bible is a book about earth, and not heaven." To have changed Jesus' message to one of good-works-for-heavenly-reward is a stark misreading of the Gospel narratives. Strikingly, the Gospels are very earth-bound in their mission-and-ministry import. But more than this, they are Kingdom-bound in spiritual matters of morals and ethics, politics and taxation, business and economy (feeding the poor, taking care of the sick, helping the homeless and impoverished, etc). And by these sublime observations one can quickly deduce how Jesus' earthly Kingdom message changes everything we thought we knew about His gospel of heaven. That it immediately gives eternal purpose and presence to our present-day lives and ministries, our work and worship, NOW and not later.
Hence, what kingdom-actions we take here-and-now have a very earth-bound meaning when shifting the concept of heaven to include not only the idea of the Kingdom of God coming down to earth at some later time, but being here - right NOW in our midst - through Christ's inaugural death and resurrection. For in Christ has the Kingdom of God come today to forcibly break through the staying realms of man. The Kingdom of God doesn't simply await Jesus' return (parousia). But it awaits the Church's enactment of Jesus' empowerment by realizing the Kingdom of God as already having come.
This then makes a big difference in how we live in the world today, when realizing that heaven isn't a place somewhere "up there with God that we await come death's door." But "has come specifically here amongst our daily regimented lives, having gloriously descended down to earth through Jesus' death and resurrection." Truly God's Kingdom has invaded the kingdoms of this world when believers understand what Jesus meant by this day has God's Kingdom come both within us, and amongst our midst.
And if this be so, than heaven is a place that we take part in now as it breaks into our present day worlds, little-by-little, beginning with personal faith in Christ as a transformative/spiritual inner event that becomes a transformative/spiritual outer event affecting those around us, our community, the world, and even the earth's ecological care take (wasn't Adam charged by God to "tend to the garden" around him in Genesis?). As such, the Church is creating heaven in the here-and-now. Even as Jesus' followers are restoring shalom (order, life) when properly imaging God entering into this wicked world. So that by becoming Kingdom-bearers we are at once re-creating and restoring God's Kingdom presence into these mortal lives that we live.
A mortal life that transforms into eternal life lived within the transformative Kingdom of God. A kingdom which the book of Revelation tells us is borne fully upon this earth, as a New Heavens and New Earth-kind-of-Kingdom. And it can only be new if it becomes reclaimed towards renewal and rebirth. But though we are promised a new heavens and new earth awaits, it must be a further joy-and-delight to know that we can bring God's very kingdom into the here-and-now of today by living as Christ did in the Gospels (love, mercy, forgiveness, etc). Consequently, one doesn't have to "wait" to go to heaven... how sad when we do... but one may live heaven out now.
How is this done? By transforming this old world that abounds every-which-way-around-us by our own personal touch of renewal by heart and soul, mind and imagination, and personal relationships, into something godly and good, pure and holy, revived and reclaimed. By being good Samaritans to those in need. Helping feed the poor and hungry. Bringing [clean] water to those that thirst. Binding the wounds of the lame and blind. Providing our talents and trades to areas of humanity requiring the touch of the Kingdom of God in their lives. This is how to read the Gospels. By living the Gospels out each day of our renewed lives.
R.E. Slater
Statedly, "The bible is a book about earth, and not heaven." To have changed Jesus' message to one of good-works-for-heavenly-reward is a stark misreading of the Gospel narratives. Strikingly, the Gospels are very earth-bound in their mission-and-ministry import. But more than this, they are Kingdom-bound in spiritual matters of morals and ethics, politics and taxation, business and economy (feeding the poor, taking care of the sick, helping the homeless and impoverished, etc). And by these sublime observations one can quickly deduce how Jesus' earthly Kingdom message changes everything we thought we knew about His gospel of heaven. That it immediately gives eternal purpose and presence to our present-day lives and ministries, our work and worship, NOW and not later.
Hence, what kingdom-actions we take here-and-now have a very earth-bound meaning when shifting the concept of heaven to include not only the idea of the Kingdom of God coming down to earth at some later time, but being here - right NOW in our midst - through Christ's inaugural death and resurrection. For in Christ has the Kingdom of God come today to forcibly break through the staying realms of man. The Kingdom of God doesn't simply await Jesus' return (parousia). But it awaits the Church's enactment of Jesus' empowerment by realizing the Kingdom of God as already having come.
This then makes a big difference in how we live in the world today, when realizing that heaven isn't a place somewhere "up there with God that we await come death's door." But "has come specifically here amongst our daily regimented lives, having gloriously descended down to earth through Jesus' death and resurrection." Truly God's Kingdom has invaded the kingdoms of this world when believers understand what Jesus meant by this day has God's Kingdom come both within us, and amongst our midst.
And if this be so, than heaven is a place that we take part in now as it breaks into our present day worlds, little-by-little, beginning with personal faith in Christ as a transformative/spiritual inner event that becomes a transformative/spiritual outer event affecting those around us, our community, the world, and even the earth's ecological care take (wasn't Adam charged by God to "tend to the garden" around him in Genesis?). As such, the Church is creating heaven in the here-and-now. Even as Jesus' followers are restoring shalom (order, life) when properly imaging God entering into this wicked world. So that by becoming Kingdom-bearers we are at once re-creating and restoring God's Kingdom presence into these mortal lives that we live.
A mortal life that transforms into eternal life lived within the transformative Kingdom of God. A kingdom which the book of Revelation tells us is borne fully upon this earth, as a New Heavens and New Earth-kind-of-Kingdom. And it can only be new if it becomes reclaimed towards renewal and rebirth. But though we are promised a new heavens and new earth awaits, it must be a further joy-and-delight to know that we can bring God's very kingdom into the here-and-now of today by living as Christ did in the Gospels (love, mercy, forgiveness, etc). Consequently, one doesn't have to "wait" to go to heaven... how sad when we do... but one may live heaven out now.
How is this done? By transforming this old world that abounds every-which-way-around-us by our own personal touch of renewal by heart and soul, mind and imagination, and personal relationships, into something godly and good, pure and holy, revived and reclaimed. By being good Samaritans to those in need. Helping feed the poor and hungry. Bringing [clean] water to those that thirst. Binding the wounds of the lame and blind. Providing our talents and trades to areas of humanity requiring the touch of the Kingdom of God in their lives. This is how to read the Gospels. By living the Gospels out each day of our renewed lives.
R.E. Slater
April 11, 2012
9“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.[a]
10 Your kingdom come,
your will be done,[b]
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread,[c]
12 and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.[d]
hallowed be your name.[a]
10 Your kingdom come,
your will be done,[b]
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread,[c]
12 and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.[d]
For yours is the kingdom and
the power and the glory, forever. Amen
Matthew 6.9-13
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Tom Wright on How (not) to Read the Gospels
by Scot McKnight
April 11, 2012
Tom Wright’s new book, How God Became King, complains that too many Christians have developed bad habits in how to read the Gospels. The essential complaint is this one: what we need to get from the Gospels we can often find; if that is how we use the Gospels then that is also why they were written.Question for the day: How would most folks in your congregation answer this question: Why do we have the Gospels? Or, What is the intent of the Gospels? What do they do? What do you think of Tom’s six strategies? Anything to add?Do you think the church has wandered away from a good, accurate reading of the Gospels? Do you think Tom’s overdoing the misreading?
Wright captures these in six general reading strategies. I will add a seventh.
1. They teach how to go to heaven. Wright, who has famously argued against this whole idea in his Resurrection of the Son of God and then more accessibly in Surprised by Hope, argues that neither “kingdom of heaven” nor “eternal life” are about going to heaven when we die but about God’s rule being established on earth. I agree with what he’s arguing but I want to press this point again: the kingdom that comes to earth is eternal, and if we can now say “heaven” is “kingdom come to earth” or “God’s establishing of his kingdom on earth,” then this whole idea of going to heaven is not as wacky as it sometimes is made out to be. In other words, I ask this: if the kingdom is eternal in the sense of our final destiny, and if that is what many people mean by heaven, and even if we are now seriously adjusting heaven to much more earthy, is there that big of a difference?
But, Tom’s got this right: many do get going to heaven out the gospels because that is what they think the Bible is on about. Tom’s got a zinger in this section: “It is as though you were to get a letter from the president of the United States inviting himself to stay at your home, and in your excitement you misread it and assumed that he was inviting you to stay at the White House” (44). Clever.
2. They teach us about Jesus’ ethical teachings. Again, this is partly right; we do get his moral vision. But this is a thin veneer of what the Gospels are doing: they are announcing far more than that Jesus was a great teacher.
3. They teach us about Jesus as the great moral exemplar: once again, there’s something true here, but it simply is too thin. “What a [great or godly] man!” is not the proper response to the Gospels; and thinking this way doesn’t make it any easier to follow Jesus.
4. They teach us that Jesus is the perfect sacrifice: here atonement theology reshapes what the Gospels are about. He had to be sinless and actively obedient, so he took on the Law and beat the thing by doing it all perfectly. Reformed theology, and Tom picks on it here, has emphasized the active obedience (and the passive obedience) and that theology sometimes works its way into how folks read the Gospels — again, not good enough Tom says.
5. They teach us how to live by giving us characters with whom we can identify: we “use” the stories by placing ourselves in them so we can hear a word from the Lord and be transformed. Again, not enough.
6. They teach us that Jesus is divine. Tom weighs in on later creeds, which set christology into the divine-human union. Good enough, but the Gospels are read improperly if this is all we are getting from them. There’s so much more.
I add a 7th, and perhaps you’ve got some to add yourself:
7. The Gospels don’t matter (because nothing happened until Romans or Paul). I tell a story in The King Jesus Gospel of a pastor who said almost this to me, but I have over the years met many who have told me they grew up in a church that preached Paul and never preached the Gospels — except at Christmas and Easter. Otherwise, it was all theology of Paul and Paul’s letters, with some wandering into Hebrews and Peter and the Johannines.
Do I think Tom’s overdoing this? In part, but only because of this: Theologians have read the Gospels well in church history, or at least some of them have. They have not figured as prominently from some as they have for others. For instance, why was Calvin’s last commentary — I may be mistaken — his commentary on the Synoptics?
But, I would want to reframe this a bit: it seems to me that pastors need to do a better job at teaching people how to read the Gospels. I’m confident many of them can read them well, but is that being passed on well? I think not. Augustine read the Gospels well; Calvin did too; I was a bit surprised at the fewness of sermons preached by Edwards on the Gospels when I checked out the database site. But the emphasis on Paul, with Paul’s theology shaping so much of evangelicalism and Protestantism, the Gospels often get shut out and if not shut out their categories get transformed into theological categories drawn from elsewhere.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Select Comments
Jamie says:
Point 1) Does this change anything? Well, speaking for myself – yes. In my genre of Christianity, this life, this earthly existence is counted as nothing, as unimportant. (That’s what we SAY, that’s not how we LIVE….we live very tied to this earth and our things….) Frankly, I think that along with shifting our view of *where* heaven is, Wright is addressing the preceding dispensational eschatology. “This world is gonna burn, so heaven can’t be “here.”
To shift the concept to heaven coming here, changes everything. What I do here, and now, has purpose. Wright is saying that maybe we don’t understand the how and why right now – but someday we will see how vocation and even everyday actions, how holy living (and yeah, there’s some adherence to moral teaching involved there, but holy living is more than that – it’s wanting to model our life after Jesus not follow rules because we’ll go to hell if we don’t.)
You all know this, too, but it doesn’t allow the laissez faire approach to earth and creation. If heaven is here and not ethereally “out there, somewhere, a spiritual place,” it reminds us of the physicality of heaven. That’s something that a lot of your fundamentalist churches don’t teach well. If heaven will be here, and is inaugurated “now,” then we can’t disregard this place under the misunderstanding that it is temporal and bound to extinction, anyway.
I get the sense that much of Wright’s writing is directed toward the American church, toward the “low church” specifically in this slice, at least. (He directs some of his “holiness talk” such as in “After You Believe” toward more of the high church, the mainline, or the more liberal church. I cringe to use the labels….but they do help categorize…) If you’ve grown up fundamentalist or dispensationalist, or if you don’t have a clue theologically and have inadvertently fallen into the cliches which abound in common religious lore – you understand the difference that Wright’s shift makes. You recognize yourself... and really, this view has teh potential to change everything.
Jon G says:
To shift the concept to heaven coming here, changes everything. What I do here, and now, has purpose. Wright is saying that maybe we don’t understand the how and why right now – but someday we will see how vocation and even everyday actions, how holy living (and yeah, there’s some adherence to moral teaching involved there, but holy living is more than that – it’s wanting to model our life after Jesus not follow rules because we’ll go to hell if we don’t.)
You all know this, too, but it doesn’t allow the laissez faire approach to earth and creation. If heaven is here and not ethereally “out there, somewhere, a spiritual place,” it reminds us of the physicality of heaven. That’s something that a lot of your fundamentalist churches don’t teach well. If heaven will be here, and is inaugurated “now,” then we can’t disregard this place under the misunderstanding that it is temporal and bound to extinction, anyway.
I get the sense that much of Wright’s writing is directed toward the American church, toward the “low church” specifically in this slice, at least. (He directs some of his “holiness talk” such as in “After You Believe” toward more of the high church, the mainline, or the more liberal church. I cringe to use the labels….but they do help categorize…) If you’ve grown up fundamentalist or dispensationalist, or if you don’t have a clue theologically and have inadvertently fallen into the cliches which abound in common religious lore – you understand the difference that Wright’s shift makes. You recognize yourself... and really, this view has teh potential to change everything.
Jon G says:
Scot said: “if the kingdom is eternal in the sense of our final destiny, and if that is what many people mean by heaven, and even if we are now seriously adjusting heaven to much more earthy, is there that big of a difference?”
I would say the difference is in how we see the World now. That is, Heaven is not a place we go LATER, so we have little justification for tending to this world NOW, but a place that we take a part in shaping everyday – We are CREATING Heaven. We are restoring shalom. Properly imaging God into this world creates the heavenly status.
So, Heaven being a far off place or right here and now has huge implications for me as to how I live today.
Jon G says:
I would say the difference is in how we see the World now. That is, Heaven is not a place we go LATER, so we have little justification for tending to this world NOW, but a place that we take a part in shaping everyday – We are CREATING Heaven. We are restoring shalom. Properly imaging God into this world creates the heavenly status.
So, Heaven being a far off place or right here and now has huge implications for me as to how I live today.
Jon G says:
Also, in dealing with this Heaven question, I’ve found a great analogy via Matt Chandler (Village Church, Dallas, TX). I don’t agree with him nearly as much as I used to but I think he nails this one. He says that making Heaven our goal instead of God is like marrying a woman for her money. How glorifying to the woman can that be? No, we follow God to get God, and Heaven is just icing on the cake.
I would add, Heaven is not what we get from God…it is GETTING God, and therefore we can enjoy Heaven now. The location is of little importance other than it’s implications for how we live life on this Earth.
Dana Ames says:
I would add, Heaven is not what we get from God…it is GETTING God, and therefore we can enjoy Heaven now. The location is of little importance other than it’s implications for how we live life on this Earth.
Dana Ames says:
I agree with Holly @7.
Cliff, there is some debate about the best translation of that 2Pet passage. Lately people are thinking it is not a picture of destruction, but rather of everything being opened up to the “fire” of God’s scrutiny and judgment at his presence; that is the sense of being “laid bare”, not the sense of being destroyed.
Scot, to answer the question you posed at #1: YES, there is that big of a difference. I first encountered the idea that “heaven” is not some “place” far away, totally unconnected to this terrestrial ball, in [Dallas] Willard. It blew the roof off my theological house. If creation is so spoiled that God has to destroy it, then the devil wins, plain and simple. But if the “Christ Event” of manifesting the Kingdom truly reaches to everything, then the plan for renewal rather than destruction of creation makes God far *greater* than any sort of plan to whisk us away to a destination beyond the stars.
It was this dawning on me that gave me hope that there was actually some sort of good news to “the Gospel.”
I see where you are going with your line of thought here. It’s very nuanced. Most either can’t or won’t consider things that way; for them, “going to Heaven (as a separate place) when you die” is much easier to deal with than considering all that “Kingdom” carries with it.
Steve Burger says:
Cliff, there is some debate about the best translation of that 2Pet passage. Lately people are thinking it is not a picture of destruction, but rather of everything being opened up to the “fire” of God’s scrutiny and judgment at his presence; that is the sense of being “laid bare”, not the sense of being destroyed.
Scot, to answer the question you posed at #1: YES, there is that big of a difference. I first encountered the idea that “heaven” is not some “place” far away, totally unconnected to this terrestrial ball, in [Dallas] Willard. It blew the roof off my theological house. If creation is so spoiled that God has to destroy it, then the devil wins, plain and simple. But if the “Christ Event” of manifesting the Kingdom truly reaches to everything, then the plan for renewal rather than destruction of creation makes God far *greater* than any sort of plan to whisk us away to a destination beyond the stars.
It was this dawning on me that gave me hope that there was actually some sort of good news to “the Gospel.”
I see where you are going with your line of thought here. It’s very nuanced. Most either can’t or won’t consider things that way; for them, “going to Heaven (as a separate place) when you die” is much easier to deal with than considering all that “Kingdom” carries with it.
Steve Burger says:
The gospel, and in fact all of God’s Word, is more than a story, more than a teaching, more than a plan. It is first and foremost a relationship with God. If we truly believe that the word is God breathed then we must dwell in the breath, in the Spirit, since it is God who gives life to the word.
As difficult as it is, I go to the word to dwell with God. When I do otherwise, the word is shaped by my character. Jesus spoke often to the Pharisee’s about this very thing. All the [seven] points above appear to have this common thread; a word shaped by self and culture.
I have found the gospels to be a wonderful place to dwell with God. Often I am left with more questions than answers, but seldom do I leave without the joy of having rested and wrestled with God.
As difficult as it is, I go to the word to dwell with God. When I do otherwise, the word is shaped by my character. Jesus spoke often to the Pharisee’s about this very thing. All the [seven] points above appear to have this common thread; a word shaped by self and culture.
I have found the gospels to be a wonderful place to dwell with God. Often I am left with more questions than answers, but seldom do I leave without the joy of having rested and wrestled with God.
How great is God that God should provide such accessibility through Son and Spirit. How gracious is God that God should provide us with each other to wrestle with our understanding of the Word. Could it be that God designed the word to create struggle thereby compelling us into community? A relationship with God and each other as we journey though the word? May the Spirit who is present in the gospel and the church guide and direct our deliberations.
Philip Donald says:
Philip Donald says:
I think that Wright does not overstate his case for the majority of people. The problem is that, as you point out, many people exposed to the history of the Church and Biblical Scholarship are exposed to good reading of the Gospels. In general, laity are not, and they approach the Gospels in one of the seven manners you describe. Wright is writing for laity, not academia. We need to place writings in their context (as we learn in Hermeneutics). As C.S. Lewis said in argument with a Bishop in the Church of England, “If you were doing your job properly, I wouldn’t have to write the books I’m writing.” We should praise God that we now have a Bishop (unfortunately and fortunately lost to academia) taking his job seriously and doing it well.
