N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Jesus, the Incarnate God Come

Jesus as Israel’s Story of God Freshly Revealed

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/11/07/jesus-as-israels-story-of-god-freshly-revealed/

 

by Scot McKnight

Nov 7, 2013

Comments 

The essence of Tom Wright’s project is to show that Paul’s theology is both thoroughly Jewish and at the same time a reframing of the central elements of that Judaism around God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

 

Wright sees three main elements in Judaism that Paul “reworked”: monotheism, election, and eschatology. All this in his magisterial new two-volume study, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. (As an aside, Doug Moo’s review at TGC’s blog is balanced, which is good for TGC when it comes to Wright, but too focused on the soteriological questions and not enough on Wright’s important worldview-to-theology approach to understanding Paul’s theology. TGC probably needs a lengthy “description” of what Wright is saying since far too many will not read the book/s.)

 

After Tuesday’s post giving the big picture, today I look briefly at the texts Wright focuses on in showing the story of Israel’s God finding its revelation in the story of Jesus. Hence, the story is the promise that God will return to Zion to rule as king, and Jesus is how Paul tells that story coming to fulfillment.

 

Hence, Wright examines these passages:

 

Galatians 4:1-11,

 

Romans 8:1-4,

 

1 Corinthians 8–10, especially the shema text of 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 (see below),

 

the creation and wisdom themes of Colossians 1;

 

those pertinent passages in 2 Corinthians 3–4,

 

and then especially Philippians 2:6-11.

 

The big ideas are these: God is creator, God is one (creational monotheism); God has chosen Israel (election) in Jesus; and eschatology (God has returned to Zion, has come to rule in Jesus). The way Paul describes all of this is through Exodus imagery. Hence, the reworking of Jewish themes around Jesus yet maintaining continuity with Judaism. God has returned to Zion and that return is like the Exodus, a redemptive act.

 

It would take a post too long to summarize each and every point he makes along the way through these passages, so I will provide his own summary:

My argument so far is that the Jewish-style monotheism of ‘divine identity’ which Paul so emphatically reaffirmed had also emphatically been redrawn around Jesus. In particular, I have argued that in several key passages we can detect the overtones of that Exodus-based narrative which formed the basis for the hope that YHWH, having long since abandoned Jerusalem to its fate, would one day return to save his people and to establish his glorious presence in the temple. As we have seen, there is excellent evidence that this was what Paul intended to convey, in one way and another, in one kind of argument or another. For him, Jesus was to be identified within the second-temple Jewish belief in who the one God was –and would be. This is the full expression of the eschatological dimension of monotheism, carrying within itself also the creational and cultic dimensions. In him, that is to say, Israel’s God had indeed returned, and to him therefore could be transferred all that had been said about ‘wisdom’ as the mode of his presence, the ‘wisdom’ through which the worlds were made. He was therefore to be discovered in biblical texts which spoke of the kyrios, translating the adonai which devout Jews said in preference for the sacred name YHWH; and, as such, was to be worshipped, and invoked in prayer. The relationship his followers enjoyed with him was to be understood, and could be spoken of, in the way that devout Israelites from ancient times had spoken of their relationship with YHWH himself. So far, so good.

But is this enough to enable us to understand why not only Paul, but apparently all his Christian predecessors and contemporaries, came to this belief? I think not. We have demonstrated that Paul (and presumably his predecessors and contemporaries) thought of Jesus in categories belonging to Israel’s God, and particularly within the narrative which spoke of long-awaited return of this God to Zion. We have not quite explained why they would think this way. This brings us to the second major hypothesis of the present chapter (689-690).

Because some get caught in a web of wondering if this way of seeing Paul might be supersessionism, I want to cite 1 Corinthians 8:4-6 to show that for Paul the classic Jewish creed — the shema — gets captured by Paul but in so doing he enters Jesus into the very heart of divine identity. Jesus is the Lord of the shema.

1 Cor 8:4    So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that “An idol is nothing at all in the world” and that “There is no God but one.” 5 For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”), 

6 yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Jesus' Story is God's Promised Fulfillment to Israel

What did it mean to call Jesus “God”? NT Wright

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/11/05/what-did-it-mean-to-call-jesus-god-nt-wright/

 

by Scot McKnight

Nov 5, 2013

Comments 

NT Wright, in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God, examines Paul’s theology as a mutation, or reframing, of classic Jewish monotheism themes (alongside election and eschatology), including who God is. This has led for centuries to the question, "If Jesus is God or, if he is not God." The framing of that question, though, is often backward or sideward and often enough not — in fact, Wright would say rarely — from the ground level of 1st Century Jewish Christians.

If Paul must have been aware that he was reaffirming the classic Jewish monotheism of his day, he must equally have been aware of the fact that he had redrawn this monotheism quite dramatically around Jesus himself. This bold claim will be made good in what follows (644).

NT Wright develops his Christology in this discussion with many proposals, including Moule, Dunn, Hurtado, but especially Richard Bauckham. Bauckham’s proposal is simple and striking:

that the highest possible Christology – the inclusion of Jesus in the unique divine identity – was central to the faith of the early church even before any of the New Testament writings were written, since it occurs in all of them. 

Nor did this require any backing away from ancient Jewish monotheism: 

. . . this high Christology was entirely possible within the understanding of Jewish monotheism we have outlined. Novel as it was, it did not require any repudiation of the monotheistic faith which the first Christians axiomatically shared with all Jews. That Jewish monotheism and high Christology were in some way in tension [with one another] is one of the prevalent illusions in this field that we must allow the texts to dispel. 

Jewish Monotheism, [Bauckham] here clarifies, has three aspects: creational, eschatological and cultic. God is the sole creator; he will at the last establish his universal kingdom; and he, and he alone, is to be worshipped. This launches Bauckham into a detailed, and necessarily technical, account of Paul’s language about Jesus, from which he concludes that Paul, like the rest of early Christianity, unhesitatingly ascribed to Jesus precisely this triple divine identity. He is the agent of creation; he is the one through whom all things are reconciled; he is to be worshipped. 

With all of this I am in agreement. But there is one thing missing, and it is the burden of my song in this chapter to propose it and explain it. And it seems to me that when we do so all kinds of other evidence comes back into the picture to make an even larger, more comprehensive and satisfying whole (652-653).

Wright continues on the same page, after observing that the method is backwards — namely wondering if Judaism had other figures about whom they said divine-type things, thereby making it Jewish to do what Christians did:

But to raise the question in this way is, I believe, to start at the wrong end. If the phenomenon to be explained is the fact that from extremely early on the followers of Jesus used language for him (and engaged in practices, such as worship, in which he was invoked) which might previously have been thought appropriate only for Israel’s God, why should we not begin, not with ‘exalted figures’ who might as it were be assimilated into the One God, but with the One God himself? Did Judaism have any beliefs, stories, ideas about God himself upon which they might have drawn to say what they now wanted to say about Jesus?

Which story? Here is Wright’s proposal:

Central to second-temple monotheism was the belief we sketched in chapter 2: that Israel’s God, having abandoned Jerusalem and the Temple at the time of the Babylonian exile, would one day return. He would return in person. He would return in glory. He would return to judge and save. He would return to bring about the new Exodus, overthrowing the enemies that had enslaved his people. He would return to establish his glorious, tabernacling presence in their midst. He would return to rule over the whole world. He would come back to be king (653).

Here we go because the way to ask the deity question is to ask if the story about God was the story about Jesus — and I would agree with NTW on this and would also say it is the way forward in so many discussions of christology. What is the story about God? What is the story about Jesus?

Notice, though, even at this stage, what follows. Whereas in the modern period people have come to the New Testament with the question of Jesus’ ‘divinity’ as one of the uppermost worries in their mind, and have struggled to think of how a human being could come to be thought of as ‘divine’, but for Jesus’ first followers the question will have posed itself the other way round. 

It was not a matter of them pondering this or that human, angelic, perhaps quasi-divine figure, and then transferring such categories to Jesus in such a way as to move him up (so to speak) to the level of the One God. It was a matter of them pondering the promises of the One God whose identity, as Bauckham has rightly stressed, was made clear in the scriptures, and wondering what it would look like when he returned to Zion, when he came back to judge the world and rescue his people, when he did again what he had done at the Exodus. 

Not for nothing had Jesus chosen Passover as the moment for his decisive action, and his decisive Passion. It was then a matter of Jesus’ followers coming to believe that in him, and supremely in his death and resurrection – the resurrection, of course, revealing that the death was itself to be radically re-evaluated – Israel’s God had done what he had long promised. He had returned to be king. He had ‘visited’ his people and ‘redeemed’ them. He had returned to dwell in the midst of his people. Jesus had done what God had said he and he alone would do. 

Early christology did not begin, I suggest, as a strange new belief based on memories of earlier Jewish language for mediator-figures, or even on the strong sense of Jesus’ personal presence during worship and prayer, important though that was as well. The former was not, I think, relevant, and the latter was, I suggest, important but essentially secondary. The most important thing was that in his life, death and resurrection Jesus had accomplished the new Exodus, had done in person what Israel’s God had said he would do in person. He had inaugurated God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. Scholars have spent too long looking for pre-Christian Jewish ideas about human figures, angels or other intermediaries. What matters is the pre-Christian Jewish ideas about Israel’s God. Jesus’ first followers found themselves not only (as it were) permitted to use God-language for Jesus, but compelled to use Jesus-language for the One God (654-655).

So now to this:

All these themes, then, lead into one another, spill over into one another, presuppose one another, interact with one another: Exodus, redemption, tabernacle, presence, return, wisdom, kingship (655).

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - What Jewish Monotheism Means

Monotheism in a Christian Framework: NT Wright

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/31/44747/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 31, 2013

Comments 

At the heart of Paul’s theology is classic Jewish monotheism ([compared] to later philosophical and theo-logical monotheism), and NT Wright opens with a sketch of Jewish monotheism and then shows how Paul reframes Jewish monotheism.

 

1. First Century Jewish Monotheism

 

Wright begins with Akiba being martyred, and in the act of dying reciting Shema as his expression of loving God with his “life” (naphsheka).

 

As we saw earlier, the most intimate and personal way of ‘taking on oneself the yoke of the kingdom of heaven’ was the praying of the Shema, two or more times a day. Invoking YHWH as the ‘one God’ and determining to love him with mind, heart and nephesh - life itself - meant a total commitment to the sovereignty of this one God, the creator, the God of Israel, and a repudiation of all the idols of paganism and the cruel empires which served them. That is, more or less, the very heart of what ‘monotheism’ meant to a devout Jew of the period (620).

 

And from 623-624: If what we loosely summarize as ‘monotheism’ is to be clarified in terms of the world of thought and practice we may safely ascribe to Saul of Tarsus, we should expect to find it, not in the realm of fine-tuned religious or philosophical speculation, not in debates about how many angels are permitted in the divine entourage before they compromise the divine unity, but in the sphere of Israel’s aspirations, Israel’s kingdom-of-God expectations. Monotheism of the sort which fired Saul of Tarsus meant invoking God as creator and judge, and also as the God specifically of Israel, and doing this within a framework of actual events, including not least the fierce opposition by pagan tyrants, leading in some cases to torture and death. Jewish monotheism was rooted in prayer, particularly in praying of the Shema. To pray this prayer was not to make a subtle affirmation about the inner nature of the One God, but to claim the sovereign rule of this One Creator God over the whole world, and to offer oneself in allegiance of mind, heart and life itself in the service of this God and this kingdom.

 

This kind of Jewish monotheism, so rooted in actual realities, is an affirmation not of ontological dualism but the goodness of creation and the created order as well as opposition to idolatries. This kind of monotheism formed itself into a community, Israel.

 

 

2. Paul’s Re-Affirmed Monotheism.

 

From p. 634: The central claim of this chapter, and in a measure of this whole book, is that Paul clearly, solidly, skillfully, and dramatically reworked exactly this ‘monotheism’ around Jesus the Messiah and also around the spirit. It is for the sake of Jesus, and in the power of the spirit, that Paul faces, and knows that his ekklēsiai are facing, the equivalent challenges to those faced by the Maccabees before him.

 

We see Paul’s robust monotheistic faith in Romans 8:28-39, and in 2 Corinthians 4; Philippians and 1 Thessalonians — the interlocking themes of suffering and Jewish monotheism are held together as they are found from the Maccabees to Akiba. Allegiance to Israel’s one God means opposition from the surrounding world.

 

Then, too, we see the same monotheism in God as creator and God as judge. From p. 638: “Monotheism of the second-temple Jewish kind, as we saw, was the belief not so much that there was one supernatural being rather than many, or that this God was a single and indivisible entity, but that the one true God was the creator of the world, supreme over all other orders of being, that he would be the judge of all, and that in between creation and a final putting-to-rights he had a single purpose which arched its way over the multiple smaller stories of his creation and, not least, of Israel.

 

In practice, classic Jewish monotheism also means one people. P. 641: “A further tell-tale sign of Paul’s foundational commitment to his ancestral Jewish monotheism comes in a couple of short but crucial passages. In all of these we see Paul drawing on the basic monotheistic heritage to argue for the unity – not indeed of ethnic Israel, but for what he saw as the renewed people of God in the Messiah.” Here Abraham comes to the front of Wright’s discussion — the Abraham in whom the new family finds its home, e.g., Galatians 3:27-29.

 

 

 

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Paul's Soteriology

From Worldview to Theology, NT Wright
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/29/from-worldview-to-theology-nt-wright/

by Scot McKnight
Oct 29, 2013
Comments

NT Wright, in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God, volume 2, opens up with a sketch of his plan, which I will sketch briefly before we get to Wright’s own proposal: Paul’s theology is thoroughly Jewish from top to bottom, and it therefore revolved around three major themes:

 

Monotheism: God is one and it is the God of Israel.

 

Election: God formed a covenant with Israel by his own will, a covenant that grabbed this nation among the many and gave to Israel a mission to the world. This election and covenant form the soteriology of Israel’s theology.

 

Eschatology: again, God has a plan for history to rule this world with Israel having formed a special role.

 

Paul’s theology though takes these three themes into new territory in reframing each through Jesus and Spirit — thus, a Christology and Pneumatology give the monotheism, election and eschatology reshaped focus.

 

Paul’s mission was to engage both Judaism and the Roman Empire with its paganism in forming churches across the Empire.

 

So now to Wright:

My particular proposal in this Part has a simple outline, unfolding in three stages. 

Stage One - I take as the framework the three main elements of second-temple Jewish ‘theology’, namely monotheism, election and eschatology. I am aware, as I have said before, that second-temple Jews did not characteristically write works of systematic theology… (610). “I am equally aware that many essays in ‘Pauline theology’ have assumed that its central, dominant or even sole theme will be soteriology, and that my proposal may appear to be ignoring this and setting off in a quite different direction. However, as will become clear, I believe that the theme of ‘election’ is the best frame within which to understand Paul’s soteriology, and that ‘election’ in turn is only properly understood within the larger frame of beliefs about the One God and the promised future (and the particular problem of evil which only emerges into full light once the reality of the One God has been glimpsed). Soteriology thus remains at the centre” (611). 

Stage Two - This brings us to the second stage of the hypothesis. I shall argue, in the case of each of these three central and correlated topics, that Paul rethought, reworked and reimagined them around Jesus the Messiah on the one hand and the Spirit on the other (612)…. 

Stage Three - The third stage of the hypothesis is to demonstrate this christologically and pneumatologically redefined complex of monotheism, election and eschatology was directed by Paul in three further ways, which we postpone to Part IV of the present book. I list them here in the reverse order in which they appear in that Part. — First, it was what drove and governed the main aims of his letter-writing…. Second, though, if Paul was indeed redefining the central beliefs of second-temple Judaism, we might expect to find, at least by implication, a running debate between him and others within that world, focused not least on how they were reading scripture (613)…Third, this christologically and pneumatologically redefined Jewish theology was in reasonably constant engagement, again sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, with the pagan world of Paul’s day.

So he is taking 2 Corinthians 10:5 at Paul’s word: the man was capturing every thought for Christ.

And all of this ends up in a local church, in the ekklesiai of Paul:

The result of all this (again, this will come in chapter 16) was the founding and maintaining of communities which, in terms of the first-century world of Diaspora Judaism, were bound to look extremely anomalous. On the one hand, they would seem very Jewish, indeed ‘conservatively’ so. On the other hand, they would seem very ‘assimilated’, since they did not practice the customs and commandments that marked out Jews from their pagan neighbours. But these communities, Paul believed, possessed their own inner coherence, due to the freshly worked elements in the theology which he expounded, elements that were not bolted onto the outside of the parent Jewish theology as extraneous foreign bodies but were discerned to lie at the very heart of what that theology had most deeply affirmed (614). 

 

 

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Paul, the Law, and Jesus

NT Wright, Paul, the Law, and Jesus
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/24/ntwright-paul-the-law-and-jesus/

 

by Scot McKnight
with additional commentary by R.E. Slater

Oct 24, 2013

Comments 

Once one opens [the] reading [of] Paul through the Story/stories at work, everything falls into place. Such an approach, followed by NT Wright in his new Paul and the Faithfulness of God, permits Wright to explain two major, major issues: the law and Jesus.

 

Where does the Torah/Law fit in all this? It all begins with a recognition that when Paul said “Law” he meant the Jewish Torah and not the “law principle” of life. So when Reformed theologians speak of the “covenant of works” or, when Lutherans pose “law against gospel,” we are looking at un-Jewish modes of thinking. For Paul the [Koine Greek] word nomos refers to the Torah of Moses. To comprehend it we need to see how it fits in the story, not to see how it fits into a generalized religious disposition or human condition [by denominational theologies].

Paul and Torah

 

To understand Torah, then, we have to know how it fits in the grand story, and it can’t be understood aright apart from that story. Here it is, with a final summary later in the post:

FIRST - Torah is a gift of God to Israel to help it be the light to the nations.

SECOND - because of sin Torah becomes Israel’s opponent. Roman  8:3 — where “weak through the flesh” refers to Israel’s failure to obey.

THIRD - the Torah has a limited temporal function: once the building is built its preliminary function ends.

FOURTH - this Torah then puts to death the “I” of Romans 7; or Galatians 2:15-21, which is all about Israel’s discipline so the mission to the nations can occur.

“The point is that God’s plan, through Israel, for the rescue of the human race (and thus for the rescue and restoration of the whole creation) meant that Israel had to become the place where ‘sin’, the personified power opposed to God’s plan and purpose, would be ‘increased’, would ‘appear as sin’, would ‘become exceedingly sinful’. And Torah was playing its God-given role within that strange purpose” (510).

On Romans 7:14-23

Nothing whatever is gained, exegetically or theologically, by supposing that the ‘law’ in the last few lines of that passage is a ‘principle’ or ‘system’. The whole passage has been about the law, the Mosaic law, the Torah; and the frustration the passage expresses is neither (a) the psychological torment of the young Jew, discovering law and lust at the same time, nor (b) the puzzle of the existentialist, trying to seize life by the performance of the categorical imperative only to discover that this produces inauthenticity, nor yet (c) the frustration of the Christian, wanting to serve God wholeheartedly yet finding that sin continues to clog the wheels (510).

FIFTH - Leading to yet another point about the Torah: Jesus, the representative Israelite, does the Torah and dies, and the Spirit is sent so the Torah is now done by the people of God. Wright expresses this in his usually fast paced and side-glancing manner:

There, through the Messiah’s death and resurrection, and by implication (7.6) the work of the Spirit (which will be spelled out more fully in chapter 8), a people has been constituted ‘in the Messiah’, a people who have themselves died ‘in him’, thereby leaving behind solidarity with Adam, and solidarity with the Torah-under-Adam, where Israel according to the flesh, continues to languish (6.14). It is this people, this "in-Messiah" people, this led-by-the-spirit people, this died-to-sin-and-living-to-God people (6.11) that now, with great but comprehensible paradox, simultaneously find themselves (a) ‘not under Torah’ (6.14) and also (b) ‘fulfilling the decrees of Torah’ (2.26). This new-covenant people is ‘not under Torah’ in the sense that it is not ‘Israel according to the flesh’, living in the place where Torah goes on pronouncing the necessary and proper sentence of condemnation. But it ‘fulfills the decrees of Torah’, and indeed ‘keeps God’s commandments’, insofar as it is the "Deuteronomy-30 people" in whom what had been impossible under Torah, because of Israel’s fleshly identification with Adam, is now accomplished by the spirit (513).

Or, as he now sums it all up:

Once we grasp how the plots and sub-plots of the story work, then, we can be quite clear that for Paul, Torah is the divine gift which defines and shapes God’s people. God’s people follow their strange vocation through the long years of preparation, through the period (particularly) of failure, curse and exile, and finally to the unexpected (and indeed ‘apocalyptic’) events which Paul sees both as the fulfilment of all the earlier promises [of God], and the new creation which has arrived as a fresh divine gift. Torah accompanies them all the way - like a faithful servant doing what is required in each new eventuality, taking on the different roles demanded by, and at the different stages of, Israel’s journey, to finally attain a [radically] new kind of ‘fulfilment’ in the heart-circumcision promised by Deuteronomy and supplied by the Spirit. At one moment in the narrative the moon is waning; at another it is full; at another, it helps to bury the dead. This narrative framework frees Torah from the burden of always playing the villain in a Lutheran would-be reading of Paul, or the hero in a Reformed one. It offers, instead, a chance for Torah to be what Paul insists it always was: God’s law, holy and just and good, but given a task which, like the task of the Messiah himself, would involve terrible paradox before attaining astonishing resolution. The Torah shines with borrowed light, and the horned dilemmas it has presented to exegetes are only resolved when the complete cycle of waxing and waning has played itself out (516).

Paul and Jesus

Now what about Jesus, where does he fit in the story/stories?

At the same time, it is important to stress that ‘the story of Jesus in Paul’, were we to tell it, would always appear as the denouement of some other story or set of stories. Paul does not introduce, or appear to think of, Jesus as a character facing a task or problem, finding it difficult or impossible, needing to seek fresh help or to ward off difficulties, and finally succeeding in the task or surmounting the problem. As with Torah, only in quite a different mode, everything Paul says about Jesus belongs within one or more of the other stories, of the story of the creator and the cosmos, of the story of God and humankind, and/or the story of God and Israel. Because these three layers of plot interlock in the way I have described, what Paul says about Jesus, and what he could have said were he to have laid out his worldview-narrative end-to-end for us to contemplate, makes the sense it does as the crucial factor within those other narratives. Thus there really is, in one sense, a Pauline ‘story of Jesus’, but it is always the story of how Jesus enables the other stories to proceed to their appointed resolution (517).

There are, then, three interlocking stories, diagrammed on p. 521:

Here is the point of all these pretty little diagrams, and I hope this exposition functions redemptively in their direction too, after the scepticism even of some of their former users. When we understand the triple narrative which forms the basis of Paul’s worldview, we can see the way in which, bewildering though it often seems to us, Jesus the Messiah functions for him in relation to all three stories simultaneously. As Israel’s Messiah, he has accomplished Israel’s rescue from its own plight, passing judgment on the evil that has infiltrated even his own people. As Israel-in-person, which is one of the things a Messiah is (see below), he has completed Israel’s own vocation, to bring rescue and restoration to the human race, passing judgment on human wickedness in order to establish true humanness instead. And as the truly human one (Psalm 8; blended with Psalm 110; as in 1 Corinthians 15) [Jesus] has re-established God’s rule over the cosmos, defeating the enemies that had threatened to destroy the work of the creator in order to bring about new creation. Jesus does not have an independent ‘story’ all on his own. He plays the leading role within all the others. He is Adam; he is Israel; he is the Messiah. Only when we understand all this does Paul’s worldview, particularly its implicit complex narrative, make sense (521).

Summing It All Up

There are then three interlocking stories:

1. Creation was supposed to be looked after by Adam, but he sinned and so lost ‘the glory of God’ (3.23). He is replaced not just by the Messiah but by [the church] - ‘those who receive the abundance of grace, and of the gift of covenant membership, of “being in the right”’: they will ‘reign in life through the one man Jesus the Messiah’ (5.17). By this means, creation itself will be set free from its slavery to corruption (8.18–26). That is the big story, the overarching plot. This is how creation itself is to be renewed. This is the ‘cosmic’ story. 

2. Humans in their sin, which prevents them from attaining their true vocation, are rescued through ‘the obedience of the one man’. Here, ‘obedience’ has taken the place of ‘faithfulness’, in 3.22 and elsewhere, as a summary of the Messiah’s completion of the work marked out for Israel.189 This is (perhaps unhappily named) the ‘anthropological’ story, which is not to be played off against the ‘cosmic’, which it is designed to serve. It is because humans are rescued from their sin that they are able once more to play their part in God’s worldwide purposes. 

3. The specific problem of Israel, highlighted and exacerbated by the arrival of the Torah (5.20), has been met, and more than met, by the grace which has abounded in the Messiah. [Jesus] has done on Israel’s behalf what Israel could not do, and also has done for Israel itself what Israel needed to be done. His Israel-work rescues Adam’s people; his Adam-work rescues creation itself. This is the ‘covenantal’ vision, which again must not be played off against either the ‘anthropological’ or the ‘cosmic’ stories. It is because the Messiah has fulfilled Israel’s calling that humans are rescued from idolatry, sin and death (531).

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - Jesus' Larger Story

At the Heart of the Apostle Paul: The Story

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/22/at-the-heart-of-the-apostle-paul-the-story/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 22, 2013

Comments 

Symbols and praxis need a story in a worldview to make sense. Famously, Bultmann stripped the New Testament of its mythology, but notice how N.T. Wright, in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God, describes Bultmann’s agenda:

The main problem with Bultmann’s proposal, in addition to the muddling of different senses of ‘myth’, is that when he insisted that we should strip the early Christian world of its ‘mythology’ he meant not only that we should express the existential challenge of the gospel without its pre- Enlightenment scientific assumptions, but also that we should re- conceptualize the gospel in a non-narratival form, reducing it to the pure existential challenge of every moment, in which one is called to hear God’s word now rather than think in terms of the waste, sad time stretching before and after (457-8).

What Bultmann was to recode that message into a saving narrative characteristic of Protestant (Lutheran) theology, ramped up by 20th Century German existentialism as well. The impact, and this is characteristic of many forms of soterian thinking, is to de-Judaize the Bible (I’m using Wright’s use of de-Judaizing). For Wright, this whole New Perspective debate is all about whether or not someone embraces the Story of Israel into its theology or not. He observes the irony that Sanders erased that narrative and — this is well-known — colonized Paul into a soteriology. He sees the same in Dunn.. Wright then takes on those who deny narrative/story as a retelling in Paul and emphasize, in various ways, proposition or a more vertical theology (JC Beker, Watson, Barclay). With Wright stand Richard Hays and many others, including Morna Hooker. There has been a rather stubborn, if not productive, pushback against the importance of operating within, or explaining Paul within, a narrative framework. Wright’s discussion then ought at least to offer a response. For me it offers a counter to a tiring discussion. When Paul says his gospel is “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David … this is my gospel” then denial of a narrative plot fails at the start.

 

In fact, NT Wright argues for stories within the story, plots within the plot. The outer story is about God and Creation. God is creator, he made humans, they have a purpose, they thwart that purpose, there is a work to undo the thwarting, etc, Age to Come, etc… this redemptive work of God has already begun in the Present Age.

 

New Creation has invaded … all a hint to a large underlying story at work here for the entire cosmos. Death is the enemy and is and will be defeated. The evil forces — demons — are in need of conquering. So this story has a theme of judgment, and this judgment is connected to a coming Davidic king.

From pp. 484-5: So how does this ‘outer story’, this framing plot of creator and creation, function in relation to all the other things Paul is talking about in his letters? Is it just a loose, wide framework, so big, so unrelated to the detailed concerns of his churches, that for the most part it has little or no effect on what he actually says, on the line he takes, on what he urgently wants his congregations to reflect on and to embody? 

That might be said (for instance) about the Stoic belief in the great periodic Conflagration. The serious philosopher can see the connection in theory, and can live ‘in accordance with nature’ in the light of it. But for most of the time Stoic ethics, as we saw, has no need to look beyond the horizon of the particular human being and, perhaps, the particular polis. One may well be able to develop the classic virtues without being too concerned about, or even conscious of, living in a universe that may one day go up in smoke and then, phoenix-like, reappear and repeat the entire story. One can believe in that framing story without it having an immediate impact on day- to-day living.

But with Paul it is different. This framing story, though it appears only seldom, functions dynamically in relation to the other stories, precisely as an outer story in a Shakespearean plot might function in relation to the smaller stories that nest within it and are joined to it by all kinds of subtle threads. To explain this next move we need to go slowly and carefully. We must ask: what are Paul’s sub-plots, and how do they relate to the main, overarching plot itself? 

To make life easy as things get more complex, I shall now do what good storytellers would never do, and reveal in advance the shape of what is to come. The first sub-plot, I suggest, is the story of the human creatures through whom the creator intended to bring order to his world. Their failure, and the creator’s determination to put that failure right and so get the original plan back on track, demands a second sub-plot, which is the story of Israel as the people called to be the light of the world. This is the level of plot at which the Mosaic law plays out its various roles, like the complex but integrated roles given to the Moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then, because of Israel’s own failure, we find the third and final sub-plot, which is the story of Jesus, Israel’s crucified and risen Messiah. His work, at the centre of Paul’s narrative world, resolves the other sub-plots, and provides a glimpse, as we have just seen, of the resolution for the main plot itself, the creator’s purpose for the whole cosmos. It is only when these various levels of plot are ignored, confused or conflated that problems arise. Allow each to do its proper job, and the Pauline story will work.

So there you have it: how the God and Creation plot shapes the whole of Paul’s story-telling and stories within the Story.

 

One plot is about the redemption of humans — purposed to reign for God in this world. They must be redeemed to reign, they must turn from their ruling on their own to rule for God. Here’s how it all fits together, from p. 489:

Thus the story of humankind falls, like the most obvious sub-plot in a play, within the larger plot, and cannot properly be understood (in Paul’s terms at least) independently from that larger narrative. The plot and the first sub-plot thus fit together as follows, explicitly in Romans 5—8 and 1 Corinthians 15 and, because these are so obviously central for Paul, by implication elsewhere as well: 

1. The creator’s intention was to bring fruitful order to the world through his image-bearing human creatures.

2. Humans fail to reflect God’s image into the world, and the world in consequence fails to attain its fruitful order; the result, instead, is corruption and decay. 

3. God intends to restore humankind to its proper place, resulting in the rescue and restoration of creation itself. 

So far, so good – though of course we have not yet explored the question of how the creator will accomplish Stage 3. This three-stage outline is not yet, in point of fact, a complete narrative, though it has the shape of one. There are many blanks still to be filled in. The passages we have already glanced at contain the clues, which we shall follow up presently.

What is so often neglected in what I call soterian approaches is that the story stops here and the whole thing gets reduced: we lose Abraham, Israel, Jesus as Messiah, and it all gets reduced to personal salvation, and here I’m rehearsing what Tom Wright is saying in this chapter. The story of Abraham is how God chose to reinstate humans in this world — Israel, then, is central to the Story. If Israel, so also David (that’s from me).

What happens if we ignore this narrative, and never enquire about its placement within Paul’s largest story, that of the creator and the cosmos? The answer is obvious, because a great many readers of Paul have done exactly that. First, it will then be assumed that Paul is talking, not about the plight of creation, but simply about the plight of humans. Second, it will be assumed that when he appears to speak of a ‘solution’ to this ‘plight’, this solution is basically something to do with Jesus and his death and resurrec- tion, seen in isolation. Insofar as Paul refers from time to time to Abraham, he is simply a ‘predecessor’, someone in the scriptures who had faith (or: the right sort of faith!). Instead, I propose, and shall now argue, that Paul’s entire theology gains enormously in coherence and impetus if we see that he affirmed, even though he radically redrew, the particular second-Temple Jewish narrative which we studied in chapter 2: the story of God’s people, of Abraham’s people, as the people through whom the creator was intending to rescue his creation. This makes sense of so many passages in Paul’s letters that it ought not to be open to doubt that Paul had this narrative in mind, and gave it substantially the same meaning it had within his native Judaism – except, of course, for the radical redescription to which he had come through the shocking and totally unexpected way in which the story had in fact reached its denouement. But to read the same story with new eyes as a result of its surprising ending is still to read the same story (495).

How so? Though the faithful Israelite, namely, the Messiah.

 

Wright explores how the Story of Israel fits into this Story … and it’s all about that singular divine intent to save the world through Israel, its failure to do just that and the expansion of Israel into the church … but in this section Tom finds a new expression that God has a “rescue operation [Christ] for the rescue operation [Israel].” Nice turn of phrase that will, I predict, become like “life after life after death.”

 

Enough for today. Come back Thursday for more.

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - The Unity of the Church

The Unity of the Church — NT Wright

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/17/the-unity-of-the-church-nt-wright/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 17, 2013

Comments 

NT Wright, in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God, makes a claim many need to hear today, both those who diminish the church for kingdom work and those who do “Pauline theology” exclusively through the lens of soteriology and make the church where the saved land on Sunday mornings. Not so for Wright: the church is where Paul’s worldview begins. At the core of Paul’s worldview was symbolic praxis and the first one is church.

No: we are simply asking the question: what were the main symbols, and symbols-in-action, of Paul’s newly envisaged and constructed world? And we are about to find, large as life, on the basis not of a theological a priori but simply by asking this question, scratching our heads, and looking around, that the primary answer is the ekklēsia: its unity, holiness and witness (385). 

The theme of the unity of the church is at the core of Paul’s worldview, his new social praxis, and Galatians 3:28 counters not only what is traditionally set alongside it from Judaism but also from the Greek world (I thank God I’m not…. all countered by Paul). That’s the unity for which he strives and the unity that drives so much of his mission. Wright then pores over 1 Corinthians through the theme of the unity of the church, and then over to RRomans 9-11 all in an effort to show how significant the church was to Paul. It was a family, a fictive kinship, marked by hospitality. Here is his summary, reformatted for easier reading on this blog:

First, the gospel message of Jesus the Messiah created a new world with new inhabitants, no longer defined by the specifics of Jewish law, but not seeking as a replacement any of the standard symbols of pagan identity. 

Second, this new community could sometimes be thought of as the new Temple, sometimes as a human body, in both cases not simply drawing on obvious and available metaphors but making powerful symbolic statements. 

Third, this new community was to learn to live as a family, with all that this would entail.

Fourth, we might suppose that this new community, being itself such a powerful symbol of a radically new worldview, might be regarded as a considerable threat to existing power structures. 

Fifth, this new symbol was rooted in a monotheism which, while having the recognizable shape of Jewish rather than pagan styles of monotheism, had come to fresh expression precisely through Jesus the Messiah. 

Sixth, this new community was formed and characterized at every point by its conformity to the Messiah himself, specifically in his crucifixion and resurrection. 

We might also then say a seventh thing. It will be noticed that in these six points, growing naturally out of the analysis of Paul’s symbolic praxis in the letters so far studied, we have just summarized Ephesians 2.11—3.21. Perhaps symbolic or even sociological analysis may yet achieve the revolution in scholarly assumptions that neither the ‘new perspective’ nor the revived ‘apocalyptic’ school, nor even the ‘political Paul’, have so far managed to do, though all might have tumbled to it at any point in recent discussion: Ephesians, long sidelined in western protestant Pauline discussions, turns out to articulate rather precisely the very points which have emerged, on the basis of the ‘main’ letters, from a detailed worldview-study of Paul’s central symbol (402).

Wright then turns to “Messiah” in symbolic praxis to observe that all the symbols find their re-expression in Jesus, in whom everything is revised to fit into a Messiah who was crucified and resurrected, leading to a people marked by cross and resurrection. Jesus is now The Lord. Wright turns this into the gospel (and he gets to using the word “gospel” as a verb — I like that!):

Put all this together, and what do we have, as the central, shaping marker of the new worldview, taking the place and bearing the weight that the Jewish symbols had borne within the worldview of Saul of Tarsus? We have precisely the gospel, the euangelion, the ‘good news’, rooted in the ‘good news’ spoken of in the Great Prophet, confronting the ‘good news’ carved in stone around Caesar’s empire. We have the symbol by which Paul declared that he was himself defined, the anchor of his own vocational mindset: Paul, an apostle, set apart for the good news of God; I am not ashamed of the good news, because it is God’s power for salvation to all who believe; the Messiah did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel; woe to me if I do not announce the good news; I do it all for the sake of the good news; let me remind you of the gospel which I announced to you, which you received, in which you stand firm, through which you are saved; the gospel of the glory of the Messiah, who is the image of God; your confession of faith in the Messiah’s gospel has brought you into proper order; let me remind you that the gospel which was gospelled by me was not something I received from other people; I did it so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you; my calling is to gospel to the gentiles the unsearchable riches of the Messiah; what has been happening to me has been for the advancement of the gospel; let your public life be worthy of the gospel of the Messiah; don’t move away from the hope of the gospel; our gospel was not in word only, but in power, in the holy spirit, and in full conviction; I wanted to keep Onesi- mus with me, to serve me on your behalf in the bonds of the gospel. The gospel, the gospel, the gospel. It defined Paul. It defined his work. It defined his communities. It was the shorthand summary of the theology which, in turn, was the foundation for the central pillar for the new worldview. It carried God’s power. That was just as well: the worldview, and those who lived by it, were going to need it (410-411).

Other areas of praxis, each discussed at varying lengths, include prayer (and mysticism) and Scripture and baptism and eucharist. On baptism:

So, to sum up: baptism in the worldview of Paul’s communities, and within his own mindset, emerges not from pagan mystery religions but from the deep roots of Jewish covenantal story and covenantal symbolism. It is differentiated from the latter precisely because of the crucifixion and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah and the effect that that has had in generating the Mes- siah’s people as a worldwide family. The passage in Colossians appears to form something of a mid-point between Galatians and Romans. In Galatians, the emphasis is on the renewed multi-ethnic family; in Romans (as in 1 Corinthians 10; for that matter), it is on the fact that the family leaves behind the realm of sin; in Colossians, there is a bit of both, and in 1 Corinthians 1 and 12 a reaffirmation of unity when faced by a different kind of threat. But the point for our present purposes is that baptism is clearly a key ritual (in the sense noted above) which serves to mark out this people inthis way as part of this single and united family, grounded in the messianic monotheism we have already described (427).

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N.T. Wright, "Paul and the Faithfulness of God" (Vol 4) - What Place Israel and the Church?

NT Wright and the Supersessionism Question: What did Paul do?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/15/nt-wright-and-the-supersessionism-question-what-did-paul-do/

 

by Scot McKnight

Oct 15, 2013

Comments 

One of the distinguishing discussions today in Pauline studies is whether or not Paul was a “supersessionist,” and the issue is Paul thought the church “replaced” Israel in such a way that now God no longer worked with Israel but with the church. To get ahold of this one means knowing how the whole Bible is to be read when we see that word “fulfillment.” At the ground level it has to do with how Torah observant “messianic Christians” are to be and how “Jewish” Christianity ought to be… it goes back and forth. N.T. Wright, in his magisterial Paul and the Faithfulness of God, as he opens the second part of the book by examining Paul’s worldview as it takes on and adapts and adjusts the worldviews of Judaism, paganism and empire, goes square at that issue without using the terms so many in the supersessionism debate use. He differs with those, like Bockmuehl and Nanos, who see the messianists carrying on their Judaism, or Paul continuing to be kosher as he had been as a Pharisee, but because this has all become a worldview issue and not simply a theology issue, the framework changes with Wright — he seems to be talking about the same issues but now from a new angle. He’s asking What did Paul do with Judaism when he saw the resurrected Jesus?

 

In brief, I see in Wright a kind of Christian fulfillment theory that some will see as replacement theology and others as supersessionism and yet others (like Wright himself) will see as nothing of the sort. It is the Jewish Paul being completely Jewish under the Messiahship of Jesus. When Jesus is Messiah, nothing and everything chances at the same time: he’s just as Jewish, perhaps more so, and yet different than what contemporaries, like Pharisees, saw as Jewish. His terms: everything gets reworked (monotheism, election, eschatology), everything gets revised, everything is taken on in new categories but it’s the same old covenant in a messianic worldview.

 

I once had a lengthy conversation with a Jewish scholar who told me I could not be Christian without being a supersessionist; sometimes one gets the impression the only way not to be supersessionist is to be a radical pluralist. Here are words NT Wright uses to describe how Paul revised the worldview of Judaism.

 

Like Temple:

The replacement of Temple with Jesus and, secondarily and derivatively, with his people remains one of Paul’s central worldview-revisions, unnoticed in an earlier generation that chose to forget the significance of the Temple within Paul’s ancestral symbolic universe. He developed it further: the Messiah’s people, and the tasks they perform ‘in the Messiah’, are described in terms which reflect the people at the centre of Jerusalem and the Temple and the tasks they performed there. They were priests, offering sacrifices, indeed offering themselves as sacrifices, or, in Paul’s case, bringing the gentiles themselves as a quasi-sacrificial offering, with a kind of heavy irony, to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem itself, the focus of the longed-for centripetal pilgrimage of the nations, has been replaced by Jerusalem as the centrifugal originating point of the world mission. The redeemer does not now come to Zion but from Zion, going out into all the world to ‘gather the nations’, not by their coming to the central symbol of ancient Judaism, but by their becoming the central symbol, as we shall see, of the transformed world- view” (358).

Like Torah and food laws:

In the light of this, and of Paul’s own insistence that he took what he calls the ‘strong’ position, I find myself in agreement with those who have maintained that Paul did not himself continue to keep the kosher laws, and did not propose to, or require of, other ‘Jewish Christians’ that they should, either (359). 

Paul’s revising of the Jewish symbol of Torah in terms of food and table- fellowship, then, was clear, if necessarily complex. First, all those who belong to the Messiah, and are defined by Messiah-faithfulness and baptism, belong at the same table: this, as we shall see, is a constitutive part of his most central new positive symbol. Second, Messiah-followers are free to eat whatever they wish, with that freedom curtailed only (but strongly) when someone else’s ‘weak’ conscience is endangered. Third, Messiah-followers are free to eat ordinary meals with anyone they like, but not with someone who professes to be one of the family but whose behaviour indicates otherwise. Fourth (an extra but important point), Messiah-followers are not free to go into a pagan temple and eat there. To do so would be to stage a contest with the lord himself. All this is not just ‘ethics’. It is a matter of a freshly crafted symbolic universe (361).

Similar, and just as interesting, observations are made about circumcision and sabbath and prayer and land and zeal/the Battle (with the satan, et al) and Scripture itself. Supersessionism? No, I don’t think. Fulfillment? Certainly. Revision? That’s the key term here. Faith in Messiah turns the old inside out and makes the old new without abolishing it.

 

He turns then to briefer escapades into worldview and paganism and then worldview and empire, on the latter he opens with this reminder, something in need of saying because so many think anti-empire means anarchism too: “The answer to corrupt authorities is not anarchy” (381). But he returns to the implication of a confession by way of a denial:

Jesus is ‘son of God’; he is ‘lord of the world’; he is ‘saviour’; the worldwide revelation of his rule is ‘good news’, because through it ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ are brought to birth at last. He is the one who ‘rises to rule the nations’. The announcement of all this is the key source, for Paul, of ‘power’, and in Ephesians, which is either Paul’s greatest summary of his own teach- ing or the work of a careful and close colleague and imitator, he speaks eloquently about the power of the one God at work in the Messiah, a power which has raised him above all rule, authority, power and dominion, and above every name that is named, both in the present age and in the age to come. Anyone who had seen the Eagle at work, and had heard its names and claims, would know what was being said. We must advance this case more fully later on (383).

On countering the breathtaking power of the story at work in empire and Rome …

Paul does not mention this story explicitly, any more than he speaks of the imperial claim made by coins, statues and other obvious imagery. Yet we should not ignore the subversive nature of the retold Jewish story which undergirds so much of his writing. If this – the story of Adam, Abraham and Israel, climaxing in the Messiah! – is the grand narrative of the creator’s design for his world, then the grand narrative of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and the visual symbolism which went with those writings, cannot be true, or the ultimate truth. That is the dilemma which Paul posed to his readers. The extent to which they will have ‘heard’ that subversive note is a question to which we must return (383).

Put together then we are back to the anti-empire theme:

When Paul said, ‘Jesus is lord,’ a good many of his hearers must have known at once that this meant, ‘So Caesar isn’t.’ And that was the ‘good news’, the euangelion which Paul announced around the world. Was that a subversion of the symbolic world of the empire? How could it not be? How would that work out? (384)

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