N.T. Wright: "Love Is the Name of the Game"

 

 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/10/16/love-is-the-name-of-the-game-rjs/

by RJS

October 16, 2012

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As I was preparing last week’s post A Conversation About Genesis, I came across the YouTube video of this extended reflection by Tom Wright put out by World Vision as part of a Faith Effect campaign in Australia. This is an excellent clip – well worth the 11 to 12 minutes or so it takes to watch it. In fact, it is well worth the 20 to 30 it takes to listen more than once and mull over some of the ideas.

 

The reflections here draw on the ideas in Wright’s book How God Became King as well of many of his earlier books. (I’d say his latest book, but it is already seven months old – so I am sure there are several since.)

 

NT Wright - extended interview for The Faith Effect

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iTAO74i0eW0

 

 

A few quotes to whet the appetite:

The vision which we find coming into full focus through Jesus actually goes right back to the beginning. It’s there in Genesis. When Jesus talks about what God is doing right now he is constantly invoking the sense of the ancient human vocation. God calls human beings to be his image bearers. (1:40-1:58)

This is how the Kingdom of God comes to earth. Wright goes on to reflect on the way Jesus approached the world and the people around him. The way of Jesus was …

…showing that God is running the world by healing, by bringing hope, by transforming, by bringing justice, by challenging the people who were doing the oppression and the wickedness and then by his own death taking the problems and the pains of all that into himself so that then these people who follow him can be the world transformers. (3:58-4:14)

 

The spread of Christianity …

The way Christianity spread over the first three centuries when the Romans were doing their best to stamp it out, was not simply by people going into the market place and saying Jesus is Lord you must believe in him, they did that too, but by people seeing that here was a community of people who lived in a totally different way. The Christians were known for going and helping people who were not their kith and kin, who were not part of their ethnic group or part of their business interests. If somebody was sick, if somebody was poor, the Christians would go and look after them. They’d say “why do you do that you’ve got nothing to gain by it” and they’d say “well, its because we follow Jesus and this is the way that Jesus does stuff”. So that it is what you do that generates the question to which the answer is Jesus is becoming king through his death and resurrection etcetra. (5:40-6:32)

As we are living as Christians we need to remake our categories and realize that heaven and earth really did come together in the incarnation, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We are not pinning our flag on God’s map – God did it. Grace transforms us so that we can be transformers. Wright uses this to go on and suggest that we should all be thinking about what God is calling us to do in the whole body of Christ.

 

But it all comes down to Love.

One day, in God’s new heaven and earth reality, Love is the language that we’ll be speaking, and we get to learn it and practice it in advance. It is like learning the songs that they will sing in God’s new world. We learn them and sing them here because we are supposed to people through whom a taste of the new world comes into the present. And again, if you think that that is just private and not something that goes out into the wider world you’ve missed the whole point. The whole point of love is that it is generous and outgoing. And so for Paul and for the other early Christian writers love is not just as it were one virtue among others. Love is almost the name of what it means to be a Christian. (11:24-11:36)

I don’t think Wright goes far enough in that last statement. He leaves some “wiggle-room.” But love is the name of what it means to be a Christian. No qualifier, no "almost." Wright doesn’t use this example – but I will: Living as though God is king means living in and reflecting out love. Love is the name of the game. Love God, love others. This theme runs through the gospels, it runs through Paul and the other New Testament writers. This theme gives a whole new perspective on the entire Old Testament. This isn’t the soft and wimpy approach, diminishing the gospel, it is the whole game. As God loves us so are we to love others.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:43-45)

 

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

 

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35)

And on, and on, and on (see something of a compilation in this post).

 

Wright’s reflection on the spread of Christianity is particularly important here. Scot put up a graphic on Saturday afternoon that illustrated a Decline in Religion. Some may doubt the reality of this trend – but it is self-evident in my world. Religious faith is viewed by most as unnecessary at best, irrational and dangerous at worst. We will not make a difference by having a better Sunday morning service, by serving better coffee, by having a more extroverted and energetic staff, by avoiding the hard questions, by keeping things shallow and palatable. Nor will we make a difference by focusing on precision in theological expression or the glory and sovereignty of God. We will make a difference by being the people of God such that his love is evident in us and through us. We must first care for the family of the people of God in our local church (why would any one join a family that rejects or marginalizes its own?) and we must also care for others locally and globally, not as an evangelistic gimmick to reel people in and keep churches stocked, but out of genuine love as a reflection of the very love of God. It is what we do and how we reflect God’s love in the world that will generate the questions to which the answer is Jesus is Lord. I am not a pessimist, I think that the Church will thrive through the power of the Spirit, but Christendom is behind us, and if it forces us to focus on the essence of being the people of God, that may be a good thing.

 

Is Love the name of the game?
 

If not, why not? Is the “almost” a justified qualifier?

 
 

If you would like to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

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How God Became King: Putting Creed and Canon Back Together Again

How God Became King

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2012/august/how-god-became-king.html#.UCUjVHBEeTE.facebook

by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
August 2012

Putting creed and canon back together.

For the past decade I've endeavored to be something of street preacher in my neighborhood. Granted, when I came here it wasn't my neighborhood. I was marked as an outsider, not only because everyone around here seems to know everyone else, but also because I'm white. And in this Southern town, white folks don't belong in Walltown.

 

Everyone knows this, but no one communicated it more clearly than the young guys who used to stand on the corner, just four doors down from our house. I used to wave when I'd pass by them. They wouldn't wave back. For months, they never said a word. They only glared.

 

The month we moved here, one of these guys on the corner was shot in the street by another guy who drove by, stuck a gun out the window, and pulled the trigger. A friend happened to be driving behind the car that slowed down to shoot. He stopped his car, jumped out, and asked the guy who'd been hit in the elbow if he needed a ride to the hospital. "Naw," this young man said, gritting his teeth and pressing his hand against the wound. "I'll be alright." The next evening, the same car drove by again, taking better aim this time. We learned at his funeral that the young man shot dead on our corner was named Robert.

 

When our household of outsiders invited a guy from Walltown who was returning home from prison to come and live with us, we started to hear secondhand what the guys on the corner were saying. When we first came, they'd thought we were a police house, sent to monitor drug traffic. Then some said we were a plant from the local university—part of a secret plan to take over the neighborhood. Finally, they settled on calling us a church house because every Sunday and Wednesday they watched us go in and out of the Saint Johns Missionary Baptist Church, our Bibles in our hands.

 

About this time, the guys on the corner start talking. I learn their names and they learn mine. A couple of them start stopping by the house for dinner. Whenever I get a chance, I stop by their corner to catch up. One day, a fellow named Andre—who likes to rap when he talks—says to me, "You're a preacher, uh huh. / You want to talk theology, don't you?" I ask him what's on his mind. "Well, I'm a Muslim," he raps, hands flying up and down, "I'm a Muslim because / Christianity's about what you believe in your heart, / but Islam is about how you live."

 

I'm a Christian who grew up singing "King Jesus is all / he's my all and all." I get up every morning and go to bed every night praying, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." But I cannot argue with Andre. The Christianity he has seen is a feel-good spirituality, a get-me-through-another-week kind of faith. "Crack religion," some folks around here call it. But Andre prefers the real thing. Still, these theological conversations on the street corner are what make me into a street preacher—not the "turn before you burn" type, but something more akin to Paul on Mars Hill, always probing to see where God fits in. Always asking questions. One day I say to a guy who's run the streets since he was thirteen, to a young man who thought he was king when other people started selling his drugs for him, "Jesus said, 'If you live by the gun you'll die by the gun.' " There's no good use for a gun in this neighborhood, I tell him. And he says to me, "You oughta tell that to the police." Jesus is well and good for the church house, but out here on the street, he says, religion can get you killed.

 

He asks the same question Andre asks, the same question these guys have been asking me for a decade: What does your Jesus have to offer a guy like me? "As I have both studied and written about Jesus and the gospels," writes N.T. Wright in his newest offering, How God Became King, "I have had the increasing impression, over many years now, that most of the Western Christian tradition has simply forgotten what the gospels are really about." This celebrated scholar and former bishop of the Church of England seems to agree with the guys who hang out on the corner in Walltown. "What we need is not just a bit of fine-tuning, an adjustment here and there. We need a fundamental rethink about what the gospels are trying to say."

 

For the scholarly Wright, the first question to ask is, How did we ever forget the main point? How did the Jesus who ignited a popular movement by promising abundant life to marginalized people like the guys on the corner in Walltown become an irrelevant idea that scholars write about or an otherworldly deity that pious people worship? The answer is not simple, but Wright makes it comprehensible. It is a tragic accident of history, the sad result of thinking that the gifts the Holy Spirit offered at one moment in history can simply be packaged and delivered to our contexts today.

 

Wright's gift for clarity rests in his ability to make crucial distinctions, and the one most central to this book's argument is the historical difference between the creeds and the canon. The creeds, Wright observes, are doctrinal statements that Christians developed to answer the particular challenges of the 4th- and 5th-century church. In their context, they make perfect sense. But because they are a response to particular heresies, they necessarily do not say everything that must be said about who God is, why Jesus came, and what the Spirit is doing in the world today. This, Wright says, is why we have a canon—four gospels that have their own story to tell. And most of what they have to say is about the gap that comes between Jesus being "born of the virgin Mary" and "suffering under Pontius Pilate." That is, the gospels, by and large, cover ground that the creeds skip over with a comma.

 

In the great storehouse of Christian tradition, we have both creed and canon. But in the midst of the particular challenges that the Western church faced at the dawn of the modern era, creed trumped canon and doctrinal claims seemed more important than the story that the gospels tell. Wright masterfully demonstrates how this tendency is common to those groups that have most vehemently disagreed with one another in the church and the academy—conservatives and liberals, fundamentalists and progressives. We all seem to have agreed that creed and canon are separable, some clinging to doctrine whatever the cost, others saying that Jesus is an interesting historical figure, even if he wasn't God.

 

At the core of this book is an invitation to re-read the gospels—to hear them as the story of how God became King by paying attention to the ways they make claims about four themes that were central to the hopes and longings of 1st-century Israel. Those themes are:

1. the story of Israel,
2. the story of Israel's God,
3. the hope of God's renewed people, and
4. the conflict between God's rule and the kingdoms of this world.

For all of its value as a clear and concise argument about the meaning of Christian faith itself, this book is at its best highlighting Wright as a Bible teacher. The gospels come alive in these central chapters, singing the song that all of creation longs for, flowing like living waters in a dry and weary land. I wanted to stand on the corner and read several passages aloud.

 

But for all of his gifts as one of our best contemporary Bible teachers, Wright is not content to end this exploration with applause from guys like me who love the Bible anyway: "Part of the tragedy of the modern church, I have been arguing, is that the 'orthodox' have preferred creed to kingdom, and the 'unorthodox' have tried to get a kingdom without a creed. It's time," Wright says, "to put back together what should have never been separated." This work of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is the work of communities that read the gospels and recite the creeds, living God's mission as the body of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Wright concludes by saying that the answer to this riddle isn't in the power of "all the king's horses and all the king's men." It's in little communities who try to live by the power of the Spirit in a place like Walltown.

 

This, I fear, is where Wright is most likely to be misunderstood: after so many years of Christendom, the news that the gospels are really about "how God became King" may come to some—especially those who worry that the Western church is in decline—as an invitation to rebuild our institutions, renegotiate our relationship with the power structures, and reclaim a sort of theocracy. I live in the Christ-haunted South. We're always susceptible to the promises of a Jerry Fallwell. But this is not the hope that the guys on our corner ache for, nor is it the good news Wright is proclaiming. "The implicit ecclesiology of all four gospels is a picture of the complex vocation of Jesus himself," Wright says. It is "to be kingdom-bringers … first because of Jesus' own suffering and second by means of their own." The Revelation is right: we will, one day, rule the nations. But we'll only get there the way Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father—by suffering with those who've been pushed to the margins until we learn to see together, through creed and canon alike, that another world is possible. Indeed, it's beginning to appear right now in our conversations on the corner and around the dinner table.

 

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an associate minister at St. Johns Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. The Rutba House, where Jonathan lives with his family and friends, is a new monastic community that prays, eats, and lives together, welcoming neighbors and the homeless. He is the author most recently of The Awakening of Hope: Why We Preach a Common Faith, just published by Zondervan.

 

 

 

N.T. Wright asks: Have we gotten heaven all wrong?




Christian apologist N.T. Wright's insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven.
http://www.religionnews.com/faith/doctrine-and-practice/N.T.-Wright-asks-Have-we-gotten-heaven-all-wrong

by John Murawski
May 6, 2012
Comments

(RNS) The oft-cliched Christian notion of heaven -- a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels -- has remained a fixture of the faith for centuries. Even as arguments will go on as to who will or won't be "saved," surveys show that a vast majority Americans believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place.

But scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament's Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

The most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist N.T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland's University of St. Andrews. Wright has explored Christian misconceptions about heaven in previous books, but now devotes an entire volume, "How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels," to this trendy subject.

Wright's insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He's not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.

"This is a very current issue -- that what the church, or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies," said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. "The end times are not the end of the world -- they are the beginning of the real world -- in biblical understanding."

Still, the appearance of a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that putting-the-heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond the academy. Wright and Morse say they have both made presentations on heaven research at local churches and have been surprised by the public interest and acceptance.

"An awful lot of ordinary church-going Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this," Wright said.

Wright and Morse work independently of each other and in very different ideological settings, but their work shows a remarkable convergence on key points. In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God's Kingdom -- a restored Eden where redeemed human beings would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.

"This represents an instance of two top scholars who have apparently grown tired of talk of heaven on the part of Christians that is neither consistent with the New Testament nor theologically coherent," said Trevor Eppehimer of Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina. "The majority of Christian theologians today would recognize that Wright and Morse's views on heaven represent, for the most part, the basic New Testament perspective on heaven."

First-century Jews who believed Jesus was Messiah also believed he inaugurated the Kingdom of God and were convinced the world would be transformed in their own lifetimes, Wright said. This inauguration, however, was far from complete and required the active participation of God's people practicing social justice, nonviolence and forgiveness to become fulfilled.

Once the Kingdom is complete, he said, the bodily resurrection will follow with a fully restored creation here on earth. "What we are doing at the moment is building for the Kingdom," Wright explained.

Indeed, doing God's Kingdom work has come to be known in Judaism as "tikkun olam," or "repairing the world." This Hebrew phrase is a "close cousin" to the ancient beliefs embraced by Jesus and his followers, Wright said.

"It's the recovery of the Jewish basis of the Gospels that enables us to say this," Wright said. "We are so fortunate in this generation that we understand more about first-century Judaism than Christian scholarship has for a very long time. And when you do that, you realize just how much was forgotten quite soon in the early church, certainly in the first three or four centuries."

Christianity gradually lost contact with its Jewish roots as it spread into the gentile world. On the idea of heaven, things really veered off course in the Middle Ages, Wright said.

"Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn't consonant with what we find in the New Testament," Wright said. "A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in."

Wright notes that many clues to an early Christian understanding of the Kingdom of heaven are preserved in the New Testament, most notably the phrase "your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," from the Lord's Prayer. Two key elements are forgiveness of debts and loving one's neighbor.

While heaven is indisputably God's realm, it's not some distantly remote galaxy hopelessly removed from human reality. In the ancient Judaic worldview, Wright notes, the two dimensions intersect and overlap so that the divine bleeds over into this world.

Other clues have been obscured by sloppy translations, such as the popular John 3:16, which says God so loved the world he gave his only son so that people could have "eternal life."

Wright offers a translation that radically recasts the message and shows how the passage would have been heard in the first century. To hear it today is to experience the shock of the new: God gave his son "so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God's new age."

"And so it's not a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught," Wright said. "It is very definitely that there will come a time when God will utterly transform this world -- that will be the age to come."

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N.T. Wright - How God Became King

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N.T. Wright, Scripture & the Authority of God - "How to Read Scripture"

continued from -

N.T. Wright, Scripture & the Authority of God

"Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and Misreading Scripture"

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/05/nt-wright-on-enlightenment.html


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Wright's 5 Recommendations

for Reading Scripture Today
http://rachelheldevans.com/wright-5-recommendations-scripture

by Rachel Held Evans

May 21, 2012

Comments

It’s Monday, which means it’s time to continue our series on learning to love the Bible for what it is, not what we want it to be.

As part of the series, we’re working our way through several books, and have already discussed The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith. Up next up is Inspiration and Incarnation, by Peter Enns. But currently, we’re discussing Scripture and the Authority of God by N.T. Wright, and today I want to discuss Chapter 8, entitled, “How to Get Back on Track.”

Wright really picks up the pace with this chapter, which begins with a reminder to readers of what he means when he talks about “the authority of scripture.”

The authority of scripture...

“The whole of my argument so far leads to the following major conclusion,” says Wright, “that the shorthand phrase ‘the authority of scripture,’ when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community...We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.”

According to Wright, “this means that ‘the authority of scripture’ is most truly put into operation as the church goes to work in the world on behalf of the gospel.”

One thing I’ve appreciated about Wright’s approach in this book is the emphasis he places on dynamic, spirit-led activity—the call to God’s people to join in God’s work of redemption, reconciliation, peace-making, and creative activity in the world. This way of speaking about the authority of Scripture stands in contrast to how it is often spoken of among Christians, as a phrase invoked to shut down conversation and bolster one particular interpretation of Scripture. (For example: “I don’t believe in evolution because, unlike you, I believe in the authority of scripture.”)

To me, Wright’s approach makes the most sense of 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

The authority of scripture affects the work of God’s kingdom, “at every level, from the cosmic and political through the personal,” says Wright. “Though this can happen in the supposed ‘desert island’ situation,’ where an individual reads the Bible all alone,” he says, “it normally comes about through the work of God’s people, from those who translated and published the Bible itself (even on a desert island, one is dependent on others!) to those who, like Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, helped others to understand it and apply it to their own lives.”

In other words, the Bible is intended to be read, wrestled with, applied, debated, cherished, and celebrated in community.

Tradition....

Honoring the authority of scripture means living in dialog with previous readings and respecting tradition, Wright says. Those Christians who have come before us may have been wrong about some things, he notes, but “every key figure in the history of the church has left his, her or its mark on subsequent readings of scripture.”

“Paying attention to tradition means listening carefully (humbly but not uncritically) to how the church has read and lived scripture in the past. We must be constantly aware of our responsibility, in the Communion of Saints, without giving our honored predecessors the final say or making them an ‘alternative source,’ independent of scripture itself.”

This approach reminds me a little of Scot McKnight’s approach in The Blue Parakeet, where he encourages Christians to read scripture with tradition, not merely through it.

Reason...

Honoring reason in the reading of scripture means “giving up merely arbitrary or whimsical readings of texts, and paying attention to lexical, historical considerations,” says Wright. This keeps us from accepting readings that propose, for example, that Jesus was really an Egyptian freemason or that the book of Mark is about overcoming alcoholism. (Apparently, these views can be found in actual published books!)

In other words, the interpretation should make sense.

Honoring reason also means “giving attention to, and celebrating, the many and massive discoveries in biology, archaeology, physics, astronomy, and so on, which shed great light on God’s world and the human condition,” says Wright....

And it means engaging in civil, reasonable discourse. “This is why public discussions and debates, rather than shouting matches, are such an urgent requirement, says Wright. “Far too much discourse on contentious issues has consisted of rhetorical moves designed to wipe one’s opponent’s pieces off the board before the game has begun...Reasoned discourse is part of God’s alternative way of living, over against that of violence and chaos."

A good reminder.

Five recommendations...

Wright concludes with a five-part recommendation for approaching scripture today:

1. A totally contextual reading of scripture: “Each word must be understood within its own verse, each verse within its on chapter, each chapter within its own book, and each book within its own historical, cultural, and indeed canonical setting,” says Wright. A contextual reading of scripture also means understanding and appreciating our own contexts and the way they predispose us to “highlight some things in the Bible and quietly ignore others,” Wright adds. “Such a contextual reading is in fact an incarnational reading of scripture, paying attention to the full humanity both of the text and its readers. This must be undertaken in the prayer that the ‘divinity’—the ‘inspiration’ of scripture, and the Spirit’s power at work within the Bible-reading church—will thereby be discovered afresh.” (Love that.) This is an exhilarating process that will never be finished, Wright says, (with all the enthusiasm and joy of someone who truly loves his job as a biblical scholar).

2. A liturgically-grounded reading of scripture: “The primary place where the church hears scripture is during corporate worship,” says Wright. “This means, we must work at making sure we read scripture properly in public, with appropriate systems for choosing what to read and appropriate training to make sure those who read do so to best effect.” Anglican worship, (to which Wright is certainly partial!), at its best, serves as a “showcase for scripture” in which “the authority of God places a direct challenge to the authority of the powers that be,” and in which the reading of scripture together in community is itself an act of worship. (Wright offers some specific suggestions for preserving a liturgically-grounded reading of scripture—including warnings against dropping certain portions of scripture from liturgical readings because they are startling or strange, as well as warnings against making sermons the focus of corporate worship— that we don’t have time to discuss in detail here.)

3. A privately studied reading of scripture: “For all of this to make the deep, life-changing, Kingdom-advancing sense it is supposed to,” Wright says, “it is vital that ordinary Christians read, encounter, and study scripture for themselves, in groups and individually.” Wright notes that Western individualism tends to highlight individual reading as the primary mode, and liturgical reading as secondary, where he sees the two working hand-in-hand.

4. A reading of scripture refreshed by appropriate scholarship: “Biblical scholarship is a great it of God to the church, aiding it in its task of going ever deeper into the meaning of scripture and so being refreshed and energized for the tasks to which we are called in and for the world,” says Wright. This means honoring the “literal sense” of scripture—not by taking everything literally, but rather seeking to understand what the writer intended. Biblical scholarship can help Christians do this better, and therefore “needs to be free to explore different meanings.” Such scholarship needs to be accessible and applicable to everyday Christians.

5. A reading of scripture taught by the church’s accredited leaders: Leaders must be trained and encouraged to keep the teaching and preaching of scripture at the heart of the church’s life, “alongside and regularly interwoven with the sacramental life focused on the Eucharist,” says Wright.

I think these are strong recommendations. I especially appreciate Wright’s emphasis on both individual and corporate readings of scripture. This is one reason why I love combining Episcopal worship on Sundays, with good, old-fashioned Bible studies on weeknights, with private “quiet time” with my Bible and a book of hours each morning and/or evenings. For me, this represents the best of all worlds, and powerfully integrates scripture into my daily life. (Too bad I rarely engage them all in a given week!)

What do you think of Wright’s five recommendations?

Where do you see your own church tradition excelling, and where do you see it falling short?

N.T. Wright, Scripture & the Authority of God - "Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and Misreading Scripture"

N.T. Wright on the Enlightenment, postmodernism, and common misreadings of scripture

http://rachelheldevans.com/wright-common-misreadings-scripture

by Rachel Held Evans

May 14, 2012

Comments

It’s Monday, which means it’s time to continue series on learning to love the Bible for what it is, not what we want it to be.

As part of the series, we’re working our way through several books, and have already discussed The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith. Up next up is Inspiration and Incarnation, by Peter Enns. But currently, we’re discussing Scripture and the Authority of God by N.T. Wright, and today I want to address Chapter 6, entitled “The Challenge of the Enlightenment,” and Chapter 7, entitled, “Misreadings of Scripture.”

Chapter 6

I confess I checked-out few times while plowing through Chapter 6, which explores the effect of the Enlightenment on biblical interpretation and scriptural authority. Because this is just the sort of stuff you bring up at parties to make friends.

Here Wright notes that “much of what has been written about the Bible in the last two hundred years has either been following through the Enlightenment’s program, or reacting to it, or negotiating some kind of halfway house in between.” And so Christians need to be aware of which Enlightenment assertions “must be politely denied, which of its challenges may be taken up and by what means, and which of its accomplishments must be welcomed and enhanced.”

Without casting Enlightenment rationalism as categorically evil, Wright details some of the problematic consequences of Enlightenment assumptions regarding the biblical text:

• false claims to absolute objectivity,
• the elevation of “reason” (“not as an insistence that exegesis must make sense with an overall view of God and the wider world,” Wright notes, “but as a separate ‘source’ in its own right”),
• reductive and skeptical readings of scripture that cast Christianity as out-of-date and irrelevant,
• a human-based eschatology that fosters a “we-know-better-now” attitude toward the text,
• a reframing of the problem of evil as a mere failure to be rational,
• the reduction of the act of God in Jesus Christ to a mere moral teacher, etc.

Wright then discusses how the rise of historical biblical scholarship has both helped and hurt the Church, arguing for something of a middle-way between anti-intellectualism on the one hand and the glorification of it on the other.

According to Wright, “to affirm ‘the authority of scripture’ is precisely not to say, ‘We know what scripture means and don’t need to raise any more questions.’ It is always a way of saying that the church in each generation must make fresh and rejuvenated efforts to understand scripture more fully and live by it more thoroughly, even if that means cutting across cherished traditions.”

And I especially like this:

“Not all who try to follow the Bible in detail - as well as [in broad] outline - are fundamentalists,” says Wright, “nor are they all guilty of those cultural, intellectual, and moral failings which North American (and other) liberals perceive in North American (and other) conservatives.

Equally, not all who question some elements of New Testament teaching, or its applicability to the present day, are ‘liberals’ in the sense pejoratively intended by North American conservatives or traditionalists.”

Wright urges Christians to avoid plugging their ears and refusing to acknowledge the insights that can be gleaned from historical criticism on the one hand, and accepting historical criticism wholesale on the other.

“There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is ‘true after all, and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes,” he says.

As the chapter continues, Wright tackles postmodern scholarship, which he believes has offered some helpful critiques of Enlightenment assumptions while providing useful analyses of how certain texts might be received by particular groups, but which tends to veer into the complete dismissal of large portions of the biblical text.

And so Wright sees postmodernity’s effect on contemporary Western readings of Scripture as “essentially negative.”

“Postmodernity agress with modernity in scorning both the eschatological claim of Christianity and its solution to the problem of evil, but without putting any alternatives in place,” he says. “ All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) sympathy.”

Wright’s solution is “a narratival and critical realist reading of scripture,” which he doesn’t flesh out in this chapter, but will in future ones...which is good, seeing as how I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Chapter 7

[This] gets a little more interesting because Wright lists common misreading of Scripture—by the religious right and the religious left.

His list of misreadings on the right includes:

- the rapture

- the prosperity gospel

- the support of slavery (so I guess he’s referring to readings both past and present)

- undifferentiated reading of the Old and New Testament

- an arbitrary pick-and-choose approach to Scripture, complete with an implicit canon-within-the-canon, which, for example, is tough on sexual offenses but says nothing about the regular biblical prohibitions against usury

- support of the death penalty

- “discovery of ‘religious’ meanings and exclusion of ‘political’ ones, thus often tacitly supporting the social status quo”

- readings of Paul that leave out the Jewish dimension through which his letters make the most sense

- attempted “biblical” support for the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of scriptural prophesy - an overall failure to pay attention to context and hermeneutics....

[I can think of plenty more, starting with the idea that the Bible presents us with a singular picture of “biblical womanhood” that more closely resembles the June Cleaver culture of pre-feminist America than the familial norms of biblical times - not that I’m biased on that one or anything. :-) ]

His list of misreading on the left includes:

- claims to objective or neutral readings of the text

- claims that modern history/science “disprove” the Bible or render it irrelevant or unbelievable

- the cultural relativity argument which assumes that “the Bible is an old book from a different culture, so we can’t take it seriously in the modern world.”

- caricaturing biblical teaching on some topics in order to be able to set aside its teaching on other topics

- “discovery of ‘political’ meanings to the exclusion of ‘religious’ ones” [a reverse of the right's misreading]

- the proposal that the New Testament used the Old Testament in an arbitrary and unwarranted fashion

- the claim that New Testament writers did not think they were writing ‘scripture,’ so appealing to their work does them violence

- “a skin-deep-only appeal to ‘contextual readings,’ as though by murmuring the magic word ‘context’ one is allowed ot hold the meaning and relevance of the text at arm’s length."

- reducing “truth” to scientific statements on the one hand, or to deconstruct it altogether on the other.

Wright believes a critical realist reading of the text is something of a third way between two extremes, one that can “take the postmodern critique fully on board and still come back with a strong case for a genuinely historical understanding.”

He argues that we do have serious and academic methods by which we can “say definitively that some readings of ancient texts are historically preferable to others,” and that those should be employed thoughtfully and humbly by the Church.

In chapter eight, “How to Get Back on Track,” Wright will propose a five-part recommendation for approaching scripture today.

Good.

It's all getting a little theoretical to me.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

So, did any of that make sense to you?

What do you think of Wright’s assessment of the Enlightenment and of postmodernism?

What would you add to the list of biblical misreadings—on either the right or left?

* * * * * * * * * * * *

continue to -

N.T. Wright, Scripture & the Authority of God

"How to Read Scripture"

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/05/nt-wright-scripture-authority-of-god.html

How Should We Read the Bible? Through Creeds or through the Scriptures?

N.T. Wright and those Pesky Creeds

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/05/07/n-t-wright-and-those-pesky-creeds/#more-28048

by Scot McKnight

May 7, 2012

Comments

Tom Wright doesn’t back down from this claim: those who read the Gospels by way of the Creed will miss what the Gospels are saying. He doesn’t back down then from this second claim: [but,] if we read the Creed by way of the Gospels — understood in context — we will read the Creeds as we ought. (After the jump I have The Apostles’ Creed.) I agree with both of Tom’s claims; but I have some reservations (see below).

Do you agree with N.T. Wright on seeing the Creed as leaving out kingdom and life of Jesus? Do you think the Creed therefore distorts the New Testament/biblical narrative? What is the relationship of Creed to Canon? Do you think the problem is Creed or soteriology?

1. Tom Wright’s aim in his scholarly career, and in this new book How God Became King, is to get into the inner and developing fabric of the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus in order to find out what makes it tick and work the way it does — shedding light on what we’ve got, not getting back to some pristine, earlier, uninterpreted Jesus or Israel. In this, Tom’s historical Jesus works differs from many. Yet, Wright’s approach is every bit that of the historian.

2. Wright knows that some today want to avoid historical scholarship, in part because some just tear the thing apart and never put it back together again. But others are more robust in saying “the Creed is what the Church believes, I will read the Bible through the Creed.” Wright contends the Creed doesn’t let the Bible do what it does naturally. The Creed is an outline of the faith, not a comprehensive confession. If you agree with that statement, everything changes when it comes to reciting the Creed.

3. The Creed omits the whole Israel Story and Kingdom Story of the Bible. Creed and Canon are not the same: “But if their enthusiasts claim that they teach exactly the same thing as the canon, they have deceived themselves, and the truth is not in them” (257). [This does leave out some historical nuances, I have to admit: just what is the relationship of the Creed to Canon? It is not that we had Canon and then we got Creed, but that Creed and Canon were mutually developing alongside one another.]

4. The Tradition and Scripture are not the same, and Scripture is not the early part of the Tradition. For Wright, who is a good Protestant and not just a historian, first Scripture and everything must answer to Scripture. There’s more to Wright than that: for him, the categories we use to understand Jesus and the gospel must derive from the Bible and be biblical and historical and not simply theological or creedal.

5. There are two ways to read the Creed, one without awareness of the biblical Story — Israel, God becoming King through the cross and resurrection of Jesus — and one with that awareness. [I am convinced many in the church have done and do read the Creed through the Bible's Story, but there is no question that far too many read the Creed with little awareness of the Bible's Story. The big point, which I will make below, is that they have learned to read the Creed through a soteriology.]

6. I’d like to contend that the problem Tom Wright is addressing in this book is not simply Creed. Yes, I agree; Creed does create some problems for non-Bible readers. But the issue is more that the Creed is not needed because what the Bible teaches is a soteriology, a personal soteriology or an ecclesial soteriology or a theological soteriology, and once one has that soteriology worked out — I see this in Matt Chandler’s book The Explicit Gospel and I see this in the Reformed “covenant soterians” and I see this in Catholic soteriological theology and I see it in Eastern Orthodox soteriological approaches and I see it in four spiritual laws revivalists gospel approaches — and these make Creed of some value but what is of value is already established.

7. In other words, the Creed problem for not reading the Gospels aright is already a “gospel problem” that means neither Israel’s Story nor the Creed are really necessary. All we need is a good soteriology [according to the groups above - res].

8. Tom Wright’s reading of The Apostles’ Creed in light of the Bible’s story, found on pp. 264-273, is a good place for someone to begin forming a good solid class on Christian Theology.

The Failure of Christianity is a Modern Myth

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/04/26/the-failure-of-christianity-is-a-modern-myth/

by Scot McKnight

April 26, 2012

Comments

If you are, say, Voltaire, or a postmodern journalist, then the failure of Christianity is the way to tell the story of the course of history. Of course Christianity gets muddled, but there’s far more in that story about love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope. So N.T. Wright, in How God Became King (p. 162-163). The world without the gospel of Jesus, Wright claims, would be “the cultural and ideological equivalent of those horrible 1960s buildings that were structures without spirit, boxes without beauty, all function and no flourish” (163).

The Enlightenment had to tell that story because it had to tell history with itself as the goal and the center, while Christianity had an entirely different eschatology — so the Enlightenment pushed religion into the private world and told it stay put. The storytellers may say otherwise, but the Christian story is good and goes on because it has an anchor in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, because Jesus is the reigning king, and because the kingdom will come.

How do you differ Wright’s kingdom theocracy with the four views below? How and why have the cross and the kingdom been separated?

But too much of Christianity bought the Enlightenment’s story and it led to dualities: cross Christians with saving-for-heaven agendas and religion vs. kingdom Christians with social justice agendas and politics. Tom Wright’s thesis — of all his writings mind you — is that kingdom and cross belong together and that the kingdom vision is simultaneously social and spiritual.

Which just shows one more time how important eschatology is: the NT eschatology is one in which the kingdom has already begun to appear but still will happen completely in the future. But what has happened is not just the internal, religiousness or spirituality but instead the kingdom has been inaugurated holistically — social, cultural, political, cosmic and spiritual.

Wright steps up his critique of how the church has read the Gospels, though there are exceptions: Wilberforce, Tutu, William Temple, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [I wonder what N.T. Wright thinks of Wesley, of Edwards, of Kuyper, of Finney.]

Wright finds four reactions to what has happened in modernity:

1. “This” [world, kingdom, etc] doesn’t matter; we’re going to heaven when we die; we’ll leave this old world behind us. Wright accurately observes this gets too close to gnosticism.

2. Neo-Anabaptists: get the church in order, live as a beacon of light, “but without actually engaging with the world.” Well, that is precisely not what the Neo-Anabaptists argue or do; instead Tom is here speaking of some forms, perhaps most, of Anabaptism. The original Anabaptists — we’re speaking here of Grebel, Blaurock, Hubmaier — were social protesters fighting Catholic taxes. Anabaptism did go through a quietist and sectarian, separatistic period, but the modern “Neo-” Anabaptists are anything but quietist and uninvolved. Think Sider and Yoder or Claiborne and McKenna… very involved.

3. Right-wing Christian activism. Those who exulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden; FoxNews.

4. Left-wing Christian activism. Those often fighting for the poor and pushing a new sexual ethic are often aping liberal modernism (166). The UK Christians are grumpy pragmatists, Tom says. He parrots them with a caricature: “What do we want? Gradual change! When do we want it? In due course!” [LOL]

5. And there are the Reformers (who assumed by justification what late medieval theologians meant and were discussing) and the modern proponents of empire criticism (who assume when Paul spoke into empire that he meant by that term what we mean today).

So we need to read the New Testament afresh.

The Jewish vision was a theocracy — an on-earth, creational theocracy, ruled by image-bearers (Eikons of God). This is not what left-wingers today perceive. He sees a temptation toward anarchy in the left-wing. [Well, yes, but also strong centralization.] Nor is the right-winger small government the solution. So, in spite of the Anabaptists who gnarl at Tom on this one, creational monotheism works best with humans ruling as wise stewards under God.

Power isn’t the problem; the problem is who does what with that power. In other words, the biblical approach is not a fear of rule or power or leaders; it is a fear of bad rule. Neither anarchy nor small government is the way forward; the way is good government. Theocracy, then, is the right word.

And the right theocracy is messianic rule by the Messiah/King.

N.T.Wright - "What Sabbath was, What it is now; and What it isn't any longer"

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/06/01/tom-wright-scripture-and-gods-authority/

by Scot McKnight

posted June 1, 2011

The biggest problem many of us have with how we frame the “doctrine” of Scripture is that it isn’t adequate to how Scripture arose as our Sacred Text or how it operates either in the church or with us as Bible readers. Here’s the traditional model: it’s a top-down deposit or transmission of information. In other words, Scripture is framed as revelation.

I, too, would place Scripture within a framework of revelation, but that’s not enough, nor is it the primary framing. [Handmade chart with Penultimate app on the iPad.]

What is your model? What model is most “biblical” for you? And, what do you think of Tom Wright’s take on Sabbath as an illustration of how his model of Bible reading works?

Scripture flows out of the Trinitarian inter-communicative Logos and it is connected to the Holy Spirit and it is a “product” as well of the church. The revelation model has a top-down model that moves from God to revelation intent to inspiration and author/text and inerrancy and authority and reading. It’s all framed as a top-down revelation. It’s inadequate because God chose to manifest truth and grace and redemption through history, at specific moments and over time and through authors and through a community, and that history is nearly eliminated in the revelation model. The model needs supplementation to frame a view of Scripture that is organic to how Scripture came into existence. This top-down model is too much golden tablets dropping from the sky.

But Scripture at the organic level emerges from authors who are part of God’s People (Israel, Church), and the books in Scripture arise out of particular circumstances and are written by authors with intent and agenda, and the individual authors interact with one another (Micah, Isaiah, Matthew, Romans, Hebrews, Revelation) and carry the Story forward so that the last version of the Story can reframe the former versions. And then there is the ongoing life of the church — and tradition. Many of us think the revelation model tells us very important things, but it is inadequate.

That is why so many of us value the voice of Tom Wright in this discussion. His newest book, Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today, is both a revision and an expansion of his former book The Last Word.

This book of Tom’s both revises and expands and, in particular, adds chapters that are test cases for how his theory of Scripture works out. He examines two topics, Sabbath and Monogamy. Today I will look at his Sabbath chapter, but first a brief on the big ideas of the book.

The expression “authority of Scripture” is shorthand for “the authority of the triune God, exercised somehow through Scripture” (21). There is something important here, for Wright acknowledges that authority is God’s — and derivatively of Scripture. Any time someone equates the two, there opens the possibility for idolatry to occur. Furthermore, Wright is keen on showing that this authority of God is God’s authority in working out the Kingdom mission for his people and creation. Scripture, then, is a sub-branch of mission, the Spirit, eschatology, and the Church itself (29). Again, very important.

When Wright comes to sum up his entire argument, on pp. 115-116, he says this: The authority of Scripture is “a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community.” Thus, the “authority of Scripture” is put into action in the Church’s missional operations. Scripture, he says, is more than a record of revelation and was never simply about imparting information — it is God’s word to redeem [and involve!- res] his people as God works out his plan for the entire created order. And you may know how the Bible teaches what Tom calls a 5-Act play: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, Church. We are in the 5th Act now....

The Sabbath -

What it was, What it is now, and What it isn't any longer

Now to Sabbath. Tom provides an exceptional illustration of how both to read Sabbath (i) in its OT setting, (ii) what Jesus and Paul “did” to that teaching, (iii) how the Jubilee principle extends the Sabbath principle, and (iv) how Jesus is the transition to a new kind of time — death and resurrection and new creation, and thus how the Sabbath principle finds fulfillment in Jesus himself, and then he probes (v) how to live that Sabbath principle out in our world. Here are some highlights:

1. In the OT Sabbath was a strong commandment, it was the day YHWH took up abode in the temple of creation (here he chimes in with John Walton) and asked image-bearers to enjoy that same rest.

2. Sabbath shows that history is going somewhere, it is a temporal sign that creation is headed toward that final rest, and it is sacred time.

3. Sabbath has to be connected to Jubilee, and therefore to justice and compassion for the poor, and that means Sabbath and Jubilee point us toward the restoration of creation.

4. Jesus thought the entire Sabbath principle pointed toward himself. Time was fulfilled in him; a new kind of time begins with him. Paul does not seem to care about Sabbath, and he observes its absence in Romans 13:9; Col 2:14-16; Rom 14:5-6. I have to be brief: it’s about time’s fulfillment. Sacred time finds its way to Jesus Christ and new creation.

5. To continue celebrating sabbaths is to focus on the signposts when we have already arrived. Thus, “Come to me and I will give you rest.” You don’t need the alarm clock when the sun is flooding the room with its light. [Sabbath has occurred. Restoration has come. - res]

6. The early Christians didn’t transfer Sabbath to Sunday. [Nor do we - res].

7. We don’t need to back up into a Sabbatarianism. [sic, Christians do not need to become Seventh Day Adventists; nor Judaise or prosyletize their Christian faith backwards into the restrictive/antequated OT regimes and lifestyle observances; etc. - res].

8. We “celebrate” instead of “rest” — a kind of celebration rest. We reserve this day for new creation life. Music, the meal, family, service, peace, justice, love — these are the notes of Sunday for those who see the fulfillment of Sabbath in Jesus.

We live in a perpetual sabbath.

*res = re slater

Book Review: "How God Became King," by N.T. Wright

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

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]



For yours is the kingdom and

the power and the glory, forever. Amen

Matthew 6.9-13

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Tom Wright on How (not) to Read the Gospels

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/04/11/tom-wright-on-how-not-to-read-the-gospels/#more-27062

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

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/04/11/tom-wright-on-how-not-to-read-the-gospels/#comments

Jamie says:

April 12, 2012 at 9:21 am

"It reminds me of a constant refrain from an eschatology lecturer I had. He would continually remind us that the Bible is a book about earth, not heaven. The end of the story (both the narrative “end” and the telos) makes sense only in light of the seeds sown in the beginning. After all, the meek shall inherit the earth…."

Holly says:

April 11, 2012 at 9:39 am

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:

April 11, 2012 at 10:11 am

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:

April 11, 2012 at 10:19 am

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:

April 11, 2012 at 12:59 pm

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:

April 11, 2012 at 5:05 pm

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.

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:

April 23, 2012 at 3:12 am

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.