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How God Became King: Part Two (Adjustment)
In the next part of Wright’s new book (4-stars) he reaches for the metaphor of a sound system whose speakers are in serious need of adjustment. While reading the Gospels, the Church has tended to turn the volume down on some speakers, up on others and nearly off on yet others still. The result has been a distortion of the beauty that is meant to ring through the beautiful and true message of the Gospels.
Turn Up Israel’s Story
After assessing the problem we face, a misreading of the Gospels, Wright directs us into an adjustment of sorts by taking us through the Gospels one book at a time. He wants to draw attention to the importance of the story of Israel for the Gospel writers and reminds us that if Israel’s story is important for them, it should be for us as well. Of particular interest is Wright’s continued insistence in the Exile motif at this junction. This view that he holds to is still widely contested but for Wright it is absolutely essential to get it right and to understand that first century Jews believed they were still in Exile and that the Messiah would come and deliver them.
So to this end – in chapter four – he talks about Daniels seventy-weeks – “a jubilee of jubilee’s” if you will – and connects it directly to Matthew’s genealogy list where the Gospel writer structures Jesus’s genealogy into three fourteen generations (14 x 3 = 42) with Jesus being the last (totalling 49, a la Daniel’s seventy-weeks). I agree with my friend Drew, that when we think about this type of math it does seem that Wright is stretching things a bit, looking for any under-the-rock evidence connecting to key Exile-related numbering systems. But maybe Wright is correct here. Maybe we are just not thinking “Jewishly enough”. Perhaps for a first century Jew, Matthew’s point would not have gone unnoticed. I can’t say for sure, but Wright does present an interesting case.
Turn Down These Two Speakers
Many Christians will find Wright’s next adjustment somewhat shocking. He says that the next two speakers have been turned up way too loud, thus making the Gospel writers more subtle points nearly impossible to hear.
Yes “JESUS IS GOD!” But…
As he touched on earlier, the Church has been obsessed with proving the deity of Christ and reading the Gospels as if that (and perhaps some moral teaching stuff) is all they had to say. Wright says, YES THERE IS A GOD, YES JESUS IS GOD (reflecting the volume of this emphasis), but the screaming of some points has drowned out the more subtle emphasis of the Gospels, not that Jesus is God (though he is), but that God has dwelt among us. Jesus did not do things to prove that he is God, he did things to show us what God is up to. It’s also been custom in the Church Tradition to read “JESUS IS GOD!” as simply an answer to Genesis 3, and to skip over, almost complete, the story of Israel. Yes Jesus is God, but he’s not just any old god, he’s Israel’s God. In fact, the main point of this whole chapter is to further what he said in Simply Jesus to remind us that the story of Jesus is more than just the story of Israel, the story of Jesus is the story of Israel’s God.
Yes, the Gospels are for the Church, But…
The second speaker that has been turned up way to loud is the one that emphasizes the Gospels as simply reflecting the life of the early Church. They have no real connection to Israel and are rather merely a reflection of the crisis’ that arose in those early days. Each Gospel writer, it is said, wrote to a specific audience to address a specific issue. They’re also read, then, as providing the early Church a proper moral compass, via the life of Christ. From the liberal point of view, this is why the Church made up a fictitious Jesus and filled his mouth with words and his hands with actions, things he said and did that he never actually said and did.
The truth is, says Wright; the Gospels are the Churches foundational documents, but primarily in the sense that they tell “the story of the launching of God’s renewed people” (emphasis original). But it’s not right to think of Jesus’ mission as one of “founding the church” because, as Wright points out, there already was a people of God.
Turned Off, Unplugged and Placed in an Attic
The first speaker, says Wright, was turned down too low and the second two were turned up way too high. But the fourth speaker, he goes on, “has often not merely been turned down, but never switched on in the first place. Maybe, to extend the metaphor, it’s even worse; maybe the speaker needs to be retrieved from its lonely spot in the attic, dusted off, put in its place, and plugged in.”
What speaker could Wright be talking about? Well, that precise speaker that speaks of the clash of the Kingdoms. Not some secondary, subsidiary, incidental clash, but an actual clash of the Empire of Caesar with the Kingdom of God. Explicit. Intentional.
For Wright there can be no doubt about it. It is especially clear, he seems to think, for anyone who embraces the notion that the true gospel is understood as the story of Jesus as fulfillment of Israel’s story. For Wright, that is a direct corollary to the notion that Jesus and his followers consciously pitted the Kingdom of God against the Empire of Caesar. (This must make Scot McKnight’s view ironic to N.T. Wright. McKnight passionately affirmed the first – that the gospel is Jesus’ story as fulfillment of Israel’s story – while rejecting the latter. )
Wright then sets about to make an impassioned case for the explicit conflict between the Kingdom of God and the Empire of Caesar in the Gospel’s:
“But, you say, surely Caesar is only mentioned once in the gospels, and there Jesus says that there’s a clear division between God and Caesar, a split of church and state, so that never the twain shall meet. Well, not so fast. We’ll get to that. It sounds suspiciously modern. Did Jesus really anticipate post-Enlightenment Western ideology so exactly? And the objection is forgetting, in any case, the wonderful passage in John 18-19 (to which also we shall return), in which Jesus, representing God’s kingdom, confronts Pilate, representing Caesar’s. They go at it together, arguing about kingdom, truth, and power until Pilate proves Jesus’s point by having him executed with the words “King of the Jews” above his head. And once we recognize that confrontation for what it is – part of the very climax of John’s astonishing gospel – there is more. Much more.” (p.135)
He goes on, in the allotted time, to build a wonderful case for the clash of the Kingdoms, not by appealing to some obscure verse here or there, but by tackling large portions of each of the Gospels and mixing them with the times and context of Israel’s own his(story). The confrontation of God and Caesar is a final corollary to the confrontation of God and Babel, or perhaps more explicitly, God and Egypt. Each case, as much as they have a spiritual element, have an explicitly physical one too.
In the end Wright’s point is that “the four gospel writers, each in his own way, tell the story of Jesus as the story of the new and ultimate exodus. What our present fourfold exercise has done is to draw out the various dimensions of that new exodus and to highlight their significance.” (p.153)
All of this delivers us through the corridors of the main arteries and directly into the heart of Wright’s book: “the explosive combination of the kingdom and the cross.” – Part 3…
Tagged Book Review, How God Became King, N.T. Wright
How God Became King: Part One (The Problem)
In How God Became King (4-stars) N.T. Wright takes up the problem he introduced in Simply Jesus and carries it to the next level. There Wright addresses the problem the Church has made of assuming ‘the gospel’ equals ‘justification by faith’ which seems to have little or nothing to do with the actual Gospels. He attempted to show us in Simply Jesus that the Gospels tell the gospel and that the gospel, proper, is the Story of Jesus. Now, in How God Became King, Wright goes a step further: the Story of Jesus is actually about another story, the story of how God became King (see here for how I think McKnight and Wright diverge on emphasis at precisely this point).
How Tradition Distorted The Gospel Message
The first two chapters play off each other in a way. The first shows how the gospel became distorted early on in the great Western Christian Tradition in large part do to the emphasis laid down in the Creeds and then later again by the Reformers. In both cases emphasis is laid upon the Birth, Death, Resurrection and (sometimes) Ascension of Jesus, leaving out complete everything in between; the life of Jesus, his mission in action and word and how the rest should be interpreted along through it’s lens.
The Liberal and Social Movement Did No Better
The second chapter then takes a look at how since the 18th century Jesus’ humanity, his actual life, was emphasized at the expense of what the Gospels actually had to say regarding those good things that the Creeds and Reformers did emphasize; the Birth, Death, Resurrection and (sometimes) Ascension of Jesus. Instead, Jesus became a social activist. His primary message, unrelated to all of that other stuff we find in the Gospels, is to care for the poor, the downtrodden, the prostitute, sinner and so on. Sliding along a bit from this Liberal Christian movement of the eighteenth century, but still keeping within this category are those Wright calls the “devout Christians” (as opposed to the Liberal’s he referred to as the “less devout Christians”). The social gospel movement that carries on today, that emphasizes what Jesus did and said in regards to the poor without necessarily rejecting the Creeds, but certainly downplaying them as if they weren’t really all that important. The problem with the social gospel movement, says Wright, is that while emphasizing many of Jesus’ apparent social concerns (such as “what you did it unto the least of these…”) and deemphasizing his more doctrinally laden ones (“the Son of Man came to… give his life as a ransom…”), the world since the birth of the social gospel movement has not really gotten any better. The social gospel, on it’s own, is not really the answer to the world’s problems.
Six Inadequate Christian Answers
In his third chapter Wright explores the six answers a devout Christian might give today to the question: what do you suppose all of that middle stuff – the stuff between Jesus’ birth and the cross – was written down for? They are: 1) to tell us how to get to heaven; 2) to teach us how to live an ethical life; 3) to give us Jesus’ example to follow; 4) to show us that Jesus was perfect, thus qualifying him as the ‘perfect sacrifice’; 5) to give us stories to identify with; and perhaps the most common answer would be, 6) to prove the divinity of Jesus. All – or most, at least – of these answers have a grain of truth to them, but they fall short of being what the Gospel’s are all about. The last point will make a good example: the early Creeds were written apologetically to defend the deity of Christ as were the apologetic writings of the eighteenth century to this day in many circles. Gnostics denied the union of the Father and the Son and eighteenth century modernists denied anything resembling miracles. In response Christians turned to the Gospels and sought to defend the miracles of Jesus so that, by default, his miraculous acts would bolster the Christian claim to his deity. That is, the Gospels have been routinely read as if their main point were to prove that Jesus is God. That’s all fine and dandy, but was that the message that the gospel writers themselves wanted to communicate? The flat out answer is no. The gospel writers didn’t seek to prove Jesus’ divinity at all, they assumed it and wanted to make other points.
Wright says that some people today say that the point of the middle stuff was to show us, through Jesus, what God is really like. He says “that is a bit more like it”, but it still falls short of the actual intent of the gospel message. The point of the middle stuff isn’t just to show us God (be it God’s character or otherwise), but more precisely, it was written to show us what God is up to. He says that people have come to the Gospels with the wrong questions, and they found answers to those questions, but that doesn’t help us understand what the actual message of the Gospels is, which should be our goal. We need to begin, he says, by admitting our misunderstanding and then seek a fresh reading.
For that, we’ll have to turn our attention to part two…
Tagged How God Became King, N.T. Wright
Another Silly Customer Story: Heaven
A customer was browsing our store recently and as she was passing by an end cap displaying Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven she said, “Ooh, another story of someone who went to Heaven?” as she took it off the shelf and began to read the back. “No”, I said. “It’s a book about heaven, but Alcorn has not gone there himself.” “Eww” she said as she promptly repositioned the book on the shelf. ”Why would anybody want to read a book about Heaven written by someone who hasn’t even been there?”
No joke. She actually did just say that.
Although her question was meant to be rhetorical, I decided to answer it anyways. “Well because in those other books people will tell you that they went to heaven, but in Alcorn’s book you will find out what the Bible actually says on the subject”.
“Oh“, she snarled, “there’s that.” Conversation ended.
Ya, there’s that. You know. This little thing we Protestants like to call sola scriptura. My concern – and desire – is not to pick on this one customer, but to observe a growing trend among conservative evangelicals. When books like 90 Minutes in Heaven and Heaven is For Real rise to the top of Bestseller charts in North America, and sustain their presence there, while those very same buyers avoid books like Alcorn’s Heaven or Wright’s Surprised by Hope, there’s a problem. A serious problem.
Tagged Heaven, Heaven is For Real, N.T. Wright, Randy Alcorn
Simply Jesus by N.T. Wright (In Review)
Simply Jesus: Who He Was, What He Did, Why It Matters
By N.T. Wright
4 Stars (out of 5)
I’ve read many books on the gospel recently and what makes this one unique is that it is a presentation of the gospel, and explanation of the gospel, without the word “gospel” in the title. It’s a book about the historical Jesus, and that’s just the point. It’s not a book about justification by faith, it’s not a book about the Roman’s Road to Salvation, it is a book about Jesus Messiah, and that is what makes it a book about the gospel.
Simply Jesus – a book with virtually no footnotes – is the sum of N.T. Wright’s mind on Jesus, who he was, what he did and why it matters, written with a broad evangelical audience in mind. It opens up by stating fairly early on a problem which Wright means to counter. He says that the church has:
“reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.” (p.5)
Playing off of the “Perfect Storm” metaphor, the perfect storm which the Gospels tell about is the collision of the Western winds of empire, “that was the gale: the first element in the perfect storm at whose centre Jesus of Nazareth found himself”, colliding with the Eastern winds of “the story of Israel as Jesus’ contemporaries perceived it and believed themselves to be living in it” which together collided with the third element of the perfect storm, the hurricane, which is God himself who is the one unpredictable element of the Jewish story (on Palm Sunday, 2011, Wright delivered this main premise in a sermon at the University Chapel of St Salvator, St Andrews).
N.T. Wright says, “only when we reflect on that combination [empire, Israel and the Kingdom of God] do we begin to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death.” (p.39)
Some of the main points in this book are:
- The message of the gospel is primarily a message about the kingdom of God, Jesus’ primary message, not just in words but in his deeds also, was that – to use Wright’s terminology – “God is in charge now, and this is what it looks like”.
- This message was subversive and threatening to the political powers of the first century, “announcing that God was becoming king, they [Roman and Jewish authorities] would smell trouble at once” (p.69). “The book of Daniel [which Jesus alluded to in his own actions and message] was designed to be subversive, to act as ‘resistance literature’ to help Jews as they face persecution. Jesus seems to have designed his parables a bit like that too.” (p.92)
- This was a message about “creation and covenant”: that the creator God – Israel’ God – was finally delivering on his covenant promise by arriving to set up his kingdom (in an unpredictable way of course)
- The great Christian creeds – for all of their good – did us a terrible disservice. They read the Gospels in a way that suggested that their primary purpose was to prove the divinity of Jesus. This had the adverse effect of suppressing the primary message of Jesus – not just his death and resurrection, but his life and actions and what they meant – which was all about God’s kingdom.
- Throughout this book we see the usual emphasis of the exodus and exile motifs; “When he was talking about God taking charge, he was talking about a new Exodus (p.66)
- Jesus was the embodiment of the Temple, “Jesus seems to be claiming that God is doing, up close and personal through him, something that you’d normally expect to happen at the Temple. And the Temple – the successor to the tabernacle in the desert – was, as we saw, the place where heaven and earth met.” (p.79)
- Jesus is compared in his context to other would-be kings of Israel at that time (in the chapter titled “The Kingdom Present and Future”). In this context Jesus is shown to believe that “God’s kingdom was already a present reality and that it would be settled by a great event that would shortly happen.” (p.117)
- Of particular interest in this book is how N.T. Wright does not shy away from Jesus’ regular workings of miracles or his spiritual warfare. “Jesus defined the great coming battle, so that it would no longer be a military battle of us against them” (p.128) because “the battle Jesus was fighting was against the satan” (p.120). In this discussion he offers this much needed advice today: “As C.S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to the reality. I’m with Lewis on this.” (p.121)
- Wright shows how Jesus redefined where God dwells in an interesting discussion on “Space, Time, and Matter”, and shows how all three converge on his very being. (p.132 ff.)
- The point of Jesus’ words, “It is finished” in John 19:30 is not to say that he has now rescued people from creation, rather it was to echo God’s sentiments at the end of day six of the creation account so as to mean, by “it is finished” that creation itself is rescued.
- The meaning of Easter is obvious: “This is the real beginning of the Kingdom”.
- Wright – not wanting to be accused of downplaying any significant parts of the Jesus Story – spends some time on what the ascension means (which is something Protestants are good at ignoring and the Orthodox are good at reminding us of that fact). “His ascension tells us that he is now running [the world]” (p.195). It is interesting how Luke tells the story of the ascension itself in a way as to be politically charged and explicitly anti-imperial (p.197).
- Wright also – of course – turns to a discussion on the second coming, and one of the first thing he says is: “don’t believe everything you read about the Rapture. In fact, don’t believe most of what you read about the Rapture.” (p.199) What Wright does not do however is outline a second coming theory at all.
- To round things out Wright answers the “now what?” question. Jesus is King, so what? Well, everything actually. In this final section he talks about what it means to evangelize. Why it matters to highlight Jesus’ life in our teaching and thinking about our faith. Our goal is not to get people to ask Jesus into their heart (a concept foreign to the scriptures), but to carry on Jesus’ exact message! That is, Jesus’ message – the gospel – was about the kingdom of God, and that is supposed to be our message too!
- We are delegates. This is an important part to understanding our vocation. In Genesis the means by which God chose to would rule the world was through humans, and according to Wright, that hasn’t changed. In fact, that is still the same today. When we ask in what way God wants to run the world the answer is “the delegation of God’s authority, of Jesus’ authority, to human beings”. (p.212).
If you ask me if this book is worth is, my answer: of course!
The quotable Wright:
“The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be “orthodox” or “conservative” Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract “atonement” that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it.” ~ p.173.
“When he wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal” ~ p.180
Tagged N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus
Mark 2: Heaven Meets Earth In “You Are Forgiven”
Mark 2 tells the story of Jesus preaching at his home to a packed out house when some people came carrying a crippled man to be healed. You know the story well. The men were unable to get the man in the room so they have to lower him through the roof. When Jesus saw him he said, “My son, your sins are forgiven” and this resulted in the sharp criticism by the scribes that “only God can forgive sins”.
Like you I have heard this passage preached on numerous occasions with all of the usual points drawn out appropriately (as Jesus goes on to heal the man, thus proving his authority to both heal and forgiven, et cetera).
But in reading Simply Jesus, N.T. Wright does what he does best by drawing out something significant and often overlooked from an all too familiar passage.
“We shouldn’t skip the stages in that implicit argument (that only God forgives sins). How does God normally forgive sins within Israel? Why, through the Temple and the sacrifices that take place there. Jesus seems to be claiming that God is doing, up close and personal through him, something that you’d normally expect to happen at the Temple. And the Temple – the successor to the tabernacle in the desert – was, as we saw, the place where heaven and earth met. It was the place where God lived. Or, more precisely, the place on earth where God’s presence intersected with human, this-worldly reality”. (p.80)
Tagged N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus
The Tension of God’s “In-Charge-Ness”
Wright believes that first century Jews held to the view that, yes, God is in charge, and yet in all sorts of ways God was not in charge.
“Yes, of course, in one sense the average first-century Jew did believe that Israel’s God was already in charge. But she or he also knew, with every bone and breath, that there were all sorts of ways in which God was not in charge – otherwise why was the world such a mess? Why were God’s people, the Jews, in such trouble? Why were ruthless, coarse, blaspheming foreigners running the show? Why were the Jewish leaders themselves such a corrupt lot? And why – in the middle of it all – is my child so sick? Why is my mother crippled? Why did the soldiers kill my son, my cousin, my husband?” (Simply Jesus, p.59)
I got into a discussion with someone the other day who was so confident that God is so universally in charge that we should take comfort in this fact no matter what. She said this is what she got from William Young’s “The Shack”. What she meant was this: if you are in a plane don’t worry, God is in charge. He will either 1) keep you safe to your destination or 2) take care of your family if you die in that plane. But I don’t know how this way of thinking about God’s “in-charge-ness” is supposed to bring comfort. So I pressed her on this thinking. When Nazi soldiers raped a little girl before gouging out her eyeballs and then leaving her on the ground for dead, all the while forcing her mother to watch, “was God in charge” of that situation?
Not surprisingly she didn’t understand my question.
See I hold with Wright this tension of God’s in-charge-ness. I hold that in some sense God is in charge. But I also believe that in all sorts of ways God is not in charge. I cannot for the life of me understand people who make the universal and unqualified statement that God is always in charge. If God is the God he says he is, then why is the world so messed up? No, we need to qualify God’s in-charge-ness. We need to be sure that we are not giving pad answers to tough questions. And if you don’t want to think about what it might look like to qualify God’s in-charge-ness, then we need to allow for the tension that while he is in charge in some sense, in all sorts of other ways he is not.
In fact, this is the point of Jesus’ central message. Announcing that “the Kingdom of God is at hand” is another way of saying, “God’s in-charge-ness is right around the corner”. To say that the Kingdom of God is at hand or to pray for that Kingdom to come or for God’s will to be done is Jesus’ clear rebuttal to our comfortable pad answer Christian notion that God is always in charge. If God is always and already in charge, why pray for that Kingdom to come? It would already be here. Why pray for God’s will to be done? Wouldn’t that be assumed?
Tagged N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus
N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight and the Gospel: Compared and Contrasted
At first glance it appears that Scot McKnight’s gospel proposal in his recent book, The King Jesus Gospel, is very much “Wrightian”. But the more I reflected on what McKnight had to say, and the more I perused much of what Wright says throughout his work, the wider a contrast between the two developed. These two scholars have many points of agreement though, and so much so that it may be suggested that McKnight’s gospel proposal was an outworking of Wright’s influence on his thinking. But Scot is a superb scholar in his own right, so it might simply be suggested that his understanding of the gospel developed independent of Wright, whom he sources simply as a scholar in agreement.
Areas of Agreement
1. What the Gospel Is Not
One of the premises of The King Jesus Gospel is that “We evangelicals (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with the word salvation… but these two words don’t mean the same thing” (p.29), he goes on to emphasize this distinction: “[T]his Plan of Salvation is not the gospel” (p.39). This is precisely the point N.T. Wright makes throughout much of his work. In What Saint Paul Really Said? Wright repeatedly makes this same point: “[the gospel] is not, then, a system of how people get saved” (p.10), “Paul’s gospel was not a doctrine of how to get saved” (p.90), “the gospel is not an account of how people get saved” (p.133).
Another thing that McKnight says the gospel is not is “justification by faith”. He examines John Piper’s question “Did Jesus preach Paul’s gospel?” and by that he says “Piper’s assumption is that justification is the gospel” and that Calvinist thinking among evangelicals “has defined the gospel in the short formula “justification by faith”. To this McKnight replies, “When we can find hardly any instances of our favorite theological category in the whole of the four Gospels, we need to be wary of how important our own interpretations and theological favorites are.” (p.25). But that is just about everything McKnight had to say about justification by faith not being the gospel. One page. In stark contrast but also in clear agreement, Wright says more or less the same thing, only to a much greater extent. Again in What Saint Paul Really Said? he writes, “For Paul, ‘the gospel’ creates the church; ‘justification’ defines it” (p.151), “I must stress again that the doctrine of justification by faith is not what Paul means by ‘the gospel’” (p.132), “I have already indicated that [justification] cannot be put right at the centre, [of the gospel] since that place is already taken by the person of Jesus himself, and the gospel announcement of his sovereign kingship.” (p.114).
2. What the Gospel Is
After clearing the debris of what the gospel is not, these two scholars more or less also agree on what the gospel is (though, as we’ll see in a moment, McKnight’s understand of what the gospel is is minimalistic compared to Wright). To put it simply, McKnight says the gospel is “declaring the Story of Israel as resolved in the Story of Jesus” (p.79). Period. To further explain he writes, “[t]he gospel Story of Jesus Christ is a story about Jesus as Messiah, Jesus as Lord, Jesus as Savior, and Jesus as Son.” (p.55). “The gospel for the apostle Paul is the salvation-unleashing Story of Jesus, Messiah-Lord-Son, that brings to completion the Story of Israel as found in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. To ‘gospel’ is to declare this story, and it is a story that saves people from their sins. That story is the only framing story if we want to be apostolic in how we present the gospel. We can frame the ‘gospel’ with other stories or categories, but there is one holy and apostolic story, and it is the Story of Israel. That is the apostolic framing story of the gospel” (p.61). In What Saint Paul Really Said? Wright says that “[t]he gospel is, then, the announcement about Jesus” (p.157), “[the gospel is] the proclamation of the lordship of Jesus Christ” (p.133). “The gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus” (p.45). “The good news [according to the prophets] would be the message that the long-awaited release from captivity was at hand” (p.43).
And both scholars emphasize our need to bring the resurrection in the gospel discussion, not just the crucifixion. McKnight writes, “The cross gospel requires a resurrection gospel…. Apart from resurrection the cross remains nothing more than an instrument of torture and suffering” (p.89) and “We need to recover more of that early, emboldened Christian resurrection gospel” (p.132).” In his recent book, Justification, Wright more or less makes the same point: “Paul does of course highlight the saving death of Jesus when he is giving his thumbnail sketch of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8. But it is interesting that in the two crucial passages where he speaks of the faith of the Christian as embodying the faith spoken of in the Old Testament – Romans 4:23-25 and Romans 10:6-11 – it is the resurrection that takes center stage. This is not, of course, an either-or. The resurrection remains the resurrection of the crucified one, and its significance is not least that it signals that the cross was a victory, not a defeat (1 Corinthians 15:17)” (p.247).
And both scholars see 1 Corinthians 15 as a key summary text of the gospel (though, again as we’ll see in a moment, Scot takes a minimalistic approach here compared to Wright). McKnight writes: “The best place to begin is the one place in the entire New Testament where someone actually comes close to defining the word gospel. First Corinthians 15 is that place” (p.46, – emphasis mine). While per-capita it seems McKnight spends much more time in 1 Corinthians 15 as a gospel definition text than Wright, still Wright would agree that this passage is a summary gospel text. In Justification he refers to this text as “one of Paul’s summaries of the gospel (1 Corinthians 15:3)” (p.105 – notice Wright says “one of” in contrast to Scot’s “the one place”).
Areas of Disagreement
In the forward to McKnight’s book Wright says that McKnights proposal is so massive “that I doubt whether any of his colleagues, and certainly not this writer, will at once agree with every detail. We will want to nuance some things differently, to highlight other points, or to emphasize other angles” (p.12, italics mine). The following is where I believe Wright would do just that.
What Saint Paul Really Said? was published back in 1997, and in this controversial little piece of work Wright has a chapter titled “Herald of the King”. It is in the opening portions of this chapter that Scot McKnight quotes from at the start of his book. Ironically much of what Wright goes on to say in this chapter McKnight explicitly rejects in his book, and other things he says McKnight ignores. The first is the pagan context of the word “gospel” and the second is its exile motif. I’m going to put the exile motif aside for the time being because it could be argued that since the exile motif is a part of Israel’s Story, that it is implied in McKnight’s statement that the gospel “is the Story of Israel resolved in the Story of Jesus”. Because McKnight doesn’t draw any attention to this important theme as it relates to the gospel, it is difficult to tell if he rejects it or accepts it.
Wright points out that some scholars see “the gospel” strictly in terms of a Jewish or Israel (Isaiah prophecies) term while others see it as having a broader cultural connotation, and he says that this is based on false “either/or”. But McKnight falls into the category of the first. He doesn’t deny that ‘the gospel’ may have had political consequences, but he does reject the idea that Paul (or anyone else) used the term intentionally to be subversive. In other words, to Wright’s mind, Scot is one of those scholars to propagate the false antithesis.
Scot’s new book, The King Jesus Gospel, was published last month (September 2011) and it is a cool irony that Wrights new book, Simply Jesus, was published just last week (October 2011). It is before me while I type, and in it he affirms precisely the same point he made all those years ago:
“The message was carved in stone, on monuments and in inscriptions, around the known world: “Good news! We have an Emperor! Justice, Peace, Security, and Prosperity are ours forever! The Son of God has become King of the World!… ‘Augustus Tiberius Caesar, son of the Divine Augustus.’ On the reverse is a picture of Tiberius dressed as a priest, with the title pontifex maximus. It was a coin like this one that they showed to Jesus of Nazareth, a day or two after he had ridden into Jerusalem… After all, as the propaganda insisted, the rule of Caesar, the Roman ‘son of god,’ was the ‘good news’ that had brought blessings and benefits to the whole world.” (Simply Jesus, p.30)
For Wright, the only way to make sense of Jesus and his mission – i.e. ‘the gospel’ – is to reflect on the combination of “the cold might of empire and the overheated aspiration of Israel” (p.39).
Israel’s Story is important and Wright spends a lot of time in it, but it is not the only angle by which we look at the term “the gospel” in the first century and ask what was going on.
For McKnight, “No matter how much I’m personally inclined to want this set of ideas to be true, I’m not convinced the anti-imperial theme was as conscious to the apostles as some are suggesting. I would prefer to see the apostles just come out and say it… to proclaim the gospel entails that Caesar – in whatever guise such an autocrat presents himself – is not. But to claim the gospel was intentionally subversive stretches the evidence.” (p.144)
Another aspect of this discussion where it appears they disagree has to do with God himself. Again I believe this is where McKnight is being minimalistic. It’s not that McKnight outright rejects what I’m about to show you that Wright says about the gospel, rather it is that McKnight – because his view of ‘the gospel’ is so minimal, “Jesus’s Story as the fulfillment of Israel’s Story” and nothing more or less – doesn’t even address it. It is perhaps this very point – that McKnight makes the gospel a message about Jesus rather than a message about God – that he also misses the imperial connection as well.
“We have studied Paul’s ‘gospel’, and have seen that underneath his regular formulae (‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ and so on) there is a carefully worked out sequence of thought, an implicit story-line, which when properly understood reveals that he both remained totally rooted in his Jewish world and was aiming his message directly at the principalities and powers of the Roman world, from Caesar downwards. Ultimately, though, this message was not simply a message about Jesus. Everything he said about Jesus was, for him, a way of talking about God.” (What Saint Paul Really Said? p.57)
I’m inclined to agree with Wright that there are more things going on – and more things meant by ‘the gospel’ – then Scot allows for. Without minimizing the centrality of Jesus’ Story as the fulfillment of Israel’s Story it is imperative to note that Israel’s Story exists as an answer to Adam’s Story and that Story is really a Story about God and about creation and about a fall and about idolatry and about earthly rulers and political leaders and false god’s and the ‘good news’ proclaimed that these other rulers are the “son of god” who bring peace to the world and that through the meeting of the Isaiah prophecies of the “herald of good tidings” that the exile – not just Israel’s exile, but the Exile of humanity – was coming to an end, that this same herald of good tidings proclaimed by the apostles that “ultimately, for the Roman point of view, there was only one Lord of the world. According to Paul, he now had a rival” (What Saint Paul Really Said? p.56)
Church Diversity: Why Piper Does Not Go Far Enough
Christianity Today recently published an excerpt from John Piper’s forthcoming book, “Bloodlines”. The article was titled “John Piper: I Was Racist” and as near as I can tell, it is the book’s introduction. Now this is an important observation to make because most often when someone writes a book the question becomes, ‘what qualifies this person to write on this subject?’ To answer this question by way of introduction, Piper launches into his own biographical back-story of how he went from being a self-professed racist to, well, not being racist any more.
For the most part I found the article quite good. He shares how merely 90 years before his birth South Carolina had a population that was 60% black, almost all of which were slaves. He comments how the whites had justified the “noble spirit of Southern slaveholders by pointing to how nice they were to their slaves, and how deep the affections were, and how they even attended each other’s personal celebrations.” He explains how when he was a child how in South Carolina segregation was all but absolute and even the church he was raised in refused to allow blacks into its pews.
“In 1962 my home church voted not to allow blacks into the services. The rationale, as I remember, was that in the heated context of the civil rights era, the only reason blacks would want to be there would be political, which is not what church is for.”
So as the slaveholders came up with a rational for slavery, so Piper’s own church of his youth came up with a rational for segregation.
Today Piper frowns down on both rationales.
He describes the event in his senior year of Bible College where he experienced an “awakening from the sinful oblivion of racism”. It happened during a missionary conference in which the missionary Warren Webster was asked how he would feel if his daughter married a Pakistani. Webster replied in force: “Better a Christian Pakistani than a godless white American!” Up to this point Piper opposed racial-intermarriage.
With such assumptions now shattered Piper turned to the scriptures to see what they say about interracial marriage. In seminary he did research and wrote a paper concluding “the Bible does not oppose or forbid interracial marriages but sees them as a positive good for the glory of Christ.” Despite receiving an A- on the paper, his professor at the time wrote in the margins: “It is extremely hard to see the positive effect of specific interracial marriage.” To this Piper writes:
“His hesitancy to give a wholehearted affirmation to the goodness of interracial marriage was rooted in his desire not to minimize the struggle for the intrinsic worth of authentic black identity.”
To this reason too Piper frowns upon.
Pause and Notice a Pattern
Before we go further we need to observe a pattern implicit within Piper’s narrative. First observe how the slaveholders provided a justifiable reason for slavery and how that reason seems revolting to us today (the reason given: slaves and their masters had good relationships). Second observe how the church of Piper’s youth provided a justifiable reason for segregation and how that reason is a terrible reason, yet more “spiritual” than the first (the reason given: blacks attending predominantly white churches were making a political statement thus distracting the worship and hindering the body of Christ). Clearly that is a terrible reason, but it seems more spiritual than the first. Thirdly observe how Piper’s seminary professor has provided a justifiable reason for not wholeheartedly affirming interracial marriage that seems to be out of concern for the black community and how that reason still seems unjustifiable to us today (the reason given: interracial marriages “minimize” intrinsic worth of authentic black identity).
In other words, with each new era the justifiable reasons seem to get “better” and more “spiritual” while the offense is lessened.
Observe How Piper Perpetuates This Pattern
Now that we’ve made that observation, let’s move on. While a hundred and fifty years ago the issue was slavery, eighty years ago the issue was segregation, fourty years ago the issue was interracial marriage. Today’s issue – it seems from the article – is racial diversity within the body of Christ.
Sadly, this is where John Piper falls apart in this article (in my opinion). Because rather than advocating racial diversity within the body of Christ he seems to follow in the pattern set out in the article. That is, while the “offense” seems lessened (lack of diversity in Church today is certainly not as offensive as outright segregation or slavery!), the justifiable reason he gives seems more spiritual than all that have come before. He has justified his reasons for not advocating racial diversity by creating a false “either/or”. He has done this by staking out his position as the “gospel” position, while subjugating racial diversity in the body of Christ under the rubric of “worldly matters”.[1] (For an explanation of this observation, see the footnote.)
His reason for taking this route is because he has to admit that he has not been a “successful multiethnic leader” and then try and justify that fact in light of his writing of this new book. So to do this he has to convince his readers (most of whom will no doubt be convinced) that he has been given a “higher” calling; that his mission is not to be a “successful multiethnic leader” because he has been called to “writ[e] books [and] carr[y] on a wider speaking ministry”. And all of this is rooted in a particular understanding of the “gospel”; and Piper’s understanding of the gospel comes out clearest in his final paragraph:
“I believe that the gospel—the good news of Christ crucified in our place to remove the wrath of God and provide forgiveness of sins and power for sanctification—is our only hope for the kind of racial diversity and harmony that ultimately matters.”
Let me unpack that a little for you. For Piper the gospel amounts to Christ’ substitutionary atonement and our heavenly destiny. In other words, all of this – for Piper – amounts to personal salvation climaxing in our floating about in heaven in the sweet by and by where there will be peoples from every nation and tribe on earth (note his reference in that quote to “racial diversity and harmony that ultimately matters”). Racial diversity in this world doesn’t really – at least it doesn’t ultimately – matter. So aside from getting saved, what we do on this earth has no “ultimate” consequences.
Now for those of you who are aware of the controversy between Piper and Wright not long ago are all too aware of where this is going. N.T. Wright has been advocating a Gospel that is larger than you and I. He has been advocating a Christian ethic that opposes the false dichotomy between heaven and earth. He has been preaching a message that is world-changing. It starts here and now. It starts with your neighbor and your churches neighborhood. It’s a Gospel that says what you do in the here and now really does have eternal consequences. As the saying goes, “heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world”.
Now Piper, in his next comment following the last quote, makes a startling turn:
“If we abandon the fullness of the gospel to make racial and ethnic diversity quicker or easier, we create a mere shadow of the kingdom, an imitation.”
But who’s advocating for an abandoning of the gospel “to make racial and ethnic diversity quicker and easier”? He has created a false dichotomy here and set up a strawman to do it.. It is not “either/or” but rather “both/and”. Piper’s idea of “the fullness of the gospel” boils down to personal salvation with a heavenly destiny. That’s not full. That is a rather impoverished view of the gospel. The Gospel of Jesus is much larger than that. The Gospel of Jesus Christ – in its fullness and glory – includes the breakdown of all racial and ethnic barriers in this world.[2]
If the Gospel is not having that kind of effect in our churches and communities, it is not the fullness of the Gospel.
In my opinion, John Piper has come a long way, but he has not gone far enough. Like those who opposed the abolition, like those who opposed integration, like those who oppose interracial marriage, so now with those who place on the back burner racial diversity in our churches, John Piper has come up with a “spiritual” justification for not going far enough.
[1] Piper’s concluding statement is a quote from Luke 9:25 except that he replaces the phrase “whole world” with “complete diversity”. The implication is clear. In the context of the article “complete diversity” means “racial diversity” of a local church that reflects its community. For Piper, vying for racial diversity in the church is tantamount to exchanging to gospel for the world.
[2] See Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11
Tagged John Piper, N.T. Wright
The “Wright” Translation
By now word is getting around quick. I wanted to wait until after Easter to post on a non-Easter themed subject. I first read about this from Michael Bird’s blog who had heard about it from Mark Stevens.
Apparently N.T. Wright will be coming out with his own translation of the New Testament in November 2011. As Bird jokes, it’s not going to be called the N.T.W. Translation. According to the publisher, HarperOne, it is called “The Kings Version” (HT: Chorus of Echoes) which has an air of irony to it: Wright, an Anglican scholar from the people who brought us the King James Version; as if to say this translation is not dedicated to the King (or Queen) of England, but to the King of kings.
HarperOne’s discription of the new New Testament is as follows:
Most readers of the New Testament have grown overly familiar with the biblical text, losing sight of the wonder and breadth of its innovative ideas and world-changing teachings about the life and role of Jesus of Nazareth. Wright now offers an all-new English translation that allows us to encounter afresh these historic works. The original Greek text is vibrant, alive, and active, and Wright’s translation retains that spirit by providing a new English text for the twenty-first-century reader. At the same time, based on his work as a pioneering interpreter of the Bible, Wright also corrects other translations so as to provide more accurate representations of the original writers’ intent. (Here)
Wright has a commentary series called “For Everyone”. The layout is similar to many commentaries in that a portion of the biblical text is placed in the commentary followed by a commentary on that portion of the text. What makes Wright’s commentary unique (aside from the obvious that the the commentary is his commentary) is that the biblical text in Wright’s commentary is his own translation. So, of example, if you read Hebrews for Everyone you would get N.T. Wrights complete translation of the book of Hebrews within the commentary.
Using his commentaries they have put his translations into one volume and voilà, a New Testament.
As a side note: he’s also coming out with a new book on Jesus titled, Simply Jesus in September.
Tagged N.T. Wright
Jesus, Paul and the People of God (in Review) Part 1
Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue With N.T. Wright
Edited by Richard Hays & Picholas Perrin
4.5 Stars (out of 5)
Every year Wheaton College holds a theological conference usually consisting of several scholars on a particular – usually theologically “edgy” – topic. The papers presented at the conference are then typically published in a book the following year. Last year was the most attended conference to date and the reason for that is quite obvious and testifies to the extent of the influence of N.T. Wright.
The conference covered the span of two days and consisted of two topics respectively and thus the book was divided into two parts. For that reason this review will also be broken up into two parts. Today we will look at part 1 which is a critical assessment of N.T. Wright’s work on Jesus; tomorrow we’ll look at part 2, a critical assessment of Wright’s work on Paul.
Critiquing Wright’s Jesus:
Essay 1: Marianne Meye Thompson asks Tom why his opus magnum work on Jesus – Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG) – almost completely substantially ignores the Gospel of John.
Essay 2: Richard Hay’s asks a similar question as Thompson, but also focuses more specifically on another critique, namely, is Wright’s method of discovering the “real” Jesus – critical realism – really the way to go? Are Wright and Barth really that far apart in how the approach the historical Jesus?
Essay 3: Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh uniquely ask Wright if perhaps the historical Jesus has more to say about global economics then Wright allowed for in his previous work on Jesus.
Essay 4: Nicholas Perrin asks Wright if his emphasis of Jesus’ call of Israel to national repentance at the cost of under-emphasizing Jesus’ call for repentance from each and every person presents a proper balance of Jesus’ message?
Wright’s Response:
Wright calls Marianne’s paper “a quizzical piece” and disagrees with her assessment in many places. His portrayal of Jesus – relying mostly on the synoptic Gospels – is not that far from how John portrays Jesus. His reason for not using John’s Gospel as a primary source is because he had a particular liberal scholarship as his primary audience in mind.
“Had I brought John into the equation without comprehensive justification, my principal conversation partners would have ignored the book.” – p.63
To Richard Hays Wright defends his method of critical realism: “You have to read them [the Gospels] critically, but you have to be a realist as well. So: critical realism” [p.119] Wright does not want to find a Jesus “behind the Gospel”; his method takes the Gospel accounts seriously while rescuing Jesus from the ultra-conservatives who have invented a non-historical Jesus completely detached from his context and from the liberals whose approach to finding the “real Jesus” leads them to search for a Jesus “behind the Gospels” which results in a cut-and-paste approach to the scriptures.
To Keesmaat and Walsh Wright concedes the point about Jesus’ economics and how they might apply today. Jesus’ concern for the poor – as their primary example – is certainly a part of the Kingdom message which does not receive a prominent place in Wrights JVG in relation to our contemporary socio-economic world.
And finally, to Nicholas Perrin, Wright admits:
“I fully accept Nick’s point… I have been so used to seeing Jesus’ commands and warnings being reduced to the rather trivial moral challenges faced by young people in comfortable Western homes that I was determined, if I could, to draw out the much larger picture.” – p.113
Perrin’s critique was that Wright’s interpretation of “repentance” in the Gospel’s was of a national “meta-sin” involving the grand motifs of Exile and Restoration and mostly ignored the call for personal repentance. Wright agrees that “there was clearly plenty of ordinary, boring old sin going on too, and Jesus named and shamed it.”
Wright on Jesus:
Part one concludes with a fantastic essay by Wright on Jesus. If you are debating whether or not to get this book, this essay – as well as the last one on Paul in part two – make the book worth it’s dime!
The chapter is titled Whence and Whither Historical Jesus Studies in the Life of the Church? In this essay Wright moves from his typical “presentation mode” (where he presents his views and arguments) and beyond his recent defensive mode (having to defend his views against the neo-Reformed) and moves on the offensive.
“Rather than simply defending the project of the historical study of Jesus, I want to move on the attack.” – p.133
He “attacks” the de-historicizing of Jesus which has been pervasive throughout the history of the Church Tradition, focusing his attack on the emphasis in our Creeds on Jesus’ “Divinity and Humanity” at the expense of suppressing the central message of the Gospels (see here); and on the Churches separation of “Kingdom and Resurrection” and also on the Churches separation of “Kingdom and Cross”:
“With the apparent encouragement of the creeds, [many Christians] would be quite satisfied if Jesus of Nazareth had been born of a virgin and died on a cross and done nothing very much at all in between. That, they would assume, would be what canonical or traditional Christianity was all about. But the canon itself suggests otherwise.” – p.142
The problem is clear:
“Many kingdom theologies seem to have no place for the cross, and many atonement theologies, including “sound” evangelical ones, have no place for God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.” – p.144
This is a big part of the problem. Wright’s “big picture” approach to Jesus brings balance to the Gospel message by attempting to tie all of the threads together to reveal the full tapestry of the Gospel story – not just this or that bit. He criticizes books like one written “two or three years ago” which attempted to explain what the Bible says about the atonement which had a lot of the Old Testament and a lot of Paul, “but almost nothing about the Gospels.” (I could be wrong, but I wonder if the book he is referring to is Packer’s and Dever’s In My Place Condemned He Stood which seemed to me to do just that.)
What makes this chapter particularly good is its autobiographical telling. In it Wright shares how he came to read the Gospels as he does and what points along the way most impacted him.
Tagged N.T. Wright
