N.T. Wright Project

This week, my fellow scholars and I fell in love - or at least I did - with Tom Wright’s critical realist epistemology. By employing this term, Wright argues that the process of knowing something can be conceptualized as humans conversing with events within the context of story. An example might be in order. In writing this blog, I am not simply aware of typing on an object called a computer. I am, Wright would contend, a “story-telling human” interacting with an object in a “story-laden world” (New Testament and the People of God, p. 44). Thus, it is as one shaped by stories (e.g. the narratives of Scripture, political headlines, Tom Wright’s books), that I sit down to write at my personal computer. And as a story-shaped human, I have believed the advertising stories about the “personal” computer; I store pictures and write journal entries on it - it is mine.

But the question now becomes: what do stories have to do with politics? Everything! Wright observes that “stories of how things were in the Depression are used to fuel sympathy for the oppressed working class; stories of terrorism are used to justify present right-wing schemes…Stories thus provide a vital framework for experiencing the world. They also provide a means by which views of the world may be challenged“‘  (NTPG, p. 39, emphasis mine).

There has been a lot of conversation the past few years in my church communities concerning the importance of story.  It is true that we are told hundreds of stories every day through books, television, conversation, advertisements…and I have heard countless pastors and other writers and speakers acknowledging that fact and encouraging us to reclaim story for the church.  Most memorably in my experience, Donald Miller spoke at the Willow Creek Shift Student Ministry Conference in 2007 as a featured speaker, and the central theme of his message to thousands of youth pastors was the importance of story.   So when I picked up Tom Wright’s “New Testament and the People of God” and found him, once again, arguing the centrality of story, I wasn’t expecting to gain many new insights.  I’d heard it before, you know?  But the following passage (yes, I know it’s long…) has stuck with me as I’ve continued through my week.

“Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews.  Where head-on attack would certainly fail, the parable hides the wisdom of the serpent behind the innocence of the dove, gaining entrance and favour which can then be used to change assumptions which the hearer would otherwise keep hidden away for safety.  Nathan tells David a story about a rich man, a poor man, and a little lamb; David is enraged; and Nathan springs the trap.  Tell someone to do something, and you change their life-for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors.  Metaphor consists in bringing two set of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so.  Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again” (NTPG, p. 40, emphasis mine).

Drawing from our conversation earlier this week, here is the video camera analogy Tom sets forth to explain how history can never be ‘merely reporting the facts’, since history always includes interpretation:

“…even a video camera set up at random would not result in a completely ‘neutral’ perspective on events. It must be sited in one spot only; it will only have one focal length; it will only look in one direction. If in one sense the camera never lies, we can see that in another sense it never does anything else. It excludes far more than it includes.” (NTPG, 83)

He is not saying we can’t know what really happened or took place in the past, but that history is a much more dynamic process involving a back and forth exchange between the interpreter and the events. We not only see from a certain perspective, we are selective in what we see.

Thought it would be fitting to cut the ribbon of this blog with a quote from Tom:

“The world is out of tune with God, its maker. How and why that is so is a deep and dark mystery. At the heart of Jewish and Christian theology is the story of how God made a world distinct from himself, and how this world, tragically, has gone its own way. Now it is not merely distinct from God; it is in rebellion against God, though still loved by him. What God has done in Christ is to turn the world gently round to face him again. In his great love, his desire is to smile the world back into life. He gazes at his world with the love which shines from the cross, from the dying and rising Christ.” (Reflecting the Glory, 51)