N.T. Wright Project

For those unfamiliar with The New Testament and the People of God, it’s the first volume of the Origins of Christianity and the Question of God series. Wright is laying the ground work and assessing the tools needed to build the rest of the series, and so the first 144 pages are strictly methodology. That’s one heck of a prolegomena. It can feel a bit long-winded at times, but not when seen in light of the task he has taken on: a fresh and comprehensive telling of the story of Christianity navigated through the three fields of literature, history, and theology.

It’s important to Wright that he establishes from the get-go what sort of hermeneutical lens he’ll be using to interpret scripture. He goes to great length in attempting to strike a balance between New Testament readings that are on one side completely uncritical and on the other side overly suspicious. This middle ground that emerges he calls a “hermeneutic of love” (64). When I came across this hermeneutic I couldn’t help but think of Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled, which I read this past summer. Dr. Peck is a psychotherapist who draws heavily from his own professional experience when writing, and I found many similarities between his discussion on the nature of love and Wright’s hermeneutic of love. In defining what love really is, Peck first has to wade through all our goofy modern notions of love, not least the myth of romance. After debunking much of the conventional wisdom surrounding this subject, the conclusion he arrives at, which sounds deceivingly simple, is that love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (81). True love, then, is never effortless; it always requires work or courage. Second, when loving someone we become vulnerable to him or her since it requires the extension of ourselves. And since his definition includes “spiritual growth,” it might also be important to point out that Peck makes no distinction between the mind and the spirit. He uses the terms “mental growth” and “spiritual growth” interchangeably to describe how a person evolves.

Later he spells out more clearly the sort of effort required to love. Although there are many ways we extend ourselves when loving someone, he states that “the principal form that the work of love takes is attention” (121).

Now lets turn to Wright’s hermeneutic of love. After a discussion on the New Testament idea of agape, he proposes we integrate this love in our study of Holy Writ: “When applied to reading texts…‘love’ will mean ‘attention’: the readiness to let the other be the other, the willingness to grow and change in oneself in relation to the other.” (64) Like Peck, Wright has placed stress on ‘attention’ in discussing love.

Furthermore, Peck goes on to say that “by far the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening. We spend an enormous amount of time listening, most of which we waste, because on the whole most of us listen very poorly” (121). He takes true listening to be a sure-sign of love because of the sheer amount of effort involved. It’s total concentration on the other. “Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well” (121).

For Wright, being attentive to the text means having a conversation with and patiently listening to scripture, it “means that the text can be listened to on its own terms…If it is puzzling, the good reader will pay it the compliment of struggling to understand it, of living with it and continuing to listen…Each stage of this process becomes a conversation, in which misunderstanding is likely, perhaps even inevitable, but in which, through patient listening, real understanding (and real access to external reality) is actually possible and attainable. What I am advocating is a critical realism – though I would prefer to describe it as an epistemology or hermeneutic of love…” (64).

What we have here is a benevolent yet critical way of reading sacred text. It doesn’t fall victim to the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’ nor its ugly twin, the ‘hermeneutic of naivety.’ Rather, there are elements of both trust and skepticism in its approach to Holy Writ.

For the last month or so I’ve made a conscious effort to be a better listener in conversations with friends and family. I’m starting to incorporate some of Peck’s thinking when grabbing a drink with a friend or sitting with peers in a precept. And since I do a lot of talking on the phone with those back home or my community in Miami, I have a tendency to multi-task during these conversations. So I’ve begun walking away my desk and computer and sitting on the couch to help me be more attentive. Listening well is hard work. And it can be tiring.

So what does it look like to have this same attentiveness in our relationship with scripture? How can we engage sacred text with this same effort and active love?