N.T. Wright Project

Young global optimism, typified in the Obama generation, seems to be on the rise, as does the growing conviction in others that the new leaders and promises of today are simply new faces and voices for the same age-old power structures of yesterday. This is simply one of the many complexities and contradictions amid our culture. What is the church’s calling in all this? And how is the church to engage (or disengage) these cultural currents?

This is part one of a three-piece post on how N.T. Wright’s ecclesiology might be used to navigate the church through the complexities of today’s global, postmodern culture. The idea for this post first came to me while having lunch with Wright a few months back when he was in Princeton. I asked him about his ecclesiastical commitments, how they’re informed by and connected to the rest of his theology. Soon after I began constructing a Wrightian ecclesiology – and mainly for two reasons.

First, I’ll be planting a church with a group of friends in Miami this coming fall, and I’ve come to believe that the picture Wright paints of the church is not only relevant, but also strongly evangelical while being deeply ecumenical. Second, while the academy has critically engaged Wright’s perspectives on, for example, justification, eschatology, and narrative theology, not much scholarly writing has been done on his ecclesiology (Jeremy Begbie’s recent paper being perhaps the one exception). Thus, one idea I’ve had for future study involves developing an ecclesiology using Wright, John Howard Yoder, and Martin Luther King, Jr., since each have their own different yet (in my view) complementary understanding of the church’s mission that’s important for us today.

Because I am writing from and for a North American context, I will begin not with Wright’s work but with a short assessment of H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology in Christ and Culture since it has provided the framework for many churches and mainline seminaries in this country for the past sixty years. I hope to point out why in the end such an approach is inadequate for the church to understand its relationship with culture. Next, I will turn to Wright’s work in order to outline the methods and foundations that support his ecclesiology. I’ll survey a sampling of his writings and sermons (chiefly in my second post) in a concerted effort to discover what sort of cultural and political engagement his ecclesiology leads to. Once this is on the table I’ll be ready in my third post to evaluate Wright’s ecclesial approach to culture in light of my earlier assessment of Niebuhr and then conclude with a few brief suggestions and ouverture.

Assessment of Christ and Culture
Definitions of culture abound. Leslie Newbigin provides as good an understanding as any; he defines culture as, “The sum total of ways of living built up by a human community and transmitted from one generation to another.” Culture is comprehensive – including language, politics, art, science, technology, and religion – for it is “the whole life of human being in so far as it is a shared life.” I will work from this basic assumption while keeping in the forefront that our globalized culture is in fact not one single culture but a multitude and mixture of cultures, and that all cultures remain fluid and dynamic, refusing to be confined to static existence.

Herein lies the first critique of Niebuhr’s typology. In Christ and Culture he outlines five different postures the church can take toward culture: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. The problem is that he never pauses to explain what exactly he means by “culture” before rushing into assessing the five types. Furthermore, culture appears to be a monolithic entity in Niebuhr’s mind. “These churches have historically opposed culture, while those over there have mixed with culture.” This simplistic understanding fails to recognize the dynamic nature of culture, that it is an ongoing aspect of human society and thus calls for different levels and ways of engagement as it continues to change.

Second, Niebuhr assumes a Christendom model of the church as normative in his assessment of the five options. He takes for granted that the church is responsible for fixing culture’s problems; apparently in the end the church must give account to both God and the world. As the authors of Missional Church state, “Virtually every Christian public ethic justifying behavior that runs counter to the example and teaching of Jesus does it on the grounds of responsibility… If an action is not responsible, then, these critics imply, one must of course not do it… The best rejoinder to such arguments is, Responsible to whom?” (pp. 124-125). It is not at all clear in Niebuhr’s thought whether the church’s primary responsibility is to God or to the dominant culture.

Third, Niebuhr’s claim – that only a church that works in tandem with the surrounding culture can transform culture – fails to take seriously the specific shape of Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection. Even before he’s finished with the introduction to Christ and Culture, Niebuhr has neutered the Matthean Jesus and rendered him as useless. Christian discipleship and social ethics look totally different without the Sermon on the Mount. John Howard Yoder levels a substantial critique against Niebuhr’s various formulas for skirting the ethical demands of the gospels, stating that all such formulas “make or presuppose a case for placing our faith in some other channel of ethical insight and some other way of behaving than that which is offered us through Jesus as attested by the New Testament” (The Original Revolution, pp. 134-135).

Wright’s Ecclesiology
Having seen the limitations of Niebuhr’s typology in helping the church understand its relationship to culture, we now turn to N.T. Wright’s ecclesiology in search of a more adequate approach. Since Wright does not spell out his ecclesiology in simple form – he is not a systematician but a biblical scholar and clergyman – my first task will be to trace the ecclesial underpinnings and contours of his thought. I propose that two themes in Wright’s work be used as the foundations of his ecclesiology; the first will be examined presently, while the second will be saved for the next post.

1. Five-Act Hermeneutic
Wright uses the analogy of a five-act Shakespearean play to explain his biblical hermeneutic. Suppose the fifth act of the play has been lost, while the first four are intact. What could be done if we agreed that the play ought to be staged? We would gather the most trained and experienced Shakespearian actors, immerse them in the first four acts of the play’s script, then once they had become familiar with the language and setting of the play, and most importantly its plot and impetus, and fully imbued with their characters, we would put them on a stage and ask them to carry the story forward by acting out a fifth act for themselves. In The New Testament and the People of God, Wright explains:

“…part of the initial task of the actors chosen to improvise the new final act will be to immerse themselves with full sympathy in the first four acts, but not so as merely to parrot what has already been said. They cannot go and look up the right answers. Nor can they simply imitate the kinds of things that their particular character did in the early acts. A good fifth act will show a proper final development, not merely a repetition, of what went before” (p. 141).

Wright contends that if the biblical story is a five-act drama, the church finds itself living in the fifth act. The five acts are thus: I-Creation; II-Fall; III-Israel; IV-Jesus. The fifth act is formed by the writing of the New Testament – including the gospels – and “would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of Revelation) of how the play is supposed to end” (NTPG, p. 142). Scripture is authoritative in that God’s people “live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion” (p. 143).

This means the church cannot disregard the first four acts by taking the story wherever it wills and the wind blows, but neither can it simply repeat the four first acts as if the story were frozen in time. The church needs both faithfulness and innovation; both consistency and creativity. The ecclesial identity advanced here is that the church has been given the vocation to be the people of God in the fifth act of creation. What Christ accomplished through the cross and resurrection (“it is finished”), the church is called to implement. And what exactly this implementation entails will be the subject of the next post.