N.T. Wright Project

This post is the second of three dealing with what a Wrightian ecclesiology looks like. In the first post I offered a critique of the Niebuhrian typology found in Christ and Culture which has largely shaped how North American churches negotiate their place in and relationship with culture. I then began constructing an ecclesiology using Wright’s work in hopes that it would render a more theologically faithful approach.

His ecclesiology begins with an understanding of the church as the “fifth act community,” meaning if scripture is a five-act drama, then the church is living in the fifth and final act. This speaks to not only the role scripture plays in the life of the church, but also the role the church plays in God’s salvific purposes. God’s desire to put the world back to rights has always involved God forming a community. First Israel (act three), then the Church (act five). In the present post I will outline the second major theme in Wright’s vision for and of the church.

2. The Cross and Resurrection as Paradigmatic

The cross and resurrection of Jesus stand – in Wright’s ecclesiology – as the two pillars of the church’s engagement with the world. Or, using a different image, if the church’s movement into the world is an ellipse, then the cross and empty tomb form its foci; they define the very shape and substance of the church’s mission. Put simply, Wright says that Christians are to be both cross-bearers and kingdom-announcers.

a) Cross-Bearers

Wright understands the cross of Christ as giving the church its prophetic edge and pastoral heart. When discussing the reason Jesus was crucified, he states it was the same reason so many people died in Sarajevo, Tiananmen Square, and Rwanda: “they got in the way of forces, of powers” (Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship, p. 18). Jesus took on the principalities and powers and got what all rebels against the powers get: he was stripped naked, publicly humiliated, and hung on a cross as his torturers celebrated in triumph. But then, quoting Colossians 2:13-15, Wright shows how Paul stands all this on its head – the cross is actually about how Jesus stripped the powers, made a public spectacle of them, and triumphed over evil! The cross delegitimizes all oppressive rulers and teaches the church they need not fear speaking out against and confronting the powers since “these powers were defeated on the cross. They have no rights over you. The battle has been won” (p. 21).

Yet the cross is not only a prophetic witness to the victimizers, it is also a message of healing to the victims; it is not only confrontational, but also therapeutic. Thus, as cross-bearers, Christians are called to go to the places of pain in the world in order to mediate God’s crucified love. In The Challenge of Jesus, Wright describes this “strange and dark theme” which is “our birth right as followers of Jesus,” in the following way:

“Shaping our world is never for a Christian a matter of going out arrogantly thinking that we can just get on with the job and it will all happen. It is a matter of sharing and bearing the pain and puzzlement of the world so that the crucified love of God in Christ may be brought to bear healingly upon the world at exactly that point. Because Jesus bore the cross uniquely for us we do not have to purchase forgiveness again, that’s been done. But because following him…still involves taking up the cross we should expect as the New Testament tells us that to build on his foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life and work over and over again” (p. 189).

Wright’s interpretation of Romans 8:18-30 and what it means for the church is as startling as it is powerful. Though the cross is not mentioned in this passage, Wright recognizes it at work deep within Paul’s logic:

“Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning together in travail – where should the church be at such a time, sitting smugly on the sidelines because we’ve got the answers? No, says Paul, we ourselves groan inwardly as we wait for our renewal, liberation. But where is God in all of this? Sitting upstairs in heaven wishing we could get our act together? No, says Paul, God is groaning too, present within the church at the place where the world is in pain… The Christian vocation is to be in prayer in the Spirit where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation we discover it to be the cross-shaped way of following Christ. Arms out stretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world and the love of God; that’s what prayer is all about” (ibid.).

Colossians 1:24, 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, and Romans 8 all attest that the cross is the vulnerable point at which the world’s pain and the church’s vocation meet. In an earlier book, The Crown and the Fire, but still in concert with Romans 8, Wright writes:

“The present task of the Church is not only to share the sufferings of Christ, but in doing so to share and bear the sufferings of the world – and, indeed, to discover that those vocations are two ways of saying the same thing; so that the pain of the world, which was heaped once and for all on to the Messiah on the cross, is now strangely to be shared by those who suffer with him. The Church is not insulated from the pain of the world, but is to become for the world what Jesus was for the world, the place where its pain and grief may be focused and concentrated, and so healed” (p. 88).

Wright makes the same point in his giant, scholarly Romans commentary, as well as in his popular-level commentary in the “Paul For Everyone” series. All those who follow the crucified Messiah are called to follow the crucified One to the areas of greatest suffering so that God’s healing love might be brought to bear on that point.

b) Kingdom-Announcers

Because the story of Jesus does not end on Friday, but extends to Sunday and beyond, the Christian’s vocation must be not only as cross-bearer but also as kingdom-announcer. At times the two are so intimately woven together in Wright’s work that it’s useless to try to treat them separately, such as in this passage from Evil and the Justice of God: “Jesus on this cross towers over the whole scene as Israel in person, as YHWH in person, as the point where the evil of the world does all that it can and where the Creator of the world does all that he can. Jesus suffers the full consequences of evil… And he does so precisely as the act of redemption, of taking that downward fall and exhausting it, so that there may be new creation, new covenant, forgiveness, freedom, and hope” (p. 92).

And although the meanings of cross-bearing and kingdom-announcing overlap and give witness to the same reality – namely, that Jesus has defeated evil and become the world’s true Lord – Wright is careful at other times to differentiate the two events for good reason; each has its own important emphasis.

Hope in the resurrection within first-century Jewish thought was not hope of going off somewhere else after you died. Bodily resurrection was part of a bigger package deal: the renewal of all things. Jews believed that the creator God would one day perform a triple- act renewal – renewal for Israel, for the world, and also for the righteous dead. Here, Wright is absolutely adamant: the resurrection of Jesus must not be seen as an isolated event, but as the sign that the great renewal has begun. Easter Sunday is about the inauguration of eschatology, and the empty tomb points toward the great New Fact that God’s kingdom has been launched on earth as it is in heaven. Jürgen Moltmann wrote years ago that a “proper theology” must always “be constructed in the light of its future goal. Eschatology should not be its end, but its beginning.” There is little doubt Wright has appropriated the Moltmannian dictum as his own, for a robust eschatology has been the linchpin for his ecclesiology.

In a set of lectures delievered at an Emergent Church conference in 2004 titled “The Future of the People of God,” Wright advocated doing ecclesiology backwards - that is, thinking from God’s future to the present. The church must first catch a vision of new creation - that what God did in raising his Son from the dead he promises to do for all of creation - and then in light of this, try to discern a vision of what the church should look like now and in the years to come. Thus at the recent Wheaton Conference Jeremy Begbie described this Wrightian idea as “reverse ecclesiology.” And pneumatology becomes central since it is only by and through the Holy Spirit that the church can experience this provisional yet concrete anticipation of the future.

Once again we hear Wright’s language of the church implementing what Jesus accomplished, but now with more force. In an Easter sermon preached at Durham Cathedral in 2006, he insists that the whole thrust of the Easter story is that “Jesus is raised, therefore the world is a different place, and we are called, as witnesses to the resurrection, to announce it, to make it happen, and to find ourselves remade in the process.” He echoes this in Surprised by Hope; the Easter vocation means “Jesus’s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice” (p. 204), it means God’s rule is resulting in salvation “both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church” (p. 205). Announcing God’s kingdom is more than mere verbal proclamation; it is an ushering in sort of announcing, an announcement made with word and deed and life. God is putting the world back to rights, and this has everything to do with the church.

Before moving on, let me address a danger that arises in Wright’s ecclesiology that pertains to whether his eschatology is over-realized. Does he believe it’s the church’s vocation to bring God’s kingdom? And the question my Barthian friends raise: is there room in his eschatology for the apocalyptic? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ It appears that Wright stresses the continuity or discontinuity of the present to new creation depending on his audience. Surprised By Hope, a book largely read by American Evangelicals, is an example of placing the accent on continuity, whereas a sermon he preached before a group of judges and lawyers titled “Full of the Knowledge of the Lord” is an example of the accent on discontinuity. For the most part, Wright is extremely careful in his wording with respect to the church’s involvement in new creation. In Following Jesus he writes, “We can’t build the kingdom by our own efforts; it will take another mighty act of our God to bring it in at the last. But we can build for the kingdom. Every act of justice, every word of truth, every creation of genuine beauty, every act of self-sacrificial love, will be reaffirmed on the last day, in the new world” (pp. 112-113). God is rescuing, not abandoning, his creation, for new creation is at the heart of God’s mission.

We have now seen the underpinnings of Wright’s ecclesiology by surveying various writings and sermons, and I would suggest the strength of this piecemeal approach in constructing an ecclesiology, or any doctrine for that matter, is its potential to be thoroughly consistent with one’s thought across the board rather than confined to a single treatment in a volume of systematic theology. His five-act hermeneutic combined with the twin towers of the church’s identity – the cross and resurrection – make for an ecclesiology that is thoroughly biblical and faithful to what Kenda Dean calls the “hot lava core of Christianity,” the story of God’s encounter with us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and promise of continued presence through the Holy Spirit. In the third and final post, I will evaluate Wright’s ecclesial convictions in light of my earlier assessment of Niebuhr and then conclude with a few suggestions of how these findings might change the future of ecclesiology.