N.T. Wright Project

I’m back from a long break and there’s a nice blanket of white snow here in Princeton. Perfect time to start working through Wright’s big blue book, Jesus and the Victory of God (hereafter JVG), which is the second volume in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series.

He begins with a thorough overview of the history of Jesus studies and some of the biographies of this Galilean Jew that have resulted. Playing off of a Schweitzer tune, he says that most historians looking for Jesus in the past were “inclined to see [their] own face at the bottom of a deep well and mistake it for the face of Jesus” (XV). There’s an old jibe that says God made us in his image, so we turned around and returned the favor.

I’ve got a stack of books about Jesus sitting on my desk, and it’s been stimulating (to say the least) to read some other folks’ perspectives on this man from Nazareth alongside my study of JVG. In Mark 8 Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say I am?” and here’s a sampling of some of the answers I’ve come across:

Pope Benedict XVI
“What was true of Moses only in fragmentary form has now been fully realized in the person of Jesus: He lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father. We have to start here if we are truly to understand the figure of Jesus as it is presented to us in the New Testament; all that we are told about his words, deeds, sufferings, and glory is anchored here.” (Jesus of Nazareth, 6)

Full story...

Five minutes ago I finished reading New Testament and the People of God. It is hard to describe the sense of accomplishment that I feel right now. On the one hand, I just finished reading 476 pages. On the other, Wright’s text is so rich that it demands a second reading - perhaps even a third. Tomorrow or maybe the day after, I will begin the critical task of engaging views of Wright’s text within the scholarly community. But for now, I want to bask in the celebration by briefly laying out three reflections about Wright’s work. I will post them in succession.

1. Critical realism

Many evangelicals have a difficult time accepting the mediated character of theologizing and biblical interpretation. By mediated, I mean coming to terms with the fact that theology and biblical interpretation involves human beings making claims about God; and further, that in making those claims, they are inevitably making choices about the meanings of words, the themes of a particular book, the leading images for taking about God, etc. The deep suspicion - which is not an unwarranted one I might add - is that acknowledging the the mediated character necessarily means that talk about God is nothing more than projecting human dramas onto a divine cansas that may or may not exist. Out of disquieting fear, the question then arises: are there any philosophical resources for evangelicals - who rightly believe that we can speak truly of God, and of God in relation to Scripture - desiring to acknowledge the mediated character of theology without subscribing to “your guess is as good as mine” relativism?

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.

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).