N.T. Wright Project

A long passage toward the end of Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God is helping re-hatch and expand my Christology. Moreover, it’s put me in touch with the humanity of Jesus in a profound way. A broad statement, but nonetheless true, is that most Christians today have no problem thinking of Jesus as the lofty and divine second person of the Trinity, yet find themselves uneasy if forced to grapple with his raw humanity.

Perhaps it’s because the church has developed an allergic reaction to anything that smells like Arius (or his contemporary sibling, the Jesus Seminar). Whatever the case, most Christians don’t take seriously the fact that Jesus would have caught common colds, made mistakes in carpentry, and struggled as he got older with what he perceived to be his vocation – unless of course you think baby Jesus knew he was the divine Son of God while still in the crib.

This is the second part of my review of Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision. I stated in the first part the two historical events that kept coming to mind while reading through Wright’s book: (1) the sixteenth-century theological dispute that set the Reformation in motion and (2) Karl Barth’s monumental and explosive Romans commentary published nearly twenty years after the turn of the twentieth century. My earlier post covered how Wright’s new book came about, the fundamental differences between Wright and Piper on justification, what exactly is at stake in their dispute, and why this resembles the Reformation in various ways (if this last line sounds melodramatic then read the earlier post). We now turn to the second half of Justification where Bishop Wright really rolls up his sleeves and does nitty-gritty exegesis. I’ll focus particularly on his treatment of Romans and how its bomb-like effect on the theological world is akin to the one caused by Barth’s commentary ninety years ago.

The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating (and Exegesis)
Wright has already put his cards on the table by the time we arrive at the second half of the book; he’s defined righteousness and justification in terms of God’s faithfulness to the Abraham covenant, argued that justification is only one part of human salvation, and drawn a distinction between how justification works in the present and in the future. He now turns directly to the text to show he’s built his case on Paul’s writings rather than some later tradition of interpretation (he accuses Piper of doing of the latter).

InterVarsity Press was gracious to send me a copy of Wright’s new book to review. While reading Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, two historical events kept coming to mind. The first is the sixteenth-century theological showdown now referred to as the Reformation; the second is Barth’s landmine commentary on Romans published almost ninety years ago. My review of Justification will be in two parts, with the second to be posted in two weeks. In this post I’ll tell how Wright’s book came about, outline its overall argument, and then explain how it corresponds with the first of these historical events, the Reformation. The next post will deal with the exegetical part of Justification as well as its relation to the second of these historical events, Barth’s commentary.

Geocentric vs. Heliocentric
Justification was written in reply to a book published in 2007 by John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright. Piper’s book is straightforwardly polemical (a PDF version is free online, and whether or not you agree with his writings, you have to respect the fact that he makes them free), with the chapters arranged one punch after another, each aiming at a different aspect of Wright’s teaching on the doctrine of justification. I read The Future of Justification shortly after it came out, and I will say that though Piper has little patience for any view other than his own, the overall tone of his book is courteous. (Unfortunately the same can’t be said for many of Wright’s other critics who have used Piper’s book as angry ammunition in their own writings and blogs; hence, Wright’s comment in his first chapter: “It really is high time we developed a Christian ethic of blogging.”)

Back in April I spent a week closely reading Karl Barth’s treatment of war in Church Dogmatics and writing an essay that affirmed some aspects and critiqued others. Over the last few years I’ve developed strong convictions in favor of nonviolence and pacifism through my reading of the Gospels, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Howard Yoder. I’m currently studying N.T. Wright’s Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship with a group of friends, and this morning I read a chapter about the ascension of Jesus that deals with power and empire. I’d like to revisit Barth’s argument in light of Wright’s chapter and see what it adds to the discussion.

To summarize (and grossly oversimplify) Barth’s argument in Church Dogmatics (hereafter CD), I should begin by saying he comes much closer to the position of pacifism than he does just war. In CD III/4 he asks, “Can there ever be a time when war is justified?” He asserts that any affirmative answer to this question is wrong from the very outset and a betrayal of the Gospel. To even discuss the question of just war, one must first admit that the arguments for absolute pacifism are “almost infinite” and “almost overpoweringly strong” (455).

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...

The church I grew up in didn’t observe the liturgical year, nor is it part of the larger evangelical tradition I come from. Other than Christmas and Easter, I never knew there was something called the “Christian calendar.” Strictly speaking, the church’s liturgical year revolves around the key events in the life of Jesus: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. Over the past few years, as I’ve learned more about this liturgical tradition, I’ve also come to understand the reluctance that many Protestant streams have in going down this path. Stemming back to the Reformation of the 16th century, many Protestant leaders chose to preach through whole books of the bible rather than follow the church’s liturgy which bounced around in different books of the bible each week. The  liturgy of the Catholic church was blamed (and rightly so) for much of the biblical literacy permeating the Christian landscape of the time, infecting both clergy and parishioners. The liturgical year was limiting (such as not including any Old Testament passages) and had become empty ritual rather than tradition loaded with significance.

Reform is good. In fact, it’s essential. Christianity has an element of self-critique built into itself, dating all the way back to Israel’s prophets.

But, as always, one mustn’t throw the banana out with the skin.

Over the past few years I’ve begun to reclaim some of the ancient liturgical tradition that Christians down through the ages have observed. I’m learning how to anticipate the gift of Christ long before December 25th, remember death while having ash smeared on my forehead, repent and make a sacrifice during lent, and party like it’s 1999 when Easter rolls around. And part of my learning curve has been figuring out what the heck All Saints Day is. So last week I read Wright’s small book, For All the Saints?, and saw just how goofy we are in America for dropping the real celebration at the end of October/beginning of November (’All Hallows Day’ or All Saints Day on Nov 1st) for a pagan offshoot of it instead (’All Hallows Eve’ or Halloween on Oct 31st). Not only have we embraced this weird pumpkin-carving, death-dressing festival with open arms, we’ve cultivated it into a full-blown money making scheme. Sounds like one big fat adventure in missing the point (instead of tossing the banana out with the skin, we ditched the banana and are eating the skin). Ah, it’s times like this that make me proud to be an American.

“The important thing is that we grasp the central hope of the ultimate resurrection, set within new creation itself, and that we reorder all our thinking and speaking about every other after-death question in that light.” (Surprised by Hope, 174)

This simple statement helps me see questions of the afterlife in a new light. When reading a book it’s much more important to grasp the thesis, the author’s underlying argument, than details or specifics of its chapters and passages. When watching a play it’s much more important to catch the plot, the storyline that is pushing the play along, than one scene or a dialogue within the play. In a way this describes the importance of grasping the hope of resurrection in the New Testament compared to other afterlife issues. This is not to say the other details are not important such as the intermediate state between death and resurrection, the realities of heaven and hell, etc. These specifics are important, for together they must constitute a coherent whole. However, it would be a grave mistake to weigh these after-death details with the same heaviness as the great after-death question the New Testament is concerned with: resurrection. Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Where will we go? What will it be like? Will I still be married? Come to think of it, we’re pretty good at asking the wrong questions. Wright says the question ought to be, “How will God’s new creation come?” and then, “How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world?” (185). Resurrection and new creation are at the center, the very core, of Christian hope; they’re the plot holding the play together. And understanding the plot of a play is the first step in making sense of its smaller scenes.

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.

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)