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.

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).