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).

“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.

John L. Drury is a Ph.D. candidate in theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Church and has served as pastor of Olivet Wesleyan Church in Glassboro, NJ. John lives in Princeton with his wife Amanda and their baby Sam. There is currently a discussion about NT Wright on his blog which is an ongoing series of weekly theological thoughts posted every Thursday.

What happens to funerals if Wright is right?

What happens to funeral practices if Wright is right about resurrection? That is the question I have been assigned and to which this post will attempt an answer. Answering this question requires that we answer two prior questions: (1) What does Wright teach about resurrection? (2) What, if anything, does he get right about it? These prior questions are necessary because only practical implications that flow from constructive engagement are worthy of pastoral consideration. In other words, if Wright is wrong then we ought not “apply” his theory to our practice. And we can’t know if Wright is right or wrong unless we know what he really says. So, I’ll briefly answer these two questions, then identify some implications for the concrete practice of Christian funerals that flow from this constructive engagement. Just to get my cards on the table now, my central claim is that Wright is right inasmuch as his understanding of resurrection can be incorporated into a vision that accounts for both the continuity and discontinuity between creation and redemption. This broader vision implies specific proposals for the reform of funeral practice, but does not necessarily imply a revolutionary overhaul.