N.T. Wright Project

My theology over the past year has been developed and refined into what I describe as “Kingdom of God” theology.  I’m still learning what exactly that means, but the ideas of NT Wright have been one of the primary influences on this development in my life.  Essentially K.O.G. theology recognizes that we live in a time of inaugurated eschatology, that with his resurrection, Christ ushered in a new inbreaking of God’s kingdom on earth, but it has not yet been fully realized and our hope is in the ultimate restoration of this earth, which is still to come.  This tension is why we pray every Sunday “thy kingdom come” while at the same time recognizing that we can claim renewal in the broken areas of our lives and our world here and now because the kingdom is here and now too.

So what is our role as Christians during this time of inaugurated eschatology?  What does it mean  for our lives now?  We are able to do kingdom work, in fact we are commanded to do so.  But what does this look like?  It looks like care for those who have need around us, being an advocate for justice, creation care, proclamation of truth….  But our engagement in these things does not bring about the ultimate establishment of God’s kingdom.  We are not responsible for this.  That, ultimately, is God’s decision, as the New Testament frequently reminds us.  The work we do does not in some sense help to further establish the kingdom.  So what is it’s purpose?  All this is very confusing, and I am still discerning what exactly that means for how we are to live our lives.

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.

“The average Jews would hear a lot of scripture read aloud or sung, and might well know large amounnts by heart…In particular, the psalter, with its continual emphasis on the importance of the Temple and on the promises made to David, would have formed an important part of the mental furniture of the average Jew.”

Tom Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p. 241

Wright argues that every worldview answers four basic questions. Who are we? Where are we? What is wrong? And what is the solution? (NTPG, 123). Using this framework, he summarizes Israel’s worldview. The people of Israel are the chosen people of God, living in the Holy Land under the wrong rulers, and thus expectantly adhering to Torah while waiting on God “to act again” (NTPG, 243). The question then becomes: what grounds this worldview, or, on what basis might someone respond differently to these four questions? Wright’s response: scripture. He mentions the Essenes, Philo of Alexandria, and the chief priests of the Temple as different ways of employing Scripture within the Jewish worldview.

In the opening section of “The New Testament and the People of God”, Wright defines worldview around four central functions.  Worldview “provides the stories through which human beings view reality”, “discover[s] how to answer the basic questions that determine human existence”, is “expressed in cultural symbols”, and “include[s] a praxis, a way-of-being-in-the-world” (123-4).  These four functions combine to form one’s worldview, which is “the basic stuff of human existence, the lens through which the world is seen, the blueprint for how one should live in it, and above all the sense of identity and place which enables human beings to be what they are” (124).  Thus, worldviews are extremely important in our daily lives and allow us to live in the world and make sense of it.

The aspect of worldview which most intruiged me as I was reading this week about the Jewish worldview as described by Wright, is that of symbol.  For the Jews, there were four key symbols, that of Temple, Land, Torah, and Racial Identity (224).  The Temple especially functioned as “the focal point of every aspect of Jewish National life” (224).  It was the place where God lived and where the people gathered, where not only religious but economic and financial decisions were made.  It was the place of celebration and being in community.  And it was “the heart of Judaism…the organ from which there went out to the body of Judaism…the living and healing presence of the covenant god” (226).

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).

There has been a lot of conversation the past few years in my church communities concerning the importance of story.  It is true that we are told hundreds of stories every day through books, television, conversation, advertisements…and I have heard countless pastors and other writers and speakers acknowledging that fact and encouraging us to reclaim story for the church.  Most memorably in my experience, Donald Miller spoke at the Willow Creek Shift Student Ministry Conference in 2007 as a featured speaker, and the central theme of his message to thousands of youth pastors was the importance of story.   So when I picked up Tom Wright’s “New Testament and the People of God” and found him, once again, arguing the centrality of story, I wasn’t expecting to gain many new insights.  I’d heard it before, you know?  But the following passage (yes, I know it’s long…) has stuck with me as I’ve continued through my week.

“Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews.  Where head-on attack would certainly fail, the parable hides the wisdom of the serpent behind the innocence of the dove, gaining entrance and favour which can then be used to change assumptions which the hearer would otherwise keep hidden away for safety.  Nathan tells David a story about a rich man, a poor man, and a little lamb; David is enraged; and Nathan springs the trap.  Tell someone to do something, and you change their life-for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors.  Metaphor consists in bringing two set of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so.  Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again” (NTPG, p. 40, emphasis mine).

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)