N.T. Wright's attack on Protestant Dogmatics

b.      Wright’s opus: Christian Origins and the Question of God

 

                                i.            A neo-Calvinist “kingdom-project”

     Though he draws much flak from (mostly American) conservative Reformed evangelical quarters, Wright situates himself, for those with eyes to see, firmly within the neo-Calvinist (kuyperian) tradition.  The New Testament and the People of God, the first volume of COQG, begins with Wright’s presentation of his methodology for his ambitious project of offering a complete historical-literary-theological analysis of Jesus, Paul and the Gospels as well as the hermeneutical ramifications of all this for today’s (and tomorrow’s) [8]“church”.[9]  As Wright describes the “tools” with which he will undertake the formidable “task”[10] before him, the buzzwords of neo-Calvinism jump off the pages.  Wright begins by inviting the reader to conceive of the New Testament as part of the Bible’s “script”, containing a 5-act drama.[11]  Inherent in this notion of Scripture as drama is that of the Bible as a single, overarching narrative, which must be determinative for the way the enterprise of Christian theology is undertaken.[12]  The biblical story does not lend itself to the arbitrary proof-texting of doctrines, the order/necessity of which are determined by theological schemes whose origin lies outside of Scripture itself.  Rather, the Bible’s narrative invites the interpreter to craft his theology in terms of the story Scripture is telling.  To respond to this invitation will require the (Protestant) theologian to abandon the traditional “six loci” method of interpreting Scripture for the purposes of Reformed dogmatics, traditionally understood.[13]  The resulting reordering of basic dogmas will have the aim of overcoming the abstract and rationalist way of dealing with doctrines, which bears within itself the mark of Protestant scholastic thought – thought that allowed extra-biblical philosophical categories to be determinative for the shape of Christian doctrine.[14]  Of course, in neo-Calvinist thought, the category of “the kingdom” is very important, and Christ’s present lordship over all of creation is given pride of place in kuyperian conceptions of all things Christian.  Wright, following other neo-Calvinist thinkers, conceives of his project as serving to “advance the kingdom of God”.[15]

                              ii.            COQG as critique of Reformed evangelical theology[16]

     It was a given for the Reformers, and has ever been foundational for Protestant evangelicalism, that the Church must live “under the authority of Scripture”[17] and that all faithful theology will ultimately prove to be biblical theology.[18]  That’s all well and good – but what does that mean?[19]  How does it work?  Within Protestantism, the answer has often seemed to be: believers must give intellectual assent[20] to the propositions of Scripture, i.e. to the Bible’s statements of timeless truth, which theologians then arrange into logical “systems” of biblical (dogmatic) theology,[21] usually according to the hermeneutical principle of “justification by faith” (= “the gospel”[22]).[23]  Wright affirms that the typically (mistaken) Protestant approach to Scripture is the result of, among other things, most interpreters coming to the NT with questions with which the first-century writers were not concerned, and having thereby forced the NT to provide “answers” for debates of which it is ignorant, all the while failing to head what the text is actually saying.[24]

     The burden of Wright’s song is that we must not rest content with reading the NT from within a 16^th-century worldview, but must rather come to the NT with 21^st-century questions about “god”, humanity and (whether there is) hope for the future and we must answer those questions from the NT, properly contextualized within the worldview of the 1^st century.  At the end of the day, Wright is reading the letters of Paul from within a different story – admittedly, a product of his historical reconstruction – from that within which the Reformers read them.[25]  As Wright pithily puts it, we have been giving 19^th-century answers to 16^th-century questions, rather than giving 1^st-century answers to 21^st-century questions.[26]  Wright understands the Reformers to have read the NT through the grid of a “moralized anthropology”, a “platonized eschatology” and a “paganized soteriology”; i.e. they read the NT as providing the answer as to how individual humans who had broken God’s moral law (anthropology) could “go to heaven when they died” (eschatology) because of the wrath of God having been satisfied through the sacrifice of an innocent human being in their place (soteriology).[27]  Wright insists that as a result, contemporary evangelicalism is functioning with, at best, a truncated gospel and at worst, a dangerous distortion of the biblical message.

     An obvious instance of this phenomenon was when Luther’s disciple Melanchthon abstracted his famous Loci from Romans[28], themes which still form the backbone of Protestant systematic theology.[29]  Once justification by faith became equated, by Luther, with “Paul’s gospel”, “justification” became the key, not only to Romans, but also to Protestant theology in general, and thus began to take on its traditional role as the very essence of Protestant Christianity.[30]  And so, on Wright’s reading, 16^th-century (magisterial) Protestantism undertook its theological enterprise by granting ultimate authority to Scripture, understood as containing the timeless message of salvation for sinful individuals[31], an understanding which led to the “discovery”, in Romans, of the “doctrine” of justification by faith as being the scriptural articulation of the “good news”; this, coupled with an understanding of Paul’s most important letter as being a systematic exposition of his answer to the plight of the individual sinner, led 16^th and 17^th century Protestant thinkers to proceed to erect a dogmatic edifice on this supposedly Pauline (scriptural) soteriological scheme.  Thus did the Bible, Paul, salvation and doctrine come together to form the Gordian knot[32] of “Protestant theologizing”[33], a knot that Wright undertakes to cut on his way to presenting evangelicalism with a “new way to do theology” (which, as it turns out, was Paul’s way).

     Wright claims that “The New Testament was written to build up and energize the church to be God’s people in God’s world, living between Jesus’ resurrection and the final renewal.”[34]  Wright decries the evangelical practice of treating the Bible as a repository of timeless truths which must be distilled from their historical context, abstracted and fitted into a “biblical” systematic schema as a failure to respect the NT for what it actually is.  For Wright, a faithful attempt to live under the authority of the NT as the Word of God must begin with respect for the nature of the NT.  The NT is an essentially narrative document[35] which was written within the context of a worldwide mission,[36] conducted by the renewed people of the God of Abraham (= new humanity) within the borders of the pagan Roman Empire and beyond.

     Wright affirms that the:

“…‘authority of Scripture’ …is a shorthand for ‘the authority of God exercised through Scripture’ and … God’s authority… is the kind of authority which gets things done.  It is not ultimately about correct ideas but about transformative action.”[37]

For Wright, it is plain that the NT’s raison d’être is not to be a handbook of doctrinal “answers”[38], but rather to empower the people of God for a world-transforming mission.  The NT is not an answer book; it is an action-book[39].  As we will see, the fact that the NT is a thoroughly historically-conditioned document is by no means an obstacle to apprehending its theological message.  Indeed, in Wright’s project, it is within the historical events to which the NT bears witness that their theological meaning is to be found.[40]  The NT is the story of what God has done to rescue his world; it is emphatically not a jumbled mess of doctrinal data waiting to be “tidied up” by systematic theologians through the subjection of the scriptural material to some sort of extra-biblical philosophical or conceptual scheme.[41]

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[1] Newbigin, Lesslie, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986, p. 20; cf. Wright, Tom, Bringing the Church to the World: Renewing the Church to Confront the Paganism Entrenched in Western Culture, Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1992.

[2] Wright, Tom, Creation, Power and Truth: the Gospel in a world of Cultural Confusion, London: SPCK, 2013, pp. 1-65; cf. Wright, Tom, God in Public: How the Bible speaks truth to power Today, London: SPCK, 2016, pp. 1-12.

[3] Cf. Wright, Tom, Bringing the Church to the World, p. 118.

[4] The author of this thesis was present at the 2017 Newman Lecture on November 9, 2017 at McGill’s Newman Centre (Montreal).  The speaker was George Weigel, who, during the Q & A period following his lecture, said that the (Catholic) church in the West finds itself today in a cultural situation similar to that of the Church in the first three centuries of the Christian era.  Reference was made to the effect of modernity on western culture, including the modern rejection of the Judeo-Christian God which led to a lack of confidence in reason and has subsequently led to a mutation of the concept of the “rule of law” into a matter, predominantly, of coercion.

[5] Wright, N.T. The Paul Debate: Critical Questions for Understanding the Apostle, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015, pp. 93-108.

[6] E.g. Wright, N.T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, New York: HarperOne, 2008, p. 27.

[7] Cf. Ibid., passim.

[8] As is the case, in Wright’s work, with most classic theological vocabulary, “church” is always spelled with a lower-case “c” (this even applies to the word “god”!): cf. Wright, COQG 1: The New Testament and the People of God, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992, p. xv where Wright offers a justification for his refusal to capitalize “god”.

[9] Wright, NTPG, pp. 11-28.

[10] Cf. Wright, N.T. COQG 1: The New Testament and the People of God, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992, p. vii.  “Tools for the Task” is the title of Section II of this volume and contains chapters on Epistemology, Literature, History and Theology, respectively.

[11] Wright, N.T. COQG 1: The New Testament and the People of God, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992, p. 6; cf. also pp. 139-43; hereafter, this work will be referenced as NTPG; cf. also Spykman, Gordon J.  Reformational Theology: a New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992, pp. 88, 126, passim; Spykman speaks, in typical Reformed fashion, of the 4 acts of the biblical drama: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration.  Wright divides the act of “Redemption” into two parts: “Israel” and “Jesus”.

[12] Ibid., pp. 38-46, 69-80;  cf. Spykman, Gordon J.  Reformational Theology, op. cit., pp. 127-28, where he speaks of the importance of paying constant attention to “the narrative flow in the history of redemption” and the fact that “woven into the fabric of [the Bible’s] many stories is its single story.  And that biblical message must define our biblical method” (emphasis added); cf. Elie Wiesel: “God made man because he loves stories”: The Gates of the Forest, New York: Schocken Books, 1966 [1964].

[13] E.g. Grudem, Wayne, Systematic Theology: An introduction to Biblical Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.

[14] Spykman, Gordon J.  Reformational Theology, op. cit., p. 135; cf. NTPG, pp. 131-32.

[16] Cf. Weston, Paul, Ed. Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian – A Reader, Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2006, p. 115, where Newbigin underlines the fact that Reformation theologies were a product and reflection of Christendom, of the medieval synthesis.

[17] As opposed, e.g. to Tradition, Church councils, the Pope, etc.

[18] Cf. Klink III, Edward W. & Darian R. Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology: A Comparison of Theory and Practice, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012, p. 13; cf. Grudem, Wayne, Systematic Theology: An introduction to Biblical Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.

[19] Cf. Bockmuehl’s comment: “Today…we find no consensus regarding the nature of biblical theology”: Bockmuehl, Markus, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006, p. 8.

[20] This was the view of B.B. Warfield: Harris, Harriet A. “A Diamond in the Dark: Kuyper’s Doctrine of Scripture” in Lugo, Luis E., Ed. Religion, Pluralism, and Public Life: Abraham Kuyper’s Legacy for the Twenty-First Century, Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000, p. 126.

[21] Cf. Vos, Geerhardus, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments, Carlisle: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975 [1948], pp. v, 15-16; cf. Neill, Stephen & Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament (1861-1986), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1964], p. 446; e.g. Grudem, Wayne, Systematic Theology: An introduction to Biblical Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.

[22] Cf. the words of G. Vos: “The Gospel having a precise, doctrinal structure, the doctrinally-gifted Paul was the fit organ for expressing this…” (!): Vos, Geerhardus, Biblical Theology, p. 8.

[23] Cf. Caird, G.B. & L.D. Hurst, New Testament Theology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1-26; much contemporary Reformed evangelical systematic theology has retained the methodology of the seminal Protestant thinkers of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, Gabler’s 18^th-century separation of “biblical” and “dogmatic” theology notwithstanding: cf. Klink III, Edward W. & Darian R. Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology, pp. 13-14; cf. Jenson, Robert W. “Scripture’s Authority in the Church” in Davis, Ellen F. & Richard B. Hays, eds. The Art of Reading Scripture, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003, pp. 31-33.

[24] E.g. Wright, N.T. The Climax of the Covenant, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, pp. 1-3.

[25] Cf. Wright, N.T. “Paul and Missional Hermeneutics”, pp. 189-90; cf. Wright, COQG 4: Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Philadelphia: Fortress, 2014, pp. 141-42.

[26] Wright, N.T. Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, p. 37; cf. Wright, “Historical Paul and ‘Systematic Theology’”: Theology Graduate Seminar, February 5 2014: “More recently, the great majority of Pauline scholars have assumed that the best way to organise his theology is through the topics bequeathed to us by sixteenth-century soteriology, which was itself a reaction to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century soteriology, with a massive focus on something called ‘justification’, a topic which was allowed to swell out of all biblical proportions to cover the whole of soteriology, and a corresponding downplaying of ecclesiology and/or ethics. We have then approached these questions through the lens, not of first-century thinking, but of the various philosophies of Kant, Hegel and more recently Heidegger and others. We have thus often spent our energies giving nineteenth-century answers to fifteenth-century questions, with occasional reference to the fourth century as well. My central proposal is that systematic theology would do well to try to give twenty-first century answers to first century questions; and that the first century questions might themselves give us some clues as to how to do that”: http://ntwrightpage.com/2017/02/24/historical-paul-and-systematic-theology/ (accessed March 27, 2017).

[27] Wright, N.T. The Day the Revolution Began, New York: HarperOne, 2016, pp. 73-74.

[28] Cf. Wengert, Timothy, “Biblical Interpretation in the Works of Philip Melanchthon” in Hauser, Alan J. & Duane F. Watson, Eds.  A History of Biblical Interpretation 2: The Medieval through the Reformation Periods, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009, pp. 323-26, 332-33.

Indeed, Romans has always been fundamental for Christian thought: Greenman, Jeffrey P. & Timothy Larsen, eds. Reading Romans through the Centuries: From the early Church to Karl Barth, Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005, pp. 13-14; cf., however, Wright, “Historical Paul and ‘Systematic Theology’”: Theology Graduate Seminar, February 5 2014: “Christian systematic theology cannot do without Paul, but it often hasn’t known what to do with him. It has often reduced him to a few passages on justification, or a couple of examples of early Christology, and for the rest has regarded him as a polemical figure whose sharp and angular words do not fit easily into the delicately shaped boxes of our proposed constructions”: http://ntwrightpage.com/2017/02/24/historical-paul-and-systematic-theology/ (accessed March 27, 2017).

[29] A practice still honoured by certain contemporary exegetes of Romans, though not without a certain self-consciousness; e.g. James D.G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, esp. pp. 25-26 where Dunn attempts to justify his decision to structure the outline of his book on the epistle to the Romans, understood as a systematic exposition of the following themes: God and Humankind (theology and anthropology),  the Gospel of Jesus Christ followed by the Beginning and Process of Salvation (soteriology), the Church (ecclesiology), and finally, Ethics.

[30] Cf. McGrath, Alister E. Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 [1986, 1998], p. 1.

[31] Individual salvation has always been a central feature of evangelicalism, and its overemphasis is consistently critiqued throughout Wright’s work; cf. McGrath, Alister, A Passion for Truth: the intellectual coherence of evangelicalism, Downers Grove: IVP, 1996, p. 14.

[32] Cf. Wright’s comments on the “knot”, within Pauline studies, formed by the strands of history, theology and hermeneutics: Wright, N.T. Paul and His Recent Interpreters, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015, p. 329.

[33] Cf. Neill, Stephen & Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament (1861-1986), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1964], pp. 444-46.

[34] Wright, “Paul and Missional Hermeneutics” in Scot McKnight & Joseph B. Modica, eds., The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016, p. 181.

[35] Cf. the description of Clark Pinnock’s turn from traditional Reformed evangelicalism towards a pilgrim, narrative theology which prioritized the story of Scriptural revelation and which was suspicious of attempts at systematization: Olson, Roger E. Pocket History of Evangelical Theology, Downers Grove: IVP, 2007, pp. 132-38.

[36] “Christianity was never more itself than in the launching of the world mission”: Meyer, Ben F. The Early Christians: their World Mission & Self-Discovery, Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1986, p. 18 (emphasis original); cf. Pinnock’s remarks: “For centuries, systematic theology has been largely devoid of any missionary consciousness, and even today it resists repenting of its mistake and converting to a kingdom-oriented and mission-conscious way of thinking”: Pinnock, Clark H. Tracking the Maze: finding our way through modern theology from an evangelical perspective, Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1990, p. 5.  Pinnock claims that if theology were to take the Christian mission seriously, it would have to abandon its philosophically determined categories in favour of the biblical narrative of world redemption centred on the death, resurrection and present reign of the Lord Jesus Christ!  Echoes of Wright resound.

[37] Wright, “Paul and Missional Hermeneutics” in Scot McKnight & Joseph B. Modica, eds., The Apostle Paul and the Christian Life, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016, p. 181 (emphasis original).

[38] Cf. G. Vos: “The Bible is not a dogmatic handbook but a historical book full of dramatic interest” (!): Vos, Geerhardus, Biblical Theology, p. 17; cf. McGrath, Alister, A Passion for Truth: the intellectual coherence of evangelicalism, Downers Grove: IVP, 1996, p. 108.

[39] Cf. Wright, Tom, Bringing the Church to the World, p. 87.

[40] Cf. Caird, G.B. & L.D. Hurst, New Testament Theology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 419: “He goes to his death at the hands of a Roman judge on a charge of which he was innocent and of which his accusers, as the event proved, were guilty.  And so, not only in theological truth but in historic fact, the one bore the sins of the many…” (emphasis added); Paradoxically perhaps, Wright’s concerns about the relationship between biblical and dogmatic theology, at first blush, may seem to mirror those of J.P. Gabler, who, in is famous 1787 address, advocated for a strict separation of the two, in order to allow biblical theology to proceed along its course of historical description, unhindered by the strictures of ecclesial tradition: cf. Klink III, Edward W. & Darian R. Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology: A Comparison of Theory and Practice, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012, pp. 14-17.  It remains to be seen whether Wright’s historical method can bear the theological weight; cf. Hays, Richard B. “Knowing Jesus: Story, History and the Question of Truth” in Perrin, Nicholas & Richard B. Hays, eds., Jesus, Paul & the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright, Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011, pp. 41-61 & Klink & Lockett, Understanding Biblical Theology, op. cit., pp. 104-06; Wright, “Yet the Sun will Rise Again: Reflections on the Exile and Restoration in Second Temple Judaism, Jesus, Paul, and the Church Today” in Scott, James M., Ed.  Exile: a conversation with N.T. Wright, Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017, pp. 72-77.  However, Wright is not advocating a theology-less history; on the contrary, his historical investigation of the NT, following the example of G.B. Caird, has managed to discover theology within the historical events that gave rise to Christianity.  However, the “theology” unearthed by Caird and Wright is not the theology of any dogmatic tradition!

[41] Cf. McGrath, Alister, A Passion for Truth: the intellectual coherence of evangelicalism, Downers Grove: IVP, 1996, pp. 102-17, which, while pointing in the “Wright” direction, albeit maintains a more cautious approach; cf. Luther’s warning about “speaking of things of God…in different terms than God himself employs”, quoted in Naugle, David K.  Worldview: The History of a Concept, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002, p. 336.