Getting heaven and earth back together

 

I first discovered N.T. Wright in 2004, as I was meandering among the library shelves of a Pentecostal Bible School.  As I perused the spines of the many volumes, one title caught my eye: The Resurrection of the Son of God.  As it turns out, I had recently been thinking quite a bit about the nature of Jesus’ resurrection and this book seemed to call out to me.  This was to be the beginning of a now 16-year obsession with the theologian who has been hailed as “the C.S. Lewis of our generation”, “the greatest NT scholar since Bultmann”, and “the most widely read NT scholar in the world today” and, indeed, a “rock star among theologians”.

     As it happens, the tome I checked out of the library that day was the third volume of a projected 6-volume project entitled Christian Origins and the Question of God.  This series offers itself as a complete literary-historical-theological account of the NT (Jesus, Paul & the Gospels), resulting in a renewed vision of God, the Church and Christian mission to the world, a vision that is firmly rooted in the 1^st century events that gave rise to Christianity and that seeks to inspire eager engagement on behalf of the Church with “the post-postmodern” world.

     As this brief summary of Wright’s project indicates, Wright is not simply concerned with NT exegesis!  Over the past three decades, besides teaching in several universities in Canada and the UK and publishing over 70 books, Wright has served as an Anglican clergyman, including an 8-year tenure as Bishop of the diocese of Durham, England (2003-2010).  Wright’s scholarship is carried out with a concern for the life of the Church, and indeed, with the needs of the Church constantly at the forefront of his mind.  Ancient historian, NT exegete, theologian, apologist, pastor, world-renowned speaker, musician – Wright has many interests, works in many contexts and indeed, inhabits many worlds.  This brief biographical account clearly demonstrates that those seeking to come to grips with this “big-picture” thinker is in for quite the challenge!

     As Wright himself puts it, he undertakes NT scholarship not simply as a career, but as a vocation.  In the first pages of the first volume of his magnum opus, Wright unashamedly states that he hopes that his efforts to understand the NT will contribute to “the advancement of the kingdom of God”.  If this rather in-your-face declaration of his intention seems to violate the objectivity that one may expect from a professional academic theologian, Wright would reply by saying that this reaction is symptomatic of the very “dualistic worldview” that he is trying to overcome in his own project by reuniting history and theology in the study of the NT by means of a “critical-realist” epistemology (à la Lonergan, B.F. Meyer, Lesslie Newbigin).  The word “worldview” brings us to the heart of Wright’s “religious vision” of his work as a NT scholar.

     Since the mid-19^th century, there has been a tradition of “worldview Christianity” among evangelical Protestants in the Reformed tradition.  Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), in his Lectures on Calvinism (1898), gave great impetus to the idea of organizing all of life according to the Christian worldview.  This conceptualization of Christianity was initially an apologetic reaction to the totalizing claims of Modernity and an attempt to demonstrate that the Bible and Christian faith could also offer a comprehensive view of reality.  One of the elements of the Modern worldview that Wright finds particularly problematic is that of “removing God” from public life, whether the life of the Academy, politics, etc. and restricting theological discourse to the private sphere.  Wright calls this phenomenon “dualism” and finds it to be incompatible with biblical Christianity.

     In case one fears that this means that Wright is simply offering up another oppressive metanarrative (albeit clothed in NT garments) designed to take us back to, say, Calvin’s Geneva or perhaps, to the agenda of the American Evangelical Right, it is crucial to look at the worldview thinker that first initiated Wright into this way of seeing Christianity and its place in the world – Brian J. Walsh.  Wright and Walsh met in Montreal in 1982 while Walsh was doing his PhD and Wright was lecturing at McGill.  This friendship would lead to extensive collaboration during the 1980’s, the crucial decade during which Wright’s thought, due largely to Walsh’s influence, achieved the form in which it has remained (Wright’s publications from 1986-1992 read like an abstract/outline for the contents of COQG) and which has been fleshed out and presented to public view with the publication of each subsequent volume in the COQG series.  Walsh and his colleague J. Richard Middleton authored two books in which they spell out their vision of worldview Christianity – a vision that is sensitive to the postmodern situation in the Western world and, while they encourage Christians to read the Bible as a single, “controlling story”, they categorically reject the notion of using metanarratives as a means of domination.  In line with this “worldview ethic”, in his latest book, Wright describes the mission of the Church as being that of suffering for the sake of the world, and in this way to actualize the victory that Jesus won on the cross.

     So, back to Wright’s sense of vocation as a NT scholar.  Thanks to Walsh’s influence, Wright seeks to undertake his academic work in such a way that brings together history and theology, the Academy and the Church, his own Christian faith and his own academic research.  Rejecting all attempts to relegate theological discourse to the private sphere, Wright insists on interpreting the NT within the horizon, not merely of the Church, but of the contemporary Western world.  It is basic to Wright’s project that the NT is a word from God addressed to the world.  In this way, Wright insists on integrating his faith with his scholarly work, from beginning to end.  To the accusation that this smacks of a hopeless subjectivism, unsuited to what should be serious, objective study of the NT, Wright responds by saying that the objective/subjective dichotomy is merely a symptom of the Enlightenment worldview, a worldview that has “been weighed on the scales and found wanting”.  In light of the end of Modernity, and in the interest of doing justice to the content of the NT, Wright proposes, through his 6-volume project, to put the split-level world of the Enlightenment back together again (concerning the NT, at least!), and to let the historical and theological chips fall where they may.

     There are points in Wright’s project where his proposed integration of faith and scholarship, of theology and history, are stretched (almost?) to the breaking point.  Richard B. Hays wonders whether Wright takes sufficient account of how Wright himself has been formed by the Christian Tradition, a tradition that Wright largely ignores as he undertakes the historical task.  In his desire to present the NT as a book whose veracity is publicly verifiable (through critical study), has Wright capitulated to Modernity’s insistence that all truth claims appear before the bar of history? Where is the line between that which is demonstrable historically and that “truth” which is proper to the faith of the Church (and the NT canon!)?  Indeed, “all truth is God’s truth”, but not all truth may be recognized as such by those outside the believing community.  Can the faith of the Church be joined to Wright’s own faith in regards to his epistemology?  Wright came to the task of NT scholarship as a Christian believer, and though he claims to be willing to modify the content of his faith according to the results of his research (Wright attempts to come to the NT as if for the first time), Hays presses the question regarding the extent to which such a self-correcting exercise can be legitimate for a scholar who wishes to maintain a Christian identity.  The Church’s understanding of Jesus has been determined by the dogmatic formulations of ecumenical councils.  As far as the Church is concerned, the identity of Jesus has never been left to the discretion of individual scholars.

     The gospel as proclaimed by Jesus and Paul was indeed “public truth”, in that it was publically proclaimed by Jesus to Galilean Jews and by Paul to both diaspora Jews and pagan inhabitants of the Roman empire of the 1^st-century.  However, the contents of the NT canon are not “public” in the same way – the traditions that make up the Gospels were assembled in their current form for early Christian communities; Paul wrote letters to early Christian communities.  Paul did not attach instructions to his letters that they be read in the town square!  It goes without saying that the NT was written by early Christians for the early Church!  Both the authors and the recipients of the NT documents shared a common Christian faith.  Surely, this reality should be reflected in any interpretation of the NT documents; may one speak of a “hermeneutic of faith” (cf. Wright, Colossians and Philemon)?  Then again, the books of the NT have been understood by the Church within a tradition of interpretation which has been undertaken throughout the Church’s 2,000-year history.

     The basic confession of the first Christians was Kgrios iesous cristos (Jesus Christ is Lord).  This kerygmatic affirmation will serve to illustrate what Wright seeks to accomplish through COQG.  First of all, Wright is convinced that much of contemporary (evangelical) Christianity fails to understand the meaning of this central NT affirmation.  Thanks to the influence of the Enlightenment worldview, which splits “religion” off from “politics”, most Christians tend to think of the phrase, “Jesus is Lord”, in purely “spiritual” terms.  E.g., Jesus is “Lord” of my life, my heart; I owe him obedience in the sphere of my personal moral/ethical decisions; He has “saved” me, my soul, from eternal judgment and has assured me of a place in “heaven”.  Wrong! declares Wright: You have bought into the Enlightenment worldview, which has deceived you into understanding the confession Jesus is Lord in purely personal, private and gnostic ways and it has prevented you from seeing its obvious first-century political ramifications!  If one knows anything about the theology of Protestant fundamentalists/ evangelicals, one can instantly see why Wright has often been accused by people in these circles of being a “liberal”!  Hold on, for things will get stranger still.     

     Wright is not content to merely provide (misguided) evangelicals with a historical reading of the NT, a reading that will help them better contextualize their Scriptures.  No, nothing less than a change of worldview will enable those who consider the NT to be normative, i.e. to be a source of authority in their lives, to actually live faithfully in light of its message.  (A strong emphasis of Jesus’ lordship over all aspects of life, private and public, has always been a key characteristic of worldview Christianity.  E.g. John R.W. Stott: “If Jesus is not Lord of all, he’s not Lord at all!”)  Based on what he considers to be the three fundamental first-century Jewish beliefs, i.e. Monotheism, Election and Eschatology, Wright lays out the fundamental biblical worldview as being comprised of a vision of one God, one People of God and one future for the world.  Until one manages to see the world as being the good creation of the one God who has redeemed, reclaimed, liberated and begun to rule over it in Jesus, is redeeming it through his Spirit-filled people and will ultimately re-create it at the “end” of all things, one will fail to understand the basic NT claim about Jesus.  To paraphrase the Apostle Paul: “No one can truthfully say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by having a worldview within which this statement makes the sense it made to me when I proclaimed it in the first-century roman world” (cf. 1 Co. 12.3).

     As has probably by now become clear, Wright has managed to make enemies in both the Church and the Academy!  Those who are used to thinking of themselves as “biblical Christians” are often shocked when Wright informs them that they have radically misunderstood the book they claim to live by.  Those who are used to studying the NT “objectively” are often shocked when Wright informs them that unless they take the theological dimension of the NT with full seriousness, they run the risk of skewing the meaning of this ancient book through a radical reductionism.

     However, Wright is still not content – it is too light a thing that he should correct evangelicals and reprimand NT scholars; Wright has a vision that will take the Church to the uttermost reaches of the postmodern Western world with the 1^st-century gospel of “King Jesus”. Displaying a (postmodern?) suspicion of philosophy, metaphysics, systematic theology and the Church’s dogmatic tradition in general, Wright understands the nature of the Church to be that of a movement on a mission, a mission of healing cultural (trans)formation, of “being for the world what Jesus was for Israel”.  Wright has no time for evangelism understood as the “saving of souls” for eternity.  It may be helpful, in order to understand Wright at this point, to paraphrase Marx: "The philosophers/systematic theologians have only interpreted the fallenness and brokenness of the world…as well as providing soteriological strategies for escaping it; however, salvation is about changing [the world]".  Wright’s “New Creation eschatology” leads him to articulate a soteriology/missiology that is radically world/culture-affirming, contra typical fundamentalist/evangelical “apocalyptic” eschatologies (e.g. as found in the Left Behind novels and movies).