N.T. Wright's theological DNA, part 4

 


a.      Back to the future: Paul’s gospel for the 21st century

     Ever since writing his doctoral dissertation on the letter to the Romans (1980), N.T. Wright has been a passionate Pauline scholar.[1]  Wright adopts Newbigin’s analysis of the post-Enlightenment western world as being, not a religion-less society, but rather a pagan society.[2]  Wright writes extensively about contemporary (American) imperialism and the resurgence of “Gnosticism” in today’s world.[3]  Paganism, imperialism and Gnosticism – the world of the 21st century begins to look more and more like that of ancient Rome.[4]  For Wright, Christians in today’s western world face a situation analogous to that faced by Paul in the first century.[5]  Wright has “turned back the clock”; he invites Christians to see their world as Paul saw the world of Rome[6] – as a pagan world desperately needing to be challenged with the revolutionary and liberating message of Jesus.  Also, Wright’s biblical theology purports to be sufficient for the church to accomplish its mission in the world.  God has already acted decisively in history to rescue the world from slavery to idolatry and the ensuing sin and death; the new creation has been “launched” by the resurrection of Jesus, and thus, in Wright’s frequent refrain, “we have a job to do”.[7]  We believe that the result of Wright’s life-work as an exegete/theologian could be summed up as follows: to equip the church to be God’s people for God’s world.[8]


b.      The future of biblical theology

     Wright is a thoroughly biblical thinker; however, his approach to Scripture is “radical” in the sense that it consists of an imaginative, historical reconstruction of the worldview/context of the authors of the NT in order to listen to them on their own terms.  Wright’s exegetical results differ from those of the 16th-century Reformers[9] (and their contemporary disciples) because he approaches the letters of Paul with a different hermeneutic.  Wright’s hermeneutical horizon expands from the salvation of the individual to include that of the entire creation[10].  Wright reads Scripture as the story of how the Creator has rescued and will renew his entire work of creation, but not without the participation of his image-bearing human creatures.[11]  Though Wright shares the typical evangelical concern to safeguard the primacy of Scripture in guiding Christian belief and practice, his method of interpretation and his manner of appropriating the Bible – not to mention his conception of the relationship between Scripture and “truth”[12] – often make it difficult for many evangelicals to recognize in Wright a comrade in the struggle to maintain the Bible in the place of ultimate authority for the church.

     Since the priority for the church is mission, in Wright’s vision Paul becomes, not the inspired author who gives us all the right answers, but rather the model of what a theologically engaged missionary to a pagan world looks like.  Paul’s mission was not to produce for his communities an encyclopedia[13] of theological “truth”.  Rather, in Wright’s vision, Paul becomes, not only an exemplary missionary, but also the quintessential biblical theologian who shows us how to do theology.  This theology will be done as the church undertakes mission in the world and in service of that mission.[14]  The mission of proclaiming Jesus as Lord “to the ends of the Earth” was Paul’s priority; the apostle to the pagans was a theologian-on-the-go – he was responding, out of a depth of biblical reflection and Christian experience, to situations in his communities that emerged quickly and changed often.  Paul didn’t do theology for its own sake – Paul theologized as a missionary-pastor.[15]

     This vision leads to a reshaping of theology – how to conceive its primary source, its method as well as the church’s motivation to think through its faith.  In Wright’s “view”, the source of theology is the scriptural narrative of God’s actions in history to bring his reign to bear on his world, the method of theology is the biblically-informed engagement with the world undertaken by every Christian and the motivation for theology is the advancement of God’s kingdom in God’s world through the mission of God’s people.  Hence Wright’s vision for theology within the church: each generation of Christians must engage afresh with the same first-century questions with which Paul wrestled, all the while providing answers that will make sense to (and challenge) the contemporary world.  Obviously, the emphasis of such a theology will not be the salvation of individuals, but rather the focus will be on the “big picture” of God’s identity and his purposes for his world, and within them, his purposes for his people, and within them yet again, for each individual who may hear God’s personal call.  This is missional theology through and through – reflection, in light of today’s concerns and realities, on God, God’s people and God’s future, all with the purpose of participating in the divine plan of new creation.[16]  Through his writings, Wright is presenting evangelicals with a vision of a “merely missional Christianity” which has the power to be the guiding story and the inspiration for “bringing the church”[17] to today’s post-Christian Western world.  Within this vision, the New Testament is seen to be the manifesto for this ongoing mission of the Creator and Lover of Heaven and Earth.[18]

     To sum up, through the volumes of COQG published to date, N.T. Wright has – by combining G.B. Caird’s understanding of New Testament theology, Brian Walsh’s worldview model, Lesslie Newbigin’s analysis of western culture and the “mythical” nature of C.S. Lewis’ “mere Christianity”, coupled with a concern to make the gospel intelligible to postmoderns – undertaken an imitatio Pauli[19] and has offered “Bible-Christians” a biblical framework for a missional theology that seeks to equip tomorrow’s church for the task of challenging tomorrow’s world with the revolutionary message of Paul’s gospel.[20]


[1] Bird, Michael F., Christoph Heilig, and J. Thomas Hewitt, “Introduction” in Heilig, Christoph, et al, Eds. God and the Faithfulness of Paul, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017, p. 3.

[2] Newbigin, Lesslie, Foolishness to the Greeks, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986, p. 20.

[3] Wright, Creation, Power and Truth, London: SPCK, 2013, pp. 1-65; cf. idem. God in Public, London: SPCK, 2016, pp. 1-12.

[4] Cf. idem. Bringing the Church to the World, p. 118.

[5] Cf. Gorman, Michael J. Reading Paul, Eugene: Cascade Books, 2008, pp. 8-9; Bird, Michael F., Introducing Paul, Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008, p. 170.

[6] Cf. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “On Scripture”, p. 85.

[7] Cf. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pp. 233-46.

[8] Cf. Idem. “Paul and Missional Hermeneutics”, pp. 181-82.

[9] Cf. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters, pp. 31-32.

[10] Though Wright insists on the necessity of every single person facing the challenge to repent and believe in Jesus for themselves: God in Public, p. ix.

[11] Cf. Wright, Bringing the Church to the World, p. 73.

[12] Cf. Idem. Creation, Power and Truth, pp. 85-92: where “truth” is the dynamic reality which occurs when Jesus is proclaimed and the kingdom of God takes hold within the empires of this world.

[13] Cf. C.S. Lewis’ warnings against using the Bible as an encyclopedia: Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “On Scripture”, p. 82; cf. Caird & Hurst, New Testament Theology, p. 16.

[14] Wright, The Paul Debate, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2015, pp. 93-108.

[15] “Paul’s theology was a world-missionary theology…his theological thinking and missionary labor conditioned one another.  If the theology served the mission, the mission entered as an intrinsically conditioning factor into the theology…”: Meyer, Ben F. The Early Christians: their World Mission & Self-Discovery, Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1986, pp. 105-13, esp. 110-11.

[16] Cf. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pp. 147-64.

[17] Wright has republished his 1992 book, Bringing the Church to the World: Renewing the Church to Confront the Paganism Entrenched in Western Culture under the title of Spiritual and Religious: The Gospel in an Age of Paganism, London: SPCK, 2017 [1992].

[19] Cf. 1 Cor. 4.16; 11.1; “we should copy…Paul, in finding out where pagan gods and goddesses are being worshipped, and finding ways of worshipping Jesus on the same spot”: Wright, Bringing the Church to the World, p. 152 (emphasis added).

[20] Wright opens the closing chapter of PFG by saying, “…the ancient Jewish vision…has to do…with the challenge to action in the world…”: p. 1474.

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