The Gospel Coalition

Yesterday, I wrote the first of a two-part series that summarizes and explores the essays collected in Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright (IVP, 2011). We’ve looked at the critique of N.T. Wright’s teaching on Jesus. Today, we look at the second half of this book, which deals with Wright’s “new perspective” on Paul.

N.T. Wright and the Apostle Paul

The first essay on N.T. Wright’s “Paul” is written by Edith Humphrey, “Glimpsing the Glory: Paul’s Gospel, Righteousness and the Beautiful Feet of N.T. Wright.” Humphrey’s contribution is unique in that she approaches Wright’s work from the angle of Eastern Orthodoxy. She sees similarities between Wright’s view of righteousness and her own, but she rejects Wright’s interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21:

Consider the lack of congruity: Christ was made sin – simply so that [hina] the apostles could show forth God’s righteousness! In such a construal the shock of the first part of the sentence (Christ made sin) does not match the functional quality of the second. No, if Christ was made sin it could hardly be for the purpose of the apostolic charism. Instead, Paul indicates a miracle that makes its impact on all in the new creation… It is the God-man who assumes death and sin in order to win life and righteousness for God’s people. It is this one who stands as judge, as advocate and as defendant. (168-9)

Regarding Wright’s view of apocalyptic symbols, Humphrey writes: “I want to affirm what Bishop Tom affirms, without denying what he denies.” (172) This refrain is repeated throughout these essays on Paul, and it sums up much of my own thought regarding Wright in general.

As a side note, there’s a humorous moment when Humphrey chides Wright for his Protestant position on Scripture. Quoting from my interview with Wright in 2008, she says:

At the foundations our friend remains a Protestant. In his own words, “My only agenda is to be as close as I can possibly get to what Paul actually says. And I really don’t care too much what different later Christian traditions say.”

Wright’s response:

“Here we meet once more with the problem of Scripture and tradition. It’s rather fun to be accused, for once, of being a Protestant… Tradition is important, but I will drink to Paul first and to tradition afterward.” (182)

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Jeremy Begbie in “The Shape of Things to Come? Wright Amidst Emerging Ecclesiologies” explores the puzzling fact that N.T. Wright’s theology (though delivered from an Anglican bishop in a bureaucratic, top-down hierarchical structure) is so attractive to young, emerging church leaders (who eschew the type of authoritative framework within Wright serves). Begbie’s summary of Wright’s eschatological vision is worth reading, and his critique of emerging church ecclesiology from Wright’s vantage point is also helpful. But I want to give more time to the next two essays, so I will refrain from summing up too much here.

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Markus Bockmuehl contributes an essay titled “Did St. Paul Go to Heaven When he Died?“. Bockmuehl critiques Wright’s vision of the afterlife, particularly Wright’s insistence that we think in terms of embodied resurrection and not the intermediate state. Bockhmuehl’s essay fails to persuade because he argues against the soundbite version of Wright’s view of the afterlife, not the expansive vision laid out in Wright’s many books. Wright does not deny that Christians “go to heaven” when they die; he merely insists on placing the intermediate “heaven” within the context of God’s promise of the final resurrected state.

Bockmuehl’s essay rightly leads to this response from Wright:

“I did not fully recognize the presentation of my views in Markus Bockmuehl’s paper… I have never rejected, as Bockmuehl says I do, the traditional Christian believe that the faithful ‘go to heaven’ when they die. I don’t regard that expectation as a ‘corruption of the hope of bodily resurrection.’ I have said repeatedly that ‘going to heaven’ is fine as a description of what happens when the faithful die. The point is that it isn’t the final destination.” (231-2)

(For an explanation of how Wright’s view of “heaven” has changed throughout the years, read this post.)

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Kevin Vanhoozer’s paper, “Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation? The State of the Union with Christ in St. Paul and Protestant Soteriology” stirred up quite a bit of conversation after it was first delivered. Vanhoozer enters this debate as an observer from the field of systematic theology. He accurately lays out the issues at stake, particularly the fact that Wright is pressing the formal principle of the Reformation (biblical authority) into service against its material principle (justification by faith). (241) Vanhoozer writes:

“By and the large the perceived problem with Wright’s position is not what he affirms but what he denies. His affirmations are important and exciting… What lands Wright in hot Reformed water are the denials.” (241-2)

What problem Reformed critics have is not so much with the affirmation (“faith is the badge of covenant membership”) but rather the denial (“faith is not the port of entry into the company of the saved”). (246)

Vanhoozer then seeks to bridge the gap by appealing to Calvin’s doctrine of “union with Christ” and in particular, the doctrine of adoption.

“Adoption is an especially rich metaphor that involves both confessing family membership and conferring legal status.” (255)

He then critiques Wright by saying, “He needs to win not more battles, but more allies… The Reformed need to accept the ecclesiological implications of being declared in Christ; Wright needs to retool his understanding of the law court and develop a fuller understanding of our union with Christ.” (259)

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The book ends with an essay by Wright entitled “Whence and Whither Pauline Studies in the Life of the Church?” This essay sums up the reasons why, for me, reading Wright is so fruitful and frustrating at the same time. Wright’s exposition of the ecclesiological implications of justification is masterful. He glides through text after text, harking back to Old Testament truth, pulling out ethical implications (including a belief in traditional man-woman marriage!), and spotlighting the beauty of the covenant community united by the cross.

But Wright’s summary of Paul’s theology is almost exclusively horizontal. It’s all about the reconciliation of humanity and very little about how that new humanity is first reconciled to God (or why we need to be reconciled in the first place). Perhaps the intent of this essay was merely to provide a study of Paul’s ecclesiology. Maybe, but I don’t think so. This approach characterizes much of what Wright has said in other contexts.

To be fair, some of Wright’s Reformed critics do indeed marginalize the church in their systematization of theology. But I fear that Wright goes to the other extreme. In pointing out the reductionism of his opponents, Wright engages in reductionism of his own. So, at one level, I am thankful for what Wright affirms, but I am constantly perplexed by what he denies (or simply ignores).

Conclusion

Jesus, Paul and the People of God is a helpful addition to the discussion surrounding N.T. Wright and his theology. May this book aid all who are interested in finding out what Jesus and St. Paul really said!

Sam Storms exposes the caricature in saying “people will suffer in hell for not believing in the Jesus they never heard of”:

Let me say this as clearly as I can: No one will ever suffer for any length of time in hell or anywhere else for not believing in the Jesus they never heard of. Should I say that again or is it enough to ask that you go back and read it again? Bell and others who make this sort of outrageous claim have evidently failed to look closely at Romans 1:18ff.

Why Christians Should Read Mainstream Books:

Christians read a lot of books. This is a good thing. Christians read a lot of Christian books. This is another good thing. But it’s also an easy thing, a safe thing. Though I am glad to see many Christians reading many books, I believe there is value in reading not only deeply but also widely. And this means that Christians should read more than just Christian books—we should read books that are in the cultural mainstream.

Japan’s Nuclear Rescuers are Heroes:

Speaking tearfully through an interpreter by phone, the mother of a 32-year-old worker said: “My son and his colleagues have discussed it at length and they have committed themselves to die if necessary to save the nation. He told me they have accepted they will all probably die from radiation sickness in the short term or cancer in the long-term.”

Famous atheist Christopher Hitchens on the King James Bible:

Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening.

The Long View of Evangelical Alliances: An Interview with Mark Noll

From time to time we find it helpful to solicit critical feedback on The Gospel Coalition’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential pitfalls. So with this eye toward self-reflection, we welcome Mark Noll’s observations based on years of studying the history of evangelicalism.

In the Spring of 2010, the Wheaton Theology Conference brought together a number of Christian scholars to assess the work of N.T. Wright, particularly in regards to his books on Jesus and Paul.  The conference title, “Jesus, Paul, and the People of God”, indicated the framework for the two-day event: one day on Jesus, one day on Paul, and all of the talk was tied to how theology influences the people of God. Wright himself was present and was given the chance to respond to the other participants.

Nicholas Perrin and Richard Hays have incorporated the papers and Wright’s responses into a new book, Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright (IVP, 2011). The book attempts to analyze and critique Wright’s historical work, particularly as it relates to Christian theology. Though all the contributors are sympathetic to Wright’s vision, they refrain from merely praising his accomplishments and choose instead to honor him by offering a robust critique of some of his most prominent ideas.

Today and tomorrow, I will provide a review of this new book. First, we’ll look at the four essays that deal with Wright’s view of Jesus. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the essays that critique Wright’s work on Paul. My goal is to briefly summarize each essay and then offer a few reflections of my own.

N.T. Wright and the Historical Jesus

The first essay comes from Marianne Meye Thompson: “Jesus and the Victory of God Meets the Gospel of John.” Thompson focuses on a troubling inconsistency in Wright’s work. Wright believes in the historicity of John and has called for scholars to “discard the century-old shibboleths” that label John as non-historical. Still, Wright bases his reconstruction of the historical Jesus on the Synoptic witness alone, which leads Thompson to explore the ways in which John’s “Jesus” lines up with the “Jesus” presented in Wright’s work. She asks great questions:

• “Do we omit the Fourth Gospel in such discussions because it would somehow be taken to compromise any historical reconstruction?”
• “If John and JVG often make strikingly similar judgments about Jesus’ mission and accomplishments, what shall we conclude about either one?”
• “And does John’s approach to understanding Jesus suggest that we ought to rethink how Jesus is known ‘historically’?”

I believe Thompson’s critique of a John-less Jesus and the Victory of God to be valid. I understand that Wright wishes to play on the field of skeptical scholarship. He responds:

“Had I brought John into the equation without comprehensive justification, my principal conversation partners would have ignored the book.” (63)

Fair enough. But maybe the time is ripe for such “comprehensive justification” in the wider academy. Who better to make the case than N.T. Wright? As it stands, Jesus and the Victory of God, while commendable in so many ways, is of limited value for evangelical Christians because of John’s absence. Thompson is correct, however, to note the similarities between the Jesus we find in John and the Jesus we see in Wright’s work.

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Richard B. Hays offers an essay titled “Knowing Jesus: Story, History and the Question of Truth.” Hays offers the most strident critique of Wright’s work. He zeroes in on the question of truth and its relation to story and history. He seeks to establish clear roles for the Scriptural canon and church tradition in the hermeneutical task. The problem with Wright’s work, according to Hays, is that despite clear affirmations regarding the complementary nature of theology and history, Wright frequently suggests that the church’s faith obscures real history. Hays writes:

“Christian theological tradition is by and large bracketed out – at least at the explicit level – in Tom’s treatment of the evidence.” (51)

“Experience and critical history rescue us from the misreading of Jesus bequeathed to us by the church.” (51)

Hays believes that Wright shares many of the assumptions of the “historical Jesus” questers he is seeking to critique. It is Hays’ attempt to move beyond these assumptions that leads to this essay criticizing Wright’s methodological approach. Hays is concerned that Wright’s reconstructed Jesus results in a loss of each Gospel writer’s individual voice. He also notices Wright’s tendency to over-systematize everything through the framework of the “exile and return.” But it appears Hays’ biggest issue is that Wright sees the confessional tradition as a hindrance rather than an aid in discovering the biblical Jesus.

The two ways of studying Jesus come to the forefront in this summary from Hays:

“On the one hand, Tom insists that without historical investigation of the factuality of the Gospels, the story is vacuous, not least at the level of concrete action in the world. I insist, on the other hand, that without the canonical form of the story, we could never get the historical investigation right in the first place.” (61)

Of these four essays on Wright’s “Jesus,” Hays’ is the most important because it goes to the very heart of the presuppositions and assumptions that undergird the foundation of Wright’s work. From my perspective, I suspect that Wright and Hays are back to back fighting off opposing enemies. Wright is not setting a dichotomy between history and canon, but between a “kingdom-less” reading of the Gospels that fails to take into the historical truth already there in the canon. Hays is not saying that history matters less than the witness of the church, only that a resurrection-shaped lens of history necessarily shapes our presuppositions and approach to historical study.

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I won’t spend much time on Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh’s dialogical essay, “Outside the Circle of Friends: Jesus and the Justice of God.” Though creatively delivered, it is the weakest in the book. Keesmaat and Walsh take Wright to task for not situating the ethics of Jesus and the Victory of God more forcefully in the economic setting of the first century. Though Keesmaat and Walsh believe Wright has missed the focus on social justice in the Gospels, they are guilty of the opposite error: they find this emphasis everywhere.

The best example is their imaginative (I would even say “fanciful”) interpretation of the Parable of the Talents. According to Keesmaat and Walsh, the villain is the master, and the hero is the man who buried the money. Of the traditional interpretation, they write: “Our economic assumptions have dictated the hero of this story for us.” (81) Really? It’s more likely that Keesmaat and Walsh’s assumptions have dictated who they see as the hero. Otherwise, why are the earliest interpretations of the parable along the lines of Wright and the traditional view?

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Nick Perrin’s essay, “Jesus’ Eschatology and Kingdom Ethics: Ever the Twain Shall Meet” seeks to point out a blind spot in Wright’s proposal. Perrin believes that Wright emphasizes corporate application of Jesus’ commands to the exclusion (or diminishment) of individual ethics. Although Wright maintains that Jesus’ command to repentance has both a corporate and personal application, Wright most often states the corporate application. Perrin writes:

“Unlike the scriptural prophets, who as far as I can tell used the term repentance to indicate Israel’s duty to forsake a broad range of sins… Tom’s Jesus employs repentance in a specialized sense, by which he focuses his call very specifically on the issue of Israel’s violent militancy.” (107)

I believe Perrin’s critique to be spot-on. We can certainly be grateful for Wright’s reminder that repentance in the first century cannot be reduced to the lone individual feeling sorry for his sin. But to downplay or neglect the truth that Jesus’ call to repentance did indeed focus on the individual and every area of one’s life (not just nationalistic zeal) is misleading. So should we choose between a collective ethic and an individualist one? Perrin answers:

“It is only in correlating the individual and the corporate, the true Israelite and the true Israel, with reference to the resurrected future, that both of these attain their proper creationally ordered place and the extremes are finally transcended.” (112)

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The final essay in the section on Jesus comes from Wright himself: “Whence and Whither Historical Jesus Studies in the Life of the Church?” Instead of posting a lengthy review of this essay, I’d like to quote one of the sections in which you can see the basic outline of why Wright thinks the way he does. This paragraph illuminates the motivation for Wright’s historical work, and it explain why so many evangelicals (like myself) have found his work on Jesus and the resurrection to be helpful in many ways:

“Remember the slogan of Melanchthon in the sixteenth century: it isn’t enough to know that Jesus is a Savior; I must know that he is the Savior for me. I agree with Melanchthon, but I think we have to say it the other way round as well. We must today stress that it isn’t enough to believe that Jesus is “my Savior” or even “my Lord”; you must know who Jesus himself was and is. Without that, merely saying that we have Jesus “within our heart” or that we “have a sense that Jesus loves me” or whatever can easily turn into mere fantasy, wish fulfillment. That has happened before, and it will happen again, unless it is earthed in actual historical reality.

In order to know that you’re not just making it up, not fooling yourself… you must be able to say that this Jesus, who we know in prayer, this Jesus we meet when we are ministering to the poorest of the poor, this Jesus we recognize in the breaking of the bread, this Jesus is the same Jesus who lived and taught and loved and died and rose again in the first century. We must believe and confess that he did indeed inaugurate God’s kingdom, die to bring it about and rise again to launch the consequent new creation. We must know who Jesus himself actually was and is.

“Generations of skeptics have swept Jesus aside in their efforts to prove that Christianity is a dangerous delusion. Richard Dawkins is only one of many examples. We have to be able to provide proper, well-grounded answers.” (119)

This paragraph shines light on the area I believe Wright’s work to be most useful: apologetics. Wright wants to provide proper, well-grounded answers to the skeptics who dismiss Jesus and the Christians who don’t know much about him. Furthermore, he wants to make sure that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same. Noble goals, even if Wright doesn’t always attain them.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at how these scholars assess N.T. Wright’s “Paul.”

Ed Stetzer – Proselytizing in a Multi-Faith World:

At the appropriate time, and with my best smile, I raised my hand and said something like this: “I appreciate the funding that allows us to survey our churches, and I think it is helpful to use similar questions and metrics for better research. But I am not here to form a partnership to help one another. I want to help the churches I serve, and part of the reason they exist is to convert some of you.”

5 Myths about Gas Prices:

Gasoline prices have been steadily climbing for several months, and Americans are feeling the pain at the pump. The possible culprits (from greedy oil execs to Mideast turmoil) are as plentiful as the proposed solutions (more offshore drilling, green energy or government reserves). But what is really driving prices up? And what, if anything, can be done about it?

How constrained is our vision,
how inadequate our words,
how paltry our love for you, Lord God,
in the wake of all that you have done,
in the wake of all that you have disclosed of yourself in your Son through your Word.

Fill our hearts with joy
that we may not only be ashamed of sin and loathe it,
but also that we may be drawn to your own dear Son,
to holiness, to transparent love for one another -
all secured by Christ and his work on the cross on our behalf.

Draw us on to the new heaven and the new earth
precisely because that will also make us better stewards of your grace here.

Grant that even now we may understand in our own experience
how the Holy Spirit is the deposit of the promised inheritance,
the anticipation of what will one day be.

Grant us the power to grasp,
together with all of God’s people,
the limitless dimensions of your love for us.

Shape our lives by gratitude and adoration.

Give us courage and stamina
and with it holy joy and a love for all that is holy.

Open our eyes to see Jesus,
the cost that he bore,
the grace that he pours out upon us,
until we are ravished by his beauty,
consumed by a heart full of adoration.

For Jesus’ sake,
Amen.

- D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There

“What is true glory and what makes a man great?

‘In this,’ says the Prophet, ‘let him that glories, glory that he understands and knows that I am the Lord’ (Jer. 9:24).

This constitutes the highest dignity of man, this is his glory and greatness: truly to know what is great and to cleave to it, and to seek after glory from the Lord of glory. The Apostle tells us: ‘He that glories may glory in the Lord,’ saying: ‘Christ was made for us wisdom of God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption; that, as it is written: he that glories may glory in the Lord’ (1 Cor. 1:30-31).

Now, this is the perfect and consummate glory in God: not to exult in one’s own righteousness, but, recognizing oneself as lacking true righteousness, to be justified by faith in Christ alone.”

- Basil the Great, 330-379

Seven links for your weekend reading:

1. Arizona bans sex-selection abortion

2. Richard Hays on Why Christians Need Eschatology

3. Loaves, Fishes, and Un-Self-Conscious Little Boys

4. America’s Got Baggage? Approaching a Post-Christian World with Tim Keller, Gabe Lyons

5. George Guthrie interviews Michael Card about “Lament”

6. Tony Reinke: “16 Lessons from the Love Wins Debate”

7. The Three “R’s” – Why Christians Sing