They were promising the healing and transformation of the present world. And the gospels portray Jesus as saying, in a dozen different ways: Here! If this is what the gospels are saying, two questions arise at once. They pull in opposite directions — often a sign that the truth is something more mysterious, not exactly half way between but perhaps triangulated with them.
Yes and no. Rather, God the creator, always at work mysteriously within his battered but still beautiful world, sometimes acts in unexpected ways. And actually healings do still happen. There are, no doubt, plenty of charlatans about. But I know, and I suspect most pastors know, people who are alive today despite the doctors having given them up as hopeless — because people prayed them through the illness and out the other side. The early Christians saw this kind of thing as a genuine sign, an advance anticipation, of the new creation which Isaiah promised.
These are glimpses of new creation. This is a sharp question for me. In the summer of two old friends of mine were both diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In both cases wise and devout church members were praying for them. Both had excellent medical treatment. One made a remarkable recovery, and is alive and well today. The other died within six months. Supposing we said that we know what scripture is we have it here, after all , and that we should try and discover what authority might be in the light of that.
Beginning, though, with explicit scriptural evidence about authority itself, we find soon enough—this is obvious but is often ignored—that all authority does indeed belong to God. God says this, God says that, and it is done. God calls Abraham; he speaks authoritatively. God exercises authority in great dynamic events in Exodus, the Exile and Return.
Then, perhaps to our surprise, authority is invested in the apostles: Paul wrote whole letters in order to make this point crystal clear in a manner of speaking. This authority, we discover, has to do with the Holy Spirit. From an exceedingly quick survey, we are forced to say: authority, according to the Bible itself, is vested in God himself, Father, Son and Spirit.
But what is God doing with his authority? There is a more subtle thing going on. God is not simply organizing the world in a certain way such as we would recognize from any of those human models. And his authority is his sovereign exercise of those powers ; his love and wise creations and redemption. What is he doing? He is not simply organizing the world. He is, as we see and know in Christ and by the Spirit, judging and remaking his world.
What he does authoritatively he does with this intent. God is not a celestial information service to whom you can apply for answers on difficult questions. Nor is he a heavenly ticket agency to whom you can go for moral or doctrinal permits or passports to salvation. He does not stand outside the human process and merely comment on it or merely issue you with certain tickets that you might need.
And it must be said that a great many views of biblical authority imply one or other of those sub-Christian alternatives. Authority is not the power to control people, and crush them, and keep them in little boxes. The church often tries to do that—to tidy people up. We have to apply some central reformation insights to the concept of authority itself. It seems to me that the Reformation, once more, did not go quite far enough in this respect, and was always in danger of picking up the mediaeval view of authority and simply continuing it with, as was often said, a paper pope instead of a human one.
That is what his authority is there for. It is an authority with this shape and character, this purpose and goal.? Then, we have to ask, if we are to get to the authority of scripture. How does God exercise that authority? Again and again, in the biblical story itself we see that he does so through human agents anointed and equipped by the Holy Spirit. And this is itself an expression of his love, because he does not will, simply to come into the world in a blinding flash of light and obliterate all opposition.
So, we get the prophets. We get obedient writers in the Old Testament, not only prophets but those who wrote the psalms and so on. God brought his authority to bear on Israel not by revealing to them a set of timeless truths, but by delegating his authority to obedient men through whose words he brought judgment and salvation to Israel and the world. As the climax of the story we get Jesus himself.
Jesus the great prophet, Jesus who rules from the cross in judgment and love, Jesus who says: all authority is given to me , so you go and get on with the job. I hope the irony of that has not escaped you. So too in Acts 1, we find: God has all authority.
Again, the irony. How can we resolve that irony? By holding firmly to what the New Testament gives us, which is the strong theology of the authoritative Holy Spirit. And then, in order that the church may be the church—may be the people of God for the world—God, by that same Holy Spirit, equips men in the first generation to write the new covenant documentation.
This is to be the new covenant documentation which gives the foundation charter and the characteristic direction and identity to the people of God, who are to be the people of God for the world. One of the gains of modern scholarship is that we now see that to be a mistake. I think they knew what they were doing.
Thus it is that through the spoken and written authority of anointed human beings God brings his authority to bear on his people and his world.
How can scripture be properly used? How can it exercise authority? If God has delegated his authority somehow to this book, what does he want us to do with it? How can we handle this extraordinary treasure, responsibly? First, we have to let the Bible be the Bible in all its historical oddness and otherness. We have, again and again, not done that.
What Jesus was really meaning in this passage. We have reduced it, so that whatever text we preach on it will say basically the same things. This is particularly a problem for second and third-generation movements of which the rather tired and puzzled evangelicalism in many British churches today is a good example.
What we are seeing in such preaching is not the authority of scripture at work, but the authority of a tradition or even a mere convention masquerading as the authority of scripture. It has lost the possibility of a critique or inbuilt self-correction coming to it from scripture itself. That order will forever be breaking in as a new word, recognizably in continuity with words heard from God before, but often in discontinuity even with the very traditions by which those older fresh words were preserved and transmitted.
Scripture is the book that assures us that we are the people of God when, again and again, we are tempted to doubt. It does in fact tell them truths which they half-knew and had rather hoped to forget. It is the story which confirms that God had redeemed the world in Jesus Christ. It is the story which breaks open all other world-views and, by so doing, invites men and women, young and old, to see this story as their story. In other words, as we let the Bible be the Bible, God works through us—and it—to do what he intends to do in and for the church and the world.
In the church and in the world, then, we have to tell the story. It is not enough to translate scripture into timeless truths. How easy it has been for theologians and preachers to translate the gospels for instance into something more like epistles! We must, if anything, assimilate the epistles to the gospels rather than vice versa. I would not actually recommend that, but if you were going to make a mistake that would be the direction to do it in.
And as we tell the story—the story of Israel, the story of Jesus, the story of the early church—that itself is an act of worship. That is why, within my tradition, the reading of scripture is not merely ancillary to worship—something to prepare for the sermon—but it is actually, itself, part of the rhythm of worship itself.
In reading publicly the story of God the church is praising God for his mighty acts, and is celebrating them, and is celebrating the fact that she is part of that continuous story. That story as we use it in worship reforms our God-view, our world-view—reconstitutes us as the church. That which is can be pieced together about any way one chooses; an innumerable number of theories can be created and supported from the arrangement and interpretation of some pieces and the creation of others.
While he has no trouble poking holes in the theories of the writers he critiques, his limited explanation in spots and his assumptions and logical reasoning at other times come with gaps which leave his own conclusions open to critique. Despite claims of relative objectivity from various parties, my sense is that this debate is a fairly impassioned one.
What then is at stake? For some, it is faith itself, for others, it is long-standing church doctrines. I'm sure there are other possibilities as well. All involved at least seem to agree that a picture of the historical Jesus is worth discussing.
View all 7 comments. Nov 01, Silvia Iskandar rated it did not like it Shelves: couldn-t-finish-maybe-later. I've been in denial. No more. I'm NOT going to finish this book. It was such a tempting title and in the beginning was quite OK, listing the history of archeological search for the real Jesus.
But it went on criticising this author, that author. If I have read the works by the other author, that would be nice, but I haven't! It's so frustrating, like when I picked up a used UK gossip magazine in a motel laundry room. It doesn't feel nice at all to read about something you have no knowledge of. This I've been in denial. This book feels like a letter from one scholar to another that was given a cover. That's it for me. View 1 comment. Classic NT Wright fashion He is generous in saying that in a marketplace of ideas, all ideas are welcome.
But he demonstrates that not all ideas can be true and support the evidence. A compact and helpful read.
Jan 29, Chris Gill rated it liked it. Wright is defending orthodox beliefs of Jesus over and against modern, popular books on the life of Christ. Much different than I was hoping, but filled with hidden gems! Mar 05, Shane Wagoner rated it liked it. Well executed but I am surprised that Wright would spend pages refuting the likes of Theiring and Spong Not to mention Crossan emerged unscathed.
This is very helpful for anyone wanting to know more about the topic, as Wright has done well to summarise a large sweep of scholarship. As for the rest of this short book, it is quite dated.
These works that he is responding to have not aged well and I have not seen them mentioned in any of the more current works on Jesus. As for his theological responses they remain consistent with what he - and others like him - are still saying today. All in all, it was a tidy and brief book with some pearls and gems scattered throughout - although, to use a musical analogy, it is more of a collection of B-Sides, rather than a full length album.
Jun 20, Gary rated it liked it Shelves: text-help , polemic-strike. To channel Wilson, Wright has his rights and his wrongs. Apparently they are mixed in almost everything he says. There are some great insights here though I suspect in Church history much of this can be found in purer form. I like how he academically dismantles most of the modern Historical Jesus advocates, and how he shows up their fantasizes as anything but historical scholarship.
However, I feel much of what he says that is good is really another layer to add to our more creedal understandin To channel Wilson, Wright has his rights and his wrongs. However, I feel much of what he says that is good is really another layer to add to our more creedal understanding of Jesus and his work.
But Wright too often makes it sound like older ideas are to be cast aside in favour of some of these insights. He is also not always as clear of such subjects as the Divinity of the Christ as one would hope. The frautration I feel reading him is somewhat similar to that thorough conservatives feel reading Lewis on Scripture, for example.
A little more fundamentalism would do the good bishop some good. Still, good and useful and interesting. Liked it. Jul 11, Pam rated it really liked it. An interesting little read. Wright responds to three authors who have questioned what we can know of the historical Jesus via the Christian scriptures - Barbara Thiering, A.
Wilson and John Spong. Passages that speak of a coming cataclysm of the world actually refer to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. The idea that the first Christians were waiting for an apocalyptic end to the space-and-time world originated, Wright believes, with modern scholars like Albert Schweitzer.
The source was pagan, not biblical. Second, Wright rejects the idea that modern people necessarily read ancient texts differently than ancient people themselves did, with different assumptions about what is credible. We are not so original in matters cosmological or metaphysical, Wright argues. Darwinism, for example, is simply a revival of Epicureanism—the ancient view that events are entirely random. The notion that modern science should alter our interpretation of the Bible is built on bad eschatology, Wright says; it regards the turning point of history as modern science.
For Christians, the turning point of history is the cross and resurrection of Jesus. The spirit always, puzzlingly, lower case for Wright is calling a people to be those through whom God puts creation to rights. Third, Wright believes that the proper way to know anything is through a critically realist epistemology rooted in love for the other. We are not affirming the otherness of our ancestors, Wright argues, if we amalgamate their beliefs with what we already believe.
There are plenty of places in the book where Wright is wrong. He consistently conflates Platonism with Gnosticism. He alleges, for instance, that resurrection would be undesirable from a Platonist perspective, because it views bodies and materiality as objectionable.
Wright speaks of theologians from the fourth century Nicaea , the fifth Chalcedon , the 13th Aquinas , and the 16th the Reformers as if all they had to offer was error.
Worse, he speaks as though all they had to do was read the bible historically—as he does—and they would have avoided their Platonist distortions. I find it hard to believe that Wright actually thinks so little of his predecessors in the church, and I suspect that if he were pressed on how particular thinkers used Plato in treating creation, the sacraments, the resurrection of the body, and the renewal of creation, he would back off.
0コメント