N. T. Wright and “Federal Vision” FAQ 1 (N. T. Wright, mostly on Jesus)

What do you think of N. T. Wright?

Hard to say now.  It has been so long since I have seriously read him.

Why is that?

Well, one big reason (probably not the biggest one) is “The Camille Paglia phenomenon.”  He got famous after his “second big book,” Jesus & the Victory of God, and then only managed to put out one more on the Resurrection (which I hear is great but it wasn’t what I was hoping for), and has since been reduced to a billion instabooks a lot of speaking engagements, and all the political and teaching business that came with his acceptace of the office of Bishop of Durham.

“The Camille Paglia phenomenon”?

Right.  Where is the sequel to Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson? Her shorter essays are great, and I’m a fan of her Salon column, but we were supposed to get a real book some day.  I’ve been waiting for that since the age of 24 or 25.

So what did you like about Wright?

Well, mainly his work on New Testament introduction and on Jesus.  It was amazing.  It took things I thought I knew and showed that I had not even begun to think through the implications.

What was the belief that you hadn’t properly used in your reading of the gospels or the Bible in general?

Mainly, what is called “preterism”–the understanding that much of the prophecies in the NT refering to “the end of the world” according to many are actually referring to the final judgment on the old order of the pre-Christian economy.  It never occurred to me that the parables of Jesus, to name one example, needed to be re-thought.

For example…

Well, the parable of the demon being driven out and then coming back with more demons–Matthew 12.43-45.  I had assumed the timeframe was Jesus’ own ministry.  He drove out the demon but it would come back worse unless the people repented.

But isn’t that true?

Sure, but I doubt it was what Jesus was saying.  I think it is much more likely (with Wright) that Jesus is summarizing Israel’s history and explaining why they are now inhabited by demons.  Because Wright is stuck on a “perpetual exile” idea (my term, I think) he doesn’t turn to the obvious national historic exorcism, but I think Zachariah is clear that the return from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple was the exorcism.  So I hadn’t rethought the time frame.  Futurism trains us to make everything begin with Jesus’ ministry and go into the future.  But why not expect Jesus to teach on what has gone wrong in Israel that is bringing them now to the end of days?

So you disagree with Wright about that Israel was still in exile.

Yes, but let me give you another example of a parable.

OK.

Consider Luke 13.1-5.  I had always thought this was a straightforward teaching  by Jesus that everyone who doesn’t repent will go to hell when they die.

But isn’t that true?

Sure, but I doubt it was what Jesus was saying.  He wasn’t making an abstract point about every human being alive since the Fall of Adam and about what they need to do to get to a good afterlife, though they can all certainly learn a lesson about that from what Jesus says here.  But Jesus was telling people to escape a specific national judgment and giving them a concrete warning about how they would perish.

How do you know this?

Well, two reasons.  First, Jesus doesn’t say that his listeners with also perish.  He says that they will likewise perish.  He says that they also will be killed by Roman soldiers and that others in Jerusalem will also be crushed under falling buildings.

Second, is the context of the passage.  Jesus is obviously talking about national judgment–what will happen to his own generation.  This is so obvious and yet somehow I totally ignored it in order to read into the passage my own concerns about the soul of “everyman” and the universal need for conversion.  These things are true.  Their truth does not justify misleading myself or others about what God’s word actually says in a passage.

It was reading Wright that made me realize how much like a liberal I was in reading Jesus in the Bible.

How so? What do you mean by “liberal”?

I mean being offended by the actual Jesus of history and replacing him with my own construct.  Stereotypical “liberals” basically make Jesus the ambassador of a few principles: “Fatherhood of God,” “Brotherhood of Man”–or “Siblinghood of Humanity” now I guess.  All Jesus’ distinctiveness is bleached out to make him look like a modern guru of modern democratic values and modern “spirituality.”

And you did this?

Sure, I did.  I am a convinced Evangelical and Calvinist.  Ergo, Jesus was just like me and he must be teaching all the things that are important to me.  He wasn’t a “great moral teacher” like the liberals said.  He was rather, something much more orthodox (which is a residual blessing) and silly: He was a great roving systematic theologian, meeting with people and publicly preaching various points on the Ordo Salutis.

And we shouldn’t do this?  Isn’t Evangelical Calvinism true?

Of course it is true, but it is not what Jesus was doing or saying.

If I tried to treat Jeremiah the way we treat Jesus, I’d be laughed at by Evangelicals and deservedly so.  We all know that Jeremiah was a prophet to Jerusalem telling them to repent and submit to Nebuchadnezzar.  For the most part, we know that we have to do some work to properly learn Jeremiah’s lessons.  When we do this, I suppose we usually do an adequate job, though in truth if one looked at how often Jeremiah is preached or taught, we then see how Biblically anemic we have become.  Jesus and Paul are our placebos for the felt need we have for someone to have written directly to us, and to have written us a theology text that is timeless.

But isn’t the Bible applicable for all ages?

Absolutely.  But the Father in His Wisdom and Love did not send us a book that looks anything like the ones we write about Christian truth.  He wrote us a history.  Jesus, in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and the Spirit given to start the Church at Pentecost, are the climax of that story, but they are not writing systematic theology.  And Jesus needs to be read more like Jeremiah and less like Louis Berkhof.

But isn’t Jesus more than a prophet?

Absolutely!  But he is not less than one.  And reducing him to theological encyclopedia might be something His Father finds insulting.

To be continued (Next: probably more about Wright and Jesus and things I disagree with or not)

4 thoughts on “N. T. Wright and “Federal Vision” FAQ 1 (N. T. Wright, mostly on Jesus)

  1. Bobber

    Thanks for writing this Mark, it really sparks my interest. I’ve never ready any NT Wright but this really gives me some incentive.

    Reply
  2. Pingback: Mark Horne » N. T Wright and “Federal Vision” FAQ 2 (N. T. Wright continued, exile and politics)

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