(Continued from Part One)

Can we talk about Wright’s idea of Israel still being in exile now?

OK, we should probably get back to that.  Part of Wright’s offense, as it were, is that he does real covenant theology; which means, he understands that the God revealed in the Bible is a God who is bound to an identifiable and visibly-marked out people or society.  As you might have noticed, both those two parables I mentioned to you involve a more “corporate” emphasis than is often realized.

This corporate  emphasis has commonly been linked–in Wright’s writings and in the minds of his critics–with the claim that Israel had never really returned from exile and that Jesus was finally announcing the real return from exile for the nation.  Basically, in Wright’s understanding, the prophecy of Moses in Deuteronomy 30, and re-asserted by Jeremiah and Ezekiel had not yet been fulfilled, even though Israel had been brought back from exile and given the land.

Is this related to that weird interpretation of the Prodigal Son in his Jesus & the Victory of God?

Oh, puh-leeeze!  That insight that the Prodigal Son story would remind listeners of the return from exile is extremely helpful and convincing.  Ever since childhood I have wondered about the weird metaphor that simply appears without warning, “he was dead, and is alive.”  Wright showed me where the concept came from, the return from exile as prophesied in Ezekiel and Isaiah.  The description of the prodigal going to and returning from “a far country” is important.

Well now it sound like you agree that Israel was in exile.

No, Israel was in deep trouble like they had never been before.  They were in Egypt and Babylon, only worse, even though they were geographically in the land.  But just like there is no reason to claim that Israel had never really left Egypt, so there was no reason to believe that Israel never left Babylon.  They had been delivered from Egypt and then they had been delivered from the nations as Moses predicted in Deuteronomy 30, but they had fallen from that greater grace into greater sin.  You look in vain for any time before when Israel was filled with demoniacs the way it was when Jesus came.  Precedents like the spirit tormenting Saul only emphasize how much worse off Israel now was when Jesus appeared on the scene.

Any evidence you want to share with us against Wright’s interpretation?

I have already mentioned Wright’s excellent insight into Matthew 12.43-45, which says that Israel had been cleansed of a demon in the past and was now worse off than before.  Maccabees simply does not cut it as a possible explanation.  The demon was sent away when Israel was again in the land.  But I think Mark 11.17 is also inexplicable unelss the promises of return have been fulfilled.  Jesus says that the Temple should be a house of prayer for all the nations.  He is quoting Isaiah 56.7 which, in context, is probably usually understood as a prophecy of the New Covenant.  But it is not.  Jesus thinks it is already in effect and that the Temple rulers have fallen away from it.

So there was a return from Exile but there was, in a sense, another fall into a different sort of exile.

Right, and this one was worse than the others.  Israel was truly free from idolatry in one sense.  Unlike the Prophets, Jesus never has to denounce the Israelites for their shrines to Baal or unauthorized image-shrines to YHWH.  But something worse has happened.  Critics are right to disagree with Wright, but they are wrong if they think this undermines his point obout Jesus socio-political message?

Socio-political?

This is another point where Wright’s insights are blindingly obvious and yet I’d been entirely blind to them.  The temple was going to be destroyed as a national judgment–but judgment for what?  The Gospels are stuffed with information about that issue, but it all gets lost in a preacher’s felt need to present a view where people don’t think they need propitiation and Jesus is telling them that they do.

Does N. T. Wright believe in the need for propitiation.

Yes, he clearly does.  In his commentary on Romans he makes this clear.  In his lectures on Romans at Regent College in Vancouver, B. C. he ripped into the NIV for not using the term “propitiation” in their translation of Romand 3.25.

So the doctrine of propitiation is not lost on this second look at what the Gospels are saying.

No, not at all. The point is that Jesus was confronting the whole nation over unrepentant sin–sin which they had managed to convince themselves was holiness.  There are several places and ways to show this, but since you asked about propitiation, lets talk about the accusation that sent Jesus the cross.  What does Jesus say to the women weeping over him as he goes to the cross?  He tells them quite directly the he is being crucified for a charge of which he is innocent, but that in a generation, Jerusalem’s children will be so obviously guilty of that accusation that they will be crucified and more.

And this is backed up by the whole choice between Jesus and another “son of the father” Barabbas.  Barabbas is a “robber”–the same word used to describe the two people Jesus is crucified between and also used by Jesus when he claims the Temple has been made into a “robber’s den.  A robber, however, is not someone who steals, but an outlaw rebel.  Barabbas, we are told in the Gospels is an insurrectionist and a murderer.

This is going to show how Jesus’ challenge was socio-political?

Yes.  Jesus came preaching the Kingdom, which everyone already wanted and expected.  But Jesus told them they were preparing for this Kingdom in a way that was only making God angrier with them.  Israel loved outlaw killers and thought they looked more like the hope of Israel than Jesus did.  As we have already discussed, Jesus told his generation that, unless they repented, they too would be killed by Roman soldiers and many more Jerusalemites would be destroyed by tumbling buildings.

Israel had adopted as a national way of life a stance toward the world and toward how to live in it that was not Her true calling.  As a nation formed by God for a mission, this covenant calling was, by definition, socio-political.  Jesus was coming and proclaiming a new way of life that was appropriate to God’s calling on Israel.  Jesus was calling for a re-defined “Politics of Holiness.”

To be continued

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)