Well, if I blogged everything good from Wright’s first long book, I’d be stuck here ’till next year. So I skipped ahead to the end and am now skipping around for now. On the last page of the work, he again lays down the ultimatum that everyone must decide an answer to the “Question of God”. There is no neutral ground. That grey area you’re standing in is blacker than you think.
The New Testament writers claim that, though there is only one god, all human beings of themselves chreish wrong ideas ABOUT this one god. In worshipping the god thus wronly conceived, they worship an idol.
Pagans worship gods of wood and stone, distorting the creator by worshipping the creature.
Jews, Paul argues in parallel with this, have made an idol of their own national identity and security, and so have failed to see what the covenant faithfulness of their god, the god of Abraham, had always entailed.
Christians, as the addressees of the New Testament writings, are clearly not exempt from the possibility of idolatry, of using the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ while in fact worshipping a different god.
Our study of the history of Judaism and Christianity in the first century leads us inexorably to the conclusions that both cannot be right in their claims about the true god.
Both might, of course, be wrong.[!]
The stoics might be right: there is one god, since the whole world is divine, and we humans are part of it.
The Epicureans, and their modern successors the Deists, might be right: there is a god, or possibly more than one, whom none of us knows very well and all of us distantly acknowledge, with ignorance and distortion.
The pagans might be right: there are different ‘divine’ forces in the world, which need to be propitiated when angry, and harnessed to one’s own advantage when not.
The Gnostics might be right: there is a good, hidden god who will reveal himself to some of us, thereby rescuing us from this wicked world of matter and flesh, which are the reaction of an evil god.
Or the modern atheists or materialists might be right.
There is no neutral ground here. We are at the level of worldview, and here ultimate choices are involved.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.475
Alright so this brings back some memories, some not so long ago:
“Romans Road, Evangelism Explosion, The Four Spiritual Laws, The Bridge – approach the “lost person” from a position of power. They come to the lost person with a prepackaged message that assumes one gospel fits all. They assume the questions to be asked and the answers that shall be given before we have even listened. (intellectually, and more important attitudinally – we are saying with our posture that we already know what you need, what your problem is, and we’re right and you’re wrong – none-Christians come away feeling like “I’m one of your ‘cases’”). I contend this is contrary to the gospel. For the gospel always comes incarnationally: i.e. humbly, entering in to hear each person/ culture in its own language. The one message fits all implies that everyone has the same problem. Only in Christendom, where everyone was already pre-initiated and where the cultural problems are homogeneous, would this make sense..”
–David Fitch, When They Will Not Come, (via the BHT, via Next Reformation)
I remember being show the Roman’s Road in sermon’s and gospel presentations all growing up. One of my earliest memories of church was being about six years old and playing some sort of Pictionary game in Sunday School that revealed various verses from Romans for this. W…Sounds like… (a picture of a cage). The WAGES of sin is death. OK I get it.
I’ve seen the bridge illustration many times. I remember by father drawing it on scraps of paper, with his trademark “Beaky Bird” characters instead of stick people. During a particularly boring sermon here and there, I’d read the bulletin though four times and then fumble with the tracts that were always on the table at the back of the church. An illustration of the bridge figured prominently in one of them.
Oddly enough, I had never really heard of the Four Spiritual Laws. That particular one wasn’t as prominent in the circles I grew up in I guess.
When I came to college, I was struck by hit head-on by something entirely different: friendship evangelism. It seemed so superior to these canned gospel presentations – investing time and energy into someone until they actually cared what you thought, then telling them gradually how Jesus had changed your life. Make them WANT what you have. The charismatic church I attended in college had this down pat. And really, there are a lot of good things to say about the approach. It builds community (even though my “friend” disappeared after the first year, I had found lots of others). There are problems with it too (besides the one I just mentioned), but I’m not going to go into that now.
So, meanwhile back at the friendship evangelism church, I signed up for a class on evangelism, taught by the cool college pastor. The first day of class, our notebooks were handed out. I was shocked. The curriculum? “Evangelism Explosion”. Memorize Roman’s Road. Cheesy 70’s cartoon illustrations. Canned question and answer. Door to door. Intellectual assault (minus the underlying scholarship). Wait a minute…
Over the next several years, I did a little bit of all that. I went door to door. I completed the assignments to accost people on campus and share the gospel with them. The Mormon guys do this every day for two years when they are in their early twenties. I’m sure it must get comfortable after a while, but for me (and most of my fellow classmates and friends) it was hell.
Why hell? Just personality weakness? Just being sinfully self-conscience and cowardly? I’ll be the first to say I wish I were braver sometimes. But it goes way deeper than that. I just didn’t believe it worked. That it was really true. Now don’t get me wrong. I believed ALL of it was TRUE. The Gospel contained in these methods didn’t contain any untrue statements about God or the Bible. But they were truncated. They left things out. They always made me feel icky. The pastor telling us we should “win souls” for the Lord by whipping these out on the person waiting in front of us in the grocery line – I just could never buy it. I remember feeling uncomfortable about them when I was young, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Doug Wilson (a local pastor and author) has written a ton of helpful and well-thought-out books on Christian living, education, parenting, ecclesiology, etc. However one of his earlier books on evangelism, Persuasions, is nothing I could get very excited about. It’s more of the same:
I, the brilliant Christian have the divine rhetoric to smack down your (fill in the blank: paganism, materialism, legalism, post-modernism, fondness for light beer). Come back when you’ve seen the light of my Biblical, Reformation-upgraded, presuppositional answers (with the Holy Spirit’s help of course) and we’ll hook you up.
And hey, I’m ALL for knowing WHY Christianity gives paganism a noogie. The rhetoric has a place too. Is that our evangelism though? That’s our main shtick to help redeem the world? I’m not convinced. Wilson and co. are not convinced either actually. They take a post-millennial-church-subverting-the-culture approach that makes a lot more sense on a lot of levels. Again. Somewhat off-topic. I guess I’m talking about evangelism proper.
Back to the quote from Fitch. From the introduction to his series of posts:
When They Will Not Come” (WTWNC) names the social dilemma of the church in post Christendom when we can no longer assume non-Christians will come to church even when they are seeking God.
Man, how quickly does the REACTION to this gospel-in-a-can dispensing fall into the ditch of liberal “don’t impose your views on other people” wishy-washyness? Long before you can pronounce all five syllables of “Proselytizing”. Ewww, that sort of relativistic mush is no good news at all.
So what to do?
A friend of mine is hoping to move to Romania soon to plant a church. An inlaw is planting one in the next town south of where I live. I’ve been intrigued by the AMiA (Anglican Mission in America’s) church planting efforts. I’ve been thinking about church planing a lot lately and that naturally leads to thoughts of evangelism proper. But what if proper as we know it is a silly invention Jesus would have rolled his eyes at? I don’t have answers to any of this stuff. A few ideas. Mostly just more wrestling ahead.
This was posted as the quote of the day at the BHT a few days ago:
“I simply argue that the cross should be raised at the center of the marketplace as well as on the steeple of the Church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town’s garbage heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek…at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died, and that is what He died for, and that is what He died about…that is where churchmen ought to be and what churchmen ought to be about.”
-George Macleod
Alright class, your assignment is to explain what implications this has for the “churchmen” mentioned. Assume this includes pastors, and laymen as some of you are or may become.
Tough!
I think Matthew 9:11-13 may have something to do with it:
And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
If we read the New Testament as it stands, it claims on every page to be speaking of things which are true in the public domain. It is not simply, like so many books, a guide for private spiritual advancement. To read it like that is like reading Shakespeare simply to pass an examination. The New Testament claims to be the subversive story of the creator and the world, and demands to be read as such. Any authority it exercises in the process will be a dynamic, not a static, authority; the New Testament will not impose itself from a great height, and to attempt to use it in that fashion is a once to falsify it. Its claim is less brittle, and, if true, more powerful. It offers itself as the true story, the true myth, the true history of the whole world.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.471
I’ve heard explained before that the early Christians had lots of hope because they though Jesus was only on vacation in heaven for a few years. He was coming back on the clouds any day to rescue them from Nero if they could just hold on tight.
Things had to institutionalize after it became apparent he was going to be (bodily) gone for quite some time, right?
One might come to this conclusion from just reading the bible (not much is said) and using a bit of imagination. However, when we look at other early church writings, it turns out this really wasn’t the case. The hope of Christianity was (still is) in the RESURRECTION of Jesus, not his second coming.
This passage from Wright is enlightening:
The usual scholarly construct, in which the early church waited for Jesus’ return, lived only for the future and without thought for anything past (such as memories of Jesus himself), only to be grievously disapointed and to take up history-writing as a displacement activity, a failure of nerve – this picture is without historical basis.
The church expected certain events to happen within a generation, and happen they did, though there must have been moments between AD 30 and 70 when some wondered if they would, and in consequence took up the Jesish language of delay [‘how long, O Lord, how long?].
Jerusalem fell; the good news of Jesus, and the kingdom of Israel’s god, was anounced in Rome, as well as in Jerusalem and Athens. But there is no sign of dismay, in any of the literature that has come down to us from the period after AD 70, at the fact that Jesus himself had still not returned.
Clement looks forward to the return of Jesus without any comment on its timing.
Ignatius is worried about many things, but not that.
Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, is as emphatic as anyone that the event willhappen. He does not know when; but then, the key passages in the New Testament always said that it would be a surprise.
Tertullian, at the end of the second century, looks forward to Jesus’ return as the greates show on earth, outstripping anything one might see at the stadium or theatre.
As far as the early Christians were concerned, the most important event – the resurrection of Jesus – had already happened.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.463
Bill Kinnon making fun of people making fun of The Shack is a crack-up:
Paul’s primary heresy; portraying G_d, the Father as a breakfast-baking, big black woman. We all know that G_d, the Father is a white male, with white hair and a white beard. (Does He wear a red suit? I can’t remember.) G_d, the Father could never be a breakfast-baking, big black woman. Especially since that person plays the Oracle in the Matrix and she bakes cookies. At least Paul Young’s G_d, the Father as a breakfast-baking, big black woman doesn’t smoke.
Don’t forget though – Young’s God the Father listens to hip hop, which depending on what circle you’re in is as bad a smoking.
Personally, I prefer cookies to breakfast, but I liked most of The Shack anyway.
When dealing with monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam mostly), Wright asserts that most important elements can be expressed as answers to these two questions:
How is the creator active within the creation?
How is the creator dealing with evil within his creation?
About the second, with record to early Jews and Christians, he continues:
The basic Jewish anser to the question, How is the creator dealing with evil within his creation? was of course that he called Israel.
This, as we saw, created second-order difficulties, since Israel became, so to speak, part of the problem as well as the means of the solution. The early Christians, on the basis of everything we know of them from both within and outside the canonical ‘New Testament’, accepted this answer, recognized this second-order difficulty, and asserted that Israel’s god had dealth with the difficulty in and through Jesus and thereby affirmed the basic answer. Israel’s prupose had come to its head in Jesus’ work, which itself had led up to its appropriate, though highly paradoxical, culmination in his death and resurrection. Those who now belonged to Jesus’ people were not identical with ethnic Israel, since Israel’s history had reached its intended fulfillment.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.457
I think this is right on. Romans 11 clearly teaches that we (Christians) were grafted onto the branch of Israel. The Old Testament had not been erradicated by the coming of Jesus, but fulfilled. The various Christians throughout history that have been unfriendly or even murderous to the Jews are deep in sin and misunderstanding. “Replacement Theology” it’s called. We replaced the Jews. Screw them.
No. We are grafted into them. But this can go the other way too (and it does).
For several years during college, I followed a lot of teaching from Messianic Jews who were really big on Israel, the nation, and the dirt itself. I even subscribed to a newsletter by Gershon Solomon, of the Temple Mount Faithful! Whenever some hurricane hit the United States, it was clearly God’s wrath for some kind of recently enacted foreign policy that wasn’t friendly to Israel. Invite some Palestinian leaders to dinner at the White House (not that I think that was a good idea), and we were clearly spitting in God’s face and the covenant he made to give Jacob’s sons and daughters that stretch of land on the east coast of the Mediterranean. So despite their rejection of Jesus the Messiah, all these old covenants were still in place. Really? Remember Jerusalem was crushed in AD 73 and its people remained scattered nearly 1900 years – longer than the previous history of the entire nation.
I’m not denying that the restablishment of a Israelli state in 1948 was rather incredible and done by the hand of God. But seriously folks, all that stuff in the Old Testament? It’s FULFILLED by Jesus. It’s actually not OK (without sin) to go kill the Palestinians still squating in the Gaza. Just because it was OK for Joshua to clean house back in 1400 BC doesn’t mean that’s still part of God’s plan (and Jesus’ followers plan) today.
I like those some of that Jewish fusion worship music too, but incorporating Israeli customs into your Christian rituals doesn’t get you closer to YHWY. Lighting up that cool Menorah you picked up in Jerusalem? That’s nice but God isn’t impressed.
So I’m down with Israel. I want the current people to thrive and turn to the Lord when they can. I don’t want their enemies, some of the Muslim, to thrash them. But they don’t have magic powers either. God bless ’em. And the ones faithful to Jesus? We ARE them.
Over and over again, I’ve read and been preached to about how the first century church was this wonderful apostle-led community and that it’s been going downhill ever since. If only we could just GET BACK to that. That’s what church should really look like. House church advocates, cell group people, a lot of people pull this one out. To be fair, some of them have a much richer understanding of this period and don’t hang out in nostalgia. But it happens often enough.
Wright, throughout this book, denounces this idea from various angles. Remember the book of Acts?
It is not surprising that Christianity developed in a multiplicity of ways. The ‘myth of Christian origins’, or in more vulgar language the ‘big bang’ theory of church origins, has been shown up as a later Christian fiction. A ‘pure’ period, when everyone believed exactly the same thing, lived in a community without problems or quarrels, and hammered out True Doctrine for the coming Great Church, never existed.
Though Acts is often regarded as an attempt to whitewash the early Christians, it must be judged singularly unsuccessful. The sin of Ananias and Sapphira, the dispute between Hebrews and Hellenists, the vacillating of Peter, the major division over circumcision, the fierce quarrel between Paul and Barnabas – even the heroes of Acts are shown emphatically to have feet of clay. The idea of early uniformity and stability owes more the Eusebius [4th century historian] and his successors than to a first-century writing; the reality was too close to be covered up.
At the same time, we must also resist the more subtle myths that crown in once we reject the facile one. If the early church was not a pure community, and to be imitated as such, no more can we assume that it was an early version of the ecumenical movement, and to be imitated as such.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.452
Why do I even write this sort of thing down? More than anything, I want to see the church flourish, unhampered by the worldliness that has creeped into so much of what we do. What the “pure” church would really look like is important to me. It’s a big part of why I wanted to read this book. I just skipped ahead 350 pages to that part! I know the early church had it’s problems, but what clues are there about what they did right (Jesus-shaped things) that can be dug up for today? It’s important for me to find out.
How can any scientific enquiry not allow for the possibility that its own worldview might be incorrect?
If it is replied that certain types of argument and enquiry would cut of the branch on which the worldview was sitting, the counter-reply might be that, if that is where the argument leads, you had better find yourself another branch, or even another tree.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.92
The fear that ‘actual events’ will disappear beneath a welter of particular people’s perceptions is a fear…to be rejected as groundless. As a particular example, it must be asserted most strongly that to discover that a particular writer has a ‘bias’ tells us nothing whatever about the value of the information he or she presents. It merely bids us be aware of the bias (and of our own, for that matter), and to assess the material according to as many sources as we can.
Intellectual honesty consists not in forcing an impossible neutrality, but in admitting that neutrality is not possible. (quoting Arthur Holmes)
Similarly, the fear of ‘objectivization’ which so affected Rudolf Bultmann’s theology may be laid to rest. Bultmann, within his neo-Kantian philosophical heritage, was anxious about seeming to talk of objects or events other than by talking of them in relation to the observer. He therefore insisted (among other things) on doing theology by doing anthropology, following Feuerbach in collapsing god-talk into man-talk.
We simply do not have to accept such false dichotomies. It is not the case that some things are purely objective and others purely subjective, or that one must reduce either to the other. Life, fortunately, is more complicated than that.
-N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.89
