Ross over at LessTravelled.net is one of the great thinkers of the emerging church blogosphere, which lately has seemed like it’s in decline. But after reading Ross’ recent post on Jesus, I’m encouraged and hopeful that we’re reaching a good equilibrium, where we can share our insights without being obsessed with blogging to the exclusion of other faith-forming activities.

What’s so great about this post? First, Ross name-drops NT Wright, which is a sure way to get my attention. I recently finished the New Testament and the People of God, and while I haven’t finished digesting it and, as we said when I was a kid, “applying it to my life,” I’m confident that it will, in the long run, be one of the most influential books I read in my lifetime.

The main effect of NTPOG is that the reader is confronted with the undeniable Jewishness and first-century-ness of Jesus. This does not detract from our perception of Jesus as the son of God and the messiah, but it does impact another perception - namely, the Jesus who is either our heartthrob or our genie-in-a-bible. Savior and lord, yes, but feathered-haired dude with sheep? Hardly.

This insight from Wright bothers Ross:

The more I have thought about Jesus in his own context, and tried to understand him as his disciples would have, as his contemporaries would have, the more disconnected he has become from the Christ of my Christian youth. The more sense Jesus made as a 1st century Jew, the less plausible he became as a timeless big brother intent on undoing the litany of errors I am so gifted at making.

But perhaps Jesus needs to start sounding a little more strange to us, if we are to understand him fully:

Jesus became real for me in a very new way; suddenly when I read the gospels, I could imagine Jesus saying the words he was quoted as saying, and I understood what he meant. Suddenly Jesus had context. He left the stained glass window and entered into the real world, where he was concerned about Roman occupation and Jewish resistance and the Kingdom of God within the world of God’s creation.

It is rare that I read a blog post and get that feeling that you get during a really good time of worship. Doxological reading, you might call it. Thank you, Ross, for lifting my day, and motivating me to start the next volume in Wright’s series, Jesus and the Victory of God.

If you’ve never read NT Wright before, I recommend starting with The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is.

Elaine, who is part of the church to which all three Radical Congruency authors belong, put together a terrific summary of Parts I and II of The New Testament and the People of God (more here), which must have been a substantial project to accomplish in one week.

The New Testament and the People of God, Part I and Part II: Tools for the task of approaching the New Testament texts, Historical data of the first century, and Theological questions

In these first two sections, Wright places his work to look at the Gospels, the persons of Jesus and Paul, and the historical context of it all, within the context of intellectual knowledge since the Enlightenment.

He draws on what others have said and hypothesized regarding epistemology (how we know things) and movements within the last century in the fields of theology…Read More

Great work, Elaine! You’ve set a high bar for the rest of us as we take turns leading our weekly discussions.

Who were the Pharisees, that often-maligned, ultra-strict sect that kept missing the point about Jesus? Deep into a chapter in The New Testament and the People of God on the various movements and divisions within first-century Judaism, N.T. Wright tackles this question.

Surprisingly, the Pharisees were a lot like us (even though we try not to be like them). Caught between a sincere concern for faithfulness and the daily reality of Roman overlordship, the Pharisees, like other groups within Judaism at the time, were looking for a way to survive, a way to maintain their identity as God’s people, and a way to see God’s will done.

Wright says:

The Pharisees sought to bring moral pressure to bear upon those who had actual power; to influence the masses; and to maintain their own purity as best they could. Their aim, so far as we can tell, was never simply that of private piety for its own sake. Nor (one need scarcely add) was it the system of self-salvation so anachronistically ascribed to them by the Christians who knew little about the first century but a lot about the Pelagian controversy. Their goals were the honour of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel. p. 189

That doesn’t sound so bad. So why were the Pharisees so obsessed with purity, and so enraged by Jesus’ challenges to their overly scrupulous rules?

Wright suggests that the Pharisees came to see their focus on purity as a replacement for the lost purity of the temple. While they and others were successful at various times at purifying and restoring the temple, it was ultimately destroyed in AD 70, and the Pharisees’ theology was ready to handle this catastrophy - by replacing temple with Torah:

Increasingly, like other Jewish sects of the period (including the Essenes and the early Christians) they regarded themselves and their own groups as in some sense or other the replacements or the equivalents of the Temple. They also appear to have regarded themselves in some sense as prophets, whose traditional role always included speaking out on ‘political’ issues. p. 190

This explains why the Pharisees wanted every Jew to follow a standard of purity not demanded by the Torah:

…they tried to maintain purity at a degree higher than that prescribed in the Hebrew Bible for ordinary Jews under ordinary conditions… And it seems most likely that, whether in great detail or in symbolic gestures, their purity codes bore some familial relationship t the purity codes required for priests when on duty in the Temple. As we shall see later, the Temple functioned as the controlling symbol for the Pharisees no less than for other Jews; and the purity codes functioned as a key means of granting to ordinary domestic life, and in particular the private study of Torah, the status that would normally only accrue to those who were serving in the presence of Israel’s god within his temple. p. 195

This is not a foreign concept to Christians. Paul says:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

And Peter goes even further:

As you come to him, the living Stone - rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him - you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says:

“See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame.”

Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,

“The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone,” and,
“A stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.”

They stumble because they disobey the message - which is also what they were destined for.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. 1 Peter 2:4-11

Peter, like Paul, like the Pharisees, is suggesting a shift away from Temple-centered spirituality, and priest-mediated relationship with God. So maybe we are Pharisees.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might recall that several of us are reading through N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, the first massive volume in an even more massive series, Christian Origins and the Question of God, that promises to be the most significant historical/biblical/theological work of our time.

This is a book that I very much want to read, and I enjoy reading it. However, the very fact that it’s so thick can make it easy to give up. I gave up once before, and decided that I wanted to finish the book, but not by myself.

So I asked some friends if they’d like to join me in reading through the book. They all said yes, and many copies were ordered. We all started. Some of us then started having children. School started again. We got busy.

So we’re all at different points, and not making as much progress as we would be in a perfect world. We’re not perfect, and that’s OK. What I’d like to do, though, is call us to press on, to keep reading, to keep searching, to keep reflecting.

Let’s try to have the first 8 chapters (243 pages) read by the end of the year. That’s over a month and a half, so that should be enough time. If that seems like too much, try reading 5 pages this weekend, and go from there.

Previously

It’s all about worldview, as we learned in college (thanks, Monte!). From Tom Wright’s New Testament and the People of God:

…worldviews provide the stories through which human beings view reality. Narrative is the most characteristic expression of worldview, going deeper than the isolated observation or fragmented remark.

…from these stories one can in principle discover how to answer the basic questions that determine human existence: who are we, where are we, what is wrong, and what is the solution? All cultures cherish deep-rooted beliefs which can in principle be called up to answer these questions. All cultures (that is) have a sense of identity, of environment, of a problem with the way the world is, and of a way forward - a redemptive eschatology, to be more precise - which will, or may, lead out of that problem. p. 123

The divide between “Left Behind” Christianity and the kind that most emerging church people practice comes from the answers to these questions. Perhaps most important is the question of redemptive eschatology - how will we get out of this mess we’re in?

I don’t think there’s too much fundamental disagreement over the first three questions. Sin is defined differently, but we generally all agree that not everything is right, and that each of us has some role in that un-right-ness.

So what is the solution? Left Behind Christianity says that, by one means or another, hopefully soon, Jesus will come back and get us the heck out of here before it gets too bad. Brian McLaren and others have criticized this view as being too escapist, and unconcerned for the rest of the world (including the world itself, as well as the people in it). However, it is rooted in faith in God, that he will fulfill his many promises to rescue and save us in our time of need.

Emerging-type Christianity generally sees the solution as being a lot closer - God’s people taking better care of each other and the environment, for starters. In practical terms, it’s much better if people believe this, because they generally act with greater responsibility. However, I wonder if we’ll lose sight of God’s role in this “redemtive eschatology.” If we can fix everything by recycling and feeding the poor, what do we need God for?

Hopefully, we are moving beyond the view of God as the cosmic band-aid (excuse me, adhesive bandage). If God’s primary role is not simply fixing things, but of actually having a relationship with us as the people he has called to himself - that might be truly a way forward.

I said:

Let’s make the next reading p. 81-144, chapters 4 and 5, to be finished by Sunday, October 1

Uh, let’s try the 15th.

For those lacking context for what I’m talking about, a group of us are reading NT Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, and sharing our thoughts as we go. This is helpful because, as you know if you’ve seen the book in hardcopy form, this is a long book, and NT Wright is a very smart man. Consequently, it’s easy to give up. However, it’s a good book, and he’s a good writer, so it’s worth working through it.

You can email me if you’d like to join in.

We have reached the end of the first part of our group read through N.T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God (p. 1-80, chapters 1-3).

Wright starts by delving into the nature of knowledge, history, and textual and literary criticism in some depth, as well as worldview and the importance of story. I won’t attempt to summarize this tremendous amount of material in any detail, but Wright presents himself as a critical realist.

The hard-and-fast distinction between objective and subjective must be abandoned as useless. p. 44

In other words, he believes that our observations are challenged by critical reflection, and can ultimately survive these challenges to speak truly of reality (see diagram on p. 36). He critiques both naive realism and the rather more radical postmodern philosophers who suggest that nothing can be known with any certainty.

One way humans know is through stories. Stories, Wright says, are not simply useful case studies or examples, but are at the very core of our existence:

Human life, then, can be seen as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another. This runs contrary to the popular belief that a story is there to “illustrate” some point or other which can in principle be stated without recourse to the clumsy vehicle of narrative. p. 38

He speaks of the power of stories, as a type of metaphor, to subvert other stories:

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life - for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors. Metaphor consists in bringing two sets of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so. Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever quite be the same again. p. 40

Wright goes on to orient literature, story, and worldview in relation to one another. I was amused by these remarks on epistemology:

When you agree with the point of view, you tend to watch as a realist (this is how things actually are); when you disagree, you quickly become a phenomenalist at the author/event stage (it was just her point of view) or even subjectivist (she simply made it all up). p. 51

Wright is profoundly optimistic and clear that we can read scripture fruitfully without becoming entangled in all the problems identified by the biblical criticism of the last century. And yet, evangelicalism has not been free from these problems:

Most Bible-readers of a conservative stamp will look askance at deconstructionism. But its proposed model is in fact too close for comfort to many models implicitly adopted within (broadly speaking) the pietist tradition. The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models.

Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously - often, in fact, there above all - there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels. The modes of reading and interpretation that have been followed are, in fact, functions of the models of inspiration and authority of scripture that have…often made nonsense of any attempt to read the Bible historically.

The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelist, the life of the early church, or even what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellows in the world of literary epistemology. p. 60.

This is the reason I find so much value in Wright’s work - he paves a faithful path into the realm of questions that most of us have been afraid to ask for most of our believing lives. We worry that if we learn too much about what Jesus meant when he said this or that, we might realize that it was some embarassingly specific first-century-Jewish thing that really doesn’t mean what we thought it meant.

Yet this will not take us off course from the orthodox faith. Wright opens the book with the Parable of the Vineyard, and helps us understand the vineyard, the tenants, the owner, and the son. The Kingdom is the vineyard, Israel is represented by the tenants, God is the owner, and Jesus himself is the son he describes in the parable. He will be rejected, like a stone rejected by builders, and yet will become the cornerstone. Wright frames this parable within the story of Israel and her lost vocation, which will be handed over to the whole world through Jesus’ ministry.

Let’s make the next reading p. 81-144, chapters 4 and 5, to be finished by Sunday, October 1. Sound OK?

(sent via email today)
Hi everyone,
I hope your reading of NT Wright’s New Testament and the People of God is going well. We are scheduled to have finished the first 80 or so pages (wherever the chapter break is in your edition) by now, so I’d love to start discussing the book.

For those of us who have blogs, I think it would be great if we could all blog our thoughts from this section of reading and send the link to the post(s) to everyone via email. If you don’t have a blog, it would be great if you could email your thoughts to the group. If you’d like to contribute via voicemail, my number (which does not ring - it goes straight to voicemail) is (US) 206-325-0663. I can podcast whatever you leave on my voicemail if you’d like.

There are plenty of ways to approach blogging about a book, including:
-Typing important quotes, with or without commentary -Writing about general impressions -Writing about one specific passage that clicked with you -Exploring questions that the reading raised for you -Connecting parts of the reading with scripture or other sources

Could we agree to do this within the next week? I think that would give us a good foundation for a SkypeCast-type-thing - speaking of which, is there a time that would work best for everyone to do that? I’d prefer a Saturday if possible.

Sorry I’m late in getting this out. I just got a job (yay!) last week, so I’ve been pretty busy. I look forward to discussing the book with everyone.

Thanks,
Justin
RadicalCongruency.com