Tom Wright and Scripture: part II

The Hebrew people loved to tell stories. The Hebrew Scriptures is nothing other than the collection of the great tradition of story telling which the people of God were involved in. But stories were not the same to the Hebrews as they are to us today. Most of us see stories as nice anecdotes or something you tell to kids before they go to sleep. No one takes them seriously though...

Tom Wright has done more than anyone in the field of the Biblical story, pointing out that the stories the people of God told were not just about conveying information, they were about changing lives. No part of the Old Testament is merely about information, everything that was taken down was done so to motivate action, everytime the Hebrews retold their story people were reminded they were part of the covenant God's role in redeeming the world. Even a cursory study of the Old Testament makes this obvious. For example compare the description of Manasseh in II Kings 21 and II Chronicles 33. In Kings the author portrays Manasseh as being entirely evil, whereas in Chronicles the author portrays him as middle of the road. Why the descrepency? Because Kings was written during the time of the exile when Judah had to be reminded of just how much they had broken their covenant with Yahweh and how just he was in punishing them with the exile to Babylon. In Chronicles we have a different situation. Judah is back from exile and now the people need to be reminded of Yahweh's faithfulness and the covenant faithfulness of his servants. Different contexts, different tellings of the same story. In the Hebrew mindset the Scriptures were not some static biography of God and his people, they were how God spoke to his people and to the world.

In the New Testament Wright points out that we find very much the same. "Paul expressed what the apostles all discovered: that this retelling of the ancient story, climaxing now in Jesus, carried power - power to change minds, hearts and lives." Or again "The apostles and evangelists believed that the power thus unleashed was God's own power, at work through the freshly outpoured Spirit, calling into being the new covenant people, the restored Israel-for-the-world. The 'word' was not just information about the Kingdom and its effects, important though that was and is. It as the way God's Kingdom, accomplished in Jesus was making its way known in the world."
Wright points out that we have forgotten about the context which the Scripture finds itself - the world yesterday, today, and forever. If as Christians we treat the word as a past event, we miss the point. The word of God is not just about a book we can hold and study, it is about the Kingdom proclamation that Jesus is Lord and Caeser (or any other worldly power) is not. We cannot seperate the reading and studying of God's word from his mission to the world.

"'The authority of scripture,' when unpacked, offers a picture of God's sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community." Wright uses "reading" in a compact form for such things as liturgy, devotional reading, etc. The important point to note is that we don't stand outside of Scripture, we as Christians must see ourselves as part of it. We are explicitely included in the canon in such places as John 17 and 21, and also in the Book of Revelation, but certainly there is an implicit understanding that the Scriptures are the word of God to his Church, which we find ourselves in and from which we are to transform this world through the power of the Spirit.

The Scripture is the word of God because he still speaks through it with his Spirit and we are to use his word to change the world around us. It is not a collection of random stories, or even a story about understanding the world. Scripture is THE story which the whole world finds itself in whether it acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord of the world or not. This is not a personal story about individual believers, it is the revelation and speaking of God, through with the Church brings the world to Christ, that we call the Bible. How did the apostles see the Scriptures? They told the story of the covenant God and his final action through his Son Jesus. But this was not just a nice story to accept mentally, the story changed lives through the power of the Spirit. Check out Acts 2 and following to get a feel for the power of God's word. Now we have that same story written down to us, but it is still living and active because it tells the same story of Jesus and God working to reconcile the world. That's why Wright emphasises that it is not the inherent authority of scripture that is most important (if even meaningful), but the "authority of the triune God, excercised somehow through scripture."

For postmodernism this seems to have two particular advantages:

1. Continental (and to some extent analytic) philosophy has stressed the importance of language. In fact postmodernity can sometimes be summed up in the idea of the "linguistic turn" a fuller understanding of how we speak and think. Heidegger and Nietzsche do battle with language and one incredible philosopher even says "everything which can be comprehended is language." Language as ontology. Whether or not one follows this extreme, clearly language is one of the most important aspects to being in postmodernity and the strong empasis on God's word through scripture plays perfectly into this. God's main mode of revealing himself is through his word, speah-acts, and ultimately in the Word of God himself: Jesus the Logos. The Word of God made flesh is a field ripe for postmodern heremeneutics and RO has only barely touched the surface which Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa had tread so long ago.

2. The Enlightenment bequeathed to us the idea of a "neutral" history, among other things. Texts as only texts about facts. As modernity birthed and lost control of postmodernity this idea of neutrality was quickly ripped to shreds. But surely the Bible never intended to be read as a "neutral history" in the modernist sense? N.T. Wright, among others, has seen this as a perfect opportunity to emphasis the fact that the Bible is the story, not a metanarrative overarching all other smaller narratives, but the narrative which God has spoken and speaks, and which his people tell and retell until his return. This is not something to be dryly studied (although it requires quite a bit of study), but a story to be lived in because we find ourselves in it. The Scriptures are the living story of how God has and is acting to redeem and transform his world, starting with the hearts and minds of each reader and moving out to the entire cosmos.

The Scriptures are not some ancient book which a bunch of religious humans wrote at various times; it is the living and active story of God, the spoken word of how he is reclaiming his creation through his son Jesus Christ and it is the power by which he has spread the message of salvation and redemption in the first century as well as the twenty-first.

Tom Wright: Biblical Scholar of the Year, Part I

The question of how to read Scripture and what authority it can have over anyone's life is a serious one, especially in the skeptical Western Church. The Enlightenment project of "pure reason" (eat it Kant) has ultimately failed and produced a child which has wrought its own destruction: postmodernism and deoncstruction. How do conservative Christians read the Bible in light of postmodernism and the Western challenge of reason alone? Tom Wright in his latest amazing book The Last Word takes on both of these challenges. I want to do two "short" entries on this book, part I here on his statements of modernity and postmodernity and Scripture, part II on his way out of both with the classic three-fold understanding of "Scripture, Tradition, and Reason" within the five act model (which looks suprisingly similar to covenant theology, Wright is a Calvinist!).

Modernity
Wright makes the interesting point that in modernity something which was once connected to an overall picture of reality all of a sudden sundered itself and was raised to the highest form of authority: reason. Not the similarities with this discussion and what Radical Orthodoxy has pointed out through univocity of being and Duns Scotus. The appeal to reason during modernity was "not as an insistence that exegesis must make sense within an overall view of God and the wider world, but as a seperate "source" in its own right." Reason is now somthing totally seperate from creation and guess where the seat of reason is found: man. So whereas up until the Enlightenment reason meant coherence in the creational and providential plan of God, a full blooded reality, reason has now been seen as the sole factor in determining truth.

Postmodernity
All of this absolute reason, something which has never existed and makes no sense in terms of a created universe with a transcendent Creator (how can anything in the creation be predicated with absolute when there is a transcendent God who cannot be identical to creation?) comes to a crushing halt as postmodernity, modernity's own child, points out exactly how far this "reason" can get us: barely out the front door. "Postmodernity, by unmasking the power interests latent in texts and movements, not least those of the last two hundred years, has offered a sustained ideological challenge not only to many ancient and modern texts but to modernism itself." This is all old hat, but the implications for Bible reading is something well highlighted:
"All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) symapthy." Postmodernity leaves us no way to decide on what text has any credence since it equal deconstructs all texts and ideas. The impact in the church is staggering: "Much criticism, both modern and postmodern, has thus left the church, after years of highly funded research in seminaries and colleges, less able to use the Bible in anything like the way which Jesus and the earliest Christians envisaged." Modernity started cutting the Bible down (as enacted by Thomas Jefferson and his "personal" Bible of just a bit of Luke and some other "true" pieces) and postmodernity finished the job by gutting the Bible entirely. Now it is up to you to decide which text is good and bad, no longer is the Bible a lion which cannot be tamed, rather it is a carcass ready to be scavaged. "All that deconstruction achieves is a nihilism in which the only relief is a kind of hermeneutical narcissism, taking one's pleasure with the text and letting the rest of the world go by unnoticed." The Bible is meaningless in the Western Church today because we have bought into this system.

But is this really where we want to be? We have allowed the Bible to be mutilated and finally totally tamed. In what sense is the Bible than to have authority over our lives? How is it ever to do the work which it so clearly seems to be set out to do? How can the Bible change lives? The only way this is going to happen is if we get rid of the man centred idea of reason vs. revelation and return to an uncompromising position of Bible first. This is the view of the Reformers, and we have even more tools in which to determine what the Bible says, but we have to admit that whatever it says is not to be judged as right or wrong by our standards, rather we are to be judged by it. But to make sense of the Bible from this perspective we can no longer see it as some isolated text among many: it needs to be central to the Church and to the world as the way in which God reveals and governs his world. Or to let Wright speak: "the phrase 'authority of scripture' can make Christian snese only if it is a shorthand for 'the authority of the triune God, excercised somehow through scripture.'" Now it is not a dead text, put a living revelation of the plan of God, active through the Spirit and made a part of our lives for the redeeming of the world.

"Paul, you are out of your mind; your great learning is driving you out of your mind."

This passage is from Acts 26:24, it is the scene where Paul is telling King Agrippa and Roman procouncil Festus of his conversion. Right in the middle of it Festus stands up and shouts this line, which is my favourite verse from this semester. Here's why:

For the last day or so I have been fighting a bunch of Lutherans over the New Perspective of Paul and trying to convince them that N.T. Wright is not a heretic. If you want to get an idea of what the New Perspective is, check out John Zahl's blog on the right there and it is the second posting with the awesome sword fight. But this morning while reading the latest comments (which have shifted away from New Perspective because a "semi-Pelegian" found his way in - go to work you Lutheran thugs!) something came to my mind which for some reason hasn't shown up in a while: "Is theological training driving me out of my mind as far as the Gospel of Jesus is concerned?"

I mean, arguing about whether faith is a covenant marker for the community of Jesus or the "work" which brings righteousness by imputation is fine and good, but I think we theology students (and others) can get so lost in the details that we forget what is central: Jesus atonement on the cross. Because regardless of where you stand on the Calvinist/Lutheran thing or a whole load of other things, the message of Christianity needs to be about this:

1. We were created good by the Triune God.
2. We fell into sin which brought the curse of death, physical and spiritual upon us.

For some reason the rest of this post got cut off, so here is an amazing picture:

Nietzsche Knocks, Gregory of Nyssa Answers

Logic, are you serious?

I was just reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science (not what you think - it is really better as the happy science, a sarcastic title against knowledge as we know it) and I came across this amazing passage. Speaking of the origin of logic (the basis for all knoweldge), he says:

"The predominant disposition, however, to treat the similar as identical - an illogical disposition, for there is nothing identical as such - is what first supplied all the foundations for logic. Similarly, in order for the concept of substance to originate, which is indispensible to logic though nothing real corresponds to it in the strictest sense, it was necessary that for a long time changes in things not be seen, not be precieved; the beings who did not see things exactly had a head start over those who saw everything 'in flux'. The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brains today corresponds to a process and battle of drives that taken seperately are all very illogical and unjust; we usually experience only the outcomes of the battle: that is how quickly and covertly this ancient mechanism runs its course in us. (Nietzsche, 112-113)"

I guess I would summarize this passage in three points (Is this a Presbyterian sermon?):

1. Logic is founded on the false idea that things are identical or can be seen as such.
2. Logic is founded on the false notion that things are constant or unchanging, i.e. substances.
3. Since these two foundations of our knowledge are incorrect, we should see logic as a cheap pragmatism which is nothing but a false construct of the world.

I think this is pretty powerful and quite explains why people see Nietzsche as bringing moderism to its knees even before the "postmoderns" arrive. His arguments to me seem rather convincing. Take the first one. This is easy to see in practice. Looking outside at all the leaves falling off of the trees it is obvious to me that my category "leaves" doesn't actually mean anything. No two "leaves" are the same, so how could I group them in such a fashion? Surely it is only because it is advantageous to do so, even though it is giving a wink to what is true. I think this is even more obvious when we are called by some group name, say "students", or "you". It is fine and good sometimes, but no one really wants to be called "student" all the time or "you", we are a particular person and we can not be defined by anything else but our name. Mental experiment for this: what makes you human? Two legs? What about those who don't have them? Ability to reason? What about those who can't? When you try and figure out a definition you see that there can be no one perfect categorical definition, because we are all different. Very interesting.

Secondly the flux questions is something postmodernism is keen to pick up on. Things are always changing. You are literally a whole different person some every five years when all the old cells die and are replaced. Physically we are all changing every nanosecond. Stability is again a wink at what is really happening. This is true emotionally as well. Nietzsche used this point to attack the notion of cause and effect as well.

"Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces, just as we always perceive a movement only as isolated points, i.e. do not really see, but infer. There is an infinite number of processes that elude us in this second of suddennes. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment - that saw the stream of the event - would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness. (Nietzsche, 113)"

We think in terms of static forms because that is how our mind best sees things, but that is not how the world is. Without going into how quantum mechanics starts playing around with cause and effect (although equally it does have a lot to say about quantization) it is easy to see how we lump a whole continuous stream into seperated events. If this is incorrect (which Niezsche argues for) then our whole linear thinking of knowledge is only a half-truth, maybe less.

So it seems to me there are two ways out if we concede Nietzsche's points (which we might have too - they seem fairly sound).

1. Admit some form of Platonism and confess that although nothing is "identical" or "stable" in this world, there are these principles in the divine mind which hold the world together. This world could then be a shadowy and fallen version of true life which we will one day inhereit in the recreation of the cosmos. This line of thinking has been the orthodox view of Christianity for quite some time now, I think. I am not totally disinclined towards it, but it does leave questions about what it will look like if everything is identical and what the form of human is in the redeemed creation. So let's leave this as a backup.

2. Follow the Eastern Church Fathers and stress the infinity of God, the inifinite difference that is involved in the Trinity and creation to Creator. I have mentioned Gregory of Nyssa before, I think he is one of the best at this understanding. This allows us to accept Nietzsche's claim of individuality and non-identity and say "Of course, if there is an infinite Creator then creation will be part of that infinite play we see all around us." And at redemption instead of all being brought back into the forms (I am not sure this is what orthodox Christian teaching really says, but it seems the logical outlook from the above view) we will be able to fully recognize our differences and find unity in participation with the divine Trinity. Sweet Trinity dance! And since He is infinite we shall have no problem with finding space within the divine recreation - it is always open to more and always fully with His already infinite prescence.

Why do I rock so much?

So I think Nietzsche is right, but I think Gregory of Nyssa (and the Capadocian Fathers) have already discussed this and realized that we are all different, but that this difference does not rise from chaos but the infinite difference of the Triune Creator and Redeemer.