Telling a different story

[on Chapter 7, "Walking to Emmaus in a Postmodern World"]

If I understand Wright correctly here (and I might be mis-reading more than anything), he's uses this chapter to answer the question, "So what? Why do I care about all this stuff?" by contrasting the plight of the modern (conservative) Christian with our culture's decentralized world view. The Christian he paints is the Christian I was taught to be, the one who knows what God wants because it says so in the Bible, the one who understands about Heaven and Hell, who can answer questions with confident certainty because there is one God, one Heaven, and one path to salvation.

But this is a difficult story to sell to our postmodern culture, which is characterized, for simplicity's sake by three things:

1. loss of neutral/objective knowledge and truth
2. the deconstructed self (who am I? nothing but a collection of signs and signifiers, perhaps)
3. the loss of an overarching metanarrative (previously we moved toward progress, know we 'know' there is no forward)

Seems like a decent summary. Anyway, in a world that does not recognize objective truth, has no confidence in the idea of a self, and is not willing to buy into a narrative of sin and redemption, what can a Christian say or do that will not fall on deaf ears?

Wright suggests that perhaps we have bought into the wrong story, a metanarrative formed as much by our modern worldview as by Biblical truth. For backup, he returns to Jesus and his disciples, pointing out that the disciples also had the wrong story. They believed in a Messiah who was coming to save the Jews, not one who was coming to save all mankind. They believed in a Messiah who was coming to bring about an earthly kingdom with earthly power,  not a kingdom that called them higher. And the famous pair that was walking down the road to Emmaus that first Easter morning--walking in despair away from Jerusalem and the hope that had died with Jesus on the cross--did not recognize Jesus because they had already seen their story's end.

And what of our story? Wright suggests we need to look back to Jesus, the man who healed the sick and loved the poor. We are to be, he says, Christ to the world, not by speaking truths which cannot be proved or known but by living lives of love that cannot be denied, by living a truth that cannot be spoken but only experienced.

Sounds a little hokey to me, but also inspiring and beautiful (and you should probably just read this chapter for yourself, actually). The final chapter of the book allegedly puts a practical spin on exactly what this might look like, so maybe that will shed some light on things!

And, I kind of like it, because I have always resisted rote evangelism (despite that oft-quoted "go ye therefore into all the world..."). This seems very much like an argument for the social gospel, of sharing God's love through actions rather than words. It also rings a bit like the "everyone has their own truth" (at least in practice) which i don't want to embrace. Maybe it doesn't matter as much what we think, exactly. Do I have to call Jesus by name to see his face? And I do think that what we know in our hearts--even if we can't articulate it--is much more important than any prayer we can consciously recite.

a brief aside and a look ahead

First, I just noticed that 5 of my last 7 posts begin with "Well..." This is terrible; I firmly resolve to change my ways.

Second, I'm almost at the end of The Challenge of Jesus--not even 2 months later! I've decided to try to keep this up (despite the paucity of devoted fans) and a few days ago my next book arrived in the mail: The Third Testament, by Malcolm Muggeridge: 

My Uncle Jack suggested this one to me (he's pretty much Uncle Jimmy's polar opposite, so it should be interesting). The book comes from a series of lectures Muggeridge did for the BBC or something like that; it "explores the spiritual wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky" according to the website link above.

Chapter 6, Part 2: the conclusion of the Challenge of Easter

well, I was a little nervous Wright would disappoint my mother but he came through in the end. This is how he says it (remember the historical question was not the improvable "did Jesus rise?" but "How can we explain why the church grew the way it did?"):

...For us historians,  the only way forward is for us to grasp the nettle [i.e. accept the impossible and allow Jesus to have been resurrected], recognizing that we are of course here at the borders of language, of philosophy, of history and of theology. We had better learn to take seriously the witness of the entire early church, that Jesus of Nazareth was raised bodily to a new sort of life, three days after his execution. And it is this, of course,  that offers far and away the best explanation of the rise of the same early church. (148-149)

This chapter would probably have been much more interesting if I had read the convoluted counter-theories proposed by modern theologians, but as I haven't and as I'm generally inclined to be a Christian myself, I find that (except in my most cynical moments) I'm convinced by Wright's arguments and happy to have the teachings of my faith buffered by some historical basis.

What surprises me is how uninterested (disinterested? i'll look it up later) I am in this all-important question. I've always felt like it doesn't matter if Jesus really rose (or even really lived) because--if we take as a premise that God made and appointed all things--than what matters is how things are,  not how things came to be. And I do believe we are fallen people, redeemed and commissioned to be and spread the Kingdom--but perhaps I wouldn't be able to believe that if I hadn't grown up hearing about Jesus from the front pew every Sunday.

Anyway, next time: "Walking to Emmaus in a postmodern world." Sounds exciting, right? I honestly can't wait to read it!

a brief note on "The Challenge of Easter" (Chapter 6, part 1)

Well,  "The Challenge of Easter" is all about asking, "Did Jesus really rise from the dead?" from a historian's perspective. Wright spends a lot of time clarifying that yes, that phrase really means what we think it means, that early Christians really did mean Jesus resumed bodily form and walked among them. No merely spiritual resurrection, no body stolen from the tomb, no Jesus who didn't really die on the cross after all but simply revived once they took him down.

So, Wright says, the question for historians is:

We are therefore forced, as a matter of history, to attempt to explain how it was that the early church came to make a claim that only made sense in the Jewish world [resurrection of the dead], yet was not precisely what they as Jews had expected [all the dead to be raised together at one time]; how they came to describe Jesus in a certain way as the basis of their life and work, yet not in the way he was made known to them in their own day-to-day experience. That is the historical problem of the resurrection of Jesus. (140)

I haven't read to the end of the chapter, but I'm inclined to agree with the naysayers Wright dismisses at the beginning of the chapter: how can we possibly answer that question with the historical record? (he turns to the earliest writer from the period, Paul, but as I said, I haven't read that far yet) If we answer, well the only answer is that it must be true, that tells us nothing other than we weren't creative enough to find a different answer, and if we do somehow manage to come up with something else, we can't be sure it's true. I'm curious to discover what Wright has to say, but it's late enough that I'll have to hold out for another day.

Chapter 5: starting with Jesus the man, not Jesus the son of God

Well, in chapter 5 (yes, you did read that correctly--this is about ALL of chapter 5 in one go! of course there was a nap in the middle and i don't want to go into the stack of oreos that contributed to this effort but i did manage an entire chapter in one sitting!). Anyway, before we begin, a few caveats:

1. I'm still confused
2. I'm going to jump right to the heart of the matter and skip Wright's sometimes compelling and sometimes confusing exposition. Just wanted to warn you, some of it might feel like it's coming out of nowhere. Read the book yourself if you care.
3. This seems like a long entry, but I promise it's worth a skim! 
   

The basic difference between Wright and 5th grade Sunday School is that at church we always started out with Jesus = God (oh, this chapter is called "Jesus and God," by the way. we're addressing the question, Did Jesus realize he was God? Did he claim to be God? etc."). Wright starts from the Jesus was a man position: Jesus was, first and foremost, a Jewish man growing up in 1st century Galilee.

And where do you go, if you start with Jesus is a man instead of Jesus was God? First, an interesting point: the "Son of God" was a way to refer to the Messiah and (as mentioned before), the Messiah was not necessarily expected to be divine. 

Now, (this is when i skip all the explanation--and some of it is very interesting--and go right to the crux, which is a bit confusing): Wright talks about Jesus knowing his vocation in the way that I might know I am 'called' to love my roommates and live in community, and that Jesus probably didn't say to himself, "I am God in the body of a man," he said instead, "I am here to do God's work, work that can only be done by God and not by a man."

This is actually how he says it:

I do not think Jesus "knew he was God" in the same sense that one knows one is hungry or thirsty, tall or short. It was not a mathematical knowledge, like knowing that two and two make four; nor was it straightforwardly observational knowledge, like knowing that there is a bird on the fence outside my room because I can see and hear it. It was more like the knowledge that I have that I am loved by my family and closest friends; like the knowledge that I have that sunrise over the sea is awesome and beautiful; like that knowledge of the musician not only of what the composer intended but of how precisely to perform the piece in exactly that way--a knowledge most securely possessed, of course, when the performer is also the composer. It was, in short, the knowledge that characterizes vocation. As I have put it elsewhere, "As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to Scripture only YHWH himself could do and be." (122, emphasis mine)

Clearer? Foggier? Wright doesn't even obliquely address the question of the virgin birth, so I can't tell you what he thinks about that, and I don't know how concrete this sense of vocation would be. Wright confirms that Jesus having a sense of vocation is "by no means the same thing as Jesus having the sort of 'supernatural' awareness of himself... that is often envisaged.." (122). It looks like Wright thinks Jesus communicated with God in much the same ways we can communicate with him--not with the simplicity of conversation that permeates the language we sometimes use to describe prayer, but with the same struggle and uncertainty and surprising, secret knowing that characterizes my Christian experience. Jesus definitely demonstrated a greater sense of purpose that I have found in my own life--then again, I'm only 26! By Jesus's timetable, I've still got 4 years for my "sense of vocation" to blossom!


Not sure what I think about this--it seems to run counter to all I've been told about who Jesus was/is--but then, very little of what I've heard about Jesus speaks to his experience as a person; he is always a superhuman character.
--
On a different note, what do you think about this way of knowing one's vocation? What do you know of your vocation in this sense--not in terms of what to do with your life, but more on the how to live side of things?

Chapter 4: things are finally getting exciting!

We now embark on three crucial questions:

1. Did Jesus think of himself as the messiah?
2. How did Jesus understand his relationship with  God?
3. Did Jesus think he was divine?

Wright will presumably address numbers 2 and 3 in the upcoming chapters; the short answer to number 1 is yes. But what does that mean, exactly? First, the idea of a Messiah is not nearly so clear in the old testament as that of the coming king. Second, when Jesus said, "Who do you say that I am?" and Peter said, "You are the Christ," Peter probably wasn't saying he believed Jesus was the divine son of God, he was affirming his belief that Jesus was the promised savior of his people (but a very human savior).

My favorite part of this chapter--well, there are two things that I liked and this is one of them:

It is unlikely that the followers of a crucified would-be Messiah would regard such a person as the true Messiah. Jesus did not rebuild the Temple; he had not only not defeated the Romans, he had died at their hands... Israel was not rescued; pagan injustice still ruled the world. However, the belief that Jesus was the true Messiah is deeply and ineradicably embedded in the very earliest Christianity... The question presses: Why? The answer cannot simply be: Because of the resurrection. (76)

Wright's answer, I'm afraid, is not half so interesting as the question he poses. He writes that Jesus was only remembered as the Messiah because he was crucified as the Messiah, and his resurrection affirmed the status he had already claimed. I see the difference, but I'm not so convinced. It feels a little circular, doesn't it?

But his larger point is that Jesus made the claim that he was the Messiah while he was alive, that his claim was recognized by others and remembered after his death and resurrection. So yes, Jesus did understand himself to be the promised Messiah and coming King for Israel. Wright has much more to say about this, but I'm more interested in the 2nd surprising bit in this chapter:

Wright reminds his readers that Jesus was a thoughtful, intentional person. He writes,

..It is high time to abandon the reticence, masquerading as prudence but in fact consisting only of timidity, which has prevented scholars from allowing Jesus to be (what we would call) a thinking, reflective theologian... Why should we be forced to think of Jesus as an unreflecctive, instinctive simplistic person, who never thought through what he was doing in the way that several of his contemporaries and followers were well able to do? (75)

This is, I think, what I have been wrestling with throughout the entire book. First, can we treat Jesus's life the way we treat a novel, reading for intentionality, structure, and metaphor in the path he took through Galilee? Wright suggests that Jesus was the author of his own life, that he thought about where and when to do the things he did, that he planned what he would say to parallel or enhance his actions.

Second--and this might be more important--I think we talk about Jesus as if he just happened, as if his life were somehow a combination of direction from above and impluse decisions, as if he wandered from place to place and ended up in Jerusalem more because this was where his Father (you know, GOD) told him to go.

I am enamored with Wright's telling--I'm swept off my feet by the idea of an intelligent Jesus. Not that anyone would ever say he was dumb, but I had this picture in my head that was based on an (obviously idiotic) impression that people in simple times (if you don't have a toilet you're living in simple times) were simple people, with simple cares and simple thoughts. Jesus fell into this category, too, and I'm not sure we do much in our Sunday school classes to dismiss that impression. People do what God tells them to do and are rewarded, or they stupidly disobey and are punished. Things were much simpler back in Bible times, and from the way we talk to our elementary school kids, things are pretty simple now, too. Not sure how to address that problem, but I think I'm going to try to read the Bible with a little more imagination from now on.

Jesus and Symbols of His Kingdom (chapter 3, part 2)

"As Jesus subverted the symbols of land, family, Torah and Temple, so he acted in such a way as to replace these with symbols pointing to his own work and agenda" (68).

Well, we're still following along the same theme: throughout his life, Jesus puts a new twist on the symbols mentioned above, making them point to a new kingdom that is (1) all-inclusive, (2) all about forgiveness and love, and (3) starting now and also coming soon, if that makes any sense (perhaps i should say it was born in Jesus's day but was not fully realized and still hasn't been fully realized).

The most interesting aspect of this section yet another return to the story of the Jewish nation's exile (which was obviously still in effect because even though the Temple still stood, they were oppressed by Rome). The story of exile is the story of  sin followed by consequences (exile) and finally forgiveness and restoration. For Wright, Jesus's emphasis on forgiveness is yet another way to signal the end of the exile and the beginning of the Kingdom--sin caused the exile and forgiveness ushers in the restoration.

So, refusing to forgive means you personally are forestalling the restoration, or locking yourself out of the kingdom: "Not to forgive one another would be a way of denying that this great, long-awaited event was taking place; in other words, it would be to cut off the branch on which they were sitting" (70).

This way of thinking about Jesus's message is both exciting and disturbing for me. On one hand, the idea that forgiveness brings freedom opens the door for a long-awaited, glorious future is pretty exciting. But does that detract from valuing forgiveness for its own sake? It feels like Jesus is preaching for his own ends, not to make our lives better and teach us how to live. But perhaps this story of exile and restoration is so universal that everyone has a part in it, even if we aren't all Jewish.