The Challenge of Jesus by N. T. Wright

After I asked my Uncle Jimmy about his experience of Jesus this summer, he pointed me to The Challenge of Jesus by N. T. Wright (OK, he gave me a copy for Christmas and dared me to read it through to the end--apparently getting all the way to the back cover requires determination).

The book is a compilation of lectures Wright gave at an InterVarsity conference a few years ago (yes, I read the introduction for once), and its tag-line is "Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is"--right up my alley these days.

Wright argues that we cannot separate our historical study of Jesus from our faith but that we must approach both, hand-in-hand, instead of letting the artificial division (introduced during the Enlightenment) hijack our search for Jesus, the man who walked the earth 2,000 years ago and changed eternity forever.

Chapter 1: The Challenge of Studying Jesus
my quick summary and reflections

The gist of this chapter is that Christians must pursue historical knowledge about Jesus Christ. We should not throw away our faith because of distressing historical evidence, but we cannot ignore history, either. While giving the Bible the credit it deserves, Wright argues that conventional interpretations are steeped in traditional and--possibly--erroneous assumptions about context and meaning. Knowing Jesus and his times will bring us to a deeper understanding of who Jesus was and what he meant by the Kingdom of Heaven.

"If Christianity is not rooted in things that actually happened in first-century Palestine, we might as well be Buddhists, Marxists or almost anything else. And if Jesus never existed, or if he was quite different from what the Gospels and the church's worship affirms him to have been, then we are indeed living in cloud-cuckoo-land. The skeptics can and must be answered, and when we do so we will not merely reaffirm the traditions of the church... We will be driven to reinterpret them, discovering depths of meaning within them that we never imagined."

Wright goes on for a while about eschatology (yes I had to look that up so you can, too), concluding that he--with Albert Schweitzer and presumably Jesus himself--understands that Jesus's life was a pivotal moment in history, a moment that changed eternity for humanity. He discusses other interpretations briefly, and if they turn out to be crucial to his argument I'll get into them later, but I think he's just addressing other points of view that don't seem all that relevant at the moment.

Can't really argue with him on anything yet, so I'll end with his conclusion. The chapter ends with five questions that will be addressed in the body of the book (along with a rather ominous indication that the road will require patience and perseverance, just like Uncle Jimmy said):

1. Where does Jesus belong with the Jewish world of his day?
2. What, in particular, was his preaching of the kingdom all about? What was he aiming to do?
3. Why did Jesus die? In particular, what was his own intention in going to Jerusalem that last fateful time? (this question is a question I have been asking myself, in various ways, for the last few months: what was Jesus thinking during all of this? What did he know? Looking forward to what Wright has to say about this one!)
4. Why did the church begin, and why did it take the shape it did? Specifically, of course, what happened at Easter? 
5. How does all this relate to the Christian task and vision today? How, in other words, does this historical and also deeply theological approach put fire into our hearts and power into our hands as we go about shaping our world? (I am particularly interested in his answers to this question because it seems inevitable that those who spend their time studying these things will not spend their time living them, and that any answer to this final question can have very little substance. We shall see!)
   

 So far I don't have much to say on this topic, so I'm not going to post additional personal reflections yet. The plan is to give you both an accurate summary and a piercingly intelligent analysis of most of what he says (why yes, I was an English composition teacher once! how did you guess?).

Cheers until chapter 2! ("The Challenge of the Kingdom"--by the way, I just checked the table of contents, and no, he does not stick to "the challenge of X" for his titles, we loose that for the most part after chapter 3)