From Knowledge to Wisdom

The paradigm shift of "Surprised by Hope"

So far I'm about half way into NT Wright's "Surprised by Hope".

On the one hand his account is a comfort. He is able explain how things hang together in a way that I find satisfying. I thought things were something like this, but I never found an explanation as clear as this.

For example in the relationships between the scientific world-view, the historical world-view and the Christian world-view.

On the other hand he raises a big challenge. He opens a vision of the magnitude of the paradigm shift brought about by the resurrection. The Kingdom of God has come and is coming. The consequences are not just life-changing but universe-changing.

So, how then should we live?

The resurrection led to fundamental changes in the lives of of Jesus' followers in the decades immediately following. Such fundamental change is not so apparent in the many parts of the church that I have passed through in my lifetime, nor is it in my own life.

Quotes, themes and thoughts so far:

Heaven is not the objective

This is a major element in NT Wright's teaching. And it turns a lot of current thinking in the church upside-down.

NOT "Jesus is raised, therefore we go to heaven"
BUT "Jesus is raised, therefore:
         - new creation has begun
         - we have a job of work to do contributing to the progress of new creation"

I find this one of the most clarifying points that NT Wright makes. The idea that the objective is "getting to heaven" and that all we have to do to get there is "believe", always seemed to me rather unsatisfactory. It devalued creation and our life here in it. Life becomes some kind of waiting game in which we are perhaps being conditioned for life in heaven.

Whereas, the explanation that it is the other way round, and earth and indeed the whole universe will be renewed (become heaven), is much more satisfactory. And, furthermore that the people of God are called to participate in the process of the now and coming Kingdom gives back meaning and significance to creation and life in it.

Wandering from Frank Viola to NT Wright to Sinéad O'Connor

Stream of semi-consciousness

Took a couple of weeks off work recently and tried to do too many things at once.

The main target is painting some of the house and disposing of some of its contents. This is progressing.

But there are many distractions and other matters of interest and duty. Maybe all my life I have had difficulty applying myself to a task.

Frank Viola

I have been listening to some interesting stuff while painting. Firstly a talk by Frank Viola "Developing a Narrative Ecclesiology" that he gave at a conference in the Bahamas in October 2007. I bought it from PTMIN on CD a while ago. It includes a very interesting explanation of Paul's ministry and a theory that Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was the leader of a legalistic group from Jerusalem, ex priests who went round all the churches planted by Paul teaching the need for the Law of Moses including circumcision and undermining Paul's authority.

The conference session where he gave the talk was apparently in parallel with a seminar by NT Wright and Frank was frustrated that he could not be at that seminar himself and very appreciative that a few people did not go but came to hear him instead.

My First N.T. Wright

Some time ago I realised there was an important gap on my bookshelf where no books appeared by N.T. Wright, the Church of England Bishop of Durham. I have now begun to fill that gap with his latest book "Evil and the Justice of God". This is a little book on a huge subject. It is, in fact, a compilation of a series of talks.

It provides a compact overview of the problem of evil with references to earlier larger works by Wright and to projects he has in progress.

He provides a novel approach to the Gospel by explaining what the problem is that Jesus came to solve. He gives an integrated view of the Old Testament and the New Testament and the repeating patterns of Gods efforts to achieve reconciliation with his loved ones in his fallen creation. In the end reconciliation could only be achieved by the sacrifice of His Son.

He begins with analysis of the state of world civilisation and the manifestations of evil.

".. as soon as I thought of speaking about evil, I realized that this is a timely, not to say urgent, topic. Everybody is talking about evil. After September 11th, 2001, President Bush declared that there was an 'axis of evil' out there somewhere, and that we had to find the evil people and stop them doing any more evil. Tony Blair declared ambitiously that we should aim at nothing short of ridding the world of evil."

"The odd thing about this new concentration on evil is that it seems to have taken many people, not least politicians and the media, by surprise. Of course they would say that there has always been evil; but it seems to have come home to the Western world in a new way. The older discussions of evil tended to be more abstract, with so-called natural evil (represented by the tidal wave) and so-called moral evil (represented by the gangsters). ... Auschwitz posed the problem in a new way, September 11th 2001 on the one hand, and the 'natural' disasters of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the hurricane on the American Gulf Coast, have now kick-started a fresh wave of discussion about what evil is, where it comes from, how to understand it, and what it does to your world-view whether you're a Christian or an atheist or anything else. And, not least, what, if anything, can be done about it."

He positions the Enlightenment and post-modernism in respect of their efforts to deal with the question of evil.

He deals rather carefully with the topic of demons. I guess where NTW is coming from, talking of demons is normally a bit out of scope. But he recognises the influence of quasi-personalities. And that organizations, corporations, even churches are more than the sum of their parts and appear to be driven by a persona.

Forgiveness is the key to deliverance from evil.

References
N.T. Wright Page
"Evil and the Justice of God"
N.T. Wright: A Biography

Absorbing the Word

How to study and interpret the Bible is a question that seems to circle endlessly around the church. And it provides an apparently insatiable market for the Christian book industry. So I found the following Q&A on the N.T Wright page very striking:

Question: What few books would you recommend as a foundation for understanding the NT?

The foundation for understanding the NT is at one level prayer, humility, and openness to what the living God may be saying in Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.  At another level, very closely integrated with this first one through the fact of the incarnation, the foundation is of course the knowledge of the history, culture and language of the time, i.e. NT Greek, a knowledge of the Jewish world of late antiquity, and the wider Greco-Roman context.  This doesn’t mean you have to be an ancient historian before you can understand the NT, but it is vital that those who are teaching in the church base their readings on real historical understanding rather than anachronistic assumptions.
I wrote my book The New Testament and the People of God precisely in order to address this need among my own students.  This was what I wanted them to know before they began; I found in tutorials and seminars I was constantly having to go through these basics rather than the topic set because otherwise they were making the wrong assumptions about what words and ideas meant, etc.
I actually still find that the big reference books, especially The Oxford History of the Christian Church and The Oxford Classical Dictionary, are invaluable on an almost daily basis.  The basic introduction by Achtemeier, Green and Thompson is excellent for those starting out.  The Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible is very good.  But actually I would urge anyone who wants to get into the NT seriously to learn as much of it by heart as they can.  If in Greek so much the better.  Talk whole chapters and books on to cassette tape and play them in the car, when doing housework, etc etc.  There is no substitute for a ready, easy familiarity with the text itself.  Apart from anything else, learning whole passages rescues you from the out-of-context readings that so bedevil an early attempt to understand scripture.

It is the simplicity of this last point that struck me - especially coming from a learned theological scholar with his own share of books in the market - just learn the text, absorb the Word by listening to it. Make your own podcast.

A friend recently lent us his set of the Bible on audio CDs, NIV from Hoddor and Stoughton. So maybe this is the moment to take N.T. Wright's advice.

What do I think about the war?

Reading a couple of articles in this morning's paper, challenged by Mark 'Ashamedly silent' and with my thinking coloured by N.T. Wright on evil I felt inspired to try to form my opinion about the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (See references below.)

Starting points
Nation state
The formation of nation states has caused us problems. Standing back for a moment, considering the question of why humanity is divided into tribes and nations. Why does each have a claim on a fixed piece of the land surface so that all stretches of land are assigned to only one nation state. The nation state seems too simplistic a construction to meet the real needs and reflect reality on the ground. See Northern Ireland, the Balkans and Kurdistan as examples of areas where enforcement of a simplistic nation state has caused long term conflicts.

So, maybe the establishment of Israel was a mistake. But as de Winter says: "At that time it was quite normal to draw a line on a map and accept that as the border of a country. No one saw it as a problem. And for millions of Jews it was the only place they had to go."

N.T. Wright and Anne Rice: Writing Our Way to God

Thanks to Edmund at Becoming (on the One Year Bible Blogroll) for the reference to a discussion between N.T. Wright and Anne Rice (a very odd couple) from Grace Cathedral, San Francisco.

I have to confess that I have not yet read anything of N.T Wright, currently Anglican Bishop of Durham, although I have recently seen so many references that I realise there is a gap in my book list. Anne Rice I had never heard of, despite the fact that she has sold 100,000,000 copies of her books - novels with occult and erotic backgrounds. But her latest book is "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" - the first of a series which tells the life of Jesus in the first person.

I found this a fascinating discussion to listen to. With the Jesus industry booming (the Da Vinci Code etc.) the question is "what's going on"? Why the ongoing quest for the historical Jesus when there is not a comparable search for the historical Buddha?

"Christianity classically is about something that happened. The happendness is incontrovertible." N.T. Wright

"there was this Christian commitment to love in the writing, in the scholarship itself" Anne Rice on how she found Bishop Wright through his writing.

Anne Rice experienced a personal return of faith a conversion - sudden yet gradual over some years. She had a glimpse of the infinite mercy of God.

Modern scepticism is unwarranted. The historical question is a good question. When the enlightenment came the church had got lazy, so was not ready to answer the enlightenment when it came with a sceptical account of the origins of Christianity. Now modern scholarship is getting its act together and demonstrating the historical truth that of course the Christian God is true, no one could have invented him.

References:
Edmund Becoming
Grace Cathedral Forum
N.T. Wright
Anne Rice
Anne Rice 'Christ the Lord' at Random House

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