Wright Thoughts: Jesus

This year's Theology Conference at Wheaton is called "Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright", a kind of festschrift honoring and interacting with Wright's work. Wright is the Bishop of Durham, England in the Church of England, prominent in the conservative evangelical wing of the CoE.

I had always heard Wright was a great theologian, and had written a definitive book on the historicity of the resurrection, which was on my 'want list' of books to check out. I was first prompted to pick up one of his books (one of his newest, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision when I heard he was part of the "new perspective" on Paul. I first got interested in the new perspective when I heard a somewhat glib summary of its thesis: the Protestant reformers read Paul wrong. As a former Protestant, now Catholic, I was intrigued.

Now I'll admit to not knowing too much about the new perspective (theology being more my avocation than what I was trained in, and being unable to find a good summary), so my only real basis is the one book of Wright's that I read, but Justification was very good, so I was very interested in this year's conference. The setup of the conference is focused on Wright's work on the historical Jesus on Friday and his work on Paul on Saturday (call it the "Search for the Historical Paul", perhaps).

Now, the so-called search for the historical Jesus has some serious criticisms that can be leveled against it (Jesus Seminar: Marbles? Seriously?), but Wright's is one of the most orthodox reconstructions of Jesus. I'm going to try and hit some of the things in each talk that stuck out to me.


Richard Hays: "Knowing Jesus: Story, History, and the Question of Truth" dealing with Wright's book Jesus and the Victory of God (JVG).

Hays is a good friend of Wrights and studied under him. He's currently at Duke University. He went over Wright's methodology. Some highlights:

*Hypothesis and verification – Wright differs from most historical Jesus scholars, rejecting their reductionist approaches. He takes the whole of the canonical evidence and formulates a hypothesis that will include the maximum amount of data. A 'hermeneutic of trust', if you will.

*Double similarity vs. double dissimilarity – Jesus Seminar (and others) tend to say the more Christ looks like his Jewish background or early Christian conceptions of Jesus, the less likely he is to be authentic. Wright flips this around.

*Skepticism of form and redaction criticism

*Extensive use of Second Temple Judaism material – this was fascinating to me, the way he firmly grounds a Jewish Jesus in his Jewish context.

Hays raised some concerns with Wright's methodology, however:

*Exclusion of the Gospel of John – Wright responded that this was a necessary self-limitation to even get the book a hearing, given the a priori assumptions of the academy to the historicity of John. It's essentially fighting them on their own ground.

*The relation of Wright's reconstruction of Jesus to the Church's confessional tradition. – Wright tends to avoid Christian creedal/confessional conceptions of Jesus, keeping them at arm's length from his historical assessment. Wright did make a good point in response, however, in that the confessions, written to defend the divinity and humanity of Christ in Hellenistic thought-forms, tend to screen out/obscure the kingdom-preaching, messianic-thinking, Jewish Jesus of history, as well as the political repercussions of Jesus.


Marianne Meye Thompson (Fuller Theological Seminary) – "The Gospel of John Meets Jesus and the Victory of God"

Thompson deals with the lacuna of the John in Wright's book and I thought she had some valuable insights. Essentially she says that Wright's synoptic-only reconstruction of Jesus is essentially Johannine. Wright tended to agree, again stating why he felt he couldn't use John more. Thompson made some good comments about Jesus as the Temple from the Gospel of John.

Interesting take away on the story of "doubting Thomas": Thomas' mistake lay not in his empiricist refusal to believe what he could not see but in his historicist refusal to believe the apostolic witness.


Wright then gave the chapel address from Ephesians. One of the things I like about Wright is his refusal to bracket out Ephesians, Colossians and other books as being deuteron-Pauline. He believes the books attributed to Paul are by Paul.


Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat (University of Toronto) – kind of fell asleep during this one. Been up since midnight. Led off with a Phil Ochs song (I enjoyed that). Didn't so much like their style of presenting in dialogue with each other. Not too sure how it related to Wright. It was trying to pull out some social ethical implications of his work but focused mostly on criticizing the financial market economy crash. Eh.


Nicholas Perrin – "Jesus Eschatology and Kingdom Ethics: Ever the Twain Shall Meet"

Perrin is a professor at Wheaton and a good friend/student of Wright and helped get him here/organize the conference. Didn't take too much away from this, though. He was a bit rushed to me and it was a bit over my head. He laid out some themes in Wright's work that I'm really interested in:

*Jesus as Israel – Jesus embodies the whole historical trajectory of Israel

*Continuing exile – Jews of Jesus' day viewed themselves as still in exile and Jesus saw himself as bringing them back.

*Integrative biblical theology – bridges OT and NT – Israel and Jesus-as-Israel

*Synthesis of soteriology and ecclesiology. Salvation is corporate and personal (complimentary and mutually strengthening, as opposed to collectivist and individualist, which are opposed) – basically, bringing an emphasis on the community back into soteriology.

*Wright eschews ahistorical positivism and historical skepticism – countering a docetic tendency in Protestantism

*Wright extends Jesus' mission to the historical-political sphere.

I did take this clever little bit away:

Western Protestantism often reduces the church to Jesus' Facebook friends.

:D

(And just for fun: Scott Hahn is attending the conference! I said hi and shook his hand.)


Will probably have more later. Right now I need to get to the evening keynote address by Wright about Jesus.