In the 1990s, N.T. Wright published three volumes on the New
Testament and Jesus – The New Testament
and the People of God, Jesus and the
Victory of God, and The Resurrection
of the Son of God. These three volumes were a series called by him
“Christian Origins and the Question of God” that proposed to discuss Christian
origins, Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels showing the interconnectedness of each.
After a ten-year hiatus, Wright has published the subsequent volumes in the
series: the two volume work Paul and the
Faithfulness of God. One can only imagine that it will take him some time
to produce the final volume in the series on the gospels.
This new book on Paul deserves some very critical analysis
(and much has already been offered). However, to understand his place in this
field of Paul scholarship, it is necessary to remind us of what the entire
series is doing. Wright’s approach is not unique but it is unusual. His odd
combination of the devotional and the academic presents a very different
picture of Paul than one might expect (neither being in the “New Perspective”
nor the “Traditional/Lutheran” view). Further, there are moments in his book on
Paul where Wright stands alone. These can only be understood if one considers
very carefully his premises. Unfortunately he does not really discuss his
premises in the two volumes on Paul. To find these odd premises, one must
consider the first three volumes of the series on the world of the New
Testament and the historical Jesus. Therefore, this is the first of several
blog posts that discuss Wright’s series from beginning to end.
Wright’s series is eminently practical to study. Wright
bridges the gap between the popular and the academic. The first three volumes
of this series have sold very well both to the devotional layperson and the
scholarly community. While some readers have found this mutually disappointing
(the layperson finding it too technical and the scholar not finding it
scholarly enough), equally have both found something in it quite interesting. I
therefore choose this series to analyze because – for all its merits or faults
in either particular community – it is a book that finds it own niche and
should be treated as its own product.
With my training in the academic world, I happily recognize
that I am a reader who is more “scholarly” than devotional – in at least the
sense that will address this book series. I will attempt to critically analyze
what Wright says in these volumes in the fold of the wider interests of
scholarship to show Wright’s assumptions, biases, strengths, and weaknesses.
I recognize that Wright’s first volume published in 1992 is
necessarily out of date. I would completely forgive him this except that he did
revive this series in late 2013. Had he never mentioned this work again, I
would not feel the need to analyze his work in a rigorous way. However, when he
revived the series, it forces us to be very critical in looking at this work
and asking if the assumptions therein are helpful or not. The moments that are
out of date and troubling are still present and being used in the new volumes
on Paul. Therefore, the work needs to be scrutinized.
In order to truly scrutinize Wright’s series which
accumulates cumulatively, it is more helpful to consider his work chapter by
chapter rather than book by book. His writing is relatively dense and to
generalize is not nearly as helpful for discovering tensions as a careful
exposition of what he is arguing. Therefore, this is the first of a long series
on the blog site that will carefully discuss Wright’s work in stages.
Analysis of Wright's
Preface and Chapter 1
To understand the assumptions of the whole project of N.T.
Wright’s analysis will take the exposition of many posts carefully examining
his work. However, the preface and first chapter of his first volume show what he considers as his assumptions. The
value of carefully examining these two chapters are that these present his stated purpose and assumptions. This is
necessary to consider as it shows how he is justifying his whole project. Later
we will consider many of the unstated assumptions behind other sections of the
text and recall this preface and introduction in order to analyze whether those
assumptions would fit under his original stated premises.
Wright constructs his preface to explain why he is writing
this book, where it fits in the scholarly continuum of books on the early Jesus
movement, and presents the book’s importance. He argues that the two most
powerful trends in New Testament studies are the “theological” and the
“historical.” He attempts throughout the book that these two trends (which he
argues are being treated as mutually exclusive), need in some way to be
unified:
I believe it is important that the
synthesis be attempted, but without false compression or over-simplification. I
hope, then, to offer a consistent hypothesis on the origin of Christianity,
with particular relation to Jesus, Paul and the gospels, which will set out new
ways of understanding major movements and thought-patterns, and suggest new
lines that exegesis can follow up.[1]
Wright then argues that these two great streams of
scholarship need someone to wade in between them to bring sanity back to the
conversation.
Wright explains in more detail his point in his introduction
– that there are two claimants to the New Testament who are mutually excluding
each other. He argues that neither can possibly hold the New Testament (which
he here metaphorically compares with a land) for themselves:
There have been two groups,
broadly, who have tried to inherit this territory for themselves, to make this
book their own preserve. Like the two major claimants to the land of Israel in
our own day, each contains some who are committed to the entire removal of the
other from the land, though each also contains many who persist in searching
for compromise solutions…There are those who, having seized power a century or
two ago, and occupying many major fortresses (eminent chairs, well-known
publishing houses, and so forth), insist that the New Testament be read in a
thoroughgoing historical way, without inflicting on it the burden of being
theologically normative…There are, on the other side, those who have shown just
as much determination in resisting the advance of the new regime. Some still
regard the New Testament as a sort of magic book, whose “meaning” has little to
do with what the first-century authors intended, and a lot to do with how some
particularly contemporary group has been accustomed to hear in it a call to a
particular sort of spirituality or lifestyle.[2]
Wright argues that these two camps are at one another’s
throat and they need someone – seemingly anyone – to attempt to manage this
problem. He suggests that readers of the New Testament are terribly confused by
these seeming warring factions and what is lost is the understanding of the New
Testament itself.
Before showing how Wright claims to solve this problem, it is
important to analyze this dialectical straw man. It is not surprising that
Wright wants to argue that his book is important and that he does so by
characterizing the field of New Testament studies to show how they fail to
provide a solution that he then will provide - after all, this is how most
argument is made. What is more troubling is how he chooses to characterize
these two figures. To say that there are only two groups - the fundamentalist,
literalistic, reader of the New Testament who pretends there are no
contradictions in the Bible in contrast to the completely relativist reader who
has no interest in the theological message of a book – is completely unfair.
There are some who do hold these views – but they are not what would be
considered “normative” either for scholarship or for any devotional community
who was not themselves fundamentalist. This rhetoric starts to sound like the
rhetoric of the “academic conspiracy theory” argument – that “scholarship”
(which apparently means one thing) has the set agenda of depietizing its
readers with no other goal. “Scholarship” apparently has the goal to destroy
all faith in any religion (which apparently was the goal of the enlightenment)
and its offspring survive at Harvard and Oxford. What Wright does to balance
this ridiculous notion, is to present an equally ridiculous position for all
devotional readers – they (again being apparently all the same thing) are
nonreflective readers who pretend they don’t use hermeneutics but instead gain
some kind of divine inspiration that magically presents itself in a consistent
and edifying way for one’s faith. This idea is equally ridiculous – there are
certainly some churches who at least claim this type of interpretation, but
nearly all the mainstream denominations hold hermeneutical principles which
they happily admit are their interpretive keys – hardly unreflecting fools who
believe in a magic book in the way that Wright presents.
With this dichotomy presented, Wright will therefore be our salvation in creating a more balanced approach. This is not too hard to do, as his rhetorical opposites could almost not be less balanced. Wright argues he will provide a message based upon the “story” of the text:
A word must be said here about the
category of ‘story,’ which I have found myself using increasingly frequently.
It has already proved fruitful in a variety of areas in recent scholarship, not
only in literary criticism but in areas as diverse as anthropology, philosophy,
psychology, education, ethics, and theology itself.[3]
His argument is that there is a kind of “master narrative” –
which he calls “story” – that governs the reading not only of the text, but
also of all aspects of life. He wants to create continuity between the reading
of the text and the historical perspective by positing a consistency between
seemingly all living things. This type of argument would be wonderful if it
could be accomplished – but serious questions remain as to how carefully this
can be done.
Practically for the New Testament, Wright explains how this
“story” concept can be applied to solve the rhetorical chasm between
“theological” and “historical” readings which he presented above:
The New Testament, I suggest, must
be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate contexts, within an
acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with
as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to
its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the
Story, which it tells can be heard as stories,
not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without
the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the
arrogance that assumes that ‘we’ – whichever group that might be – already have
ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full
appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama it
suggests[4]
Wright wants to present that one needs history and theology
– so then his universal “story” of the human drama can appropriately be acted
out. This is the great solution to the great problem he has created.
It is this interest in explaining “the whole of everything”
that not only is he going to use both theological and historical readings, but
he is somehow going to incorporate all approaches
to the scripture in his analysis in some kind of pan-hermeneutical approach:
We must try to combine the
pre-modern emphasis on the text as in some sense authoritative, the modern
emphasis on the text (and Christianity itself) as irreducibly integrated into
history, and irreducibly involved with theology, and the post-modern emphasis
on the reading of the text.[5]
Wright attempts to unite all things and all readings
together in a balanced way.
If Wright is able to make this case, it should strike even
the passing reader that the chasm between the interpretative methods must not
be as great as he suggested. Wright even admits as such by showing that
“historical” and “theological” readings are never actually separate:
It is, nevertheless, a matter of
fact that most people who have tried to write about Christian theology have
felt it appropriate to devote some space to the historical questions, and that
the vast majority of people who have read the New Testament seriously from a
historical point of view, and who have written about it thus, have in some way
or other intended to address the theological questions as well, albeit of
course reaching a wide range of answers.[6]
While what Wright says here is obviously true, he also
creates an odd logic that needs to be carefully considered. His logic is both
circular and contradictory. He implies the following proposition:
1.
There is a problem in that the current
interpretations of the New Testament are deficient in their radical duality
between one another (the historical and theological).
2.
The chasm is too great and we need a more
balanced approach which takes the best part of both interpretations creating a
“whole world” that includes both theology and historical context.
3.
Most all scholars already agree with Wright in
his approach and practice it regularly.
4.
Proposition 1 does not truly exist, so Wright’s
position can’t be wrong – but it does challenge why he is bothering with this
book.
Wright has presented an argument that fulfills its own
veracity. However, serious challenges can be asked as to what it is that he is
truly doing.
The above analysis shows Wright’s stated goals. We should
not, however, given the above challenge to these goals, discard Wright
completely. First, Wright has overstated the importance of his book – but that
does not mean that the book has no importance. Just because his straw men are
not nearly as large as he hopes – and his solution is not nearly as unique as
he hopes – it does not mean he does not have anything to add. Further, the one
stated goal that does deserve serious examination is his argument for a “story”
that will be encompassing. This, by Occam’s razor is valuable. If it were
possible to discover a simple unifying theory that explained everything then
that would be preferable to a far more chaotic presentation with
contradictions.
Given these stated goals of the book, it will be up to the
remainder of these blog posts to analyze what Wright is doing in his actual
arguments – the ways that he holds to this and applies these theories as well
as implying other assumptions and biases which he did not state at the
beginning of his study.
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