[This is an ongoing project that is analyzing N.T. Wright’s
5 volume series, Christian Origins and the Question of God. This series is
widely read and bridges the gap between the academic and devotional world. It
is therefore worthy to be carefully analyzed so that all readers can understand
his key points while at the same time gaining a critical eye to some of his
rather bold claims. This series of posts are concerning volume 1 – The New Testament and the People of God.]
N.T. Wright’s understanding of the symbols and everyday
praxis of second temple Judaism at the time of Jesus is a wonderful
illustration of how Protestant thinkers (and perhaps non-Protestants as well,
but I am only familiar with Protestants) understand enough about Judaism to
create a reasonable foil for understanding the New Testament, but not enough to
truly gain an appreciation for the nuanced arguments concerning Torah presented
in the gospels and works of Paul.
First, Wright does a good job using his concept of worldview
as elongated story in Judaism. In a previous blog post I analyzed the assertion
that worldview is best expressed in “story” or “mythos;” however, when
considering Judaism in the second temple there was such an advanced and
prominent mythos that using it as the form of understanding the group is well
taken. Wright shows that the mythos is complicated and has at least two forms:
First-century Judaism is an
excellent example of a culture which quite obviously thrived on stories, which
we may for simplicity divide into two categories: the basic story, told in the
Bible, of creation and election, of exodus and monarchy, of exile and return;
and small-unit stories, either dealing with a small part of the larger story,
or running parallel to some or all of it. In each case, we gain a powerful
index of the Jewish worldview, which then opens up to create the context for
the symbols and the praxis.[1]
First, he shows the “grand narrative” that was behind most
of the worldviews of the adherents. Second, he creates a neo-structuralist langue that will then dominate all the
symbols one can possibly create. Many would argue that the former is quite
valuable whereas the latter is overly simplistic. Whether it is simplistic or
not, for his purposes of understanding how a mythos might unite a people, the
idea functions well.
Secondly, he uses this mythos to show that the Jews of their
own day were able to understand it very much in their own life. He argues that
the mythos itself has no clear conclusion leading readers to expect one for
themselves:
The great story of the Hebrew
scriptures was therefore inevitably read in the second-temple period as a story
in search of a conclusion. This ending would have to incorporate the full
liberation and redemption of Israel, an event which had not happened as long as
Israel was being oppressed, a prisoner in her own land. And this ending would
have to be appropriate: it should
correspond to the rest of the story, and grow out of it in obvious continuity
and uniformity.[2]
Wright displays here how a mythos functionally is supposed
to work – it is supposed to include the readers and be logically consistent.
Wright then shows that the mythos creates and revolves
around four key symbols which provided identity and consisted of the religious
world of second temple Jews. The symbols were Temple, Torah, land, and ethnic
identity.
The stories which articulate a
worldview focus upon the symbols which bring that worldview into visible and
tangible reality…Both Temple and Land were regulated by the Torah, which formed
the covenant charter for all that Israel was and hoped for, and whose
importance increased in proportion to one’s geographical distance from Land and
Temple. Closely related to all three was the fact of Jewish ethnicity: the
little race, divided by exile and diaspora, knew itself to be a family whose
identity had to be maintained at all costs. Temple, Land, Torah and racial
identity were the key symbols which anchored the first-century Jewish worldview
in everyday life.[3]
These four points of identity might be disputed, but as a
heuristic device, they are pragmatic and helpful. Wright rightly points out
that they were interrelated and that no one could independently exist.
While each of the four points which Wright presents could be
discussed, Torah is the one that is most relevant for this project – showing
how frequent characterizations of Judaism provide a foil for studying the New
Testament, but do not do a good job of showing what Judaism was doing
independently.
First, Wright argues that Torah was connected to all other
concepts which made it pragmatically useful for those who were not in the land:
Temple and Torah formed and
unbreakable whole: the Torah sanctioned and regulated what happened in the
Temple, and the Temple was (in much of this period) the practical focal point
for the observance of Torah, both in the sense that much Torah-observance
actually consisted of Temple-ritual, and in the sense that the Temple was the
major place for study and teaching of Torah. So, too, Torah and Land formed a
tight bond. The Torah offered the promises about the Land, the blessings which
would be given in and through it, and the detailed instructions as to the
behaviour necessary for blessing to be maintained. After all, the reason that
YHWH had driven out the previous occupants of the Land was precisely their
idolatry and immorality. Israel had to be different if she was not going to
suffer the same fate.[4]
Wright points out that Torah was historically bound up with
the concept of land, temple, and ethnic identity. The problem is that his
characterization is aggressively out of date. He is absolutely right that in
the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-2 Kings governed by the theology of
Deuteronomy), it was absolutely the case that if Israel followed Torah, then
they would receive blessings manifested as militarily success in keeping the
land if they failed to follow Torah, they would receive curses manifested as
military failures losing the land. However, this view had long been challenged
within the Hebrew Bible itself by the time that the New Testament was written.
The book of Job, Ecclesiastes, III Isaiah, II Isaiah, Ezekiel, and
Ezra-Nehemiah were written directly to address this and argue that religiosity
did not depend upon having the land and prosperity – in fact, it seemed to come
full circle arguing that proper religiosity caused enmity with all those around
Israel and to expect persecution rather than prosperity. Therefore, this idea
that Wright - along with many protestants – hold about Torah is an earlier idea
that was never dismissed, but was thoroughly nuanced later on.
Wright does understand well the significance and
practicality of Torah for the vast majority of followers. First, for those not
near the temple – or those who rejected the way the temple was being run on
principle – looked to the Torah as a practical replacement to Temple worship:
The presence of the covenant god
was not, after all, confined to the Temple in Jerusalem, which was both a long
way off and in the hands of corrupt aristocrats. It had been democratized, made
available to all who would study and practice Torah.[5]
The presence of God had formerly been seen as channeled through
the Temple and this practice was seen as also being possible to be through
Torah. This suggested that Torah had a divine status and a link to God
directly. Further, the practical value of this being in every synagogue was
quite helpful in contrast to the one temple in Jerusalem one had to travel to
access. Here, Wright is completely correct.
Where Wright struggles is in the practice of Torah. He
rightly shows that Torah became the identifying mark of Jews in antiquity
through proper practice:
And the Torah, especially in the
Diaspora, but also anywhere where Jews felt themselves beleaguered, as they
mostly did in one way or another, could be seen as focusing on those things
which distinguished Jews from their (potentially threatening) pagan neighbors:
circumcision, the keeping of the Sabbath, and the purity laws.[6]
While Torah obligation did focus on purity rules, the reason
was not only because these were the
easiest boundary markers that made Jews Jewish. This certainly was true, but
that reduction seems far more like a foil to understand the later dialogues
concerning the Jesus movement (e.g. which rules from the Old Testament were
simply identifying Jews as Jewish and which rules applied to all people) rather
than being a careful discussion of Judaism itself.
Wright, like many Protestants, focuses on Torah in two ways
– 1). as the first 5 books of the Bible which are divine and demanded study and
2). as the obligations one had to follow to be in relationship with God. Wright
therefore focuses on the Sabbath obligations and purity obligations for
properly following Torah. To Wright’s credit he attempts to show that these
were not understood in some kind of “works righteousness” sense that many
protestants wish they were so that Luther’s idea of a catharsis from guilt of
failing to fulfill the law can be released by the forgiveness in Christ.
Rather, Wright correctly points out that some kind of idea of trying to “reach
God through action” is not one that is found in any kind of Judaism in
antiquity (and perhaps in the modern world as well). Instead, Wright directly
addresses this point:
The ‘works of the Torah’ were not
a legalist’s ladder, up which one climbed to earn the divine favour, but were
badges that one wore as the marks of identity, of belonging to the chosen
people in the present, and hence the all-important signs, to oneself and one’s
neighbours, that one belonged to the company who would be vindicated when the
covenant god acted to redeem his people.[7]
Wright does a good job dispelling this myth, but in so
doing, reduces the concept of Torah significantly.
Wright has a strange logic that ends up diminutizing the
importance of Torah – even though he himself says it is of utmost importance.
The logic seems to go something like this:
1.
Torah was the replacement of the Temple to be
channel through which God worked
2.
The primary function of Torah was to provide
identity markers
3.
The practical use of Torah was in doing several
deeds (dietary restriction, Sabbath, etc.)
4.
These deeds did not help one use the channel to
reach God
5.
Torah did not really express number 1.
The absurdity shines through – he wants Torah to be
simultaneously a replacement for Temple and not actually do the work of Temple.
The reason Wright struggles is that he does not show the
full extent of what Torah is. He gets close several times when he argues that
Torah can be seen as a type of replacement for Temple. Jon Levenson has
cogently shown how Torah was very much a channel by which Israel had a
relationship with God. Torah becomes the intermediary through which Israel and
God unite. However, the mistake is in Christians assuming that the direction of
the channel was only up – namely Israel doing works to call out/reach God.
Instead, the main direction was down – the way that God reached Israel. All the
works that one would do were merely a response.[8]
The idea that Torah was primarily the channel through which God acted rather than the channel through which humans act significantly complicates the understanding of “works of the Torah” so present in the work of Paul. “Work of the Torah” could be the obligation that humans must do in the system of Torah. However, it is equally (and I think more) likely that it is not the work humans are doing; rather, it is the work that God is doing on earth. Therefore, Paul could be contrasting two very different things in Galatians and Romans – salvation by God through the “work of the Law” compared to the salvation by God through Christ.
While the question of the meaning of works of the Torah in
Paul remains an open question, Wright’s characterization of Torah as primarily
a human action wherein one attempts to reach God (either explicitly or
implicitly) is a common mistake the Protestants make because of how such a view
would make reading Paul make sense. While there are plenty who still think Paul
holds this view and that he is contrasting this in a significant way, there is no
reason to think that Torah as such had that idea at all for the larger world of
second-temple Judaism.
No comments:
Post a Comment