[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 2 –
Jesus and the Victory of God.]
This last chapter of N.T. Wright’s three chapter discussion
of the kingdom of God discusses Jesus’ message of judgment and vindication.
Here, he concludes the message of the kingdom of God in its fully apocalyptic
scheme. Here – as before - he argues that Jesus’ message of judgment fit fully
into the cosmic scheme of expected Jewish apocalypticism. What changed,
however, were the parties involved. Wright argues that the kingdom itself has not
been changed – the challenge was that rather than judgment against Babylon,
here Jerusalem and Israel have become Babylon and the promised delivery of
Israel has been transferred to Jesus’ followers. Wright should be commended for
following this logic to its end. Many hold much of what Wright has claimed for
the first two sections of the “announcement” and the “warning” that he
discussed earlier, but are unwilling to fully explicate the way that the
different parties in the “judgment” and “vindication” section would look for
fear of aggressive supersessionism. Wright should, therefore, be lauded for
being willing to follow his logic to its end. The challenge will simply be if
one chooses to accept this or not. His argument depends heavily upon the Gospel
of Luke and Mark 13 which could be troubling, and his defense of them causes
even more of a troubling factor.
First, Wright does well to argue that whatever we think of
Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, we should expect that his ideas made sense to
his audience. Even John Dominic Crossan who believes that Jesus was not
actually an apocalyptic prophet at all, instead he was a social reformer, would
agree that his message was couched in the language
of an apocalyptic prophet (Crossan believes that Jesus was at one time an
apocalyptic and after the death of John the Baptist changed from this basic
viewpoint and shifted his emphasis to something else; therefore, his language
always was apocalyptic – even if he was attempting to avoid it). Therefore, at
the most basic level, Wright’s assertion that whatever we think of Jesus’
message of kingdom of God, a better understanding of it would be one that made
good sense of the concept to the larger Jewish milieu. Wright has done this
well – he argues that Jesus never challenged the nature of the kingdom of God nor the events leading up to it. The only thing Jesus changed was who the parties were:
Jesus is telling the recognizable
story of Israel, with the coming judgment and vindication exactly as one might
imagine it within mainline restoration eschatology; except for the fact that, just as we find in some of the Scrolls,
Israel’s official leaders (and their cherished symbol, the Temple) have been
case in the role of ‘enemies’, while the role of ‘persecuted and vindicated
Israel’ is given instead to Jesus and his disciples. The story itself has not
changed. Jesus is speaking of judgment and vindication, just as so many
prophets had done before him.[1]
Here Wright argues that it is the leaders of Israel in the
temple who are the “evil” usually depicted in apocalyptic language that needs
to be destroyed. Wright further explains that in the apocalyptic language (most
familiar to readers in the book of Daniel, but through a variety of apocalyptic
texts in antiquity), Jesus has used the image of the city of great evil –
Babylon – and recast the new Babylon as Jerusalem itself:
Jesus, I shall now argue, predicted
that judgment would fall on the nation in general and on Jerusalem in
particular. That is to say, he reinterprets a standard Jewish belief (the
coming judgment which would fall on the nations) in terms of a coming judgment
which would fall on impenitent Israel.
The great prophets had done exactly the same. Jerusalem, under its present
regime, had become Babylon…Jesus seems to have adopted the theme from John, who
predicted “wrath to come,” saying that membership in physical Israel was no
guarantee of a share in the age to come. Very much in the mould of Amos, or
indeed of Qumran, John insisted on redrawing the boundaries of Israel; for him,
only those who repented and submitted to baptism would be included. The story
Jesus told about Israel’s immediate future seems to have developed directly
from this point.[2]
Wright, therefore, has found a way to present his point
about the kingdom itself not being changed, just the roles being refigured.
Wright’s recasting of his point is valuable because it
allows him to fully finish his idea of Jesus’ radical rethinking of who is
going to be judged and vindicated. Israel – being the apocalyptic embodiment of
evil – will be judged whereas Jesus’ disciples – being the followers of the
good – will be delivered from the coming wrath that will restore all things
upon the earth:
“The constant emphasis that we find
here is that those who had followed Jesus (and, by implication, those who would
follow his way in the future) would escape the great coming disaster, and would
themselves receive the vindications that had been promised to Israel. They
would be the ones who would inherit the promise, who would experience the real
release from exile.[3]
Jesus, it appears, has woven into
this story a further strand, that of the rescue of Israel from destruction by
holding firm to the end; but now the Israel that holds firm, and so is rescued,
consists of his own disciples. And
the great city that oppresses them, from whose imminent judgment they must
flee, is not Babylon. It is Jerusalem.[4]
Here Wright has fully concluded his point. In a
supersessionistic spirit, Jesus’ followers are the new true Israel and those
who do not accept Jesus are exactly the ones who should be avoided and in fact need to be destroyed. Here Wright should
be lauded for being consistent. If he is going to be so bold to claim such a
reversal of roles for the message of the kingdom in the previous two chapters,
that reversal demands this conclusion.
For Israel to be the antagonist, they need to be fully an
antagonist in an apocalyptic scheme. Apocalyptic schemes are not ones that
allow “middle ground” – one is cast on one side of another of a cosmic drama
that will conclude with the destruction of evil after a great battle wherein
all people will be included. It is for this reason he notes that the disciples
are warned of coming trials – this is part of that eschatological battle that
casts them as the sons of light against the sons of darkness – to borrow
language from the Qumran community:
Completely consistent with his
whole approach to the events that were about to take place, h e is predicting
that the ‘Messianic Woes’, the birthpangs of the age to come, are about to
occur in full force. This is how Israel is to be reborn. The story will take
the following form: all manner of strange, dire events will take place, and the
disciples will be exposed to the allure of various people who will give
themselves out to be YHWH’s anointed, commissioned to lead Israel into her
glorious future.[5]
Israel, then is a foreign nation that shall be utterly
destroyed – casted in the role of the sons of darkness who will wage war
against the light:
“The horrifying thing was that
Jesus was using, as models for the coming judgment on villages within Israel,
images of judgment taken straight from the Old Testament, where they had to do
with the divine judgment on the pagan
nations (Tyre, Sidon, Sodom – and Nineveh; though Nineveh escaped the
judgment, because she repented).[6]
The coming judgment upon these cities were not ones that
allowed later friendly interaction. They were ones that demanded utter
destruction in order to purify the earth. This is precisely what Wright argues
Israel has become in Jesus’ message of the coming kingdom.
To justify this position, Wright relies heavily upon Luke.
He argues that Luke preserves well Jesus’ position on this and that Jesus
imagined the kingdom already here now – even if the temple was not yet
destroyed. This, of course, fits well with Luke’s language of the kingdom of
God being “among you.” The problem is whether this position is based upon good
historical principles. Wright is aware of this problem and therefore defends
it. However, his defense leaves much to be desired. First consider the defense:
First, it is a basic mistake of
method to suppose that because the evangelist, like all writers that ever
existed, had reason for selecting and arranging what was written, the material
is therefore non-historical…Second, we should take careful note of the
implication of saying that his whole swathe of Lukan material does not relate
to Jesus. We are forced, quite frankly, to say either that Luke did not know anything at all about the emphases of
Jesus’ teaching, the plot of his story, or
that the ministry of Jesus really did have the warning of imminent national
disaster high on the list of regular themes. No middle ground is really
tenable.[7]
The argument
Wright presents is not convincing. This argument is frequently used and if one
considers it carefully, it doesn’t make much sense. The idea that one has to
accept everything a person writes as
historical or nothing is a poor
argument. Why is it so untenable as Wright presents? There are, of course, many options. It is certainly possible that Luke has preserved
everything historically, but that has to be proven. It is not simply something
that one can say “if you trust a single thing in Luke, you have to trust all of
it.” That is simply not accurate. Do we expect that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas – which is a text of Jesus as a young boy
who does essentially magic tricks – is somehow historically accurate simply because
it includes some historically accurate information (Jesus’ location, ancestry,
etc.) – of course not. It is very possible for something to have some
things that are historically reliable and other things that are not. To simply pretend
that “no middle ground is really tenable” guarantees that this argument will be
dismissed. Further, by privileging Luke to this point, does he use this same
criteria for the other gospels? Given that Mark’s picture of the kingdom of God
is quite different from Luke’s, does he completely throw it out because there
is “no middle ground?” In fact, he depends upon Mark 13 for much of his
picture. Therefore, he – like many Christians who make an argument like this – use
this type of argument when it is convenient and then say nothing when they
break the principle themselves.
Again, Wright’s analysis might not be wrong. He later
clarifies his position with a better argument. He says that he believes there
is a general picture that makes better sense if this apocalyptic scene were historical:
Two things in particular support
the latter alternative: a good many of the sayings just collected occur in some
form in other strands of tradition; and the picture we now have before us forms
part of an overall hypothesis which, I submit, makes sense historically.[8]
Here, Wright is back into a conversation which is
historically viable (even if not all readers agree with it). He has continually
argued for a consistent “Story” which makes best sense in the fold of Jewish
apocalyptic expectations now turned on its head into a supersesssionist
movement. While this can be challenged, it is firmly his historiographic method
and brings with it an internal ambiguity based upon this improvable hypothesis.
It is far better when he admits this rather than when he pretends that he is
not making this claim.
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