I am rereading [and was beginning again to exegete] the article linked in a post I made last January on rex.espiritu.net referring to the thoughts of N.T. Wright. In the course of doing so, one paragraph from another related link seems appropriate to include here. In an article on Christianity Today, James W. Sire provides a brief review of N.T. Wright’s recent book.
SIMPLY CHRISTIAN: Why Christianity Makes Sense
by N. T. Wright
HarperSanFrancisco
256 pp.; $22.95
Echoes and Voices from Beyond
N.T. Wright argues that Christianity better comprehends our deepest human longings.
…Wright’s emphasis on the present and future of the kingdom of God is a corrective for those who think that the point of Christianity is “to go to heaven when you die.” God, Wright argues, is bent upon putting “the whole creation to rights.” “Earth and heaven were made to overlap with one another,” the author writes, “not fitfully, mysteriously, and partially as they do at the moment, but completely, gloriously, and utterly.” Our task as Christians is to join our lives to that great end.
Following are modified excerpts from Tim Stafford’s interview with N.T. Wright in Christianity Today magazine:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/january/22.38.html
Mere Mission
N.T. Wright talks about how to present the gospel in a postmodern world.
Interview by Tim Stafford | posted 1/05/2007 04:00PM
Your book “Simply Christian” speaks to people outside the faith, in what must be a conscious imitation of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity….
There’s an old evangelical saying, “If he’s not Lord of all, he’s not Lord at all.” That was always applied personally and pietistically. I want to say exactly the same thing but apply it to the world. We’re talking about Jesus as the Lord of the world—not the Lord of people’s private spiritual interiority only, but of what they do with their money, with their homes, with the wealth of nations, and with the planet.
You put less emphasis on Jesus’ claims to be God-come-to-earth, and more on his forceful activity, doing what only God can do.
…until we look hard at Jesus, we really haven’t understood who God is.
…within postmodernity, people have tried to pay attention to the narrative without paying attention to the fact that it’s a true story.
This particular story is about the Creator and the real world; it’s not about a God who is only interested in our interior reflections or our spiritual progress, the Gnostic worldview.
The Gnostic conspiracy theory says that orthodoxy hushed up the really exciting thing and promoted this boring sterile thing with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And of course there’s a great lie underneath that. In the second and third centuries, the people being thrown to the lions and burned at the stake and sawed in two were not the ones reading Thomas and Judas and the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary [as recent writings like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code might purport(?)]. They were the ones reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Because the empire is perfectly happy with Gnosticism. Gnosticism poses no threat to the empire. Whereas Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do. It’s the church’s shame that in the last 200 years, the church has muzzled Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and turned them into instruments of a controlling, sterile orthodoxy. But the texts themselves are explosive.
But why has Gnosticism become so attractive just now? What is it about our times?
…In the middle and late second century, … A.D. 135. Jewish people who have clung fiercely to their Scriptures, as the desperate side of hope when everything seems to be going wrong, have lost.
Jewish Gnosticism emerges out of that failure… [of the second Jewish revolt] … So you say, there is no hope in the world, the world is a dark place run by evil, wicked forces who have no fear of God, no sense of spirituality. Therefore, the only thing is to turn inward.
… Gnosticism seems to many people like a place to find something good about oneself in the face of a hostile world.
[Like the second century,] we have neo-paganisms of the Right and the Left. On the Right you’ve got war and money, Mars and Mammon, calling the shots. If you oppose the necessity of going to war, you’re not quite sane. And if you say you’ve just been offered a job at double the salary but you’re going to stay with what you are doing, people will look at you as though you are mad, because the money imperative is just assumed to be all important. It’s not just that they disagree or think you’re stupid, they just cannot understand what you’re talking about.
And the same paganism is on the Left. Obviously sex, the goddess Aphrodite, makes demands. To resist those demands for whatever reason is just assumed to be completely incomprehensible. Somebody falls in love with the wrong person, off they go, and it’s just a shoulder-shrugging thing. Of course you’ve got to do that because this is the imperative, this is what our culture is all about.
How do you see the church’s mission in this context?
For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery.
The longer that I’ve gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it’s been borne in on me that that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with working for God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That has always been at the heart of the Lord’s Prayer, and how we’ve managed for years to say the Lord’s Prayer without realizing that Jesus really meant it is very curious. Our Western culture since the 18th century has made a virtue of separating out religion from real life, or faith from politics.When I lecture about this, people will pop up and say, “Surely Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world.” And the answer is no, what Jesus said in John 18 is, “My kingdom is not from this world.” That’s ek tou kosmoutoutou. It’s quite clear in the text that Jesus’ kingdom doesn’t start with this world. It isn’t a worldly kingdom, but it is for this world. It’s from somewhere else, but it’s for this world.
The key to mission is always worship. You can only be reflecting the love of God into the world if you are worshiping the true God who creates the world out of overflowing self-giving love. The more you look at that God and celebrate that love, the more you have to be reflecting that overflowing self-giving love into the world.
Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today.
N.T. Wright is a world-renowned New Testament scholar—author of Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God—and bishop of Durham in the Church of England. He is also a keen observer of culture. ct senior writer Tim Stafford caught up with Wright as he drove from meetings at Windsor Castle to his diocese in Durham. They talked about communicating the gospel in a post-Christian society.
