Wednesday, September 14, 2016

How God Became King, by N. T. Wright

Chapter One

1.  Wright introduces his book with a recollection of a project from his days in high school involving a small Christian studies group.  “I was assigned the task of preparing and leading the second of these: Why did Jesus live?”  “I had stumbled, without realizing it, on a weak spot in the general structure of Christian faith as it has come to be expressed in today’s world— and, I suspect, for a lot longer than we might imagine. Here is all this material in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why? What are we supposed to make of it all?”

- At what point in your early Christian development did it occur to you that faith was more than just the acquiring and reciting of certain beliefs and traditions? 
- What were some of your earliest questions/concerns, and what formative role did they play in your discipleship journey?

2. Wright continues his “Puzzle of a Lifetime” narrative with flashbacks to a Bible exposition to the student Christian Union at Cambridge in 1978, “The Gospel in the Gospels,” which he struggles to recall in much detail.  “The puzzle of Jesus’s lifetime - what was his life all about? - has crept up on me and become the puzzle of mine.”

“We use the gospels. We read them aloud in worship. We often preach from them. But have we even begun to hear what they are saying, the whole message, which is so much greater than the sum of the small parts with which we are, on one level, so familiar? I don’t think so. This is the lifetime puzzle. It isn’t just that we’ve all misread the gospels, though I think that’s broadly true. It is more that we haven’t really read them at all. We have fitted them into the framework of ideas and beliefs that we have acquired from other sources. I want in this book to allow them, as far as I can, to speak for themselves. Not everyone will like the result.”

- In your own words, how do you understand Wright’s concern?
- What is missing in our reading (or our not reading) of the gospels?

3. “My problem…is that the canonical gospels and the creeds are not in fact presenting the same picture.  The great creeds, when they refer to Jesus, pass directly from his virgin birth to his suffering and death. The four gospels don’t. Or, to put it the other way around, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all seem to think it’s hugely important that they tell us a great deal about what Jesus did between the time of his birth and the time of his death. In particular, they tell us about what we might call his kingdom-inaugurating work: the deeds and words that declared that God’s kingdom was coming then and there, in some sense or other, on earth as in heaven. They tell us a great deal about that; but the great creeds don’t.”

- How do you understand the origins and roles (then and now) of our Christian creeds?

4. “To this day, whenever people take it upon themselves to explore the divinity of Jesus, there is at the very least a tendency for the theme of God’s kingdom, coming on earth as in heaven, to be quietly lost from view.”  “The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God. It would be truly remarkable if one great truth of early Christian faith and life were actually to displace another, to displace it indeed so thoroughly that people forgot it even existed. But that’s what I think has happened. This book is written in the hope of correcting that distortion.”

- As Lutherans, how does the structure and implementation of our Sunday worship seek to address this potential distortion?

5. “Bultmann therefore read the gospels not as the story of why Jesus lived, not in order to find “the gospel in the gospels” in the way I have described, but in order to observe the early Christians expressing their faith by telling and retelling stories that appear to us to be “Jesus stories,” but that were, for the most part, “mythological” expressions of early Christian experience projected back onto the fictive screen of the history of Jesus. Bultmann’s whole project of form criticism, at least in the way he practiced it, was predicated on the assumption that if you could discover the “forms,” the characteristic shapes of the small anecdotes that make up much of the gospel material, you could thereby observe, as through a lens, the early church expressing its own faith. That, it was believed, was why the early gospel traditions were passed on: not to remember or celebrate something that had happened in the past (i.e., in Jesus’s public career), but to celebrate and sustain the continuing life of faith of the early community.”

- How, then, do the weekly Sunday reading and preaching of these gospels speak to and sustain our present faith community?

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