Chapter Two
1. The idea that Jesus came to teach a new, simple, clear ethic of being
nice to people, without any “dogmatic” claims or “supernatural” elements, is so
deeply embedded in Western culture that one sometimes despairs, like a gardener
faced with ground ivy, of ever uprooting it. To this day there seems a ready
market right across the Western world for books that say that Jesus was just a
good Jewish boy who would have been horrified to see a “church” set up in his
name, who didn’t think of himself as “God” or even the “Son of God,” and who
had no intention of dying for anyone’s sins— the church has gotten it all
wrong. The authors of such books routinely proclaim themselves “neutral,”
“unbiased,” “impartial,” or “independent.” As if.
- Describe some of current Western
depictions of “Jesus.”
2. Faced with these challenges, would-be “orthodox”
Christian scholars and teachers have had one of two reactions. First, many— including the present writer—
have accepted the historical challenge and sought to answer it. When we really
study all the evidence for all it’s worth, it is possible to offer a
historically rooted picture of Jesus that is much fuller and more positive than
the one classic liberal reductionism has constructed. Engaging in this work
does not mean, as some have supposed, that one must first accept the
reductionist worldview of the Enlightenment. Plenty of people were doing
history before the eighteenth century; the word “history” does not simply mean
“what a good eighteenth-century skeptic would allow.” In the second reaction, many devout Christians,
including many learned scholars and theologians, have held aloof from the
“quest” and from any imperative toward actual historical inquiry concerning
Jesus. Surely, they say, we simply have to go with what our great tradition has
handed down to us, rather than play around with historical reconstructions
offered by skeptics; we mustn’t try to go behind our God-given gospels and
invent something different of our own. I still believe that the first of these
positions is justifiable, though it is no part of the present book to argue the
case for it. My problem with the second position is that it takes us back once
again to the problem of creed and canon, or indeed “gospel” and “gospels.”
- Wright asks, “How
can we escape this trap?”
3. The Achilles heel of the “social gospel” movement,
however, was that many of its enthusiasts were, like the critical scholars of
the time, focusing on the center rather than the edges, and so misreading the
center itself. In trying to have a Jesus who cared for the poor without needing
to be the incarnate son of God or to die for the sins of the world and be
raised bodily thereafter, they falsified (so we could argue) even the bits they
were highlighting. The problem with all this, however, is not merely at the
level of theory (“How come you’ve taken some bits of the gospel story, but left
out other bits?”). The problem is that, a century after the “social gospel” was
at its high-water mark, the world, including the Western world, still seems to
be a place of great wickedness. Greed and corruption, oppression of the poor,
violence and degradation, war and genocide continue unchecked. It isn’t only
the Jesus of popular imagination, then, who expected something dramatic to happen
and was disappointed. The “social gospel” may have helped to clean up some
slums, to reduce working hours for women and children in factories, and so on.
Wonderful. But homelessness and virtual slave labor are still realities in the
modern Western world, never mind elsewhere. Has anything really changed?
- Wright inquires,
“Faced with this puzzle, it is fair to ask: What difference might it make if
the ‘middle’ of the gospels was integrated with the ‘outer’ bits? What would it
be like if the cloak was no longer empty?”
4. One might even state it as an axiom: when the church
leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them
into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief. But the proper
reaction to this, whether it’s in the second century or the twenty-first, ought
never to be simply to dismiss the heretical teaching outright and continue as
before. The proper reaction is to look carefully to see which flank has been
left unguarded, which bit of core teaching has been left out, where the
canonical balance has not been maintained. Only then might one set about
reincorporating that within a fresh statement of full-blown Christian faith.
- Where do
you witness the church leaving out bits of its core teaching?
5. My case throughout this book, then, is that all four
canonical gospels suppose themselves to be telling the story that Paul, in some
of his most central and characteristic passages, tells as well: that the story
of Jesus is the story of how Israel’s God became king. This is how, in the
events concerning Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel has become king of the
whole world. This is the forgotten story of the gospels. We have not even
noticed that this was what they were trying to tell us. As a result, we have
all misread them.
- Why does
Wright feel we have all misread the four gospels?
- How might
we address this?
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