How God Became King, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Three

1. Wright asks congregations to identify the purpose of the four gospels.  What are they all about?  This chapter isolates six traditional church answers.  “The first inadequate answer is that Jesus came to teach people how to go to heaven.”  “The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth. When Matthew has Jesus talking about heaven’s kingdom, he means that heaven— in other words, the God of heaven— is establishing his sovereign rule not just in heaven, but on earth as well.”  This summary is fully explained in Wright’s previous book, Surprised by Hope.

- How does this common misreading of the gospels misconstrue Jesus’ life and message?  Why is this so difficult to reconcile in our culture?

2. “A second popular approach to the material ‘in the middle’ of the gospels is to understand it in terms of Jesus’s teaching, particularly about what we call ‘ethics,’ or how to behave.”  “Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was ‘teaching’ people how to live within that whole new world. To that extent, we should both embrace the idea of him as a ‘teacher’ and radically qualify or modify it. You only understand the point of the ‘teaching’ when you understand the larger picture of what Jesus was doing.”  “In the gospels, Jesus is undoubtedly a great moral teacher and exemplar. But he is much, much more. And it is that ‘much more’ that the church has found so hard to grasp and express.”

- In your view, how does Jesus both fulfill and transcend the role of teacher?  What does it mean for Jesus to be more than just a teacher?

3. “A third standard line people sometimes advance when wondering why the gospels tell their readers about what Jesus did in his public career is to suggest that he was offering an example of how to live.”  “Again and again in the gospels we find that Jesus is not, in fact, holding himself up as an example to follow or copy.”  “But it is held within a framework where Jesus is not simply ‘an example to copy,’ but the one who is doing something new that will change the way things are for everybody else. Where he is going, he tells them, they cannot come. He is to be arrested, but they must escape. His task is unique. It cannot be reduced to that of the great man showing his followers how it’s done.”

- Where is our religious culture guilty of this?  Why is it so popular?

4. “A fourth inadequate answer has tried to tie the first and the third together. The aim is still to get us to heaven, but Jesus is not just the moral exemplar— his perfect life means that he can be the perfect sacrifice. Since it is his sacrificial death that enables our sins to be forgiven, and since in the Old Testament the sacrifice must be pure and without blemish, it was necessary that Jesus’s life should be sinless, so that his sacrifice would be valid, acceptable to God. Many Christians have tried to ‘explain’ the ‘middle bits’ of the gospels in this kind of way.”  “The idea of Jesus as the sinless sacrifice is clearly present in early Christianity. But do the gospels make this link?”

- Why does Wright struggle to accept this premise?

5. “A fifth inadequate answer takes quite a different tack. ‘The gospels are written,’ people have said to me, ‘so we can identify with the characters in the story and find our own way by seeing what happened to them.’ Well, there is once again quite a lot in that. Getting inside the stories in the gospels is indeed an excellent way of coming to understand Jesus better and allowing the power of his life to transform our own. But this is scarcely a sufficient explanation for why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the books they did.”  “The question we have to face about the gospels is the question of where they are coming from and where they are going, not simply the various things we can use them for along the way.”

- What are the limitations and risks of such self-application?

6. “The sixth standard line has been to say that the gospels were written to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus. This, I suspect, is what many Christians regard as the gospels’ principal purpose. Some would add too the equal purpose of demonstrating his humanity.”  “Sometimes people will say, making a more personal or pastoral point, that the gospels, in telling the story of Jesus, show us who God really is. That’s a bit more like it. That, in fact, is precisely what John says at the end of his prologue: nobody has ever seen God, but the only son, who is intimately close to the Father, has brought him to light. Look at Jesus, and you’ll see the human face of God. But even that doesn’t get us far enough, because John at once goes on, as do all four gospels, to tell us what this embodied God is now up to. It isn’t enough to know that Jesus is in some sense “divine.”

- Wright asks: Which God are we talking about, what is he now doing, and why? What does it mean?”  Why are these question so critical?