Chapter Eight
1. Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only
have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them
down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that
happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate
an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would
discover not only new life, but new vocation.
- What factors contribute to our “making the gospels
ordinary?”
2. We have lived for many years now with “kingdom
Christians” and “cross Christians” in opposite corners of the room, anxious
that those on the other side are missing the point, the one group with its
social-gospel agenda and the other with its saving-souls-for-heaven agenda. The
four gospels bring these two viewpoints together into a unity that is much
greater than the sum of their parts, and that is mostly what Part III is about.
In fact, what we call “politics” and what we call “religion” (and for that
matter what we call “culture,” “philosophy,” “theology,” and lots of other
things besides) were not experienced or thought of in the first century as separable
entities. This was just as true, actually, for the Greeks and the Romans as it
was for the Jews.
- Looking back at Wright’s historical explanation, how
did the Enlightenment contribute to the formation of kingdom/cross Christians?
3. So what has been the Christian reaction to all this?
How have those who habitually read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John responded to
the challenge of modernity? In very mixed fashion.
- Review and discuss Wright’s appraisal of the churches’
four reactions.
4. So, to sum up this very long but necessary
introduction. Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to
be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth,
was created as God’s temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in
that temple. But the world was out of joint through the failure of humans in
general and Israel in particular, so God the creator would have to act in
judgment and justice to hold them to account. And the sign of that coming
judgment was that at the heart of the world God had placed his covenant people,
gathered around the Temple, which was the microcosm of creation, to
celebrate his true order and to pray for it to come on earth as in heaven.
- How does this context provide a fuller comprehension
of the purpose of the four gospels? What
do we have in common with this context?
5.
And it was, of course, to those
first-century Jews that the evangelists saw Jesus coming with his message of
God’s kingdom. As we turn now,
none
too soon, to consider the themes of kingdom and cross, we note that for all the
evangelists, as for Paul, there is no sense of the kingdom not after all having
appeared. Yes, it has been redefined. Yes, there is still more to do, as long
as evil continues to stalk the earth. But the early Christians all believed
that with Jesus’s death and resurrection the kingdom had indeed come in power,
even if it didn’t look at all like they imagined it would. The hope had been
realized, even though it had been quite drastically redefined in the process. A
new theocracy had indeed been inaugurated, because the Temple where God lived
among his people had been radically redefined. A new empire had been launched
that would trump Caesar’s empire and all those like it, not by superior force
but by a completely different sort of power altogether. And the place where
this vision is set out is, to the great surprise of many who at one level know
these documents well, the collection of the four gospels we find in the New
Testament.
- How does this
portrayal of the arrival of God’s kingdom in the four gospels give you hope in
the midst of contemporary chaos and upheaval?
- Where do you encounter that kingdom and how does it
sustain you?
