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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