How God Became King, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Six

1. What has, for many generations, been passed off as “critical scholarship” has in fact regularly reflected one of two quite different prejudgments [skeptics & fundamentalists], both of which must be challenged… These prejudgments have simply falsified the entire gospel tradition. This isn’t a matter of “proving” that this or that element in the gospels is in fact historically reliable. History has, in any case, a type of “proof” different from that in many other disciplines. Science studies repeatable phenomena; an experiment can be replicated on the other side of the world. History studies unrepeatable phenomena; you cannot step twice into the same river. “Proof” in history must therefore reside in the balance of probabilities, not in the repeated experiment or the analytical mathematical truth. It’s more a matter of recognizing that the gospels were indeed intended as “biographies” in some sense or other, even though they are biographies that carry all kinds of other stories, as we are seeing in this part of the present book. And my judgment as a historian is that, once we think our way into the world of Jesus’s day, they convey the mood and flavor of the times and of its toweringly central character with remarkable precision.
 

- How do the mindsets of skepticism & fundamentalism preclude thinking our way into the world of Jesus’ day?  Why do biographies succeed?

2. Another distorting pressure, however, must also be named. This is the tendency, which we have already observed, for people in our generation, both inside and outside the church, to assume that the gospels are basically about “moral teaching,” that Jesus was a moral teacher and that the gospels record his wise words. Any serious readers of the gospels will see the flaw— Jesus was not less than a “moral teacher,” but he was certainly much, much more. But for many preachers and teachers this exerts an insidious pressure, helped on its way by the need to produce yet another sermon (or two or three) for yet another Sunday. How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom! Hence, once more, this speaker gets turned up far too loud.

- How have religious authors and publishers colluded to produce and market an endless stream of morality under the guise of Christianity?

3. One good way to get this third speaker adjusted to its proper volume is to think of the four gospels as deliberately composed foundational documents for the new movement. They are, in this quite proper sense, “myths”— not in the sense of “stories that didn’t happen,” but in the sense of “stories communities tell to explain and give direction to their own lives.” The question is whether the “myth” corresponds to reality. Well, the question of the gospels is whether the “myth” that they convey corresponds to reality. Early Christians would have said that the test of this was the reality not simply of their historical memories, but of their community life. When they told the stories in the gospels, they told them not simply as a way of reminding one another of things that had happened, however interesting. They were reminding one another of things that had happened through which the new movement of which they were a part had come into being and through which it had gained its sense of direction. Their whole raison d’être depended on these stories.

- How do the gospels serve as “myth” in shaping our community life?

- How would you describe the current direction of our faith movement?

4. It isn’t just that the church finds itself doing a few of the things that Jesus’s first followers found themselves doing. It is that the story of the gospels, reaching its unique climax in the death and resurrection of Jesus, is told in such a way as to indicate that Jesus’s followers now have a mission, indeed a mission that goes way beyond anything they had had during Jesus’s lifetime. We have already seen that Matthew suggests a transition from a limited mission in Jesus’s lifetime to a worldwide one after the resurrection. Something similar is true in John’s gospel (not that the disciples have as much of a “mission” there during Jesus’s lifetime). Here is the heart of it. The more you tell the story of Jesus and pray for his Spirit, the more you discover what the church should be doing in the present time. Because the gospels are the foundational charter for the church’s life, they must be stories primarily about Jesus; otherwise the church would be rooted in itself.

- How do the stories about Jesus direct your sense of faith and mission?

5. When we ponder this, and the many other moments in all four gospels that have the same kind of effect, we realize that the scholars’ instincts were in this way right on target: the four gospels were never meant as “historical reminiscence” for its own sake. The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus’s first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament.

- What is our responsibility as stewards of the four gospel stories?