N.T. Wright

In The New Testament and the People of God, NT Wright offers an epistemological theory as a necessary prolegomenon to his overall work. He does this because he wants to defend the gospels against the charge that their value as historical documents has been fatally compromised by their theological purposes. Wright’s epistomology is fatally flawed and leads to unsustainable conclusions about history.

I want to pick up on a couple of issues that Paul Hartigan raised in his ‘NT Wright is seriously wrong’ post. They do not appear as yet to have been covered at any length in the discussion, which has focused on the question of whether the Bible offers us a good God / bad God scenario, though the thread has got rather long and I could easily have missed something.

I have come to the view that there are serious mistakes in NT Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God.

One error is that Wright presents a view of salvation history which is anachronistic at key points; and which fails to notice the difference in the portrait of God in the New and Old Testaments.

Wright wants to present God as having had a plan from the time of the fall for defeating evil. The plan involves the selection of Israel to be a light to the world. There are a number of problems with this. 

i find it ironic that Jesus never wrote anything down and more and more i find myself asking, "why not?" apart from anything else, Jesus was a great & wise teacher. therefore, in not writing his core teaching & theology down, either himself or via scribe - as Paul did -  he must have been confident that the most vital elements of His teaching would resound unadulterated through the centuries.  the emergent conversation has tremendous value in my mind and i’m not discounting such efforts to break through to a more realistic view of Jesus and answer to the question: "who was Jesus?" however, it begs the further question: if such a question is so fundamentally important, why did He leave himself so open to misinterpretation?

After coming back to New Testament theology following many years’ absence I have found the work of NT Wright invigorating- I wish I had had something like his conceptiion of the scriptures years ago.

That having been said I find his position on history and critical realism not on a par with the rest of his work. As regards critical realism he attacks the view of knowledge based on sensation but without any apparent grasp of the work of the later Wittgenstein - work which bestrides the modern philosophical world like a colossus. He is also unaware of the work of Michael Dummett. His critical realism, though it is given the trappings of argument is not really argued for but simply asserted. I think he would have been better off saying: I am not going to get into the philosophical debate about knowledge but simply take the plain man’s view, with the caution that in the case of the the scriptures we have to very rigorous in what we assert.

Was Jesus crucified on cross (hands outstretched) or on a post (hands over head)?

This conference has had a profound effect on the way I view the world, who I am, what the church is. Tom Wright has made me think back to the Back to the Future movies with the very youthful looking Micheal J Fox(MJF). In those movies, MJF could travel backward in time to effect the future, and if I re-call travelled forward to view the results. We can’t go back persoanlly but we there is a similarilty in our vocation: We are the people of the future.

Instead of going back to alter the present, we are the people of the new creation / the kingdom. WE CHANGE THE PRESENT BY SOWING/LIVING THE FUTURE NOW. In that way we are also bringing about the future. The historical study of Jesus helps us to understand how to live the future in the present; His way of doing it, his means of bring it about. The questions / tentions that this brings about are these:

We agreed with Tom Wright at the end of the Future of the People of God conference, and have confirmed with him since, that we would initiate an online discussion around some of the ideas that he presented at the conference. We think these two paragraphs from the end of the first session (download) are an excellent place to start. In effect Tom makes a case here for an ‘emerging theology’ - though he doesn’t use that phrase himself - that draws together three key themes: i) the interpretation of mission in terms of the new creation; ii) the link between historical Jesus scholarship and the mission of the church; and iii) the analogy between Jesus’ mission to Israel and the church’s mission to the world.