Messiah and King

For my daily readings, I have been working through Paul’s letters in NT Wrights translation of the New Testament called the Kingdom New Testament. One thing that I find really refreshing is that he does not use the word “Christ”. I like this because “Christ” has become a contentless name for English-speaking Chrisitans.

Wright translates the Greek word “Christos” (which is not a surname) as “Messiah” or “King”. Both the words are much closer to the real meaning of christos.

Reading passages about King Jesus or Jesus the Messiah in Paul’s letters really heightens their meaning. It puts quite a different slant on his gospel and explanation of what Jesus achieved.

Gospel

When interviewing NT Wright, Trevin Wax asked him to describe the gospel in two minutes. He described what he had said to a Japanese student on a train who asked a question just minutes before he had to leave the train. Tom Wright was reading a book about Jesus and the student, who knew nothing about him, asked Tom who Jesus was. He said,

Jesus was a Jew, who believed that God’s plan to rescue the whole world was coming to fulfilment in him. He died to take the weight of evil upon himself. He rose from the dead and launched God’s project and invited the whole world to join with it and find themselves.

I like that way of putting it. When I became a Christian at the age of 25, I did not hear this gospel, but it was the gospel that I received and believed.

After looking out on the world from a farm for five years, I had realised that it was a mess. I went to University to find out what was wrong and who knew how to put it right. After completing a degree in economics and politics, I discovered that this was a dry well. No one knew how to fix the world, because they did not know how to deal with the problem of the human heart.

When I heard about Jesus again, I realised that he not only knew how to clean up the mess that humans and the spiritual powers of evil had made of the world, but he had done everything that needed to be done to make it possible. That was the good news that lead me to follow Jesus. I was glad to be part of Jesus project, because he knew what he was doing.

A year later, I discovered that he had sent also sent his Holy Spirit to tell us what to do, and to empower us to fulfil the good news of his Kingdom.

Unity

NT Wright on Unity

It is quite easy to do unity as long as you don’t care about holiness.

And it is quite easy to some sort of holiness, if you don’t care about unity,

but doing the two together is jolly difficulty.

Big Narrative

NT Wright on the Big Narrative

Almost everybody in today’s world is living on an implicit narrative that says that the modern world came of age in the enlightenment era. We can now make and do things. We are the super race, so we run the rest of the world, and if they do things we do not like, we tell them off, or go and drop bombs on them, or whatever. Even the people who are trying to subvert that narrative are subverting from within the narrative, so you get westerners going around saying “We in the West are so wicked, we should be doing this”, because there is no other narrative.

The ultimate post-modern thing is that you collapse the narrative, and then all you do is look inwards and you play with electronic toys.

As human beings we function best in the big narrative, and the bible gives us that.

Simply Good News

I have just read "Simply Good News:Why the Gospel is New and What makes it Good" by NT Wright. It is an interesting book. The title includes the word simple. He is effective at communicating simply, but he tackles some quite complex ideas. Any book that refers to Foucault and Derrida is not for the faint hearted.

Wright says that the popular understanding of the gospel that “Jesus died for me so that I can go to heaven when I die” is a bit of a distortion. He explains clearly that the good news is that Jesus died and rose again, so his kingdom has come. This is good, but I find his vision of the kingdom is a bit weak.

Tom Wright makes five main propositions about the kingdom.

1. The Lordship of the risen Jesus, who had launched his new creation in the middle of the present old one, means that real and lasting change is possible at personal, social, cultural, national and global levels. It has happened, and it can happen again.

2. Real and lasting change is costly. The principalities and powers that have run the world in their destructive fashion for so long won’t release their deadly grip without a struggle.

3. Therefore, real and lasting change in everything from personal to global life is always sporadic. It is never smooth, linear progress.

4. There is an equal and opposite danger that Christian, recognising the danger of a triumphalist progress of the gospel, will retreat once more into gloom and negativity. True, real and lasting change in the present time will not bring God’s kingdom all by itself, but such real and lasting change genuinely anticipates God’s final kingdom points towards it, and gives a foretaste of that ultimate reality.

5. It is vital that those who believe the good news work tirelessly for real and lasting change in individual lives, the church and the wider world.

The good news is true. Something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place. We can be part of it. If we are following Jesus, praying for his spirit to guide and empower us, we are already part of it.

Wright only expects a real manifestation of the Kingdom has to wait until Jesus appears at the end of history.

Mcknight and Wright

Earlier in the year, I read The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight and When God Becomes King by NT Wright. I like the way that Wright and McKnight bring together the message of the cross and the Kingdom. McKnight tells the story against the background of the altar call gospel, whereas Wright frames it within the gaps in the creeds. Although, they come from different directions, they end up in a similar place with a renewed emphasis on the importance of the Kingdom of God. Wonderful stuff.

They both emphasise that Jesus is the fulfilment of Israel’s story, but I get a bit nervous about the use the word “story”. Did something really happen in Israel. Did Abraham and Moses really exist, or are they just a post-modern metanarrative that the gospel writers used to frame their gospel. I am sufficiently pre-postmodern that I need the history of Israel to be real and mean something in terms of Gods plans and purposes.

I realise that it is churlish to say that a book has failed to answer important questions. An author cannot every question, and they are entitled to choose which questions they think are important and worthy of answer. Nevertheless, I am going to say that I think that three important things are missing from these two books. I will deal with these in the next three posts.