Simply Jesus 7

Last updated on: November 30, 2011 at 7:58 pm By Scot McKnight

The question I kept asking as I read Tom Wright’s new book, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters, was this: OK, so God becomes King in Jesus and God exercises his sovereignty through Jesus, but what does that look like today? where is that to be found today? How close are kingdom and church? How is it meaningful to say Jesus is the Ruler of the World? I found this chp fascinating.

First, Tom contends vigorously, and he anchors this from Genesis 1 to Revelation, that God exercises his rule today through the church, through us.

Jesus rescues humans in order to extend his kingdom and rescue project through those who are rescued. We are not helping him; he gives this task to us. He called his followers to be his witnesses in Acts 1. It was through them that the gospel would go to the Roman empire. Tom develops the temple them in Acts.

Second, the vital action of the followers of Jesus in this kingdom work is to worship the one and only God, and worship is the most political action the Christians are to perform. They are also to do good works as the way to implement the rule of Christ in this world. The church has surrendered too much of this to the State, forgetting that it was the church that did these things over its history. [I wondered here if Tom would consider the implementation of these elements by the state as evidence of the church’s ministry and mission being successful.]

I would ask you: Where is the kingdom manifested today?

Third, this means Tom is one of the important voices today in seeing the significance of the church in the kingdom of God in this world today; it means he sees an ecclesial shape to kingdom. He has some wise words about how the media talks about the church and observes that it might be a 1000 to 1 ratio of folks doing good things vs. the one bad egg the media decides to squat on. The church, he reminds us, is the society of the forgiven and reconciled and not the society of the perfect. (more…)

Simply Jesus 6

Last updated on: November 30, 2011 at 7:02 am By Scot McKnight

In one chap in Tom Wright’s new book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters, he sketches his views of the resurrection, of the ascension and of the second coming! But he does so through the lens of God becoming king in Jesus, and so it is all related to the grander cosmic scheme at work in Tom’s new book.

[You may have already noticed the snazzy new buttons Patheos has installed on the blog; they make “sharing” easier. Thanks Patheos. And they help spread the word in these posts.]

First, Easter is about new creation. Second, ascension is about the enthronement of Jesus as the king of new creation — it is not about Jesus, in some spiritual non-bodily state disappearing into heaven where spirit existence is established. Third, the second coming is not a “return” to earth so much as the reappearance of the Son of God where new creation will be finally established.

Tom’s books on resurrection (The Resurrection of the Son of God, Surprised by Hope) have already been digested by many of us, so I’ll avoid saying much except to say this: resurrection is not about some ethereal existence but about a physical, bodily existence.

The ascension, and I don’t believe I’ve read much about the ascension in Tom’s stuff, reminds us that heaven and earth are not far apart; heaven is the place from which the earth is run; the “vertical” movement in Acts 1 is metaphor for ascension and assumption of the throne; and the ascension mocks the rule of Caesar and announces that Jesus is the true king.

The second coming … well, Tom begins by saying most of North Americans are all messed up because they’re addicted to rapture stuff and they are not right. It is about the re-appearance (parousia) of Jesus Christ as King, it is about our (metaphorical but real) “meeting” him in order to escort him back to the new heavens and new earth to be with him (and he is now with us). (more…)

Simply Jesus 5

Last updated on: November 28, 2011 at 5:57 am By Scot McKnight

Perhaps the most perplexing issue in the historical Jesus debate of the last two decades was how to make a solid connection between Jesus’ kingdom vision and the crucifixion as an atoning death. How, some of us were asking, do we get from Luke 4:16-30, Jesus’ inaugural kingdom sketch, to Romans 3:21-26? Many historical Jesus scholars said there was no sound connection — those early Christians more or less made that atonement theology up because it did not come from Jesus. Others suggested Jesus died a tragic life because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time; others said it shows his exemplary love. A more recent view is that Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat who exposed the sickness of the systemic powers. In Tom Wright’s new book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters, he provides the fullest expression of his view on how to tie kingdom to cross as atoning. (If you’d like to see my view, you can read it at Jesus and His Death.)

He goes fast — you can read it on pp. 179-189 — and I will try to capture it in an even simpler sketch. It can be called a “new/fresh perspective on the cross.”

How does Tom Wright’s sketch here help us in the atonement theory discussion? Does this take us forward?

Jesus over and over anticipated his own death, and in Mark 10:45 he opens up new soil by showing that his death will be a new kind of power. When Passover came Jesus revealed even more, and to do so he gave his followers a meal — “with a radical difference” (180). This mean pointed forward (not just backward) to the great sacrifice; is the real Exodus; the real return from exile; the new covenant; sins would be forgiven; a great jubilee moment; the era of blessing. His disciples participate in that event by sharing the meal. This is a new kind of presence of God — in bread and wine. It is a new Temple, and a new vocation as the royal priesthood.

“Jesus has taken Israel’s destiny upon himself and will now take Israel’s fate upon himself, so that Israel’s vocation can be accomplished” (181). He finds this best sketched in John 18-19 [after the jump I have the whole text], and he shows the interplay of Rome, Jewish leaders and the love of God in the cross.

So what models are we to use? Tom says it is easy to belittle the death: man crushed by system, example of love, just representative, transaction … yet, each of these says something right: he is an example, it is love, he did represent, there is a penal representation and substitution… but… there’s more, and if we want to get inside Jesus and his time to see what he was doing we need to explore this:

(more…)

Simply Jesus 4

Last updated on: November 24, 2011 at 9:52 am By Scot McKnight

The major themes of the Exodus are at the heart of Tom Wright’s new book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. But there’s more to say than that: Exodus is at the heart of the entire mission of Jesus. Because this Exodus theme is both cut up into its seven segments (more below) and because Exodus becomes more central, it is fair to say that Simply Jesus takes us beyond Tom’s well-known Jesus and the Victory of God. He puts it all together in this book….

First the seven Exodus themes are tyrant, leader, divine victory, sacrifice, vocation, divine presence, and promised inheritance. This is at the heart of this book.

Second, Tom sketches how three absolutely crucial (to Jesus and to the apostles) figures of the Old Testament illustrate these seven themes and therefore are instances of carrying forward the Exodus project. The three figures are the Servant of Isaiah 40-66, the Son of Man of Daniel 7, and Zechariah’s king, esp as found in the last half of Zechariah. You will have to take my word for it that he has given us an important sketch of exodus themes here.

Third, now the big one: Jesus’ mission is shaped by those same themes, and so I want to quote from what I think is perhaps the crucial paragraph in this whole book. Remember: it’s Exodus, Exodus from Moses through Isaiah, through Daniel, through Zechariah, and now reshaped and reconfigured for a new day in a new way by Jesus — the three-fold storm converging: Rome, Jewish leaders, and the new message about God becoming king in and through Jesus: (more…)

Simply Jesus 3

Last updated on: November 21, 2011 at 12:07 am By Scot McKnight

It is Tom Wright’s contention, in his new book Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters, that Jewish kingdom movements had two integral features: a battle and the temple. Tom examines those two themes in the Gospel records about Jesus.

First, the battle: “it was a different sort of thing, because it had a different sort of enemy,” and here Tom examines “the satan” in the Bible. There is so much battle with “the satan” in the records about Jesus that it has to be taken not only as an element but significant (Mark 1:13, 27, 34; 3:11-12, 22-27; 5:1-20; Luke 10:18; 13:16; 22:31; John 13:2, 27). To be sure, we may struggle with this stuff but that doesn’t mean they (or Jesus) did. That battle seems to have two stages: an earlier stage (the Temptation) and a final victory. The satan’s victory is the cross, but the victory was not to last.

How central are the battle and the temple to most of our understandings of Jesus? How central are space, time and matter? Do you think these ideas are supersessionistic or continuous with Judaism?

Second, the temple. Here Tom focuses on the “cleansing of the temple,” which is really a royal declaration of God’s judgment on the temple and its authorities. (more…)

Simply Jesus 2

Last updated on: November 13, 2011 at 11:53 am By Scot McKnight

Deep in the heart of Judaism in the centuries leading up to Jesus was a dual conviction: that God had elected Israel as creation-restoring agents and, right next to this, the manifold brokenness of creation and Israel and the Land and the priests and the Temple. What sustained their hope? One Story: the Exodus. They told its story, sang its songs and continued to celebrate God’s victory. Why? Someday that same God would do it all over again. So argues Tom Wright in his new book, Simply Jesus.

The Exodus Hope included seven elements: a wicked tyrant, chosen leader, victory of God, rescue by sacrifice, new vocation/new way of life, presence of God, and a promised/inherited land.

When you think of the Master Story of the Bible, the one that shaped the Bible and that shaped how Jews thought of themselves, what were the most important two or three stories? Which one do you think was most important? Which story most “controls” how your church thinks? [This is a big one folks, and it gets right to the heart of the meaning of the word “gospel” in the New Testament.]

Then along comes Jesus announcing God was becoming King. Jesus’ preaching then is the start of a campaign. Three actions pull this into focus: celebrations at meal time, healing of one person after another, and forgiveness. This is what it looks like — Jesus was saying — when God takes charge, when God becomes king. (more…)

Simply Jesus 1

Last updated on: November 7, 2011 at 8:30 am By Scot McKnight

Tom Wright belongs in a line of only a few noble UK scholars who have the capacity to write about complexities with clarity and simplicity, without turning the whole thing into some kind of limp populism. That line of UK scholars includes William Barclay and C.H. Dodd. I’d like to include C.F.D. Moule but I don’t know that he ever quite turned his pen toward the ordinary person. Still, Tom is the current version of the prose of Barclay and Dodd. Yet different, as they too were different.

Tom Wright is proposing that next to our New Testament we should open Virgil’s The Aeneid and Josephus. Josephus is boilerplate for those who want to comprehend the Jewish context of earliest Christianity, but why Virgil? Simply put: Virgil provides the historical grounding myth of the Roman empire. He tells a story that comes to completion in none other than Julius Caesar, Octavian and Tiberius — in effect, the sons of god of Rome.

Here’s one way to put the claim of Tom Wright: to claim that Christianity, or whatever you want to call it, non-political is the worst sort of error. Jesus’ kingdom vision was front to back political, and it was a different kind of political, one that challenged the Roman representative power (Herod Antipas) and the priestly powers in Jerusalem.

So our question for today: What kind of politic did Jesus envision?

Many readers of this blog will know that Tom already has two books on Jesus, one a major tome called Jesus and the Victory of God, and the other one called The Challenge of Jesus. This new book, Simply Jesus (standing alongside Simply Christian) takes those two books, with some of his The Resurrection of the Son of God tossed in, to advance what he has already said and at the same time make those books even more accessible.

Tom Wright’s ruling metaphor in Simply Jesus is that Jesus stepped into a perfect storm. (more…)

N.T. Wright’s Newest: A Biography Of Paul

Last updated on: December 9, 2017 at 11:08 am By Scot McKnight

N.T. Wright’s big book on Jesus called Jesus and the Victory of God was turned into a more accessible book when he wrote The Challenge of Jesus and then later Simply Jesus, so when he wrote Paul and the Faithfulness of God many of us expected something similar: The Challenge of Paul or a Simply Paul. But that’s not what he’s done. His newest (and soon to be released) book is called Paul: A Biography and it is not an accessible version of Paul and the Faithfulness of God but something altogether different: a biography.

Here we go again with another adventure through the mind of NT Wright about the mind of Paul in the world of Paul.

Here’s an opener:

An energetic and talkative man, not much to look at and from a despised race, went about from city to city talking about the One God and his “son’* Jesus, setting up small communities of people who accepted what he said and then writing letters to them, letters whose explosive charge is as fresh today as when they were first dictated. Paul might dispute the suggestion that he himself changed the world; Jesus, he would have said, had already done that. But what he said about Jesus, and about God, the world, and what it meant to be genuinely human, was creative and compelling—and controversial, in his own day and ever after. Nothing would ever be quite the same again.

Tom is always asking the bigger questions, the central questions, and these are two of them:

This raises a set of questions for any historian or would-be biographer. How did it happen? What did this busy little man have that other people didn’t? What did he think he was doing, and why was he doing it?

Why did all that change? What exactly happened on the road to Damascus?

Wright gets personal in this introduction, about his early years of learning to read Paul while still in school:

His letters existed for us in a kind of holy bubble, unaffected by the rough-and-tumble of everyday first-century life. This enabled us blithely to assume that when Paul said “justification,” he was talking about what theologians in the sixteenth century and preachers in the twentieth had been referring to by that term. It gave us license to suppose that when he called Jesus “son of God, he meant the “second person of the Trinity.” But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century.

And what he now still believes, but it’s all the same and different:

I hasten to add that I still see Paul’s letters as part of “holy scripture.” I still think that prayer and faith are vital, nonnegotiable parts of the attempt to understand them, just as I think that learning to play the piano for oneself is an important part of trying to understand Schubert’s Impromptus. But sooner or later, as the arguments go on and people try out this or that theory, as they start reading Paul in Greek and ask what this or that Greek term meant in the first century, they discover that the greatest commentators were standing on the shoulders of ancient historians and particularly lexicographers, and they come, by whatever route, to the questions of this book: who Paul really was, what he thought he was doing, why it “worked,” and, within that, what the nature of the transformation he underwent on the road to Damascus was.

As always, Wright’s concern is history and a historical perspective, a Paul in his own time:

Once we get clear about this, we gain a “historical” perspective in three different senses. First, we begin to see that it matters to try to find out what the first-century Paul was actually talking about over against what later theologians and preachers have assumed he was talking about….

Second, when we start to appreciate “what Paul was really talking about,” we find that he was himself talking about “history” in the sense of “what happens in the real world,” the world of space, time, and matter.

Third, therefore, as far as Paul was concerned, his own “historical” context and setting mattered. The world he lived in was the world into which the gospel had burst, the world that the gospel was challenging, the world it would transform.

This will become a standard textbook on the life of Paul, mark my word.

Beyond the Tiny Gospel

Last updated on: January 19, 2017 at 1:25 pm By Scot McKnight

By John Frye

Beyond the Tiny Gospel

What if I said to you that the story of the movie The Sound of Music was about guitars? Would you disagree? What if I said the story of the movie Ben Hur is about chariot wheels? What if I said the story about the movie Titanic is about the north Atlantic ocean? You would think I was a little (or maybe hugely) short-sighted about these magnificent films. Why reduce the story of the von Trapp family to the topic of guitars? Are there, in fact, guitars in The Sound of Music? Is not the scene with Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) entering the room with a guitar singing a major turning point in the story? What about those Ben Hur chariot wheels? Aren’t those very wheels the source of incredible tension in the (1959 film) chariot race scene? Where did the Titanic sink? I rest my case. But I know you’re not convinced. Why? Because each of “my” views is a horrible reduction of those tremendous, expansive stories.

How you feel about my reductions of great stories is, I think, how Jesus and Paul would react to the contemporary reductions of the New Testament Gospel. The gospel is very simple in the minds of most people. A friend reported to me recently the gospel is obvious; it’s the pathway to salvation. Really? Did early Christians and Christians though church history die for a plan of salvation? Here is what other friends suggested the gospel is: John 3:16. This mind you even though this singular verse is in, wait for it, the GOSPEL of John! Another said “forgiveness of sins.” Is that the gospel or a wonderful benefit of the gospel? One suggested “an eternal home in heaven.” Again, that is a popular expression of the gospel—going to heaven when you die. Oh my. There is so much bad theology and reductionism in that view of the gospel. One person offered that the gospel is “God’s power to save.” I believe that idea is a reflection of Romans 1:16, but is that the gospel itself or the energy that the gospel has? What if Romans 1:1-5 is Paul’s succinct summary of the gospel and the rest of Romans unpacks its dimensions, implications and benefits?

I did a Google search of the question “What is the gospel?” In less than a second, I got 88,300,000 results! Eighty-eight million plus. You would think that on something as basic as the New Testament gospel there would be overwhelming unity. Well, think again. What startled me the most as I worked my way through many of the Google results was the observation that many local churches believe that it is their duty to define their “take” on the gospel. As if the gospel in Lubbock, TX has to be nuanced vis-à-vis the gospel of Charleston, SC or Kenosha, WI and Portland, OR. (No, I am not impugning contextualization.)

I’ve been reading Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel and N. T. Wright’s Simply Good News. As a pastor I recall the radical exposé of the reduced Western gospel by Dallas Willard in his book The Divine Conspiracy. Dallas coined the phrase “the barcode gospel.” In this gospel, Willard contends, the only thing any Christian really needs from Jesus is “a little blood for their sins.” That’s it. Even more telling about the reduced gospel, as McKnight observes, many Christians cannot imagine why we need to know anything about Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. We all know “Christ” is simply Jesus’s last name. What’s “Messiah” got to do with the gospel?

According to Paul’s own definition (description) of the New Testament gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, the gospel is the Story of Jesus the Christ bringing to completion and expanding the Story of Israel. Tom Wright contends that the more Jewish the gospel is, the more universal its impact on the dark powers resisting new creation. Even more, YHWH, in the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, now reigns a King over all other powers in the universe. This is the good news! “Our God reigns!” This news must now more than ever be announced. It is the only news that saves this fractured universe by producing new creation.

The grand story of the New Testament gospel in the USA, with its deep roots in the Old Testament, has been reduced, like making guitars the story of The Sound of Music.

Simply Good News: NT Wright’s New Book

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:59 pm By Scot McKnight

C.S. Lewis sketched “mere” Christianity in those famous radio talks after World War 2 and the literary deposit, Mere Christianity, has shaped the mind of many of us. Then along came John Stott who “evangelicalized” Lewis’ book in his book Basic Christianity. Then along came England’s third contributor to this basics discussion with Simply Christian, followed by Simply Jesus (filled out in his How God Became King) and now by Simply Good News. Of the three, I like the word “mere” best but Wright’s books have overpowered both Lewis and Stott because he has expanded those studies and set it all in a firmer historical orientation.

Now to Simply Good News, Wright’s recent contribution — yes, a study of the gospel. [Image credit] To repeat what I have said a number of times, most often in The King Jesus Gospel and also in Kingdom Conspiracy, many assume today they know what the gospel is but can be quite surprised when someone points them to a text like 2 Timothy 2:8 (“Remember Jesus Christ, who was raised from the dead and descended from David. This is my good news.”). Wright is pressing against the reduction of gospel in various contexts in our world today.

What is your response to the four elements of NT Wright’s “phenomenology of gospel” below?

N.T. Wright wants once again to remind us of the major contours of his previous studies on gospel and to make it more accessible than any of his other books. The most accessible study of gospel was his chapter in What Saint Paul Really Said. But here he begins at the beginning — with the meaning of the word and to see it as “news” in the sense of public news.

The Christian faith, in its earliest forms, is presented as good news. That is the original meaning of the Old English word gospel. I am arguing that the idea of seeing the Christian faith as news that is good is itself, ironically, news to many people today (2).

What he does in this book is a kind of phenomenology of gospel by breaking it into some important elements:

What good news regularly does, then, is [1] to put a new event into an old story, [2] point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so [3] introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, [4] people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way (4). [Numbers added.]

In many churches, the good news has subtly changed into good advice: here’s how to live, they say (4).

In other words, while some Christian teachers have exchanged good news for good advice, others [here is pointing at the soterian gospel crowd] have preserved the gospel as news, but they are telling a different story from what the New Testament authors meant by good news (5).

In this book Tom makes more accessible his gospel-against-the-empire theme. So he sketches Julius Caesar and his assassination, then the 13 yrs of civil war, then the duel between Octavian vs. Mark Antony and then the story of Octavian (Augustus) winning and the folks in Rome waiting two years before his return in triumph, and how Herod the Great accommodated himself to Augustus after having previously supported Mark Antony. In this section Tom is at his best.

Most importantly, now, Tom articulates the NT gospel in the context of the “gospel” of Rome. [The emphasis here, of course, is noticeable but one needs the OT and Jewish storied context as well and he does give some attention to that. The word “gospel,” after all, has not just a Roman/Greek setting but also a Jewish history and setting.]

Starting with Octavian, the Roman emperors regularly used the words good news to describe both what they had already achieved and what life would now like as a consequence. When the early Christians used this language, they used it in a similar way. Something had happened because of which everything was now different. Something would happen that would complete this initial victory (like Octavian returning to Rome and setting up his court). As a result, the present moment was new and different. This good news transformed people’s lives. It was bound to (12-13).

The opening chps in this book focus on Paul’s telling of the gospel and so to Paul we turn, and he opens with observations of what the gospel is not.

Despite Paul’s talk about God, he was not telling people about a new religious system. Nor was he urging them to adopt a new type of morality. He wasn’t offering them a new philosophy—a theory about the world, how it worked, how we could know things, how we should behave. Other teachers at the time were offering things like that, but Paul’s approach was different. True, his message would eventually affect those areas, too. But many people today assume that Christianity is one or more of these things—a religion, a moral system, a philosophy. In other words, they assume that Christianity is about advice.

But it wasn’t and isn’t.

Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place (16).

NT Wright knows that we can sketch the gospel through a number of texts, and he begins with 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 to get the ball rolling. Here it is in the CEB:

1Th. 2:9 You remember, brothers and sisters, our efforts and hard work. We preached God’s good news to you, while we worked night and day so we wouldn’t be a burden on any of you. 10 You and God are witnesses of how holy, just, and blameless we were toward you believers.

What does he find?

Paul had many ways of saying all this, but however you approached it, this was the heart of his message: an event involving Jesus and a revelation of the one true God. Something that had made the world a whole different place. Something because of which people were now faced with a challenge (like Herod faced with Octavian’s victory): If this is the new reality, where do you stand in relation to it? (19).

But to make the claim the gospel makes one must know the story that is at work leading to that gospel announcement:

Paul’s Bible was the Jewish Bible of the day, what Christians now call the Old Testament. Paul, like many Jews of the time, read this Bible as a single great story—but it was a story in search of an ending. It was about how God, who had created the world, called a single people, Israel, to be his people—but not for their own sake. He called them and made them special, so that through them he could rescue the world—the human race and the whole creation—from the appalling mess that had come about (24).

Wright and Middleton are on the identical page here in terms and categories: the gospel mission is the rescue and renewal of the cosmos. But many get it messed up right here: they get the wrong story going and then use Jesus to finish off their story.

Many people, including many Christians, assume a very different backstory. For some, it goes like this: What we need is life after death, but we’re not sure if t’s true or not. Now Jesus has been raised, so we know that there really is a life after death.

For others, it goes like this: We aren’t sure whether there is a God or not, or whether Jesus is divine— but he was raised from the dead, so there is a God, and Jesus is his son.

For others again, there is a darker note: We believe in heaven and hell, but how can we know which direction we’re heading? Answer: Jesus was raised, so all his people are going to heaven.

There are numerous variations. Such notions are not one hundred percent wrong, but they are caricatures and, as such, highly misleading if embraced as if they were the real thing. Notice what they miss out. In all of these, the word Messiah [Christ] functions as a proper name. For Paul, it really means “Messiah. This goes closely with the true backstory for the good news: the Messiah died and was raised “in accordance with the Bible” (25, reformatted).

He presses Paul deeper into his Roman empire context by observing how odd and scandalous this message was:

The reaction from his Jewish contemporaries was bad. But worse awaited him outside on the street. Paul’s good news, his royal announcement about Jesus, was nonsense at every level (28).

In essence, Paul’s gospel is a message about God, the God now made manifest in Jesus.

So what are we saying? Paul has taken biblical language about God and has applied it to the message about Jesus, knowing that in his hearers’ minds it will resonate with language they associate with Caesar. If we can get our minds around that idea, we will be veil on our way to understanding what he meant by the gospel (34).