N.T. Wright | Jesus and the People of God

thanks Bob and thanks grant and thanks to the musicians it's very good to be back with you this evening and I admire your stamina and I hope you admire Maggie's stamina not to mention mine this is a very very exciting time and I say again what I said earlier today it's actually very hard to believe that a conference like this is happening and that so many people are that interested in finding out what Tom Wright really said as somebody said one of my students did do a riff after I left Oxford or as I was leaving Oxford and they had gave me a little book called what Tom Wright really said written by some Paul and they gave me a little book they gave me a little book called who was Tom Wright written by Jesus and and actually that is the really worrying one but I saw say a few things by way of introduction about the backstory of how we got here I was asked to speak on this whence and whither where have we come from in all of this where I come from in terms of historical Jesus study when I was doing it it seemed like the natural next thing to be doing in terms of what I've been doing so far I now realize listening to the things that people say about historical Jesus studies that my story may have been a little unusual in some respects but we all go back in the Western world to the great scholarly works of the last two or three hundred years and we have to live with those whether we like it or not that is to say you can leave them on the shelf and ignore them but that is really like trying to reinvent the wheel or trying to reinvent some kind of medication when in fact them in scientists working on these problems for years and so on it's better to engage with them invite my view but when we engage with the stuff that's been done on historical Jesus work over the last couple of hundred years an awful lot of that has come out of a church and a Western world which as I said earlier today has lived with a split level view of reality and often with a split level view of Jesus that people knew that there was a real person called Jesus who walked and talked and lived and died and did this and that they weren't quite sure exactly all that he did but more or less there but then they had this Jesus who they sang hymns to and who they prayed to and never the twain seemed really quite to meet there was a split level about it and when we come into the early 20th century in the scholarship of that of that period and particularly the great work and it is great work of Rudolf Bultmann even though I disagree with him he was an amazing scholar who who saw these big visions of how early Christianity might have been and we need people who see big visions even if they have to be corrected and that there was a legacy in biltmans work already both of a particular kind of Lutheranism and Lutheranism has great strengths but like all traditions some blind spots but also bits of philosophy which were militating against ever actually getting close to the history because for Bultmann right through history was a dangerous place because it encouraged people to think that humans could take control of their own destiny so that history became something was antithetical to grace we must we must avoid really doing history too much to make sure that grace is still Grace and within the Lutheran worldview very often we have seen a so-called two kingdoms theology where the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God are really quite separate things and that's come about through various things in the 16th 17th 18th century but the result is that for some Lutheran scholarship and certainly true for for Bultmann and as we heard from Nick Perrin earlier forborne cam and many other similar post-punk Mannion's the idea that Jesus might have been into politics was simply a category mistake he was obviously teaching something existential something timeless something which would issue in a spirituality in a devotion in a preaching in a conversion and ultimately in a future salvation but probably not to directly in actual political affairs and likewise with within Boltzmann's three-decker universe heaven was up there earth was down here and actually never the twain did meet and a lot of the methods that were developed in the early years of the 20th century which continued to be taught as objective methods through when I was studying and through indeed what many of my students were expected to know about so I had to tell them about them even though I was anxious about their provenance a lot of those methods like certain types of source criticism of the Gospels criticism of the Gospels particularly came not as objective neutral ways of studying these texts but as methods which were designed actually to further particular philosophical cultural social political and theological agendas just one example of that I don't know how much you know about early 20th century European history but after the first world war finished in 1918 with the disastrous end of the war from the German point of view not just because they lost the war but because people were starving and there was there was real hardship and-and-and poverty and all the rest of it then the Germans decided they'd had enough of big leader figures of the Kaiser and of Bismarck and people like that and the whole culture of the time was to say we do not want these big leaders anymore what we need is a community and we are just a community the German word reminder we are agra minder we don't need these big figures and it was precisely at that time that Rudolf Bultmann was articulating his view that the Gospels do not give us a picture of Jesus the great leader but rather of diga minder the Christian community at worship at prayer in its witness and so forth so that once we locate Boltzmann and his methods within the world of his own day we can say well maybe that was what he had to say then but please don't imagine that that gives us neutral objective scholarship for all time any more than mine or anyone elses is going to be neutral or objective we have to do what we have to do in our own day as best we can but ancient historians have always protested against that diminution of a would be historical task indeed ed Sanders in a recent article commented that up until Boltzmann German scholarship on the New Testament was really doing rather well and was coming up with all kinds of interesting things from Jewish history from greco-roman history which really would have helped the study of early Christianity and that he Saunders thinks that Boltzmann and his movement put the shutters up on that and that it's now time to get back to genuine history and I would agree with that and as you know from my work in the New Testament people of God I actually do think that the sources for our history do not tell us simply about themselves and the people who wrote them but that through the sources we can actually see things that were going on this may sound blindingly obvious but sometimes people talk about the Gospels rather in the same way as the old fable of the hare and the tortoise you know you can prove mathematically that the hare can never overtake the tortoise because the hair is always having the distance between himself and the tortoise and however far you go there's always another half distance down to the last millimeter so it's mathematically certain that the hare and of course we all know that the hare does actually overtake the tortoise and in the same way you can say well Matthew tells us about Matthews community Matthew's Gospel tells it about Matthews theology Matthew's Gospel shows us Matthews sense of what sort of a literary construct this story could be therefore we can't ever be quite sure that it might tell us about Jesus and I want to say just remember the hare and the tortoise this is an optical illusion of course in principle writers who intend to write about other things than themselves will give you quite a lot of themselves enroute but that doesn't mean they aren't telling you about things that actually happen yes you have to read them critically but you have to be a realist as well so critical realism and where does this all go for the church's ministry and the church's apologetics Melanchthon in in the 16th century Luther's a great sidekick if you like said that it is not enough to know he is a savior you must know that he is a savior for you I want to reverse that I don't disagree with melanchthon but I want to say as well it's not enough to know that Jesus is your Savior you must know who Jesus himself was and is otherwise simply saying he lives within my heart I have a sense that Jesus loves me or whatever can easily turn into mere fantasy that has happened for it will happen again unless it is earthed in the actuality of who Jesus is how do you know that it's not a wish fulfillment you may feel it very strongly but lots of people feel all sorts of things very strongly and in order to know that you're not fooling yourself and if you don't think that that's a danger you're skeptical friends ought to tell you that then you have to you have to be able to say no the Jesus of whom I am aware in my prayer that Jesus I meet when I am working with the poorest of the poor that Jesus I recognized in the breaking of the bread this Jesus is recognizably the one who walked and talked and lived and died and rose again in the first century and particularly from the apologetic point of view it was a major emphasis in seminaries and churches as well as university departments in the days of my youth to say we know that Jesus never said this we are sure as a result of critical study that Jesus could not have thought this or that or the other he could never have thought this as a priori that he would die for the sins of the world what a silly idea that would just make him weird some scholars have said or that Jesus to have thought that he was God would be impossible because he was a Jewish monotheistic the first century I grew up with stuff like this being said all the time and if you imagine being trained to be a preacher and a teacher in the church with your teachers even in seminary telling you this stuff it is pretty debilitating and it results and it did result in a lot of clergy going out than either having to say I'm just going to shut my mind off to all that I've read all that stuff in the commentaries and I'm going to give them the old simple gospel that I knew way back when which is better than nothing but it would be much better if they can actually engage with the questions because people in the pews will be engaging with them or some clergy have flipped the other way and they have then told their congregations that you can't trust Matthew Mark Luke and John and that we can only just reconstruct little bits and pieces this is not a health neither of these are healthy ways for the church to live in particular it's a well-known bit of the 20th century's story after the debacle of the Second World War Ernst Kaiser Minh one of the great German exegetes of the second half of the 20th century said we must do historical Jesus study even though it's difficult because when we weren't doing it during the 20s and 30s what happened was that Hitler's tame theologians were able to invent a Jesus figure in the image of the sort of ideology they wanted Jesus who was recognizably non-jewish for a start and who would legitimate the ideologies that people then wanted to espouse and Kaiser Minh said even though this is going to be tough we've got to do the history otherwise the church is all too easily capable of being deeply deceived look where it's got us by not doing that history as John Calvin said the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols and the among the idols we can make all too easily our idols that we give the name Jesus to but in fact are not the real Jesus how are you going to prevent that happening this is more or less where I came in the little bit of autobiography which may be of interest at least I got a flicker of interest in historical Jesus studies through of all things rice and Lloyd Webber's musical Jesus Christ Superstar when I first because that was the first time I remember when it was 1971 somebody lent me the record of it and I listened to it it was the first time that it had occurred to me that it was possible to ask the question what was Jesus actually thinking about and I suppose that up till then I'd taken it for granted that because he was the son of God he just went through life unreflective ly just doing what came next automatically as a sort of a supernatural robot almost and going off to die for the sins of the world and the thought that he might have actually struggled with questions of vocation what am I supposed to be doing how am I going to play this next one what is it going to be all about or anything like that but main in the back of my mind because I was doing research on Paul at the time in the early 70s and it was then with 1978 when Ben Myers book the aims of Jesus which I mentioned already was published that my interest was started up afresh and I started to read seriously in historical Jesus literature and then when I was at McGill teaching grant American tear among others in 1981 to three the first three years I was there I was teaching about the Jewish world of the first century leading up to the world of early Christianity and because I was trained as an ancient historian I really enjoyed doing that stuff and I found that going through the Maccabees and going through the Hasmonean dynasty and going as far as Herod and who are the Pharisees and what with the Dead Sea Scrolls and then I got to John the Baptist and John the Baptist just fitted into that world very easily make a lot of sense and I remember thinking as I was preparing the lectures is there any reason why I shouldn't just go on doing the same kind of thing when it comes to Jesus and the Gospels thinking well of course not because Jesus was a figure within that history and the sense he made he made within that history he wasn't floating above it he was precisely living in the middle of it the word became flesh and so I didn't stop there and I went on reading the history as the history of Jesus and exploring how you could say what the Gospels were trying to say within that historical world and that's the movement of my thought out of which 14 years later and 12 years later Jesus and the victory of God emerged so I believe it is a false dichotomy to say that doing historical Jesus studies involves somehow going behind the text to construct some sort of other Jesus than the one that you find in the text basically we are trying to understand what happened Jesus of Nazareth was not a private individual who hid away from the world Jesus was walking about being and doing and speaking what he seems to have conceived of as public truth those of you who know Leslie new begins work will know how important the notion of public truth is because Christianity always appeals to history and to history it must go because it is about creation it is not a form of Gnosticism saying this world is a dark bad place and we're going to escape it it is a form of creational theology saying this world is God's world and God is coming to rescue and remake it the word became flesh not the flesh became word God's kingdom came not in terms of people just saying things and doing nice ideas here and there and organizing them in their heads but through actual things that happened and Matthew Mark Luke and John themselves are absolutely convinced that the kingdom of God came not when they picked up pen and ink to write their Gospels but when God took flesh and blood to come and live and inaugurate the kingdom and die on a cross and rise again and in Matthew 28 the risen Jesus does not say all authority in heaven and on earth is given to the books you fellas are going to go and write he says all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me and if there is such a thing as scriptural authority which I passionately believe there is that is a shorthand for God's Authority through Jesus exercised and outworked through these books which we call Holy Scripture so I do believe that the Gospels give us access to what Jesus was actually thinking as well as doing to his worldview and his mindset this is not a matter of trying to psychoanalyze him some people who said you can never psychoanalyze somebody in another culture like that I'm not talking about psychoanalysis we are trying to get at the things that Jesus chose to do and to say makes sense to ask of John the Baptist why did he think it was a good idea to go down by the Jordan and splash water over people it seems to have been something to do with a reenactment of an entry into the promised land or a new Exodus or something like that as a way of saying this is how God is becoming King and this is how you can be part of that movement that wasn't an unreflective impulsive thing and so it was with Jesus it wasn't just that he woke up one morning and said well let's go and start talking about the kingdom of God and see what happens he wrestled with it according to the Gospels he'd wrestled in prayer and fasting with it he'd taken decisions we see in the Gospels often the things that he did but they inevitably posed the question I think to any intelligent reader why did he do those what did he think that was about is there a credible first century Jewish mindset within which this makes sense because if we can't answer yes to that then teachers and preachers are going to be left saying well scripture says Jesus said this but actually there's a seed of doubt in my mind and my preaching is going to be infected by that if I'm not very careful so I do not think that it is right to say that we can't go behind the text or that a historian like myself is setting up a historical Jesus over against the canonical one rather the canonical story is the big story of Scripture the canonical story in Matthew tells us that this is the fulfillment of that long story which includes Abraham David and the Exile as you see in the genealogy all those fulfillment stories in Matthew are ways of saying this Gospel hooks into and brings to its climax all that has gone before in the Old Testament John does it in his way Luke in his mark in his they look back and they say the big story is the big story and we're telling you how it reached where it was to go and the trouble is that the church and its tradition has often ignored that big story the church's perception of the Canon has been very limited and distorted this is the problem the churches often remain content with that colluding with shallow one-dimensional readings of the Canon and shallow one-dimensional readings of who Jesus really truly was actually we all however much you say you're a canonical Christian or a traditional Christian we all depend on extra textual stuff to know about what's going on even if it's just to look up the Greek words in a lexicon somebody's made that lexicon from other historical documents and sources and texts and and and we know about archaeological artifacts and so on you you can't actually do without history let's rather embrace it and see where it's going to take us then it is precisely the traditional Church I fear I speak as a traditionalist I'm an indefinite own man I'm an Anglican for goodness sake I'm a bishop you know what what is this but I want to say that I I'm not simply an iconoclast knocking the tradition but I fear it is precisely the traditional Western Church that has an has invented another Jesus and superimposed that Jesus on the Canon greatly to the diminishing of what the Canon was all along trying to say and this is partly an oblique response to something Richard Hayes said this morning I'm really sorry Richard had to go and we know why that was but it would have been good to carry on the dialogue but he talked about Martin Kayla great German theologian from a century ago that Kayla was warning against the historian doing this non-canonical Jesus and substituting it for the Canon but I'm afraid that the traditional church has invented Jesus's and substituted them for the Canon and but because when it's read the Canon it's had its own construct of Jesus in mind it hasn't even noticed that it was doing it and so the question looms up from the medieval world onwards what are the Gospels all about and I have a pet theory at the moment which is to say that way back behind the Reformation right as far back as the high middle ages the Western church simply has not really known what the Gospels were there for and that problem has gone in different ways there are two big ways in which this is so and this forms the centerpiece of what I want to say tonight and the first is that when we read the canonical Gospels Matthew Mark Luke and John they are not obviously all through about the divine identity of Jesus but about Jesus inauguration of the kingdom of God it is clear that in fact Jesus as Kingdom bringer has been screened out of the church's dogmatic tradition again and again from probably the third or fourth century onwards the church managed to talk about Jesus while forgetting the thing that the Gospels kept on saying that he was inaugurating God's kingdom on earth as in heaven and I suspect that that dogmatic tradition through the fourth and fifth centuries by concentrating on the question of how Jesus could be both divine and human actually ignored and sometimes even falsified what the Canon itself was still trying to say because the divinity bit often appears to me to have been a shrinking and even a refusing of the kingdom of God the Gospels don't say Jesus is divine Jesus is divine they that's a conclusion that you rightly draw from them what they say is Jesus is the one who is bringing God's kingdom on earth as in heaven and you can't simply abstract that into the idea of divinity without great loss and likewise the human bit yes Jesus was fully human but his humaneness was his Jewish humaneness and his decisive climactic Messianic Jewish humaneness and I sometimes think that the Council of Chalcedon in 451 might be seen as the D Israelite ization is that a word no it isn't but I just made it up the D Israelite ization of the canonical picture of Yahweh and Israel into the tract categories of divinity and humanity and though I will affirm Cal Seaton because it's much better to say yes he is fully divine yes he is fully human then not to say that I regret that that seems to me a diminution of what the canonical Gospels themselves are saying about Jesus now it may be difficult to say this because it might even appear heretical it's you know the Gospels aren't about the divinity of Jesus they're just about the kingdom that could sound awful and those of you who know me will know that I don't mean it in that sense but in fact I do believe that if we're looking for the divinity of Jesus in the Gospels which we are right to do we will not see it unless we see it as Israel's God coming in his kingdom to his people and his world that's a far far more powerful theme than the usual proofs that Jesus was God which in the 18th and 19th century were all that many people were interested in well quickly escaped through the Gospels and see if you can disprove the skepticism of the day by showing that well Jesus did miracles and he walked on water he did this there we are that's all right so he must have been divine ignoring the fact that both in the biblical tradition and in other traditions lots of people do very strange things but it doesn't mean that they're necessarily the second person of the Trinity here here ironically ironically Richard Hayes's next book of which I've had the privilege to read one or two advanced chapters on the Old Testament in the Gospels is extremely important and I will give him a plug for that book showing what we've missed in Matthew Mark and Luke as well as John because the Synoptics in their use of the Old Testament do have a very high Christology but it is not just divinity in the abstract it is Israel's God at work in and through the person of Jesus so the church is dogmatic tradition has made retrieving the canonical Jesus as Yahweh in person and the canonical Jesus as Israel in person much much harder and with it it has made it harder for us to retrieve the history to which the cannon gives access and was designed to give access one of the reasons therefore why we have to be serious about history is because it matters that this stuff actually happened once and once it's a good Protestant traditional position to say the ephah packs the once and once only of the events if you don't have that historical rootedness you will very quickly turn the message of Jesus into a general truth either about how you can have a particular kind of spirituality or how you can have a particular salvation in the future it isn't a general truth it is a specific statement that at one point in time and space and matter the great door of history swung open on its hinge and the Living God who made history said it's time to do this stuff over again it's time to make all things new and the Jesus story is precisely about this world this creation not about the private life of one private group of people the canonical story is the public story of the real Jesus and the real world and to live within the Gospels story in all this wonderful stuff about what it means to be people of the story and so on I fully embrace that as you as a I'm sure a lot of you know but to live within the Gospel story is not to enter a private world separate it off from the story of the rest of the world it is to enter the public space time and matter world with all its risks to imagine that by saying story we escape the public world and its risks or are immune to it is to fail to see which story it is so my first big problem about not really doing history properly is that we shrink the story of God and God's kingdom in Jesus and the story of Jesus bringing Israel's destiny to its climax those two stories then joining up and becoming one we shrink that to the abstract categories of divinity and humanity it is much safer less risky to do that but much less like the actual gospel both of the Canon and of Jesus the second point is about the kingdom and the cross the kingdom and the cross I was at a conference a few days ago a couple of days ago also here in Wheaton we were talking about this a lot and I made the point that in my diocese there are many churches which are basically Kingdom churches but don't know what the cross is there for and many that are basically crossed churches but don't know what the kingdom is all about because in many Christians in in my church at least who see in the Gospels Jesus healing people feasting with outcasts and sinners bringing a new way of life and they say that's the man for me I'm gonna follow him he's my sort of person I really want to be like that I'm gonna go and do that stuff as well and there are many noble people who have given their lives to Kingdom work in some of the toughest parts of my country and your country and so on follow Jesus and then they get this puzzle what a shame that his public career was cut short so soon he was he was he was on a roll with that stuff he could have gone on doing it for years the fact the fact that we feel that as fun as funny is actually a measure maybe of where we are because there are many people of whom that isn't funny at all actually but then you see the opposite of that is there are many churches for whom it would have been totally sufficient for Jesus to have been born of a virgin and died on a cross and never done anything in between then you think so why did Matthew Mark Luke and John bother to write all that stuff up then we're back to what Nick parents said the rest is just what was that nice phrase chips and dips bits and pieces of stuff that's an optional hors d'oeuvre before the main course of Pauline theology which we hook on to the story of Jesus death and resurrection know the Gospels the canonical Gospels are quite clear that the kingdom and the cross go together but much later Western church tradition has manifestly found that conjunction very very difficult and has often played Kingdom and cross off against one another because it's had one vision of reality about God making the world a better place through doing Kingdom work and another vision of reality which is about Jesus dying for us in so we could go to heaven and never the twain seemed to meet but both in Cannon and in real history they belong together and unless we are to collude with the split level level world that we find in some 19th century writers where to begin with Jesus has a Galilee in springtime where everybody loves him and he's going around having a great time and then suddenly there's a turn and a chilly wind blows and he's not so popular after all and then he conceives of a plan B which is okay we'll stop doing that stuff and now we have to go and do the thing with the Cross instead and that's you know or the split world of Jesus as the social activist who just happened to get killed for his pains or even worse again some people have said contemptuously that if Jesus intended to go and die this makes it look as if it's just a kind of arranged assisted suicide with some odd bit of biblical or theological construct hooked on the top unless we're going to diminish things like that the question of history as well as of the Canon is this how might Jesus of Nazareth himself have thought about have conceived have imagined as a matter of vocation this vision of the kingdom in which the cross was essential this vision of his forthcoming death as the key moment in his kingdom program and this can be asked as a matter of historical investigation and the purpose of such historical investigation I will go on repeating it is not to replace the Canon with a historians reconstruction but to offer a hypothesis to explain what the church has manifestly not explained or understood namely what is it that the evangelists are trying to tell us because they don't seem to think that there's a massive disjunction between Kingdom and in a sidebar let me just say about the Gnostic Gospels Thomas and so on for a start they're not actually Gospels gospel is good news about something that's happened the agnostic Gospels are precisely not concerned with something that's happened but with advice about how to order your private spirituality they're not about a kingdom on earth there is no Israel dimensional Old Testament and in particular there is no cross or resurrection so why are they so popular why have they been so popular in a large swathe of your North American culture as well as to a lesser extent in mine it seems to me that can only be because there is a cynicism out there in many people who feel that the church has let them down a post-christian world that feels Christianity to be oppressive and that once simply a privatized self-help self-salvation spirituality just rather like the middle of the second century when a lot of people felt after the fall of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 ad that the ancient promises and scriptures had let them down and they just had to put their worldview upside-down and inside-out in order to have anything to live by so put them to one side but I say that because it's out there it's in the media it's in Time magazine and many of you will have seen that a wonder really what you should be thinking about it there's much more I could say about that and if you're here in Wheaton you can always ask Nick parent who knows far more about it than I do so that's all right so the question then that the Gospels face us with that the historian has to answer in respect of Jesus as well as in respect of the Gospels is what sort of a kingdom is it that is accomplished by the crucifixion of the one who brings it or to put it the other way round what sort of an atonement theology is it that effects the establishment of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven because most visions of kingdom including sadly many would be Christian visions of the kingdom haven't got any place for a cross and most atonement theologies including some very sound and Orthodox and evangelical ones have no idea that the point of an atonement theology ought to be if it's true to Matthew Mark Luke and John something to do with the establishment of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven our vision of social ethics and our vision of atonement have become cruelly detached from one another just as with the problem of evil in philosophical theology for the last 200 years or more the problem of evil is simply a topic to be discussed as to how could a good God have made a world like this without seeing that in the Bible again and again every time you have something like a problem of evil the answer is not a philosophical explanation but the death of God's Son on the cross that's what I was writing about in that book evil and the Justice of God and my working hypothesis is therefore that the evangelists are reflecting a train of thought of prayer of scriptural reflection and particularly of vocation which was Jesus own train of thought otherwise we'd have to suggest that actually Jesus was an unreflective sort of chap who just happened to go around doing stuff and the evangelists were the brilliant creative theologians I think that they themselves would say no don't be so silly we are trying to describe to you the one who was the extraordinary brilliant innovator it ought to be counterintuitive to do it the other way and in particular we hit this this morning when Paul says he loved me and gave himself for me and when John says when Jesus having loved his own who were in the world he loved them to the uttermost east tell us - to the end it is a perfectly sensible historical question to say did Jesus really think like that did he do what he did out of love mark says that he looked at the rich young ruler and loved him that's a rare moment in the Gospels for that to be said explicitly but is it true that Jesus himself was passionately and compassionately motivated by a love of which the later theology would use all sorts of theories and wonderful constructs but which nevertheless was the deepest truth about him personally part of the methodological reflex from this which I hinted at earlier today is that Jesus in the Gospels and I believe in reality is both sovereign and vulnerable and the fact that he is sovereign the fact that he is divine the fact that we believe him to be the second person of the Trinity must not for one split second mean that we think he ought to be above the vulnerability not only of being spat at and beaten up and then finally crucified but also having the sharp critical historical questions asked of him it seems to me that that is part of what it meant to say that he was in the form of God but he did not regard his equality with God as something to exploit but emptied himself and took the form of a servant he became vulnerable to the world in his day is there any reason to suppose that we in the church should now take it upon ourselves to do what he for bad Peter and the others to do in the garden that is to defend him from the possibility of criticism is it not more likely that rather the way to truth is by going on respecting him for who he is rather than trying to make him into the sort of God who would be a lot more convenient for us to live with and then of course if it is true that there is a problem about putting together the kingdom and the cross there is also inevitably a problem about putting together kingdom and cross on the one hand if you can hold it like that with resurrection and so many theologians in this last century have used the idea of Resurrection although the word and the concept of Resurrection not actually to mean the bodily rising again of the kingdom bringer who was crucified but simply as a way of saying that Jesus is around somewhere he's still a spiritual presence and even though his body may be moldering in a tomb well never mind because that history was irrelevant and now he's escaped all that and so now we can have some kind of relationship with him that's not what resurrection is all about the resurrection in the new Testament is the resurrection of the kingdom bringer the resurrection of the Crucified kingdom bringer not of someone or something else it is vital in the New Testament that the risen Jesus is known by the mark of the nails and the thrust of the spear in his side and please note the resurrection of Jesus is not straightforwardly the proof of his divinity yes you can get to that as Thomas got to it a week after Jesus resurrection when he said my Lord and my god but actually the resurrection first and foremost demonstrates that Jesus really was Israel's Messiah do not short-circuit the Israel dimension in the story of Jesus you will falsify it you will misunderstand it you will force it into your own worldview instead of opening up your own worldview humbly to receive that which comes at you from Scripture itself the resurrection says he really was Messiah all along which means that his death was the Messianic death which means that his death was the death which establishes the kingdom that's why he had King of the Jews written over his head because on that cross he was doing the Messianic thing defeating the powers that had enslaved the people of God and the whole world to conquer death you only have to die as Tim rice actually put it in Jesus Christ Superstar but if he was the Messiah and if his death was the messianic death than if his death paradoxically was the defeat of all the powers of tyranny and ultimately death itself death being the last weapon of the tyrant then his resurrection means that new creation has begun I don't know how many Easter sermons we've got between us here tonight either the ones that you've preached or the ones that you've heard but so often preachers at Easter will say Jesus is alive again therefore he's in heaven therefore we're going to heaven one day that is not what either Matthew or mark or Luke or John or Acts say they say Jesus is raised bodily from the dead therefore he is the Messiah therefore God's new creation has been launched the old world of Exile and sin has been dealt with the new age has dawned and therefore we have a job to do that is endemic in the confession of resurrection it is not we just have a nice future weh-weh and by-and-by in the sky or anything like that it's Jesus is raised from the dead therefore new creation has begun and therefore we have a job to do and part of that job is to tell the story the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of God Israel's God and as the climax of the story of Israel the means of the world's Redemption where do we go with all this many many tasks are still remaining the world of biblical scholarship is a difficult world a complex world as many of you will know it's much easier to get a PhD in biblical studies if you're a details person rather than a big picture person Richard Hayes spoke about this this morning in Myers Briggs terms it's much much easier to get a PhD in biblical studies if you're an ISTJ you'll never do it if you're an ENFP because you'll never finish it you'll be having such fun but we need we need we need ends in this business as well as s's because we need big picture hypotheses it's very difficult to do that at PhD level because your supervisors and examiner's will want you to nail down all the details and you have to do that but we need these big hypotheses we need as we heard this afternoon from Bryan and Sylvia we need to think big about the economics of Jesus day and about the ways in which Jesus praxis and his teaching and then yes the praxis of the early church challenged and overthrew some of the if not all of the economic assumptions then and maybe should do so now in ways that we've completely screened out we need to think more about Jesus and the temple as Mary Ann and Nick have been saying we need to think more about pre Jesus and priesthood as I was saying as Nick has got another book coming out on there are a thousand other themes waiting there in the Gospels I would not dream of saying that in Jesus and the victory of God I'd solved the problems I know grant said this morning that either 10% or 30% or whatever it was of what I said is probably wrong and but it's it's just incomplete and I was aware of that as I was writing the book there's so much more don't imagine that the the field is now closed an example would be the meaning of the last supper you know when Jesus wanted to give his disciples a grid of interpretation by which they would know what his forthcoming death was all about and how it related to the kingdom which he'd been announcing and inaugurating when he wanted to convey all that to them he didn't give them a theory he gave them a meal that was what Jesus did specifically because a theory can remain in the head and you can play around with it and adjust it this way and that a meal is something that you share it's something that you do it's something that you profit from it's something it feeds you when you're hungry and it feeds perhaps other people when they're hungry too and that's part of the meaning of the kingdom and there are many many new questions about the Gospels and their traditions and yes in Jesus and the victory of God of course I didn't really have space to say well at this point this evidence comes from Matthew and it fits in Matthews literary and theological artistic structure like the sand so the book would have been a lot lot longer if I'd done that I originally did conceive of that project in terms of having a final section on why there are the Gospels what they are but I quickly realize that is a whole other topic and I hope and pray will be spared to get to it sooner or later and likewise though I have by contextualizing form criticism in its German context in the 1920s showed why I distance myself from it actually the question of why the forms of gospel tradition are what they are is not a silly question it's just that the way that Bultmann and his followers chose to address it inevitably skewed it in a particular way and I believe there might be much better ways of asking why the traditions of Jesus got shaped the way they did once we realize what early Christianity was really like as opposed to what some other scholars have imagined but what is the result of all this for the church I take the so what very seriously as I hope you know and I believe that the so what of all this for the church is not primarily about apologetics conceived as an intellectual exercise but about mission for me one of the breakthrough moments came back in my Montreal days when I suddenly realized the meaning of John 20 verses 19 and following when Jesus breathed on the disciples and says receive the Holy Spirit as the father sent me so I send you and that as so suddenly opens up an entire hermeneutical world in which all that we can see historically about what the real Jesus was actually doing becomes the template and the energizing source for all that we the church are to go and do and be we are to be for the world what Jesus was for Israel and you will only understand the mission of the church in the world if instead of going into the Canon as though it was a closed story in which as long as you were in the Charmed Circle it meant what it meant but it never could break out on anyone could break in instead of that you've got to go back to Jesus himself which is what the Canon is pleading with you to do and by seeing who he was and is to say now we know in the power of his spirit who we have to be in and for his world and if you want to know what that looks like try reading the book of Acts and read it in that way is this what it looks like when people with the breath of Jesus in their lungs go out and tell the world that he is Lord and sometimes they get killed and sometimes a thousand people get converted and sometimes all sorts of other things in-between happen and somehow the gospel gets to Rome and Paul announces it under Caesars nose that Jesus is Lord and God is king openly and unhindered but in order to do this we constantly have to reconnect with the real Jesus who the canonical Gospels give us but whom we have so misunderstood because the world is going to try and pull things apart again your world will do this the North American worldview at the moment is desperate to try to pull this apart mine is from a different point of view in our skeptical Northern Europe the world will pull things apart into political agendas that are culled from elsewhere which we can then adopt and feel good about adopting but which do not have a cross attached to them or into a detached spirituality where because of Jesus death we are assured of eternal salvation and told not to worry about the injustice in the world there are atonement theologies out there which deliver a type of evangelical preaching which is now completely detached from Scripture two or three years ago there was written a book which attempted to say this is what the Bible teaches about the atonement and it had quite a bit about sacrifice in the Old Testament and quite a lot about Paul and almost nothing about the Gospels how can you possibly do that the Gospels are not simply the backstory for Paul lines and actually that's to misunderstand Pauline theology as well the Gospels of the story of how God's son inaugurated God's kingdom through his work and through his death and unless we are prepared to do business with that we have no business calling ourselves biblical and within that yes there is an apologetic task an apologetic task not to prove Jesus divinity by some arm-twisting fashion we can actually find foundations on which to stand which will mean that you'll have to agree with us or you'll just have to confess you're stupid or something but rather rather we need to be able to speak truly and wisely about Jesus and show that the Gospels as they are not as the tradition has shrunk them into being really do make sense historical sense and that the overwhelmingly best explanation for the Christian faith and its rise is that Jesus really was and did what the Gospels say he was and did otherwise and this is my perceived problem with Barton it's open to Barton scholars to tell me I'm sure they will but this is a caricature of him otherwise it seems to me that there is the danger of getting into this closed Charmed Circle where we don't allow any natural theology on board there is no way to break in it's just that when God is ladies hand on you then the whole system works but you've really got no point of contact with the outside world or from outside in Bart's rejection of natural theology and the Barton's emphasis on story of a particular kind always appears as though when Paul went to the Areopagus he shouldn't have tried to talk about the altar to the unknown God all the signals of God within their world that was a mistake really whereas the whole point of Israel's tradition the whole point of Abraham's vocation was that they would be the people through whom God would go out and address the world jesus said you are the light of the world don't hide it under a bucket and that presupposes that the world can see the light when it's shining and it is precisely the canonical Gospels that take us not into a world simply suffused with the light of Resurrection but into the pre-easter world where they say they didn't understand what he was saying the resurrection both does and doesn't in fact the whole of the rest of the story the Gospel writers want us to see things from a pre-easter perspective that's why they tell the story as they do even John okay John does say are now well after the resurrection this happened and and Mark hints at that at one point in other words it matters to the canonical Gospels that we grasp what it was like without knowing about even quite what's going to happen in Jesus death still less Easter and I believe it is a methodological and theological a priori to say it's all basically about the resurrection of course without the resurrection there is no gospel but just to ret reject that and to say well all the gospel stories really give us is the Risen Jesus and then some back details simply it misses the point it is the pre Easter Jesus that Jesus who goes about doing and speaking God's kingdom who is the same yesterday today and forever as the Risen one and though of course we know him as the Risen one we know him as the one who is alive today we know the Risen one let me say it again as the Crucified kingdom bringer and indeed we only know the meaning of resurrection in the light of the inauguration of the kingdom and the death of Jesus on the cross otherwise the word resurrection itself loses its meaning and merely becomes a cipher for some new kind of spirituality and nearly done let me conclude we are to be transformed by the renewal of our minds and it is history as well as faith which enables us to do that and to say he loved me and gave himself for me I have spoken many times and written many times about the encounters of the Risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene at the tomb with Thomas a week later with Peter by the lake and those are wonderful stories each is worth exploring not only for the sheer wonderful human dynamic of it but for the epistemological significance for instance of Thomas saying I want to touch and see and Jesus doesn't say oh no that's completely off-limits he says here you are Thomas be my guest we're not told that Thomas did actually touch and see he said my Lord and my god but there was an epistemological bridge Jesus was prepared to come and meet Thomas in terms of the questions he was asking similarly with Peter I can't resist telling you this no Peter Jesus says Simon son of John do you love me AGGA peace me and Simon says yes Lord you see you I saw see fellows that you know that I'm your friend he won't use the agape word and Jesus says again Simon son of John ago peace me do you love me with this agar pail of yes Lord you know so I - ah - Phil Oh si you know that I I'm your friend and then Jesus says Simon son of John Feliz me are you my friend and John says Peter was grieved because he said to him on this third occasion are you my friend but actually shouldn't have been grieved because you see what Jesus is doing Jesus was coming down to where Peter was okay Peter if that's where you are if that's all you can say at the moment that's where we'll start maybe there are some Peters here tonight who need to hear that this is the way Jesus deals with us yes we want to get to the agape we want to get there but if at the moment all you can say clinging on by your fingernails is yes Lord you know I'm your friend that's okay that's where we'll start follow that through into a whole epistemology but it's not just the Risen Jesus dealing with his friends in this wonderful way it's the Jesus who walks and talks and strolls around Galilee who gets his feet dirty with the dust of the street who meets Peter in Luke 5 and Peter says depart from me because I'm a sinful man Lord and Jesus says no actually I've got a job for you and it's it's the it's the Jesus who is there in the house in Luke 10 and Mary is there in this male space she should be in female space back in the back of the house and Jesus said let us stay here this is fine it's Matthew and Matthew 9 and Matthew himself if it is Matthew recording us who knows tells this story of the of the conversion of Matthew Sturrock Levi as part of a string of healing miracles because as far as he was concerned it was a healing miracle when Jesus came to the tax booth and said you I want you nobody else wanted him he was the tax collector Jesus wanted him we need those stories we need the historical Jesus because if these are just fantasies if these are just nice fictions stories into which we can escape and live in a private world they went to us any good because we need him to meet us today with the dust of the street on our shoes and in our souls with the worries and weight of the world on our shoulders with fears and suspicions and prejudices and misunderstandings in our hearts in our villages and in our homes we need the real Jesus to meet us we need the flesh-and-blood historical Jesus to meet us because we are flesh-and-blood historical people and because the Living God has in Jesus and through his death and resurrection established his kingdom on earth as in heaven and he has said to you and to me follow me let's pause and pray for a moment and then we'll take some questions almighty father we can only just scratch the surface of these amazing truths these wonderful texts our hearts and our heads can be full but they're nowhere near as full as your heart of love for us and of the power that is revealed in Jesus and his life and his kingdom and his death and his resurrection we pray that you will open our minds afresh to understand the scriptures we pray that you will open our imaginations so that we can do the history properly and more thoroughly we pray that you will reveal to us the depths of Matthew Mark Luke and John in ways that we've never seen before and we pray that in and through all of that gracious Lord it won't just be so that we can have our minds filled with nice and exciting ideas but so that you will equip us to be your people for your world send us out gracious Lord we pray that we may be for the world what Jesus was for Israel in the power of his spirit so that he may be glorified and your kingdom advanced we pray in his powerful name amen apparently some questions have been handed in which is great this is a neat way of doing it and actually much easier than trying to take QA from 1500 people yeah we've got a few questions and some of these are trying to get a little bit more of your autobiography I know the British are not inclined towards autobiographical musings maybe we could tease you into a few and then we have a few more theological ones and then maybe some more pastoral or churchly one so we'll see how much time we have if we can start autobiographically could you tell us a little bit more about the influences that have really formed and shaped you as the Jesus scholars a scholar of Jesus studies the teachers books dialogue partners from the past yeah under the present I've spoken to or three times about Ben Meyer and I really do think though I disagree with some of his work that book the aims of Jesus was absolutely brilliant and groundbreaking and I thank God for it then Ben Meyer inevitably sent me back to reach fights so who I'd only just read briefly before but again even though spite sir is delightfully wrong about several things he's it's one it's one of those books which it's hard to put down once you've opened it it'd be weary of going to look up a reference in Schweitzer because as I said the other day about CS Lewis you'll read for half an hour and half your morning may be gone so she fights ax is part of the back story it was only curiously when I was at McGill that I read finally a little pamphlet by my teacher George cared Jesus and the Jewish nation published in the 1960s and I wished I'd read it before but when I was studying with George we only ever talked about some Paul we never talked about the Gospels but it was shatteringly illuminating and then I went back to Karen's commentary on Luke and discovered that quite a lot of what he'd said there was actually embedded in the Luke commentary as well Marcus Borges first book conflict holiness and politics and the teachings of Jesus was greatly illuminating Antony Harvey's book Jesus and the constraints of history was raising the historical question in fresh and I found helpful ways again I didn't always agree with his conclusions ed Sanders work turned all sorts of things upside down and in I doubt in terms of putting the temple incident right up front and saying everything's got to be seen in the light of that which is indeed a very excuse me Johan I move and then I was part of the conversations through the 1980s and 1990s I was never a member of the Jesus Seminar but half of those guys were either friends or associates or whatever and I've meet them at at different conferences and we would be in dialogue and I have been inevitably shaped by that dialogue and sometimes one may be miss shaped by certain dialogues and if that's happened that's happened obviously Dom Crossan particularly a brilliant utterly brilliant man and I've learnt an enormous amount from having to reason through what he was doing and why those are perhaps the the obvious major influences on me and I put a lot of it I found I had to make my own way and do my own digging so that's grant if I forgotten anybody does anything else we think of okay if you think say it was well well I mean of course Brian and Sylvia but yeah in terms of methodology yeah yeah well absolutely if it wasn't for the worldview model that Brian and I hammered out on one glorious day in Oxford I wouldn't have approached it the way I did yeah another question that brings together the scholarly Tom with the pastoral Tom or are you bishop right when you're a pastor yes I'm sorry I have to get the right one what have you been learning recently about Jesus and his mission from your pastoral work as a bishop yeah I've spoken about that in the conference earlier this week quite a bit I learned all kinds of wonderful things and it's tremendous when you grab some water actually there's a bottle somewhere thank you and it's tremendous when you go into a it's in the podium it is you're right it's okay it's right here thank you yeah there's a parable there you know you look everywhere but the obvious place wherever it is and that's a wonderful Schweitzer image where he said about Paul that people try to explain Paul by Hellenistic sources rather than by Jewish runs he said it's like somebody trying to water a garden by going with a leaky bucket to a tap half a mile away when there's a fast flowing stream going right beside it so there we are that you we'll remember that now um I mean I could tell you about a parish where because of all sorts of financial difficulties half the shops in the town had shut and then the banks decided that there was no point then being on the high street because there weren't too many shops which were their main business so the bank shut and the whole place was becoming almost a ghost town and the people who live there who don't have the money to go anywhere I mean we got real poverty in that area they were in a really bad place and some people in the local church without anyone telling them they had to accept the Holy Spirit decided they would go to the bank and say can we use this what are you gonna use it for well we're going to do this and that and the other we're going to establish a credit union we're going to establish an old people's daycare center we're going to establish or a literacy training course because illiteracy is one of the problems we're going to do all sorts of things there and I have been privileged to be with those folk when on a weekday morning they will meet in the church for an early Eucharist then they will go down and unlock the door of this of this old Bank and come in and make it a place of hope and and it's it's just a building which says there is hope when the people who are most hopeless can go in there and find hope excuse me that just got the fingerprints of the gospel all over it and the the the whole movement for international debt relief which I've been quite involved with it must be something I swallowed earlier and the hold the whole movement of international debt relief it's been the churches in England which have kept the pressure up on the government in relation to that and the government's been very surprised that the churches haven't just sort of had a quick fling and then gone away and they've had to take it seriously when ten and tens of thousands of Christians get together and pray and March round Edinburgh or Birmingham or over the g8 or whoever it is a meeting then it is clear this is a cheerful thing this is not a gloomy sort of shouting angry protest it's just saying these debts are completely stupid and irrational and immoral and they've got to stop and we are just going to go on praying and working until that happens there's all sorts of things like that and being a bishop has meant I've had the privilege of being on the edge of a lot of that a lot of sadness and trying to be a person of hope and to bring the love of Jesus whether is sadness and a lot of real excitement seeing God do new things so it's been a wonderful eye opening time for me another question that holds together the scholarly in the pastoral how and in what situations could the results of historical Jesus scholarship inform pastoral ministry or evangelism goodness there are thousands and thousands of ways I think I am you know increasingly struck by the holistic nature of Jesus mission you know when Jesus told parables sometimes they were straight off this is what I want to tell you often they were because of something he was doing which made people authorities real or self is self-appointed say to him who do you think you are why are you doing that and I find myself asking the question what would what should we be doing that would make people ask us the question who do you think you are wife you got the right to do that to which the only possible answer might be once upon a time there was a woman who had two daughters and the older one did this and the younger one here whatever you know if it's when you find yourself needing to tell parables that you know that you are breaking open a worldview and that you are actually trying to get people to live within the kingdom worldview instead of the one which is killing them that's a start there are there are lots and lots of other answers but that is not another related question in some ways you're a Bishop of a global church we're more and more aware of the rise of non-western Christianity and as a force of the modern world and that we in the West are more and more in the minority your account in the first part of your talk was largely about Western scholarship European scholarship in particular do you see value in non-western approaches to biblical interpretation especially in ideas of Jesus coming from outside I is about Jesus coming from outside the West if so how should Western Christians approach non Western Christian scholarship granted residents question it is a grant ish sort of question and it's a very good question I'm not really equipped to answer it because though I have often wished I could actually get more into readings of scripture from other parts of the world I really haven't had the space to do that and that may just be a false priority on my part when I was in Princeton last fall I actually got out of the library several key texts on readings of some Paul from other parts of the world and I read through bits of them as quick as I could but again I didn't have time to get down deep enough into them and I really want to do that and I am aware that that I have inevitably lived within the Western scholarly world I don't see that as a fault just as a necessary limitation we all start where we start and we're engaged with our own cultures but it probably is time to bring in breaths of fresh air from other parts of the world we've had that in another sphere in Britain we have a black Ugandan Archbishop of York and interestingly when he was moving into the house outside York where he lives he found a box of papers from Michael Ramsay's day in York from fifty years before and there was an address in which Michael Ramsay looked forward to the day when a black African would come and be Archbishop of York and centum who quoted that in his enthronement address which was wonderful and I look forward to the time when actually that interchange of scholarship of insight will be happening in a way that it really isn't at the moment and that's that is partly again our university system our tenure track system etc and it takes courage to break out of that and say no I'm actually going to do something different I'm going to read different sources and different texts and we perhaps need a new generation perhaps some of you younger folk here to take up that mantle when when people like me are being a bit sleepy and elderly that was actually my question time because next years they'll theology conference here Wheaton is on global theology thank you for giving us a plug maybe you'd like to come to the conference we'd be glad to have you a couple of theological questions if you still have a voice you've argued that the kingdom and cross must not be separated can you give some examples of other theologians either scholarly or popular past or present who seem to have gotten this pretty much right or who have particularly influenced your thinking about keeping cross and Kingdom together I've mentioned my teacher George CAD and I don't know that he did it quite the same way that I'm doing it but he was concerned to hold that picture together I mean actually in all sorts of ways Albert Schweitzer was trying to do that his vision of Jesus seeing that the world was out of joint seeing that the Jewish tradition of the messianic woes was coming upon the world and that he had to take that upon himself and that he flung himself on the wheel of history and though he died it started turning in the other direction there is something in that remarkable powerful and violent image which is not just about an atonement theology but about something totally new being born into the world it does it doesn't do it quite as much as as much as I said I mean I go back in my own tradition to people like Wilberforce the great Anglican from two centuries ago for whom personal spirituality and public Reformation went absolutely hand-in-hand and one of the tragedies of evangelicalism in Britain in the 19th century was that those two increasingly got further and further apart with all sorts of other symptoms like a decline in resurrection belief so that many evangelicals would use the word resurrection meaning dying and going to heaven rather than resurrection and at the same time failing to see the what we might call the social or reformation 'el in social Reformation imperatives of the gospel but it's basically the Calvinist tradition isn't it I mean that in in the best sorts of Calvinism I'm looking at brown and others here that there is this strong combination of the social and the personal and that the two do not cancel each other out and but they actually need one another and I've been fortunate to see that actually happening on the street in real church is where they are determinately getting out and working with the police and being there for the people who are on the street in the middle of the night and and doing all sorts of things being in the prison and the schools and so on not as a displacement activity to avoid talking about having Jesus in your heart or being saved by his cross or whatever but as the necessary outflowing of that and then the necessary in flowing back into that and and and actually once you see it done is not difficult this isn't rocket science it all makes sense and the Gospels come alive in new ways so you shouldn't be afraid of it and nobody here is afraid of it so that's alright him one more question okay all right from your reading of the four Gospels was Jesus messianic status more important than his divinity coming back to your comments about divinity from lecture do you read Jesus messianic status as being more important than his divinity and if so what would that mean for us today I really don't know how to answer that I mean it's like it's like saying is breathing more important than the circulation of the blood you know you you probably you probably need both okay you

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Keywords: wheaton, college, illinois, N. T. Wright (Author), Wheaton Theology Conference 2010, A Theological Dialouge with N.T. Wright, Theology (Field Of Study), Jesus Christ (Deity)

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Length: 74min 38sec (4478 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015