The Jesus We Never Knew | N.T. Wright

[Music] thank you thank you very much for your welcome thank you Craig for your kind words and I add my thanks to those already mentioned to priscilla pope Leverson who has worked tirelessly to organize this whole event and as i have discovered over the last year's since she and i and her husband jack sat down to plan what we were going to do when priscilla organizes something it stays organized and that's wonderful thank you it's great to be back at SMU it's quite a while since I've been here and to enjoy the warmth of Texas just as we in Scotland are sinking into our dark and chilly winter and it's also nice to come to somewhere where you're not having any particular political turmoils and so on at the moment we've had hours but I hear there are odd things going on and we British always enjoy speaking in the USA perhaps especially the south for linguistic reasons a former a former colleague of mine John Baca some time of Cambridge was once invited to address a conference in America and he was very busy and he didn't even recall the type of conference it was but just knew he was supposed to be lecturing about God as you do and he arrived at the last moment and gave his address ending by declaring triumphantly that if the doctrine of the Trinity didn't exist it would be necessary to invent it and he received a wonderful ovation and sat down to prolonged applause and as he sat down his neighbor on the platform said very daring very daring he said well I thought it was really very Orthodox well yes said the speaker but this is a Unitarian conference and so said Boca why are they all applauding no he said they just love your accent so I hope the accent at least will carry me through this evening it's it's gonna have to because my body clock is telling me it's nearly 2:00 in the morning so bear with me but though I hope what I'm going to say is basically Orthodox the whole point as in my title that Jesus we never knew is that we and by we I mean all of us scholar and non scholar Christian and non-christian all of us in today's Western world when we think about Jesus the reality is so powerful and challenging that we easily scale it down to something we can fit into the way our minds already work wery make jesus if not in our own image there that happens too sometimes then into something or someone we can cope with a bit more easily as you know one of the great events of this last week a sad event is that the great singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen just died I recall from the 60s that Jesus image in his song Susanne and Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden Tower and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him he said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them but he himself was broken long before the sky could open forsaken almost human he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone and you want to travel with him and you want to travel blind and you think maybe you'll trust him for he's touched your perfect body with his mind I wish my voice was half an octave deeper and then I could sing it the way that Cohen did myself I was a teenager in the 60s and I still remember the almost electric shock of words like that no one have done that before Koen invited us as poets do to look at reality at Jesus even from new and disturbing angles he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone generations have heaped up words about Jesus and the real Jesus is mostly obscured by them rather than illuminated and the way Cohen turns around the story of Jesus walking on the water catches at today's easygoing Jesus images as well as scholarly constructs when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him perhaps it is only when we individually or collectively a driven away from comfort when we feel ourselves drowning for whatever reason that we are ready humble enough perhaps to come back to Jesus and reach out a hand to him like a drowning child grabbing for a parents outstretched hand now rationalists would of course sneer at this that they would say is the way to be sure you get a Jesus who offers you the help you think you want but whoever supposed that only cool detached rationalism could give you true answers to life's most important questions reason is like the engine of the car you need it but it needs fuel to drive it and a human will to direct it and if you're drowning actually reaching out for help is the most reasonable thing you can do among the multiple ironies of Cohen's poem is that line forsaken almost human Koen seems to start by thinking of Jesus as a divine being some kind of super man floating around coming down towards Earth who then we realize as he comes to a sad end he is almost human now that's the exact opposite of what most people in our culture have imagined which is a straight forwardly human Jesus who from time to gives us hints of something more and that humanist Jesus picture has then bred other reactions many people have said that the something more the divine bit if you like was added to the stories by the next generation to boost the legend to keep the dream alive and so on but at least it puts the question on the table and gets us wondering and thinking when we get beyond our inherited and imagined stereotypes what can we truly say about the Jesus we never knew and in the light of that what can we say about God asking those questions sends me back in my mind about 15 years ago my wife and I were invited to lead a private pilgrimage to the Holy Land the couple who invited us were a very interesting and remarkable couple the wife was in a quiet way a practising Christian but the husband Sir Stanley Clarke was a leading industrialist and philanthropist who had always held back from any specific faith and now he was by then in his late sixties he clearly wanted to sort things out for himself as my wife said to me afterwards this is how Stan's run his life he decides what question he wants to ask he goes and finds a team expert he looks them in the eye and he asks him the question on the first evening of the trip after a long and tiring journey we were finally settled into our hotel in Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee at the end of dinner as they were serving coffee Stan took a deep breath and looked at me so Tom he said let's get this straight there really was a Jesus Christ yes Stan I said there really was a Jesus Christ and he really did die on a cross I said yes he really did die on a cross and he really did rise from the dead yes I replied and when we get to that point I'll be explaining how we can be sure of that and then he gave me a long hard look Stan had succeeded in business by giving people long hard looks and then asking the crunch questions so he said who is God anyway I managed to keep my nerve and restrain my academics impulse from launching into a half hour lecture on the Trinity and I just said more or less great question were going to be thinking about that throughout the next two weeks and we did and a year or so afterwards here are two afterwards something happened which fascinated me the trip had a profound impact on Stan within months he made a public profession of faith and he then soon afterwards entered a three year battle with cancer which would finally kill him but during that process I watched Stan coming to terms with the Jesus he had encountered in the Holy Land the Jesus he had never known to begin with he encountered Jesus as a living person someone to get to know someone to follow obediently but at the start whenever we talked as I naturally word about Jesus in the kingdom of God and the implications of the kingdom of God for today's world Stan would always want to hold back a spiritual Jesus was fine that was meeting his own needs where he was but as social and politically involved Jesus nope we're not going there Stan was on the right of British politics which as you may know is probably center-left in yours but that's a whole other story and in Britain the right tends not to like Christians talking about political issues in case it upsets the status quo of Business and Finance you can figure that out and so Stan didn't really want me to talk about the kingdom of but in his last year without me doing anything more he changed and the last time we met I was talking and praying with him and his wife when they knew they didn't have much time left together but he had something he wanted to say to me particularly Tommy said you must go on telling people about what Jesus wants in the world about justice and peace and helping the poor it's important people here that you might have thought that a man facing death would be thinking about life after death and he was but what he'd learnt about Jesus in the three years that he had been an explicit and open disciple was a bigger vision altogether the vision of the Jesus who had launched God's kingdom on earth as in heaven for Jesus we never knew the Jesus Western culture has done its best to ignore or forget the Jesus who still stands at the crossroads of history and beckons modern Western culture has of course been haunted by Jesus sometimes almost obsessed by him one sure way of getting on the front cover of Time magazine has been to write something new and edgy about Jesus 20 years ago this was all the rage with a group calling itself the Jesus Seminar who made a splash in America their action nowhere much else with their claims to have concluded on scientific historical grounds that Jesus never did and said most of what the Bible says he did and said that he didn't claim to be the Son of God he never thought he was going to die for the sins of the world and he certainly didn't rise from the dead now a few maverick writers have gone even further and claimed that Jesus of Nazareth never existed that the whole thing was made up a generation or two later by a new religious group who just wanted to valid eight their own existence and over against that there are many images in popular culture mine as well as yours in which Jesus plays the role of Superman swooping in with supernatural power to do crazy things called miracles to overcome evil and then to go back to heaven taking people with him or promising to do so if they will say a simple prayer and try to stop misbehaving I think Leonard Cohen would have made short work of both those extremes and needed Ben write his own solution though if it really was that since it was after all a poem not a work of theology is itself only a distant pointer to the larger stranger reality that our culture both our Christian culture and our atheist culture has done its best to ignore because like it or not Jesus doesn't fit he doesn't fit into our culture we don't have a ready-made box where he can be safely placed and indeed the idea of placing Jesus in a box is already ridiculous they tried that once and it didn't work we have we have boxes though called religious guru or spiritual hero or social revolutionary and if we are Christians we probably have categories like divinity and humanity which we think we know what they are and we think they're absolutes which can then be predicated or not of Jesus and we tell ourselves stories from our culture about sin and salvation about sin and holiness about sin and guilt and help hell sin tends to come into most of them for various reasons and we assume that however we tell those sorry stories Jesus whoever he is will just fit into those stories and provide the solution and the Jesus we never knew stands there patiently waiting ready to tell us as he so often did a story which isn't quite the story we were expecting or wanting a story to break open our questions and come at the whole whole thing from a different angle once upon a time there was a man who had two sons or a farmer sowing seed or a woman who lost a coin or whatever it might be fortunately this can and does still happen Jesus has an uncanny knack of coming and telling stories that weren't what we wanted or thought and when that happens it's life transforming but how does it happen and how can it happen to me to you to us to our culture to our world there are two basic ways in which we get to know and know about Jesus and part of our problem in the Western Church in world is that these two ways have been held firmly apart as though they've got nothing to do with one another and that is one of the reasons that the real Jesus so often escapes and slips between the cracks of our fumbling grasp we've given these two ways of listening for the real Jesus the deceptively simple sounding names of history and faith again as though we assume we know what those two words mean and we assume often in our culture that history and faith are like oil and water they won't mix and it gets very messy if you try and that mistake too and it is a mistake is part of our modern Western culture it's specific to us we owe it to the 18th century in particular to the same cultural impulses that led Thomas Jefferson and others to hold church and state faith in history if you like firmly apart I understand the plus side of doing that believe me I have lived with the muddles of the British constitution and a church which is established but nobody knows what that means and so on and so forth all our usual British compromises I've lived with that all my life but it was that same impulse at the same time which led skeptics to challenge Christian faith at the root by saying we will study the history of the first century and we will prove that Jesus was really just a failed Jewish revolutionary or perhaps just a spiritual teacher of timeless truths or whatever and that Orthodox heavy-handed controlling Christianity was after all based on a historical mistake and since that's what many people wanted to think in the 18th century for all sorts of other reasons as well and since so many people in our culture want to reach the same conclusions today it's not surprising that would be historical research on Jesus has continued to suggest this negative result will do the history and will pull down your grandiose Christian claims and show that however nicer guy Jesus may have been however many good ideas he had he certainly wasn't what you Christians have always said and so history goes off in one direction while then faith does a vertical take off in another direction and would-be defenders of Christianity have often reacted by steering attention away from the messy historical questions and encouraging people into a world of a non-historical faith of worship of prayer of personal spirituality and those of us who have lived uncomfortably at the intersection of those two worlds have often found it well uncomfortable as secular historians accuse us of smuggling faith into our historical study and the advocates of a spiritual faith accuse us of submitting eternal truths to historical scrutiny and so on but I and others have persisted in this double quest despite all the naysayers and we've done so because in my case at least I can't speak for the others the more I study first century history which by the way was part of my undergraduate degree with Jesus at the middle of it the more I find the figure of Jesus to be both real and disturbing and utterly compelling though in several ways quite different from the Jesus I thought I knew about before when I was growing up and the more I pray the more I seek to follow Jesus in my own life the more I attend the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine in his name I find that I'm not just evoking a memory but encountering a living and loving though again a disturbing presence I find in other words that the very meaning of the words history and faith themselves get reconfigured around the figure of Jesus there is no neutral territory there is no epistemological Switzerland there is no fixed ground from which to survey the options the roads called history and faith are full of potholes and even sinkholes and many regard them as too dangerous for serious travel that of course is the point that post modernity has made so graphically but what post modernity has not usually allowed for is that at the end of these damaged highways there might be a different sort of reality that this reality might be personal and that this person might be beckoning us to step out of the boat to walk on the water to find him as the fully human being in whom to the horror of all our categories the living Creator God was and is personally present how on earth could we make a start on such a journey there is a problem about simply starting with faith because our culture is always ready with the smart put-down which shows that your faith or my faith is merely subjective it has no actual purchase on reality it emerges from your jeans or your hangups or your Catholic upbringing or your fundamentalist forebears or your love of music or some quirk in your DNA or whatever but it's not real it doesn't tell you about the real world we have separated off belief from reality and of then watched belief collapse into feeling and we've watched feelings themselves be deconstructed by Marx or Freud or Nietzsche or whoever until all we're left with is prejudice articulated either by the brute force of the victor or by the scream of the victim that's not a good way to be which is why faith itself needs to be reconstructed and reconnected with reason but as we await that possibility history remains a good place to begin we know quite a lot about the first century of the Common Era we know quite a lot not least about what was going on in the Middle East that is where we meet Jesus of Nazareth he is a recognizable and identifiable figure of first century real history and that I suggest is where we have to begin now the Middle East was just as turbulent and confused and dangerous in the first century as it is today perhaps that's inevitable as geographical factors bring different cultures together in close proximity like tectonic plates that are bound to rub up against one another and cause earthquakes in society and politics and culture and yes religion in the ancient world we need to say a word about this word religion because it's so confusing in the ancient world religion was something about everything together it was the complex interweaving of the visible and the invisible forces in a city a village a home a country in our world especially since the 18th century religion holds things apart faith apart from public life spirituality from politics and so on so the word is more or less useless for studying history since in the modern Western world at least it's come to mean more or less the opposite of what it meant back then the only people in the 1st century who would have recognized our Western set raishin of the worlds of the divine and the human would be the philosophers known as Epicureans and there is a strong epicurean streak in today's Western culture pushing the gods upstairs out of sight and allowing us to get on running the world the way we want to sounds familiar it was your very own Thomas Jefferson who said I am an epicurean let's just pause at that point and reflect ancient Epicureanism interestingly was a philosophy of a the elite who could themselves separate themselves off from the common herd and live in isolated luxury and that's what they thought the gods did that again sounds very much like today's Western world though the dream was shattered on September the 11th 2001 and is now in tatters with the refugee crisis a million Lazarus's landing up at the rich man's gate all this is important if we're to understand why it's hard for us us Westerners to grasp the meaning and message of Jesus the Jewish people of Jesus day were certainly not Epicureans and indeed to this day the word epicurean coming through in Yiddish as a peak arose or something like that is one of the strongest Jewish terms of abuse basically you're an unbeliever you've got rid of the gods you don't believe that God and our world have anything to do with each other the Jewish people of Jesus day had a very different worldview and Jesus lived within that Jewish worldview and believed it was coming to fresh expression fresh meaning fresh and creative resolution in his own work it's all too easy for us to glance at the Jesus of the Gospels and imagine that he meant what he meant within our worldview but that is going to distort the whole picture and here is the value of history in the well-known cliche the past is a foreign country they do things differently their genuine historical investigation is a continuous act of intellectual humility putting our own way of seeing things on hold and allowing texts and artifacts from very different times and cultures to make their own impact and to suggest their own categories and that's what we have to do with Jesus I read a book recently by the late great British historian ASA Briggs ASA Briggs was one of the bright young things in Cambridge during the Second World War and was recruited to be among those who worked at Bletchley Park cracking the codes that told the German submarines what was going on and they had access to these K they worked to cracking the codes and he said they recruited historians to do this task because historians were trained to think into the minds of people who thought very differently from how they did and so they were good at thinking into the minds of German submarine commanders whatever so that's what we're doing with history were trying to get into a different world not forcing that world to conform to our stereotypes a word about sources because I'll be sure that if I don't say this somebody will want to ask the question anyway skeptics sometimes sneer there will be only real evidence for Jesus comes from your early Christian writings the four Gospels in particular and of course they're biased because the authors all believed in Jesus anyway but actually things are more complicated and interesting than that there are non-christian sources which mentioned Jesus and his followers like the Roman historian Tacitus and Suetonius the Jewish historian Josephus the Roman statesman Pliny they didn't say very much about him by the time they were writing the movement had only just begun and it was far off in a foreign country for all of them except Josephus but then the letters of Paul however our earliest surviving Christian writings show beyond any doubt that within 20 years of Jesus death there were people all around the eastern Mediterranean world who were declaring public allegiance to this Jesus rather than to their local tribal or political leaders and divin and Paul knew that this only made sense because of the sheer historical reality of Jesus and his death and Paul insisted his resurrection so we've got good evidence for the existence of Jesus and already for quite a lot about him about his emphasis on the kingdom of God and all that that meant but what about the charges that the main sources are biased let's face it all writers on all subjects are biased there is no point of view which is nobody's point of view so of course the Gospel writers and Paul are biased in the sense that they have selected and arranged their material according to the things they want to tell their readers big deal that's actually what everybody does we all do it all the time but that doesn't mean that you make up the basic story all writers and speakers in public and private select and arrange I am a lifelong supporter of a not very successful English football club Newcastle United used to be successful hasn't been for a long time but if I read the report of a recent match in the newspapers from Newcastle I expect to find them grieving over every loss and there have been many the celebrate celebrating wildly over every victory and just recently we've started to have a few but obviously the local newspapers are heavily biased but I don't expect them to tell me the wrong score you know they that would make no sense at all and Matthew Mark Luke and John though of course wanting passionately to tell people that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the living embodiment of Israel's God coming back at last to rescue Israel in the world they are precisely wanting to say that these things happened these are not ideas projected onto a fictitious screen actual events mattered them precisely because they were Jews whose message was about stuff that happens in the real world and carries divine significance the message was about God becoming King on earth as in heaven only makes sense if it's about stuff that more or less actually happened of course there were other writers later on who told the story quite differently there has again been a modern American fashion for suggesting that books like the so called Gospel of Thomas were actually written earlier than Matthew Mark Luke and John and that the four who made it into the New Testament did so as a kind of political move some centuries later because they were offering a toned-down and more socially acceptable version of the truly radical early message of Jesus this comes through in popular books like The Da Vinci Code and so on but also in some more scholarly works but it is unwarranted historically and is in any case actually a rather obvious instance of one particular modern Western culture projecting its own desires back onto the first century the other Gospels mostly come from circles we know as Gnostic offering secret revelations for the elite insiders revelations precisely not about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven but about a private spirituality now and an escapist heaven Hereafter and this has been the default mode of much Western religion for at least two centuries but it has no purchase on first century historical reality in fact the Gnostics were the ones who escaped persecution no Empire is going to bother about people who cultivate a private spirituality and an escapist soteriology empires do take much more notice of people who go around saying that someone different is now the true Lord of the world and that's what Matthew Mark Luke and John was saying and doing about Jesus that Jesus we never knew so what can be said about the real historical world and the real historical meaning of Jesus of Nazareth Jesus was born into a world of hope but the hope had been sorely tested the hope was expressed in powerful symbols which had themselves become a puzzle and behind the hope and the symbols though is the great story and this is perhaps the hardest thing for us in the modern Western world to get our heads and our hearts around but without it we won't understand the hope and the symbols and we certainly then won't understand what Jesus meant when he announced that this at last was the time for God to become King which was after all the central theme of his public Proclamation the story goes back many many centuries before Jesus day however much history you know about your country or even mine it won't be the same kind of story as the one Jesus and his contemporaries were telling the one they believed they were living in we in Britain tell the story of our island home many of you have visited it kings and queens and battles and revolutions and so on but we don't tell the story of our country as a story which is moving in a particular direction and has an obvious goal whether or not we think we've got there or if we do we do it with a bit of a smile since we're quite resigned to the fact that we had an empire a century or so ago and kind of dwindled into the Commonwealth which is a nice Club but it doesn't cut much political ice or expect to do so you of course for your part like the French tell the story of your nation in terms of the Glorious Revolution of the 18th century something happened which changed everything and which you must now live out that's why you always hope that in the next election you will at last vote for the Messiah and then get puzzled when it doesn't happen I I had quite forgotten I'd written that in my notes I apologize serviceable BC if this is one of the central reasons why Jesus eludes our grasp the 18th century enlightenment taught all Westerners Europeans as well as Americans to suppose that up to that point the world had been in a kind of superstitious semi-darkness from which the developments in science technology and political theory had at last set us free the human race had come of age we gave up superstition on the one hand and dictatorships on the other and we or at least you embraced the bright new world in which Epicureanism again the gods have been banished upstairs and we could run the downstairs world now this is the movement that post modernity has shown up as a self-serving confidence trick yes science and technology have done amazing things and yes I prefer democracy to dictators but this was not the climax of history contrast the hope of the Jewish people of Jesus day when we look at the five centuries before Jesus we trace a very specific hope they recalled in festival and song their ancient origins they were children of Abraham Isaac and Jacob they'd been promised to land as their inheritance they were rescued from slavery in Egypt they told these stories again and again and again the little children knew them by heart they'd been given the divine Laure the torah to guide and guard them they told and retold the stories of David and Solomon the building of the temple the time when the promises seemed to be fulfilled forever but it had all gone horribly wrong subsequent Kings had gone to the bad prophets had spoken lies priests had committed abomination most of the original 12 tribes were lost and finally Babylon had overcome the rest had destroyed the temple had taken the people into exile and the prophets of the time interpreted this as the direct result of Israel's idolatry and sin Israel was kicked out of the land like Adam and Eve being kicked out of the Garden of Eden and that was the point worst of all was the belief that Israel's God Yahweh had left his people to their fate they had abandoned him so he had abandoned them that was what the original covenant had stipulated and it had happened but the same prophets assured the Exile that the ancient covenant also promised a time of return of restoration a time when yahuwah and israel would get together again like the reconciliation of a divorced couple when that happened said the prophets then not only would Israel be restored the temple rebuilt not only would Yahweh return to live in the temple once more then the nations of the world would come to see what had happened and would abandon their idols and worship the one true God at last and this would be the fulfillment of the original plan for which God had called Abraham Isaac and Jacob in the first place this was the creator's intention for the whole cosmos this would be the true climax of history that's not just a vague idea they lived it they had festivals which celebrated it they knew the stories they knew the songs this was their story what was needed then was a new Exodus the original exodus from Egypt had been a rescue from slavery but this second Exodus a release from this hideous exile would be a release from a deeper slavery which was the punishment for idolatry and sin so be both rescue and forgiveness so when some of the Jews did return from Babylon and did rebuild the temple some thought this must be it the new day had arrived but it was a false dawn the Jews were still not free they were ruled over by the Persians the Egyptians the Syrians and finally after a brief precarious independence by the Romans and throughout these later events in century after century you have to imagine in a way that's very difficult for us as modern Westerners people living with this entire story in their well-known folk memory throughout these later events we find Jewish writings which cling on to and reexpress the hope for the real return from exile the real new Exodus and particularly for Israel's God Yahweh to come back again as he had promised the Book of Daniel one of the most popular prophecies of Jesus day promises that the Exile would in fact last not for 70 years but for seventy times seven years 490 years nearly half a millennium a jubilee of Jubilees and after that time Israel's God would come back rescue his people at last and set up a new Kingdom that's the language Jesus took on a new world through which all the ancient promises would be fulfilled that was the hope of the Jews of Jesus day in Jesus day the prophesied half millennium was pretty well up the oppression from Roman overlords and their local henchmen was getting worse every populist movement of the day and there were many was hailed by some as the agent of the long-awaited liberation there were at least a dozen messianic or prophetic movements in the century either side of Jesus people were on tiptoe with expectation even they weren't quite sure just what form that liberation would take could take should take whether it would involve a great war who would spearhead the movement and all this is what I mean when I say that the hope of Israel was rooted in a long story in which Jesus and his contemporaries believed that they themselves were living it wasn't just a story by itself way back then from which you could learn some abstract lessons it was like the earlier acts of a drama in which suddenly you called onstage had to finish and take the story where it had to go the story they told themselves wasn't just a parable though you could tell parables about it and Jesus did so it wasn't just an illustration of spiritual truth though there were profound theological truths embedded in it the story was the real-life story of God and Israel in the world and each generation around the time of Jesus was hoping in whatever way that they would be the ones who would seize the moment and bring the story to its triumphant climax and when Jesus appeared and said the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand this must have been what people heard this sense of a real living story of actual history freighted with theological significance is vital if were to understand what Jesus thought he was doing and how his work was perceived he wasn't then offering spiritual advice or ethical Maxim's or a fast track to heaven he was announcing the time had arrived for the hope of Israel to be fulfilled this was the time for God to become King plenty of people in his day were longing for that news but they didn't think it would look or sound like Jesus he came to his own and his own didn't receive him that Jesus we never knew is the Jesus who came to fulfill this ancient hope but to do so in a way nobody had seen coming it takes as I've said considerable effort of the imagination to hold this thought in your mind and stop flicking back to the default modes of thinking about Jesus the Guru Jesus the one offering a quick route out of this world and into heaven and if this is so about the story of Israel the same is true for the other side of what I want to say which is the symbol of Israel's national life which was the Temple in Jerusalem for years growing up as a young man a young Christian even when I was training for the ministry I basically thought of the Temple in Jerusalem as though it was just like a large Cathedral a big religious building to which people would go for special ceremonies to do that worship stuff it was only when I lived in Jerusalem myself for three months and was staying at the Anglican Cathedral up the road from the old city where day by day we were saying the Psalms in our worship that I realized what it actually meant because it's there in the Psalms you're actually saying that the creator of the universe has chosen for reasons best known to himself to take up permanent residence on this little Hill just down the road this is an incarnation 'el symbol right there and generations of biblical scholars and other readers have missed it Jesus action in the temple when he went in and drove out the traders and the way he explained that action bring into sharp focus the way he was telling and living the story of Israel and the question of how he believed the kingdom of God was to be inaugurated on earth as in heaven and to understand this we have to make another trip back into Israel's scriptures again we live in a largely epicurean or at least deist world God and all that is up there and we live down here and if there is any commerce between them it's a bit odd and spooky and dodgy that's not how people in the first century thought apart from that very small number of a lead philosophers in the scriptures the creator made the world as a unified though two sided creation heaven and earth were made for one another the creation story in Genesis 1 is modeled on the construction of a temple a building where heaven and earth belong together the wilderness Tabernacle in Exodus was then a small working model of the whole creation with Aaron the high priest taking the role of Adam and Eve in the original creation the divine image bearers and when Solomon constructed the first jerusalem temple it too was a microcosm a small working model of the whole heaven and earth creation with kings and priests as the image bearers most people never think of israel's temple like that and that's one reason we don't understand Jesus the Jerusalem Temple you see always was a sign of the divine intention to renew the whole creation it stood at the heart of Israel's national life as a sign that Israel was the bearer of this promise for the whole world but remember what had happened before in the time of Jeremiah the symbol had been turned outside in the temple have been seen as a good-luck charm as a talisman an automatic guarantee of security against foreign invaders even if the people of Israel were taking no notice of it in the way that they should have done the results was destruction and exile and for Jesus to the chief priests who ran the system were worldly and wealthy and equally many would be revolutionaries bent on military violence against Rome regarded the temple as their ideological focus for that nationalist violence and though the Temple Mount still retained the sense of divine promise and presence like the Western Wall in Jerusalem still does to this day for millions of Jews there was an equally strong sense that the great promises had not been fulfilled the prophets went on promising that Yahweh would return to his temple but he hadn't done so yet Isaiah had said centuries before that Israel's God would return in plain sight and that the whole world would see it nowhere in that extended Exile does anybody say it's happened this is where the Jesus we never knew comes into sudden focus as unexpected then as now we are quite used to Jesus the ethical teacher Jesus saving souls for heaven Jesus perhaps as a social revolutionary or as I said from the other side Jesus as the Superman figure doing impossible things to prove that he's God excuse me we may not agree with any or all of these pictures but at least they're familiar and even Leonard Cohen's disturbing image of Jesus for drowning sailor is a poetic image that we can understand and relate to but Jesus as the living embodiment of Israel's returning rescuing God Jesus bringing to its climax not only Israel's history but world history this is not what we're used to and it's not what Jesus own contemporaries were expecting actually this unexpectedness provides incidentally one of the clearest signs that this story was not being invented by clever writers a generation or so later on the contrary Jesus own closest followers seemed to have taken some while to get their heads around it around what was happening and what it all meant they didn't have a template all prepared into which Jesus could just step rather Jesus burst open the existing templates and seemed to be insisting that what he was doing was the new focal point around which previous ideas had to be reorganized the kingdom of God he was saying is like this and this and this with each this indicating another extraordinary thing the healing of a crippled woman the raising of a dead girl the shameless party with the down-and-outs and the riffraff the extraordinary catch of fish all accompanied by small glittering stories which broke open the existing models of what it might look like when God came back to become King and created a fresh imaginative world into which his hearers were invited to come if they dared yes a world where ashamed father welcomes home his scapegrace son a world where it's the Samaritan who shows what neighbor love would look like a world in which the seeds of the final harvest will bear a great crop but only when 3/4 of them seemed to have failed a world in which the farmer will come looking for fruit and won't find any in which the vineyard owner will send his son to get the fruit and the tenants will kill him a world in which God will become king but not the way anyone had imagined a world in which the full revelation of divine glory will not be in a blaze of light and fire coming to dwell in the existing temple but rather in a life and death of utter self giving love which for those with eyes to see would reflect the self giving love of creation itself one of the reasons why sceptical historians have so often declared that the Gospels must have been made up later is that the skeptics like many of the devout have missed the central point the story makes sense only but precisely in the first half of the first century AD and only but precisely in the Palestine where the dominant story was the return from exile the real second Exodus and the dominant symbol was the Jerusalem Temple as the micro cosmos the little world the sign of hope for all creation the place to which the Living God had promised to return in glory the sign the symbol and the promise that heaven and earth really did belong together and one day would come together completely so when Jesus did extraordinary things these powerful healings these were not 18th century-style miracles that's the problem with the word miracles that we inherit this view of a distant or absent God who might occasionally reach in and do something odd and then quickly go away again if that's what you mean by miracles the New Testament doesn't support it the miracles the mighty deeds of Jesus are deeds performed at the intersection of heaven and earth and heaven and earth were always sort of intersecting that's what temple theology is all about they are signs that heaven and earth are coming together that new creation is being launched and when Jesus came to Jerusalem finally a Passover time at Exodus time and when he declared in powerful symbol and word that he was effectively upstaging the temple that the Sun was rising and it was time to give up the flickering candles of earlier symbols he was announcing that this was how the Living God was becoming King on earth as in heaven Jesus wasn't denouncing ordinary religion and telling us we had to go to heaven instead he wasn't offering simply a new private spirituality or ethic though prayer and transformed human living follow right on from what he was actually doing jesus was unidentified by his contemporaries because he didn't fit their expectations of a messiah or of God's coming Kingdom and he is unrecognized or cut down to size harmless size in the modern Western world because we think world history reached its climax in the 18th century rather than the first and because of our split-level epicurean world where religion and Jesus with it belong up there with the irrelevant gods rather than downstairs disturbing and remaking the world around himself that's why it's been so difficult for modern Westerners to understand the real Jesus because he lived within that world of story and symbol the new Exodus the new temple which we have pushed to one side in our efforts to make him fit our models to speak to different questions different construe 'ls of the human plight but once we get inside the history then the Jesus we never knew shines through and now at last is the point at which history poses the big question to faith the question of faith will you now believe in this God and the question to faith supposing you already say you believe in God will you allow your vision of God to be reordered around this point this always was and is the question posed by the Gospels by the early Christians as they went out into the world with their unexpected and unwanted message whatever the word God has meant before they were saying think of it being reshaped around Jesus that's the challenge you can't do it the other way around you can't first sort out what you want to mean by God and then squeeze Jesus into that that's what we've often tried to do and it doesn't work the first Christians insisted you had to do it the other way around look long and hard and humbly and in awe at Jesus himself and try to think what the word God might mean if this is what it looked like when the world's creator Israel's God came back in glory to do what he'd always promised I'll be speaking more about this tomorrow night and our time now is short but let me just push the point home by saying this in Western culture people have routinely imagined that the word God is univocal that it always means the same it doesn't and never has there are various options if you ask someone in the street here in Dallas or for that matter in London if they believe in God chances are they will think of the distant God of modern Western imagining the day is God or epicurean distant aloof detached uncaring those still perhaps threatening what a bad combination in reaction to that now as in the ancient world some flirt with pantheism that there's a divine force in everything and we're all part of it but that too has little in common with the temple focus to the story shaped world of Jesus many Christians think in platonic terms of a shabby downstairs messy world of physicality and bodies and sex and politics and all that nasty stuff from which we're going to escape up into a detached heaven no wonder we never really knew Jesus even though in grace and mercy Jesus makes himself known despite our wrong ideas a mistaken imaginings but when you start with the story of the long-awaited return from exile which is also the forgiveness of sins when you start with the unfinished narrative of Yahweh and his dealings with his people when you hold in your minds the promise that when all other help fails then Israel's God will come in person to rescue and deliver and deliver and when you start with the symbol of the temple in which heaven and earth belong together as the sign of creation new creation with a human being a king a priest standing there to complete the picture then it makes sense glorious sense world shattering sense heaven and earth sense to see Jesus of Nazareth as the climax of this story the fulfillment of this symbol the embodiment of this God and the four Gospels which tell his rich powerful story are written as an invitation here they are saying is the story of the worlds true God you didn't know him but he knew you you didn't want him truth be told because he comes to wound as well as heal to warn as well as to welcome but the four Gospels tell their story and they invite you to read it and make it your own to read it prayerfully humbly wonderingly asking that your own life will be reoriented around this life this divine life this human life Jesus reaches out his hand as to a drowning child and we who feel ourselves sinking under the wisdom of the world will find that in his brokenness he will touch our brokenness that in his forsaken as' he will meet us in ours about that I shall say much more God willing tomorrow night but for now hold on to the story and the symbol and see them both reaching their fulfillment in Jesus then ask yourself if you dare what it would look like if the Jesus we never knew turned out to be the Jesus who knew us all along the Jesus who came to launch God's rescuing rule on earth as in heaven that Jesus who now loves us and calls us to follow him thank you dr. right of course is agreed to answer a few questions and there are many far more than we have time to to but thank you very much for a beginning this journey with us for the next few days with tonight's tonight's lecture it in terms of their there are many questions but and and I'm just going to go at random here as I've tried to sort them out but just to begin isn't it isn't it more important to live by Jesus's two great Commandments love God and love neighbor and not get too concerned with the rete with reconstructing the specific context of the first century world in a sense yes and it's rather like saying if you're in a family isn't it more important to make sure that the kids have some food on the table than it is to fix that problem with the drains or the leaking roof or whatever yeah let's just get the kids fed but actually the whole family is going to be happier if you fix that drain before it gets toxic and if you mend the roof before the next hurricane and when the church does its work of theology and of history and putting the two together a lot of that is fixing the drains and fixing the roof because we're always in danger of forgetting how the whole thing works to the point where if you say oh just love God and love your neighbour hang on which God are we talking about and which neighbor are we talking about so several questions in this vein and so however you would like to approach it but is there a relationship between our Western obscured vision of Jesus and the current American political situation or broader world political situation you don't have to get no I'm not asking you to get too political but no I mean absolutely and I hope you know this is it's a very serious thing because I grew up in a world where all the talk about theology happened over there and all the talk about politics happened over there and it took me years to join the two together and the only reason I did so which I was reluctant to do was because I was studying Jesus in his historical context and I just found that the two worlds did not belong apart that they did belong together in the first century which then makes you think is that our fault or were they getting it wrong or what and so I want to say yes a lot of our present puzzles are puzzles of narrative puzzles of story and I've instanced again and again in some of my recent work the problem when we had five years ago the so-called Arab Spring when all the Western leaders in your country and mine assumed that the whole world was signed up to a narrative which says what you have to do if there's a dictator or tyrant is get rid of them and then everyone will want to be nice modern liberal Western democratic people's again and we really believe that and we acted on it and we devoted billions of dollars and pounds to the pursuit of that goal and we still think like that even though the last 10 years 15 years of shonas how catastrophic be wrong that was that's why we do not now have a narrative which will explain why there are refugees washing up on our shores let alone a narrative that tells us what on earth to do about them let alone all the other things and it's we have something happened with the unlikely scene people say I'm anti-enlightenment I'm not I do not want to be operated on by a postmodern dentist or even or pointy Dupree modern one I want high modernity thank you very much in my medical technology but to think that because there were huge scientific and technological advances there for everything the 18th century said was right is just folly and you need to study the history of that because the split of theology and the real world has had these enormous impacts on our whole way of doing society globally as well as nationally I could say much more but actually I I wrote at a book not long ago called God in public it's actually a collection of essays for some reason my American publisher hasn't published it it's it's in its published in Britain you can get it on Amazon Cote UK but not on amazon.com but so there's more stuff in there understood the first century world of Jesus was much more oppressive than our context today in the Western world such as Jesus only having male disciples how do we make adjustments in Jesus teaching for our day when Jesus was raised from the dead it was the most important moment in history and one of the most important things any human being was ever called to do in history was the first person to be told to go and tell other people that Jesus had been raised from the dead that person was Mary Magdalene I think I rest my case something happens at the resurrection which is life transforming until that moment until the crucifixion the resurrection there are all sorts of things which are kind of waiting to happen and which burst upon an unready world at that point there is a real danger in imagining that ethics change with the calendar so that well they did then that stuff then we have to progress now there's a real danger in assuming a sort of ethical progress as that were all signed up to the fact that we get a little bit more whether it's liberal in our values or conservative in our values or whatever as time goes on I think we all ought to know by now that life is much more interesting actually as well as much more complicated than that so in many Protestant churches the Bible's been perceived as a prescriptive how to live life guide suggestions on ways to to help us think beyond the reductionistic Bible as a how-to manual framework yeah I'd not rather people use that the Bible as a how-to manual than all sorts of other books I can I can mention or think of um you know there's all sorts of distortions of Christianity but at least if people say their prayers and go to church then there's a chance that something is going to break through and we have cut the Bible down to size again to fit into our little ways of being and one of my sort of purposes in life so it seems is to encourage people to read the Bible big you know plenty of people in our culture read Tolkien or read the Harry Potter novels or whatever and the Bible is no bigger than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or the collection of Harry Potter novels no reason why one shouldn't get to know the plot of the Bible the characters in the Bible how the narrative plotline works out it's it's not right it'll tax you but it's not rocket science any anyone with the reasonable reading intelligence can do it and if instead you try to satisfy yourself with ten verses here and five verses there and a little maxim or reverse you learnt in Sunday school order again that's better than nothing but better than a lot of other rubbish you might might have but but no actually get the big story it means what it means within the big story what are what are areas within the historical Jesus studies for aspiring scholars students to explore apart from the current early high Christology debates that's good question I mean I've said a bit about the temple tonight biblical scholars Old Testament scholars Judaica scholars have written about the temple have said the sort of things that I was saying tonight for many years for two or three generations at least in archaeology as helped and so on most New Testament scholars have hardly begun to clue into all of that and I think there's a huge amount still waiting to be done there there is so much more to learn about the world of first century Judaism there's been great advances within the last two generations particularly but not exclusively since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and new editions of all kinds of early Jewish texts that's a wonderful wonderful work and there's there's far more to learn as a result at any point one can turn the corner and think oh my goodness maybe that was the nuance of that particular parable or whatever it is so there is always going to be more but I think particularly by understanding the centrality of the temple and what the temple actually meant as the microcosm the promise of new creation I think we were only just on the edge of beginning to figure all that out this question has been reading Bart's epistle to the Romans and he speaks of the intersection of heaven and earth as well but I'm this questioner struggling with my comprehension of this would you give just a little more insight into this idea at the intersection of heaven oh if you had nice little questions we'll do that that's right three three o'clock in the morning on my body look we have until 9:00 p.m. um of course the big questions of Theology all swirl around this and what carbot was doing in his commentary on the romans which was one of the great books of the early 20th century was reacting against the easygoing liberalism of his teachers who had all cheerfully gone along with the Kaiser in the First World War etc and Bart saw that actually you had to be able to hear a fresh word from God especially when that word was no you know if you think you can read off divine purposes by just looking and seeing what is going on in history then you are grievously mistaken and we'll run into great trouble Bart already saw that in 1918 and went on saying it through the 1930s which was why he had to leave Germany in a hurry and go back to his native Switzerland but it seems to me that what he what he didn't get certainly there and I'm not sure even in the church dogmatics not that I've read every volume of the church dogmatics certain number of and was was this sense again of the eschatological narrative of Israel of the story which was going towards a climax which was returned from exile new Exodus and also of the centrality of that symbol because I think if you see that then you see Jesus at the middle of a reconstructed cosmology as it were that you're learning cosmology from Jesus there when you do that you realize that it is in fact the thing that the Old Testament have been pointed to all along I think Bart would have liked that actually I think you would have resonated with that it's hard to channel the great master from Basel of this distance but we are doing you mentioned that Jesus Seminar earlier in the lecture and and the Jesus Seminar claims that there's very little we can know of what Jesus actually said what would you expand on what your take of this is and a little risky yeah if anyone wants more detail I have written quite a lot about this about 20 years ago when it was at its height in my book Jesus in the victory of God there's a whole section on that and one or two ancillary articles it was it was basically a high modernist project on the assumption that you could feed data into a kind of neutral detached system which would spit out authentic historical answers and of course that's not how history works it's not how the study of the past works history works by telling stories by hypothesis and verification by looking at the big picture as well as the little pictures and the original leaders of the Jesus Seminar particularly Robert funk who's now dead but was that was the Guru behind it all he had very much a high modernist methodology as well as a high modernist desired conclusion he knew what he wanted to find about Jesus so he filtered the sayings to fit with that and also it has to be said and this is you know this is not as not a put-down because I had several good friends in the Jesus Seminar Tom cross is a good friend Walter wink the late water wink was in the Jesus Seminar Marcus Borg close friend of mine again now late sadly so I knew these guys quite well but most of the leading American Jesus scholars did not join in ed Saunders didn't join in Jim Charlesworth didn't join in JP Meyer didn't join in you know the the the real big names of North American biblical scholarship right across the board Christian atheist agnostic Jewish etc they didn't go along with it because they could see that it was actually rather a significantly flawed project which I think has now run its course what's one last question I'm going to ask priscilla pope Levison to join me on stage and she's going to actually close the lecture if we'd all remain seated while she does that and then at the right time we want to certainly give you a thank you but this last question how specifically does our culture warp the historic historical view of Jesus into a postmodern version of Christ just some specific examples in that regard well in in movies and books so where Jesus figures then there are many many distortions and so on and I quoted Leonard Cohen's poem and obviously some of the things he's saying if you take it as though it's a literal theological statement or something then it doesn't work but you can see I think what he's doing with the poetic imagery like you can with say TS Eliot in some of his work and so on it seems to me the biggest distortion of all is this chronological eschatological one that the Western world is the world I grew up in the world I just instinctively lapse back into if I if I don't catch myself we really do believe that world history reached its climax when we the modern West were born out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century so everything that came before was kind of superstition or they didn't quite get it and we now know how things should be that's been an amazing dream which we've been able to live on for two-and-a-half centuries but we are now ourselves paying the price and we are realizing the rest of the world has had to pay the price all along that's a very serious thing and the reason I said is this that if you think world history reached its climax in say the 1770s or or whenever then you cannot imagine that world history reached its climax when Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross and was raised again three days later but the New Testament says that that is the truth rather than the modernist claim and the problem with post modernity is that it sees that the arrogance of modernity but it hasn't got anything to put in its place so all post modernity can do is to play it plays with floating signifiers it plays with Jesus images so that you can reconstruct I'm going to the SBL conference in San Antonio next weekend and there will be a thousand different Jesus images literally playing around seminars and lectures and so on fine we maybe have to do that but we're playing on we're dancing on the edge of a volcano here and the thing about post modernity is basically preaching the doctrine of the fall saying too arrogant modernity all your righteousness is like filthy rags but it's one thing to preach the fall it's a good thing if you've got a gospel to preach afterwards and post modernity has no gospel because ultimately you just look inside yourself there's nothing there but that doesn't mean you can run back to modernity it means you have to go back and say wait a minute maybe world history really did reach its climax with Jesus himself so dr. right many many months ago Priscilla Pope Levison had a dream and a vision that you would be on the stage of McFarland Auditorium where indeed Martin Luther King actually even spoke and that you would be able to share with the Perkins community the SMU community the Dallas community what you've shared tonight in will the next few days and so I know she wants to join me and all of us want to join in thanking you and she'll close our time but let's thank dr. Wright you

Channel: The Narrow Gate

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Keywords: Jesus, Satan, Sin, God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, Bible, Christian, The Gospel, Truth, Lord, Salvation, The Word, Preaching, Study, Sermon, The Father, Faith, Hope, Love, Apostle, Disciples, Heaven, Hell, Demons, Angels, Prophets, Saints, The Cross, Calvary, Crucified, Born Again, Scripture, Prophecy, Holy, Justification, Sanctification, Regeneration, Soul, Church, The Blood, Prayer, New Covenant, Grace, Christianity, Martyr, Pastor, Messiah, Savior, Atonement, PRAYER, repent, N.T. Wright

Id: AbFxzrLt97w

Length: 76min 19sec (4579 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2016