Reading Wright, NTPG, Parts 1-2 Summary

Before continuing to the next chapter in The New Testament and the People of God, I want to summarize my thoughts on the first two parts of this book (Chapters 1-5, pp 1-144). These chapters represent Wright's epistemology; reading with a critical realist eye, taking a both/and approach to many of the typically either/or debates. In my comments on the first chapter, I briefly mentioned the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern periods. Painting with very broad brush strokes, I want to illustrate the foundational epistemology of each (specifically in reference to areas of the New Testament: history, literature, theology).

In the pre-modern period, especially after the first century and those who received the New Testament, the Bible was knowable because of authority; that is, God had spoken it, He speaks truth, therefore, it is known. Some might call this knowledge through revelation. In classic Christianity, it was faith seeking understanding.

The modern period moved the basis of authority and knowledge from revelation (God has spoken) to rationality; Descartes "I think, therefore I am." The rise of the critical disciplines came and much of the Bible was questioned, some of the traditional interpretations were thrown out because the interpretation did not pass rational muster. In a way, the classic Christian model was reversed: now understanding was seeking faith. Yet some of this was good and necessary. To quote Wright, "Christians have often imagined that they were defending Christianity when resisting the Enlightenment's [Modern] attacks; but it is equally plausible to suggest that what would-be orthodox Christianity was defending was often the pre-Enlightenment worldview, which was itself no more specifically 'Christian' than any other." (p 9) 

We arrive at post-modernism and rationality is thrown out! What's left? The Self. Knowledge is now limited by one's experience and (in the radical view) cannot be shared among others. It is a hyper-empirical model. Authority and knowledge now rest in the self. "My truth, your truth, no absolute truth." Reading becomes reduced entirely to how it impacts me. It seems to me that the post-modern epistemology is self-defeating. Taken to its 'logical' conclusion (you can see how even the idea of logic in a post-modern view can't even make sense), nothing can be known or communicated. History is unknowable.

What Wright does with his both/and approach is attempt to take the wheat from each of these models, while discarding the chaff. One of the reactions of Christianity to the modern period was to double down on traditional interpretations, some of which needed to be abandoned. Unfortunately, Christianity has tended to get its interpretations mixed into its view of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. Not to mention a lack of nuance of exactly what it means by those terms. The interpretation is not inspired or inerrant! Nor does inerrancy equal literal interpretation.

The following is my reading of the wheat/chaff in these early chapters by era (quite likely I have some categories mixed):

	Wheat	Chaff
Pre-Modern	Scripture speaks truthfully of God (p 128)	Interpretation by authority (p 7) History cannot question faith (p 9)
Modern	Reading the Bible historically (critically; p 60)	Separation of supernatural and rational/natural (p 10, 97)
Post-Modern	Rejection of positivism (hardline objective/subjective distinctions, p 97) Emphasis on narrative (p 38)	History is unknowable (p 54) Reading as only phenomenon (self-centered; p 59) Rejection of revelation (p 128)

An author, even a post-modern one, intends to communicate something to the reader, with the intent of changing or informing the reader. The best way to understand what is being communicated (especially in the area of the NT) is to become more aware of the author's worldview and that of the intended audience and see where it differs. What the New Testament authors are ultimately communicating is either a new or modified worldview to the reader--what God started with Abraham He has completed in Jesus. To the Jew, this is a modification. To the Greek, this is new. The goal is to change the reader's worldview, to begin to see the world through Jesus as Messiah. And so we must enter the world of the first century, which is where the next chapters will take us.

Reading Wright, NTPG, Chapter 5

I continue reading The New Testament and the People of God in chapter 5 (pp 121-144), on theology, authority, and the New Testament. This is the final chapter in the first part of this book, where he is laying out his epistemology for his entire multi-volume work. I think in this chapter what he is addressing is an objection (among the many) that the New Testament does theology, not objective history; he is attempting to demonstrate why all of these things (literature, history, theology) come together in the New Testament. He does this by taking the reader on a deeper dive into what constitutes a worldview.

Wright opens the chapter by hoping he has made the reader aware there is no such thing as 'objective history.' All history is written in a time, place, culture, and within its author's worldview. History is always selected and interpreted. This does not make it right or wrong; but it does communicate something to us (ie, why this and not that). And the more we are aware of the worldview of the author (and our own), the more we will be able to better understand what is being communicated.

Wright argues that worldview can be seen in the four elements of what it does (pp 123-4): it provides stories through which human beings view reality which provide answers to the basic questions of human existence expressed through cultural symbols and which is visible in the way people act (praxis). I didn't discuss his four basic questions of human existence when first introduced, but he goes through them again in this chapter (pp 132-3): who are we; where are we; what is wrong; what is the solution? We are story-telling beings, so it is natural that we would express answers to our basic questions in the form of stories. We are embodied beings, so it is to be expected that our answers will be expressed in physical, symbolic forms and acted out/upon. As an example, in first century Israel Passover was a powerful symbol that was acted out in the Passover meal as the story was retold of God's salvation from Egypt because He had chosen them as His people.

Worldviews, through which we view the world, are seen in basic beliefs and aims which then give rise to consequent beliefs and intentions (p 125-26). Wrights suggests that most conversation occurs at the level of consequent beliefs while the basic beliefs and worldview assumptions remain unspoken. Thus, one of the tasks of Wright is to peel back and expose the basic beliefs and worldview elements of the first century in order to better understand some of the 'surface' of the New Testament.

What then is the function of theology? Wright argues that "theology highlights what we might call the god-dimension of a worldview" (p 130). Unfortunately, and I am guilty of this, we should not separate Christian theology from its underlying worldview and stories to make it serve a truncated purpose of answering dogmatic or abstract questions.

Wright sums up, "The Christian reader of the New Testament is committed to a task which includes within itself 'early Christian history' and 'New Testament theology', while showing that neither of these tasks... can be self-sufficient. And this fuller reading... includes as one vital part of itself the task of telling the story of Jesus, with the assumption that this story took place within public history." (p 139) In short, combining literature, history, and theology.

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Reading Wright, NTPG, Chapter 4

I continue reading The New Testament and the People of God in chapter 4 (pp 81-120), on history and the first century. Yet again, I find myself having made simplistic assumptions about the nature of history and access to the historical record that need refinement and Wright provides assistance in revisiting (and revising) these assumptions.

History is not, as I had thought, simply an objective report of the facts. All history involves selection and interpretation into narration (83). This is, upon reflection, rather obvious, even in how one reports events in one's own life. I do not (and can not) report every detail--colors, objects, and most events are selectively eliminated. If I tell a story about going to the grocery store, I will avoid describing every car in the lot, every stop sign, tree, and basket I come across (lest I drive away the listener). Thus, Wright defines history as "the meaningful narrative of events and intentions." (82) The selection and interpretation embedded and communicated in the story is exactly what history is, not a reason to reject it. The author's bias is no reason to reject the story as it is reported (89).

One of the big issues in New Testament studies is that the stories contain reports of events that to the modern mind are impossible (miracles). Wrights counters that "one cannot rule out a priori the possibility of things occurring in ways not normally expected, since to do so would be to begin from the fixed point that a particular worldview, namely the eighteenth-century rationalist one, or its twentieth-century positivist successor, is correct in postulating that the universe is simply a 'closed continuum' of cause and effect." (92) I'll put it a different way. The writers of the New Testament intended to change the reader's worldview! Trying to fit Jesus into the "good teacher" straight-jacket fails to account for the majority of the New Testament data. This brings us to Wright's three-point suggestion for a good hypothesis.

A good hypothesis is one that includes the data, constructs a simple and coherent picture, and assists in explaining other problems (99-100). Wright traces examples of theories which satisfy the second while failing badly at the first (like the 'good teacher' hypothesis). We must be careful in our reading of history and the criteria that we use as we read. Wright argues, "If the controlling criterion for a particular story is its ability to legitimate a particular stance, whether Christian or not, we have collapsed the epistemology once more in the opposite direction, that of phenomenalism. The historical evidence is only to be used provided it functions as a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we wanted to see ourselves." (103, emphasis original) Wright argues that both the fundamentalist and the secular scholar have read parts of Jesus the way they wanted him to be (or not to be), failing to either account for all the data, or failing to provide a coherent picture. This is a danger in any historical reading. Part of the critical realist approach is a spiral of hypothesis and verification with the text and other historical sources. A great example of this, to be discussed in the future, is the whole debate around the New Perspective on Paul. Much of the debate surrounds reading the sixteenth century Luther-Catholic debate of faith-works back into the first century of Paul's writings. To provide a very silly analogy, we would never think that had Lincoln encouraged Grant to beat the South by any means necessary, it would have been an authorization to use nuclear weapons--those didn't exist in the nineteenth century!

Wright then discusses the relationship between history and meaning, and in particular, that it is possible to get to a certain set of meanings even with the historical method (ie, the 'why')! Some might argue that historical knowledge is limited only to the event itself and any other discussion moves into the area of psychology. On the contrary, Wright says, "History, then, includes the study of aims, intentions, and motivations. This does not mean that history is covert psychology." (111) In other words, we don't need to ask Jesus to lay down on the therapist's couch to determine his intention in telling the story of the Good Samaritan to a Jewish audience (modifying Wright's imagery on 116). At a minimum, we can certainly say what his intentions were not (winning more Jewish friends, for example). Ultimately, the meaning of an event may impact and change the hearer's worldview (117). As suggested earlier, this is precisely what the authors of the New Testament authors intend.

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Reading Wright, NTPG, Chapter 3

This week continues The New Testament and the People of God in chapter 3 (pp 47-80), on literature, story, and worldview. There is quite a bit covered in this chapter and is setting up more of the 'ground rules' by which Wright will do his reading of the New Testament.

Since most history comes via literature, Wright begins by describing some of the ways of reading literature and how history is reported. I found this discussion helpful and it builds on his discussion of objective/subjective in the previous chapter. A naïve view of history is that the author is simply reporting the events of the past and you as the reader have direct access through this 'report' to the events (p 82). But, applying a critical lens should allow us to see that direct objective history ("just the facts, Ma'am") is not possible--an author will select and describe scenes, activity, and stories. To use an analogy of Dr. Bock's, there are multiple cameras at sporting events, each providing a different angle of the event. The angle itself determines what is visible ('selected') and what is not. Reading critically is understanding that the historical reporting is a selected (sometimes biased, inaccurate, false) report.

However, a post-modern, to my surprise, takes this to an extreme with a 'phenomenalist reading' of a text--the only thing that matters (and is knowable) is what the text means to me; everything else is unreachable. Yet I hear (and have said) this very thing frequently stated in Bible studies, "What this passage says/means to me..." The church has swallowed the culture. The intention of the author, the original culture, the meaning of the words in their context don't matter (or are unknowable); only the present 'phenomenon' of the text and me is meaningful at the moment. This, of course, means that everyone will construct their own meaning, no meaning is "right or wrong," allows the reader to throw away anything that offends, and ultimately, it prevents any possibility of accessing the past.

Wright advocates instead for a critical realistic reading (pp 61-4), where both the impact on the reader is acknowledged and the text as its own thing is recognized. The author wrote with the intent of communicating something; it is possible to access that (usually), but with caution, recognizing that the author may have lied, misreported, misunderstood, etc. In other words, we read critically but realistically. We also read understanding that such activity impacts us as readers--we might have our minds, or better yet, our worldviews changed! "I suggest that human writing is best conceived as the articulation of worldviews, or, better still, the telling of stories which bring worldviews into articulation." (p 65, emphasis original) You might begin to wonder if Wright is going to suggest that the purpose of the New Testament authors was to alter the reader's worldview(s). Absolutely!

Wright then moves on to a narrative analysis that I have found both delightful and very helpful, worked out by an A.J. Griemas (pp 69-77). It divides stories into three sequences and there is a careful format that is followed to expose the story form. One has to wonder what kind of tedious new diagramming technique these scholars are inventing, but there is a point! Often stories become so familiar we lose the essential emphasis of the story itself and this level of analysis allows us to identify it again. He takes the reader through the story of Little Red Riding-Hood and then turns to the parable of the vineyard (Mk. 12:1-12; pp 74-5). The jaw-dropping story point is that God will use Rome to judge the Jewish people for their failure to be the people God intended them to be! Talk about shaking up a first-century Jewish worldview. Jesus takes the story of Israel and redraws it (with himself at the center); Paul will redraw the Jewish story around Jesus (p 79). Wright finds the narrative analysis helpful in bringing this out more clearly and I found it very helpful throughout his work. 

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