This week I continue in The New Testament and the People of God with chapter 8 (pp. 215-43) as Wright discusses the elements of Israel’s worldview. As he noted in chapter 3, worldviews are visible through story, symbol, and praxis, and it is on these three areas that he narrows the focus.
The great story of Scripture was of creation, fall, and redemption. Abraham’s call was seen as the solution to Adam’s sin—all nations would be blessed through the descendants of Abraham. But things did not go so well. The book of Judges provides a glimpse of the problems. David seems to be the new solution, but he and his descendants don’t do so well either. Israel is finally taken into exile, then returned to the land, but under foreign rulers. “The great story of the Hebrew Scriptures was therefore inevitably read in the second-temple period as a story in search of a conclusion.” (p. 217) To put it in current context, it is as if the stories (and movies) Lord of the Rings and Two Towers were written and made, but Return of the King didn’t exist! We would expect there to be a finale, something that actually completed the story! So did the second-temple Israelites.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the diversities of Judaism were the views of what needed to happen to ensure God’s people were ready for the story fulfillment (separation, greater Torah faithfulness, military resistance, etc). Second temple Jews told themselves stories not only of how they got here, but where they were going. Wright expands on this beautifully, “In helping us to understand how the first-century Jewish worldview functioned, and how the biblical stories which reinforced it would have been heard, it also gives us a grid against which we can measure the alternative stories told, implicitly and explicitly, by Jesus, Paul and the evangelists, and to see their points of convergence and divergence.” (p. 223, my emphasis) This was a key understanding for me.
The second element of a worldview is symbol, visible through temple, land, Torah, racial identity (p. 224). Wright notes that the temple was 25% of the city of Jerusalem (p. 225)! For the Jew, the temple was critical. God had promised Abraham a land and at the present, Israel was in the land, but it was ruled by the Romans. The covenant made with Israel, the Torah, was the guidelines and rules to follow. And the Jews were a distinct people; indeed, you see that Samaritans were despised because they had intermarried with other peoples.
The third element of a worldview is praxis, or the actions. Festivals, studying the Scriptures, circumcision, Sabbath, and kosher laws were the activities (or refraining from) practiced in the outworking of this unique people. These helped set them apart, and provided a continual reminder of who they were. Wright sums up the importance of these practices by noting that “maintaining the marks of Jewish distinctiveness was quite simply non-negotiable.” (p. 238)
Finally, “the prevailing second-temple belief that the real return from exile had not yet occurred… the entire story… [was] the still unfinished story of the creator, the covenant people, and the world.” (p. 242) This was the expectation in the first century. This was what the scribes and Pharisees searched the Scriptures for. We are the people of God, in exile, waiting for Him to save us. What must we do? When will this occur?
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