In a prior post I mentioned that I have been listening a bit to N. T. Wright and now I am starting to read him. I have begun reading "The Challenge of Jesus." I have to say that I really enjoy listening to Wright. There is something about that British accent that grabs the attention of this American. But I think my enjoyment of him goes much deeper than just the accent, he has a wonderful way of communicating substantive comment in an understandable manner.
Having just begun the book I would say the same about his writing style. If this book is any indication of his other writing, he is very engaging. He communicates substance with style, shall I say. His writing is erudite, yet clear.
One thing that is not so clear to me, and I think to some others, is his view of Jesus' self-understanding. He has a chapter in the book on Jesus and God in which he deals with Jesus self-understanding by answering two questions - 1) Was Jesus God? and 2) Did he know he was God, and if so, in what way?
With that as an intro I'd like to take the rest of the post to process a few of my own thoughts showing where I think Wright is helpful and where his views are problematic. Any insight from friends and foes of Wright would be much appreciated.
I'll begin by sharing where I think he is helpful, or at least not heretical.
Wright seems to think that we start in the wrong place when we talk about God. He thinks we tend to bring a preconcevied view of who God is into our study of the Bible in general and Jesus in particular and then seek to fit Jesus into that. He thinks we ought to go the other way around. We need to look at the history of Israel and their understanding of God, and look at the man Jesus, and extrapolate from those back to an understanding of who God is.
He didn't say it this way but I think he might agree with this summary of what he seems to believe. If you were to ask the first century Jewish man on the street who is God, that man probably wouldn't answer "God is God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth."
Of course all of that is true, and those words, which for the uninitiated are taken from the Westminster Shorter Catechism question #4 are properly deduced from Scripture, but this is not what was in the mind of the first century Israelite.
The people of Israel viewed God through the lens of creation and covenant. If you asked them who God is they would answer that He is the one who created the world and all that is in it and who chose Israel to be His people. In other words, they would define God in terms of His great works and His covenantal relationship to the people of Israel.
That is an insight I find very helpful. It does not negate the truth of the shorter catechism's statement, yet it sets a helpful trajectory for us as Christians as we develop our understanding of what it means to be the new covenant people of God.
Also, one frustration I have with Wright is that he can be clear and brilliant on many things, providing many eye-opening "aha!" type insights, yet there are times he can be downright confusing. On some matters he writes quite elliptically, not getting to the point I want him to get to. To me that comes out the most in his views of Jesus self-understanding. Yet, I do think on the question of "was Jesus God," we can safely say that his views are orthodox (I know, I know, Wright will breathe a sign of relief when he finds out that I have graciously pronounced him orthodox). On that question Wright gives what I believe is a good answer:
In Jesus himself, I suggest, we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Is 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could doo; the creator God, giving new life; the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures; the faithful God, dwelling in the midst of his people; the stern and tender God, relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation nd especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress. "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall carry the lambs in in his arms; and gently lead those that are with young" (Is 40:11). It is the Old Testament portrait of YHWH, but it fits Jesus like a glove. (Challenge of Jesus, p. 121)
Obviously, the language here isn't creedal or confessional, but it is clearly biblical and I do think Wright identifies Jesus with YHWH strongly enough here that creedalists and confessionalists ought to recognize at least this statement as orthodox.
I am jumping on that for now because some of his other statements on the self-understanding of Jesus are muddier. And in our present climate where the hermeneutics of suspicion seem to rule, muddiness is often equated with heresy. I also want to be careful that Wright not fall victim to guilt by association. A long time ago in a blogging galaxy far, far away, an emergent leader was discussing why some emergents might be sympathetic to Arianism and Wright's name came up:
1. The work of theologians such as NT Wright has encouraged the emerging church to relocate Jesus in a plausible historical context. Inevitably this has brought the human, Jewish Jesus sharply back into focus and has raised again the question of how we make the lengthy theological transition from apocalyptic prophet to second person of the trinity. As we come to understand more fully the worldview and motivation of Jesus the Jew, it becomes harder to think of him as somehow almighty God in human form. I recognize that to some extent this shift of emphasis is offset by more recent interest in relationality and community within the trinity (see this discussion).
Wright does indeed keep the human, Jewish Jesus in sharp focus in his writing and speaking, but his discussion of Jesus is highly nuanced. If there are those who are reading Wright who are dabbling with Arianism, I would hope that, absent direct evidence from his own body of work, that he not be mindlessly linked to them.
Which brings us to Wright's muddy waters. If Wright's view that Jesus is God is orthodox, his view on Jesus self-understanding is confusing at best to me, and problematic at worst. In the paragraph after the one I just quoted by Wright, he says this:
Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying. I do not think Jesus "knew he was God" in the same way that one knows one is hungry or thirsty, tall or short. It was not a mathematical knowledge, like knowing that two and two make four; nor was it straightforwardly observational knowledge, like knowing that there is a bird on the fence outside my room because I can see and hear it. It was more like the knowledge that I have that I am loved by my family and closest friends; like the knowledge that I have that sunrise over the sea is awesome and beautiful; like the knowledge of the musician not only of what the composer intended but of how precisely to perform the piece in exactly that way - a knowledge most securely possessed, of course, when the performer is also the composer. It was, in short, the knowledge that characterizes vocation. As I have put it elsewhere "As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which only Scripture and YHWH himself could do and be.
That reads like something I have heard him say in various talks and I have to confess that, having now read it several times and typed it out, I am still confused by the whole thing and am trying to unpack it.
A few thoughts come to mind here. If Wright is implying that there is some sense in which Jesus' knowledge and understanding were limited during His earthly sojourn, that is not, in and of itself, problematic. Philippians 2:5-9 speaks of the self-limiting nature of the incarnation. Matthew 24:36 and Mark 13:32 speak of the fact that Jesus doesn't know the day or hour the events he has just spoken of will occur. Luke 2:52 speaks of Jesus growth in wisdom, which implies a limitation of wisdom.
Similarly, Wright implies that there is a distinction between the thoughts of the Father and the thoughts of the Son. In other words, we might want to consider whether, during His earthly sojourn, Jesus always knew what the Father was thinking as the Father was thinking it. The above Scriptures suggest He did not.
I would even be willing to concede that, whenever and however Jesus thought of Himself as God, He wasn't reciting the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds in His head.
So, cutting all that slack, Wright's statement just seems to weak to me and the analogies don't seem on point. Wright asserts that Jesus didn't know Himself to be God in a mathematical or observational sense, yet I couldn't discern an argument that backed up the assertion. BTW, I don't think Jesus needed a mathematical or observational kind of knowing to know He was God, I just think Wright may be throwing a straw man out there as I have never heard anyone speak of Jesus' self-understanding in those terms.
It is this idea that Jesus knew Himself to be God as a matter of vocation that is troubling to me. I appreciate Wright bringing vocation into the discussion, but it seems to me that there is a way of knowing one's identity that either transcends or is distinct from one's vocation. I know I am a human being in a different way than I know what my vocation as a human being is. I am not arguing that Jesus didn't know the vocation to which He was called, I am arguing that He has to have known He was God in a way that preceded, transcended, or stood distinct from His knowledge of His vocation.
For example, it is hard for me to imagine that the apostle John knew of Jesus' pre-existence, as he wrote about in John 1:1-3, and Jesus didn't. It seems to me that Jesus would have to have been the one to have told John of that, and thus we would have to assume that, during His earthly sojourn, He knew of His pre-existence. This seems to me to be a kind of knowedge that would transcend the "knowledge of vocation."
Anyway, I am getting a headache thinking about all of this and trying to sort it out, so I am going to start bringing this post in for a landing. I hope I have conveyed that there is great value in reading Wright, and even when you don't agree with him, he brings up things that are worth wrestling through. On this last item though, that Jesus knew of His divinity as a matter of vocation, it seems to me that Wright is in error, that his views could lead to other errors, or that his thoughts in this book are simply incomplete and expounded elsewhere. I don't offer that as some kind of judgment on him or his work, I know he has written a good deal more which may or may not clarify things. And I know there are others who know his work better than I who may be able to leave some comments which may clear up my confusion.
Having said that, Wright is very concerned, rightly I believe, with the human Jesus. He thinks many of us have a gnostic/docetic view of Jesus that doesn't give full weight to His humanity. Fair enough, but if Docetism is the error on the one side, Arianism is the error on the other side, not giving full weight to His deity. As I said, I don't think he is Arian and I'd be willing to defend him against the charge, at least based on what I've read so far. Yet if some of us inadvertently lean toward or open doors to docetism, it seems to me that Wright's thoughts on Jesus self-understanding inadvertently leans toward or opens doors to Arianism.
I think what Wright was getting at is the distinction between knowing how (to do something) versus knowing that (a statement is true) (a common distinction in philosophy). Someone with no language ability could know how to reliably spot red without knowing that that color is red. Someone could be a whiz with fixing cars but not be able to explain how they do it. (btw, I'm not saying I agree with Wright).
Posted by: mark steen | July 20, 2006 at 10:03 AM
Hey David,
I really have had a lot of similar thoughts in reading Wright. I've read "The Challenge of Jesus", NTPG, JVG, "Simply Christian", and listened to all the audio at the N. T. Wright page. I absolutely love his work.
What you outline above is indeed what I myself find most puzzling. I do have one thought to bring to the table though. It might not totally clarify things, but perhaps it will give the mud a runnier consistancy, rather than the thick gloppy soupy mud you currently have.
Bascially, Wright is saying all this within the context of modern New Testament scholarship. People have been saying that this whole Christology stuff - gods impregnating people, god becoming man, etc - can't possibly have anything to do with the historical Jesus, because 1st century Jews didn't think like that. That's all greco-roman pagan stuff, so it must have been added on later. It would be unthinkable for a 1st century Jew for the thought "hello, I'm YHWH" to enter their mind - any more than we would think "maybe I'm actually the embodiment of the Edinburough Castle". It's just not the way they thought about YHWH - whereas pagans might think that way about their gods.
Contra this, Wright is showing a way of thinking that could exist in this first century Jewish worldview - this category of vocation that, while shocking and dangerous, is at least coherent in that culture.
But it is still rather difficult to understand, particularly for someone like me who isn't immersed in modern NT scholarship. I think he needs to address this better for this audience. Once I feel like I can really understand what he is saying, I can decide how much I am willing to agree with him. As it is, on the issue of Jesus self understanding, I think he's got something good to say, but he's also raising some red flags for me.
Posted by: Wonders For Oyarsa | July 20, 2006 at 10:36 AM
The question is not whether we can come up with an account of Jesus' self-understanding that fits with the limited conceptual scheme of 1st century Judaism. It's whether the biblical texts' presentation of Jesus' self-understanding is the sort of thing that would fit with the limited conceptual scheme of 1st century Judaism. I think the answer to that question is a clear no. Jesus was consistently challenging exactly the conceptual scheme that Wright is trying to fit Jesus' own self-understanding into. That doesn't seem to me to be a reasonable method of interpreting the texts.
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | July 20, 2006 at 11:15 AM
Hi David,
I agree that NTW has been hard to follow at this point and it has resulted in a lot or criticism. I'm not sure I completely grasp his point let alone agree with it.
A few months ago Joel Garver had a helpful blog post regarding this: http://tinyurl.com/96l2d
Posted by: Wayne | July 20, 2006 at 12:05 PM
Wayne - Joel's post was very helpful - thanks for the link.
Jeremy and Wonders - your comments get at an important point in this discussion. I think Wonders is correct. Wright doesn't share our American, conservative, evangelical background - he is neck deep in critical NT scholarship and we can't expect him to speak "our" language. I get the impression that he is a raging conservative in his own world. Wonders points out that Wright seems to be creating a plausibility structure whereby the modern NT critical scholar can conceive of Jesus as divine.
To me this helps understand why he is so confusing. It also gives me pause to be careful about embracing him whole hog. He has his own pressupositions in this discussion and we have to be careful.
Still, Jeremy, I wonder if you are still around if you could flesh out your point more. Why is it a clear no, that Jesus conceptual scheme wouldn't fit the limited the limited conceptual scheme of first century Judaism?
I may be able to answer my own question here (partially to my own satisfaction though maybe not to yours). On the one hand I would disagree with you and say that Wright has gone to great lengths in many ways to show how Jesus' understanding of his role as YHWH incarnate and Messiah directly contradict the first century conceptual scheme of Judaism.
On the other hand I think you are right and that Wright shoots himself badly in the foot here by not giving a better account of Jesus' divinity, particularly in reference to His transcendence. The more I think of it, at least in this section, Wright seems to make Jesus' divinity captive to his humanity.
Anyway, just some ramblings, I'd appreciate any comebacks that can be provided.
Posted by: David Wayne | July 20, 2006 at 12:47 PM
I'm afraid that I have to disagree with Jeremy here. First of all, just theologically speaking, God has spent the entire Old Testament developing a specific contextual scheme in which to reveal himself. First century Judaism isn't just any culture, as if Jesus could have been born as anything at any time. No, it is the culture of the covenant people of God, whose stories, practices, beliefs, questions, longings, etc. have all been shaped by generation upon generation of striving with God.
Now, Jesus did indeed challenge the messianic hopes and vocational understanding of Israel. This is clear. But this is different than not fitting into the contextual scheme altogether. Jesus said "the kingdom IS coming, but it wont look like what you think" - but he didn't say something like "it's not about a kingdom, it's about quantum physics". What I mean is, while he radically challenged things, he didn't do so from an alien worldview. He did so from within that very worldview that God had been shaping for so long.
Perhaps this is why Wright harps on this so much - to truly believe in the incarnation, he proposes we need to see Jesus as fully human - and culture and worldview are part of what it means to be human. So, in principle, I think he's not unreasonable in his goals here, as Jeremy suggests.
Posted by: Wonders For Oyarsa | July 20, 2006 at 01:22 PM
David,
Try reading Wright's paper Jesus and the Identity of God. It does a better job of explaining the stuff we are talking about here. This is part of what is driving him:
Thinking about what we normally consider orthodoxy, the Apollinarian shoe actually fits rather well. I wonder if in the end I'm going to have to jump on Wright's bandwagon here.
Posted by: Wonders For Oyarsa | July 22, 2006 at 09:43 AM
Hi, I've thought for some time whether or not to comment on this post. I gather from other things you've said that you've listened to some of the audio of N.T. Wright as well. And you could not have missed his 1999 series on Jesus that builds this perspective in layers. Therefore, the confusion must flow from the fact that what is glaringly obvious to me is less so to others.
There is always a tension between our understanding of the humanity of Jesus and his divinity. Not only is there a tendency to give more emphasis to one or another, there is also a tendency to try to make Jesus half one and half the other. And that's not correct. Though it remains something of a mystery, we must confess that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. At the same time.
And thus we move to Jesus' self-knowledge. From my understanding of N.T. Wright, he is stating that Jesus had a deep and abiding sense that he was to embody the return of Yahweh to Zion, that he was to embody the fulfillment of so much that had been prophesied. But he did not and could not have had the sort of certain, forensic knowledge with which we often characterize him (and thus come dangerously close to a docetic perspective).
Rather, he believed and trusted in that truth as we do. He trusted the Father. There is no other way to make sense of Gethsemane. Jesus' full humanity and his recapitulation of the life we should have led (in Adam) and the life Israel should have led, demanded that he accomplish our central failing. The root of sin, I believe, lies in our failure to trust God in the face of uncertainty and doubt. Our, indeed, our failure to trust him at all. If Jesus did not face that temptation, then there is no way that he was tempted in every way in which we are tempted. For that lies at the core of our temptation. Do we trust God in the face of our incomplete knowledge, or do we not? And Jesus clearly did.
So he had the deep, abiding sense of vocation or calling of the Father. But he lacked the forensic certainty that we ascribe to 'knowledge'. That's the spot it strikes me that Wright is trying to reach.
Posted by: Scott M | July 22, 2006 at 06:06 PM
What I am saying is plainly taught in the gospels. It's surely true that they had the resources to understand more of what Jesus was revealing than they did understand, but the fact is that they did not have a picture of what the Messiah would be that fully captured what the prophecies conveyed. They did not understand, for one thing, that his victorious kingship would be because of his suffering servanthood. They did fully grasp that he was claiming divinity, but they wrongly interpreted that as blasphemy rather than recognizing the clear implication of passages like Ezekiel 24, where Ezekiel says God himself will be their shepherd without an intermediary and then goes on to explain that there shepherd would be a son of David (and so on).
I'm not saying that there wasn't any indication in the texts they had that could in hindsight be used to see that God really had foretold this ahead of time. I'm saying that their actual picture of what the Messiah would be just didn't allow for what the Messiah actually turned out to be. I do believe that any other view flatly contradicts the gospels.
So I think Wright is making a huge mistake to insist on finding an account of Jesus' self-understanding that fits what ordinary people in Jesus' time would have grasped. Jesus clearly was not limited by the ordinary understanding of people in his time, as shown in the gospels, so why assume he was limited by it in terms of his self-understanding?
Posted by: Jeremy Pierce | July 22, 2006 at 07:27 PM
Mark, I'm not sure that Wright thinks Jesus wouldn't be able to explain it. In one of his lectures online, Wright mentions that Jesus would have read the Scriptures and discerned that YHWH, His Father, had called Him to be all Messiah was to be, most specifically His Passion. He probably could have explained it by referencing these texts. However, I would agree that there is a component of it that is intuitive and cannot be explained, not because He couldn't but because it couldn't be explained by the very nature of the knowledge. It isn't so much a matter of knowing how vs. knowing that, but it is a question of the degree of certainty on what basis.
Posted by: MWC | July 23, 2006 at 12:28 AM
It is not difficult to assess the status of Jesus while on earth once we understand the cause for which he died. This was simply to reverse all that had transpired in Eden, choose for himself those who would become the Israel of God and open the 'Way' to the Highway of Holiness along which all mankind will travel during his Millennial Rule at the end of which those worthy will gain everlasting life on earth as promised to Adam.
Concerning the divinity of Jesus while on earth, if he had been divine then this would have made him of two natures spirit and human which would make him a hybrid and abhorrent to Almighty God.It would also have over-qualified him for the role of an equal ransom for Adam and if as the Trinitarians say, he was actually God incarnate, then as Almighty God is immortal and therefore cannot be destroyed,then jesus could never have been put to death and the sacrifice would be rendered null and void.When he was raised from the dead however, he was raised up as an immortal spirit creature, a God. Which is why Thomas when confirming this declared, "My Lord and my God." But note he did not say "My Lord Almighty God."
In his wisdom Almighty God never creates anythig over which he does not have complete control, which is why Jesus himself said: "My Father is greater than I." When also his followers said to him one day: "Master, you are good." he replied: "Why do you call me good, only one is good God." he would not have made this statement if he was God incarnate.
Alexander Winslow
Posted by: Alexander Winslow | July 23, 2006 at 11:40 AM
Jeremy, aren't Wright's criteria ones of double-continuity and double-discontinuity? That's at least the way he lays it out in Jesus and the Victory of God.
The idea is that the genuineness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus is attested to, on one hand, by that fact that, while the Jesus of the Gospels exists fully within the categories and contexts of the OT and 2nd Temple Judaism (continuity), there are also ways in which those categories are radically and unexpectedly reworked in ways that couldn't be anticipated from within the resources of the OT or 2nd Temple period (discontinuity).
On the other hand, while the Gospels present a Jesus who is clearly the basis for the message and life of the early church within which the Gospels were produced (continuity), the concerns and issues that the Jesus of the Gospels addresses and deals with are not longer precisely the issues facing the early church (discontinuity).
As to the "psychology" of Jesus, this model comes to particular application in that Jesus' own sense of vocation, as attested to by his words and actions, is fully at home in the categories of the OT and 2nd Temple Judaism, yet nonetheless completely, uniquely, and unexpectedly reworks those categories.
I guess what I'm saying is that I just don't see Wright "insist[ing] on finding an account of Jesus' self-understanding that fits what ordinary people in Jesus' time would have grasped." That's not what he's up do and wouldn't accomplish his apologetical purposes.
Posted by: garver | July 23, 2006 at 03:04 PM
I read the Gospel of John to say that a Jewish man of the 1st century who said, "Before Abraham was, I Am" and that also claimed to be "the resurrection and the life", then himself rose from the dead, had a firmer grip on his identity than I do. Of course, I believe the Jesus in John is the Jesus of history, a history revealed and not created.
Judging from the links and trafic in my browsing, Wright has become the latest darling of internet theology, reminding me of the Corinthians arguments over which teacher they should follow. Paul's response should stand us up here.
Posted by: Jan McKenzie | July 24, 2006 at 10:40 AM