Bishop Wright’s recent interview, in which he said you could be a Christian without believing in the bodily resurrection of Christ, has brought out the usual suspects on both sides of the debate.
Has he been treated fairly? And why should we care what he says?
Wright is both a scholar and a popularizer. As a high-profile critic of the Jesus Seminar, he has acquired quite a following in conservative circles.
But we need to remember that conservatism is a relative marker. Wright is a conservative in a liberal denomination, which would make him a moderate in a conservative denomination.
He stands out, in part, simply because he’s to the right of many other prelates in the Anglican Communion.
If he were a Baptist or Presbyterian critic of the Jesus Seminar, he’d never get the same coverage.
It reminds me of the way Evangelicals fell all over themselves to invoke the name of Wolfhart Pannenberg because of his mild defense of the Resurrection. Because we expect Germans to be ultraliberal, when we stumble across a German who is something of a moderate, it garners an inordinate amount of attention.
Wright has written a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately, you have people who give him a pass for all the bad stuff on account of the good stuff.
The theory seems to be that if a bank robber shoots the teller, but saves a five-year-old who wanders out into a busy intersection, the good deed absolves the bad deed.
Let us remember that there’s a reason why many men choose to be Anglicans rather than Baptists or Lutherans or Presbyterians.
This is the denomination that contributed “latitudinarian” to the theological lexicon.
One of the striking things about Wright is that he’s very outspoken on some issues, but notably coy on others.
Does anyone know what Wright’s position is on the doctrine of hell? He’s written books that address eschatology, but he’s never tipped his hand on this particular issue that I’m aware of. Instead, he chooses to tease the reader.
Wright is also one of the behind-the-scenes players in the effort to strike a compromise over the ordination of Vicky Gene Robinson and subsequent repercussions.
Wright’s secular politics are decidedly left of center, but in church politics his idealism gives way to the cynicism of a Real Politician, a la Kissinger or Metternich.
In the voting booth, Wright is Jimmy Carter—but in the consistory, Wright is Gen. Scowcroft.
Wright has a chapter in his book, Following Jesus, called "Hell." it's chapter 10. It is rather strange. Some quotations:
ReplyDeleteFirst, it must be said as clearly as possible that as soon as we find ourselves wanting to believe in hell we find ourselves in great danger. The desire to see others punished -- including the desire to do the punishing ourselves -- has no place in a Christian scheme of things. There is, of course, a right and proper desire for justice, for the victory of right over might; the desire to punish, however, must be sharply distinguished from this. And justice, when it comes in this world, may well involve some sort of retributive action against the perpetrators of injustice. But punishment for its own sake, as it were, is something else. Philosophers and psychologists, as well as theologians, have debated the nature of punishment for years without getting very far, but one thing seems to me clear: that if I find myself wanting to see someone else in torment, I am plucking from the tree a fruit which is sweet for a moment but bitter for an hour, and which will poison me unless I repent. All too often such desire stems from jealousy rather than justice, from fear rather than fairness, from repressed guilt rather than a longing for the kingdom of God.
Second, most of the passages in the New Testament which have been thought by the Church to refer to people going into eternal punishment after they die don't in fact refer to any such thing. The great majority of them have to do with the way God acts within the world and history. Most of them look back to language and ideas in the Old Testament, which work in quite a different way from that which is normally imagined...
...So from these two points -- the danger of our wanting to send people to hell, and the fact that most of the New Testament warnings aren't about that anyway -- we may already deduce that there is some serious rethinking to be done, for which of course we don't have space within the confines of a single chapter in a book which is really about something else. My third point is a preliminary one about that rethinking, that reconstruction.
~~N.T. Wright, Following Jesus, pp.92-93
His "preliminary" point about rethinking Hell essentially goes like this: We are made in the image of God. When we do not worship Him, but worship other gods (including the self), that image atrophies. Such people cease being "entirely human." They are "courting death", which is to say that they are rejecting what it means to be human, i.e. to reflect the image of God. Such people begin to reflect their idols rather than the true God.
Then, he says that the debate in the 20th century between eternal punishment and annihilationism misses the point. The goal is to live more and more into the image of God (that's what following Jesus is). Those who refuse to do so invariably choose to live more and more into the image of something else, something that can't give life, and since we are made to reflect God's image, they become less human. He gives the examples of addiction, unemployment, homelessness, and hatred as examples of what that looks like. He then summarizes thusly:
I see nothing in the New Testament to make me reject the possibility that some, perhaps many, of God's human creatures do choose, and will choose, to dehumanize themselves completely. Nor do I see anything to make me suppose that God, who gave his human creatures the risky gift of freedom and choice, will not honour that choice, albeit through the deep sorrow and sense of loss that any God we can truly imagine must carry at his heart, a sorrow lived out fully on Calvary. This, I think, is the way in which something like the traditional doctrine of hell can be restated in the present day.
~~ibid, pp.95-96
He then warns us not to place undue emphasis on the idea of "eternal" or "personal" destiny, since these are not really the emphasis in the New Testament, and then relates the "this-worldliness" so common in Wright's work to the idea of Hell. Just as we look forward to a "marriage of heaven and earth", we should be worried about the possibility of a marriage of earth with Hell. We see that marriage at the community-level. First, a society goes after other gods (he says, "We passed that point in Britain some time ago"). How do we see idolatry in Britain? Selfishness, especially in a disparity of wealth and the pains this puts on the poor.
The antidote to this, Wright says, is the preaching of the Gospel (that is, the denunciation of idolatry as previously defined coupled with a message of comfort to the "exiled"). Then, there's a chapter on "Heaven and Power."
So, Wright's chapter on Hell essentially says, "We shouldn't want to believe in Hell, most of the passages you think are about Hell really aren't, and I don't have room to tell you what Hell really is, but we might start by saying that it's about people not living up to their raison d'etre." But really, guys, he's a conservative. He is. He really is. He's not a liberal. He's defending the faith against the Jesus Seminar!