Bishop Wright's response to the pandemic

No doubt the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign? These are knee-jerk would-be Christian reactions in a culture which, generations back, embraced rationalism: everything must have an explanation. But supposing it doesn’t? 

The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.

God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person—the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about—he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit “groaning” within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.

It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead.

https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/

1. N. T. Wright has always been a mixed bag. As I recall, he developed a conservative reputation by debating Jesus Seminar types, and he was pretty good on his side of the debate. He also wrote a classic defense of the Resurrection. But in addition he churns out hasty, forgettable potboilers. He spreads himself way too thin. He's overrated and overexposed. He's become an oracle who's expected to have something wise to say about everything.

Hart failure

https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/new-testament-strange-words-david-bentley-hart

Why a Virgin Birth?

https://thearcmag.com/why-the-virgin-birth-7271d0d03627#.aj90dsx1i

The Righteousness of God

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/book-reviews-righteousness-of-god-lee-irons

Going ape over Adam

Doug Wilson recently quoted N. T. Wright saying:

And it leads me to my proposal: that just as God chose Israel from the rest of humankind for a special, strange, demanding vocation, so perhaps what Genesis is telling us is that God chose one pair from the rest of early hominids for a special, strange, demanding vocation. This pair (call them Adam and Eve if you like) were to be the representatives of the whole human race . . .

That gave rise to the following exchange:

Tim Enloe 

From what little you cited, it looks like Wright affirms a literal, historical Adam and Eve, but you interpret his denial of young earth and affirmation of evolution as denial of the literal, historical Adam and Eve. That sort of thing is what bugs me about the reactionary style of young earth rhetoric: it's just as sloppy as much of what comes from the other side.

steve 

Because, Tim, he doesn't affirm the "literal, historical Adam and Eve" of Scripture, but a substitute that would be unrecognizable to the narrator and the original audience.


He's reassigned the historical referents to something utterly extraneous to the text. His interpretation has no more basis in the text than saying Adam and Eve were really extraterrestrials, or androids created by alien cyberneticists.


You can't just edit out the Adam and Eve of the narrative, splice in a par of hominids, and keep everything else intact. That's cutting something out of the Genesis account, cutting something out of the evolutionary narrative, then selectively combining two different stories by adding a new set of characters to replace the original.

N.T. Wright, Bigot Par Exellence

http://dougwils.com/s7-engaging-the-culture/and-all-gods-people-said-wut.html

"So now you know — for Wright, Marcus Borg was a Christian passionately devoted to Jesus, despite his denial of the resurrection, and someone who believes in an historic Adam made from the dust of the ground is a literalistic and gnostic goon show. So note again that this is not a fundamentalist attempt to draw hard heresy lines — this is N.T. Wright doing it."

Panning Paul and the Faithfulness of God

http://dro.dur.ac.uk/14230/1/14230.pdf?DDD32+dth0jmb+d700tmt

N.T. Wright And The Evidence For The Virgin Birth

Steve Hays drew my attention to an article by N.T. Wright arguing for the virgin birth. Wright makes some good points, but some of the best arguments for the virgin birth and some of the best responses to objections to it aren't addressed. Here's an article I wrote earlier this year that outlines some of the evidence for the virgin birth and links a lengthy book review I wrote on the subject.

Among other points I make in my article linked above, it should be noted that the virgin birth receives indirect support in the citation of Luke's gospel as scripture in 1 Timothy 5:18. Though John doesn't refer to the virgin birth in his writings, what he does write is consistent with the doctrine, and it's affirmed early and widely among the disciples of John and the churches he most influenced. The virgin birth was affirmed by Polycarp and other contemporaries of the apostles, as I document in my material linked above. Christian sources in the second century refer to the virgin birth as a core belief of Christianity that's accepted across the Christian world. I've also argued that early and widespread belief in the virgin birth is the best explanation for why the premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy wasn't more controversial in early Christianity. We have far more evidence for the virgin birth than the material found in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke.

Cosmic imagery

It is a serious misunderstanding of the relevant ways of speaking and writing to suppose that when the Bible speaks of the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven, and of similar “cosmic” events, it intends the language to be taken literally.

http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Apocalypse_Now.htm

More specifically, different manners of speaking were available to those who wished to write or talk of the coming day when the covenant God would act to rescue his people…Metaphors from creation would likewise be appropriate. The sun would be turned to darkness, the moon to blood. 

It is vital for our entire perception of the worldview of first-century Jews, including particularly the early Christians, that we see what follows from all this. When they used what we might call cosmic imagery to describe the coming new age, such language cannot be reading in a crassly literalistic way without doing it great violence. The restoration which would be brought about was, of course, painted glowing and highly metaphorical colours. The New Testament and the People of God (1992), 283-84.

i) I appreciate the fact that Wright is debunking pop dispensationalism hermeneutics. Mind you, the fact that he's correcting one error doesn't make his own position correct. Indeed, he could be committing the opposite mistake by overreacting.

ii) It may also be that he's trying to make Scripture less vulnerable to scoffers. Perhaps he thinks some eschatological language involves a three story cosmography. Taken literally, that would be false.

iii) For some odd reason, he seems to equate a "literalistic" interpretation of this imagery with cosmic disintegration. But there's no reason to suppose the phenomena he quotes, even if taken literally, denotes cosmic disintegration.

iv) We also need to distinguish between figurative imagery and mythopoetic imagery. He acts as though the imagery he quotes can't be literally true. But even if, for the sake of argument, we think the imagery he quotes is figurative, that doesn't make it mythopoetic. In fact, it's fairly prosaic.

v) Apropos (iii-iv), he doesn't seem to grasp what the imagery describes. In my opinion, a darkened sun denotes a solar eclipse, a darkened or blood-colored moon denotes a lunar eclipse, and falling stars denote a meteor shower. There's nothing inherently figurative about that imagery. These are natural phenomena. I myself have witnessed a solar eclipse. Unfortunately, it was overcast. Even so, for a few minutes morning became night.

I've witnessed a lunar eclipse. The moon was literally darkened. And it was reddish. A red hue. And I've probably seen shooting stars.

vi) As I've remarked before, I think one problem with some Bible scholars is that they are so out of touch with nature that they just assume certain descriptions must be figurative or mythopoetic. It's not something they themselves have observed or experienced.

Keep in mind, too, that if you live in or near a big city, light pollution obscures stargazing. But people in Bible times had a better view of the night sky than we do.

Just recently, as I was returning from a late afternoon walk, I saw a sunset sundog (parhelion). That's a rare optical illusion in which refracted sunlight generates a cloudy virtual mirror-image. A double sun.

Now, if I was a Bible writer or Intertestamental writer, Wright would chalk that up to "figurative" omen. Yet it really happens.

vii) I don't think there's a presumption that cosmic Biblical imagery is either literal or figurative. That depends on the context and the genre. And sometimes context or genre is inconclusive. In those cases, you have to be open-minded.

viii) In addition, there's nothing mythopoetic about Christ returning in the clouds. I think that's like Ezk 1. Christ will return in the Shekinah.

The coming of the Son of Man in Mark's Gospel

http://www.tyndalehouse.com/tynbul/library/TynBull_2005_56_2_04_Adams_SonOfMan_Mark.pdf

Gathercole reviews Wright

http://www.reformation21.org/articles/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god-a-review.php

Wright on Adam

OK, Genesis one, two, and three is wonderful picture language, but I do think there was a primal pair in a world of emerging hominids, that’s the way I read that. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2014/01/23/evolution-death-adam-wright-rjs/ 

The way I see it is that there were many hominids or similar creatures, part of the long slow process of God’s good creation. And at a particular time God called a particular pair for a particular task: to look after his creation and make it flourish in a whole new way. 

http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2014/06/02/n-t-wright-bible-isnt-inerrantist/

There's an obvious problem with that position. That's not something you find from studying the Bible, and that's not something you find from studying evolutionary biology. On the one hand, Genesis doesn't have "a world of emerging hominids, part of the long slow process of God’s good creation." On the other hand, evolutionary biology doesn't have Adam and Eve. It's a makeshift combination that's unsupportable from either source. It arbitrarily splices together two independent, divergent narratives. 

N. T. Wright on miracles

Let’s give up the world miracle because the word miracle comes to us now in our culture from that Epicurean or deist worldview which envisages a God who is outside the process and occasionally reaches in and does something funny and then pushes off again. Now, that is not what the New Testament is talking about. So when people say can we believe in miracles I say no, because the word miracle gives us this sense of a normally absent God sometimes reaching in, that’s not the God of the Bible.  

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2014/01/28/wait-no-miracles-wright-on-rjs/

Wright's way of framing the issue is confused:

i) Metaphysically speaking, God is outside the process. God subsists apart from the world. Indeed, on a classical theistic view, God is timeless and spaceless.

ii) God created a system of second causes. Mundane events generally occur according to natural mechanisms. Physical causes producing physical effects. 

Physical processes are unintelligent. They do whatever they were programmed to do. They operate automatically and uniformly, if nature is allowed to take its course.

To a great extent, the natural world is like a machine. Of course, it takes wisdom to design the machine and power to build or maintain the machine. So that doesn't exclude God by any means.

iii) A miracles stands in contrast to this default process. There are basically two kinds of miracles:

a) Miracles which bypass natural processes. The effect is not the result of antecedent conditions. God causes the effect apart from the usual chain of cause and effect.

b) Miracles which utilize natural processes, but are more discriminating than blind natural processes. Where God has prearranged causally independent events to converge on a very specific and highly unlikely outcome. 

Reviewing Paul & the Faithfulness of God

http://thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/paul_and_the_faithfulness_of_god_waters

Reinventing Christianity

http://www.dennyburk.com/the-contributions-and-revisions-of-n-t-wright/#more-27649

Hurtado: “Here’s where Wright is Wrong”

In several recent blog posts, Larry Hurtado has been reviewing N.T. Wright’s massive work, “Paul and the Faithfulness of God”. From his most recent blog post:

But my problems with Wright’s particular view stem in part from his accompanying notion that this one family/people of Abraham/God must be homogenous, and that for Paul the historic special significance of ethnic “Israel” as a people is now dissolved in God’s plans.

Now the notion that ethnic Israel has lost its former significance in God’s purposes and that the church has inherited all that once was attached to the people of Israel is a venerable Christian one, going back to the second century or so. But the question I have is whether Paul shared this view. I don’t think so.

Wright knows that this sort of view is often labelled “supersessionist” and he strenuously denies the charge. In his scheme, it isn’t so much that Israel is simply cast aside. Instead, Wright refers to a “reworking” of “Israel” in Paul. Briefly, here is how this works. First, he claims that ethnic Israel was called by God for the purpose of bringing God’s revelation to the world. Indeed, Wright repeatedly claims that Israel was chosen by God to be the vehicle of redemption. This is crucial in Wright’s argument.

Schreiner reviews Wright

http://www.credomag.com/issues/Justification2.pdf

His review begins on p27 and ends on p56. His assessment begins on p44, and his criticisms begin on p47, if you wish to cut to the chase.

Wright's reformulation of justification

http://upper-register.typepad.com/blog/2013/11/n-t-wrights-reformulation-of-justification.html

Paul and the Faithfulness of God

http://thegospelcoalition.org/book-reviews/review/paul_and_the_faithfulness_of_god

Paul and Empire

Commenting on Wright's recent magnum opus on Paul:

In this chp we get to the heart of the new contribution that PFG will make; here is a full display of the imperial cult as a/the context for understanding Paul’s claim that Jesus is Lord. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/10/rome-as-empire-and-emperor-worship/

Now, I haven't read Wright's new book, and I don't plan to. I'm just commenting on McKnight's summary. 

i) It's hard to see how that's a "new" contribution to Pauline scholarship. The Paul-and-Empire angle already well-trodden ground. For some background:

http://www.upper-register.com/blog/?p=230

http://www.upper-register.com/blog/?p=253

http://www.upper-register.com/blog/?p=254

http://www.dennyburk.com/Publications/JETS-Burk-FreshPerspective.pdf

ii) Apropos (i), for those who look to Wright for groundbreaking scholarship, this is day-old bread. 

iii) Academic Bible scholarship (as well as academic theology) is on a perennial quest for newness for the sake of newness. That's a way to make your mark in the field. Saying something new and bold. Or at least make it seem new and bold. 

iv) Although Wright is a theological leader in the Anglican Communion, and even though he has quite a following among some of the laity (both inside and outside the Anglican Communion), I seriously doubt that within the guild of NT scholars, he sets the agenda. He's one of scads of prominent NT scholars. Competition is stiff.

v) But let's get to the main point. In the NT, the Lordship of Christ may have some incidental political reverberations as a polemic against the imperial cult or the divinization of the state.  However, the fundamental reason the NT presents Jesus as Lord is not make a political statement, but because Jesus is the Incarnation of Yahweh. Jesus is the fulfillment of OT prophecies regarding the coming of Yahweh  to redeem, rule, and dwell with his people. And, of course, that will be subdivided into two separate advents.  

Although the Lordship of Christ can serve to undercut totalitarian statism, that's not the raison d'être. Jesus isn't Lord to foil Caesar. Rather, because Jesus is Lord, for reasons altogether independent of Caesar, Jesus can function as a foil to Caesar, and modern counterparts. 

And there's nothing that distinctive about the Roman imperial cult. After all, in the OT you had the Egyptian Pharaonic cult. Same play, different players. The Babylonian state religion is another analogue (cf. Dan 3).