158. N. T. Wright Talks About History & Faith- Res. Faith

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N. T. Wright talks about history and belief

Resurrection faithN

EWTESTAMENT SCHOLAR N. T. Wright, who has

taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Montreal, re

cently became the canon theologian at Westmin

ster Abbey in London. He is both a vigorous in

vestigator of the historical Jesus and an effective communi

cator of the gospel. His scholarly works include a two-vol

ume project on the origins of Christianity: The New Testament and the People of God (1992) andJesus and the Victory of God (1996). More popular works include The Orig

inal Jesus: The Life and Vision of a Revolutionary (1996)and Luke for Everyone (2000), which is part of a series of"New Testament Guides for Every

one" distributed in the U.S. by Pil

grim Press. Tom Wright is also well

known for carrying on a lively public

debate on Jesus with the American

scholar Marcus Borg, which led to

their joint book The Meaning ofJesus: Two Visions (2000). We recently spoke with Wright about his life as

a historian and believer.

You once wrote: "Authentic

Christianity has nothing to fear

from history." Why is that?

Well, it's a slightly polemical remark, directed at those Christianswho think Christianity is simply amatter of the community of faithtelling its own story, and who don'teven want to discuss issues of the historical Jesus because they think theBible and the tradition have told usall we need to know. That seems to

me profoundly wrong. The Gospel writers think they'retalking about things that actually happened. If they didn'thappen, then I've got other things to do with my life. If, forexample, Jesus died of influenza at the age of 25 and everything about the crucifixion was made up, then something pretty significant about Christianity is lost. Ofcourse, the primary issue here is the resurrection. I am notgoing to stay up nights sweating about such matters aswhether Jesus walked on water.

One of the underlying issues here is that of miracles.

Does the postmodern context, with its suspicions of

"The historian has to offer an hy-

pothesis about the resurrection."

rationalism, open up the issue of miracles in a way

that it hasn't been ope n since the 18th century?

I think that's true. When Marcus Borg and I debate eachother on these topics, we don't use the word "miracle" because we both agree that the term is too infected by postEnlightenment debates. It is accompanied, especially inAmerica, with the idea that God exists outside natural processes and sometimes reaches in and does something and

then pushes off again. That is how a lot of people think omiracle, though that view is more part of the superman

myth of God than part of Christian theology and history.

In any case, I think God can do whatever God wants. I don't think we knowwhat the limits are. And our discussionof the limits is too much shaped by theterms of modern philosophy.

Can't we talk about empirical lim

its, however? We know certain

things, such as the laws of gravityand that human beings cannot walk

on water.

I've been told that in some Muslimfundamentalist circles people aretaught to walk on water as a spiritual exercise. I'm prepared to believe it. I dothink there are all sorts of odd thingsthat happen in the world. And there areseveral stories in the Gospelsthe resurrection is the main onewhich havethe flavor of people saying: Look hereyou're not going to believe this, but this

is what happened.

How do you, as a historian, approach the resurrection?

Well, we know quite a lot about first-century Jewishmovements, many of which ended with the leaders deathI've tried to imagine myself in the world of someone likeJosephus, the first-century Jewish historian. He hears abouthe demise of a messianic leader or prophetic leader, and istold that this leader has been raised from the dead. He isgoing to ask: What do you mean he's been raised from thedead? And he will not be satisfied if the answer is: Well, Ihad this vision, or I felt my heart warmed, or I felt that God

CHRISTIAN CENTURY December 18-31,2002 28

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had forgiven me for letting the leader down. He would say,'Well, fine, I'm glad you had that experience. But why didyou say he's been raised from the dead?" My point is thatresurrection is something that had a quite clear meaning atthat time. It was something that every pagan knew doesn'thappen. And a lot of Jews (the Sadducees and some others)believed it doesn't happen. Those who did affirm the resurrection did not think it was just a way of saying, "He is Lord."

The historian has to offer a plausible hypothesis of why

the disciples used the language ofresurrection. My hypothesis is that there were two things: an empty tomb andsightings of Jesus. An empty tomb by itself doesn't meanthat much, nor do visionsmany people have had visions,particularly after somebody they love has just died. Giventhe accounts of the empty tomb and of the sightings, however, I think the historian is faced with two parts of an archwith the piece in the middlethe resurrectionmissing.The question is: Are these just two isolated phenomena?

The historian cannot prove the resurrection in the sameway that one can prove that Jerusalem was destroyed in 70A.D. But I think the historian can say: Here are the plausi

ble explanations. And there is an extreme implausibility ofvirtually all the rival suggestions, such as the one thatJames, the brother of the Lord, was walking around in thegarden at the same time, and because he looked rather likeJesus, the women saw him in the half light. That story isnot going to last more than an hour or two.

What is at stake for you in the issue ofresurrection?

Or to put it another way, what's at stake in the argu-

ment between you and Marcus Borg, who would not

be that concerned over whether the resurrection

happened, who would be content to say " Je s u s

is

alive today regardless ofwhether the tomb was

empty."

Resurrection is hugely important as the beginning ofthe new world God has already startedwhich is how Paul

talks about it. Resurrection is also the foundation of Christian ecological action and political action, for God has actually launched the new mode of being into the world. Onthis point Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan make what Ithink is a very modernist complaint. They say that the resurrect ion of Jesus would not be fairIf God raised Jesus,why only Jesus? Why didn't God do it for everybody? I understand that view, but it completely misses the point thatthe resurrection is a beginning. It is a seed being sown, atune be ing composed which everyone now gets to sing.

And the resurrection is the sign that death is defeated.That's the point of1 Corinthians 15. Many Christians talk

about death in a way that suggests it isn't actually so badafter all. But ifChristians allow death to rule in the realmof physicality, then ultimately the doctrine of creation is in

jeopardythe doctrine that God remains the good creatorwho loves the world that God has made and who is nogoing to abandon it.

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You're saying that the resurrection of Jesus intro-

duces something really new in the history of the

cosmos and that this new thing is connected to a

historical event. By contrast, Borg and others

would say that something can be truly new, but it

can arise from a story or myth, not from a historical

event.

Yes. The myth of a new beginning was around for centuries. The Jews weren't expecting it to take the form of a

young, would-be Messiah executed by the pagans followed three days later by news of a resurrection. Theywere thinking in terms of something happening to allGods people at the very end of time. Resurrection was asmuch a shock for them as anyone.

The resurrection, seen as a "new beginning," has

always raised a question: Why is the new begin-

ning so slow to take shape? Why is the reign of God

delayed?

The problem of the delay of the parousia is a modernmyth. The problem is caused by liberal Christianity s no

longer believing in the resurrection, which means that theweight of God's activity is pushed forward in time. There'snot much evidence that the early church was anxiousabout this. First-century Christianity didn't see itself somuch as living in the last days, waiting for the parousia, asliving in the first days of God's new world.

St. En da , on the shore in winterthe island of Inishmore, Ireland

This is the shape of a murmur turned on air.It tells how hills wear down. Gray stone, too.Sound. Wind always works its way through,

and walls won't last. The ocean, the farther coastacross the bay: today they disappearedbeneath a blank parchment of clouds.

Along the barrens to the shore, no one comes.No one has passed here for months. My coracle,clothed in seaweed and periwinkles,

is a black-backed turtle beached since summer.There is only the surprise near dark, of seeing sealstheir foolish heads surfacing beyond the breaks

to watch me gather mussels. I am lost, Lord.Asleep in a deep womb of chill rain. The futuremumbles to me like a river bed. This is the place

the ground unwound. Where earth,weary ofits heft and ragged-bone soul,stumbled and shuddered, exhausted.

Steve Wilson

We are still awaiting the final outworking of what Godaccomplished in Jesus, but there are all kinds of signs toshow that, though the situation is often bleak, we are infact on the right road.

You have engaged in dialogue with Dominic Crossan

and others in the Jesus Seminar, which has famously

issued statements on the unreliability of the

Gospels' accounts of Jesus' life and teachings.

Though you have generally reached different con-clusions from major figures in the seminar, do you

think its work has been fruitful?

It has alerted a large number of people to the fact thatthere really is historical investigation into the first century,and that the world of the first century is not the same asours. But the way it has done thatwith the rhetoric of"We, the scholars, will tell you, the ordinary people, thetruth"has been singularly unhelpful.

I would add that any work that makes available majornew editions of relevant noncanonical texts, like theGospels of Thomas and Philip, is very valuable.

Can you say something about your own life of faith?

I was raised in the Church of England and at varioustimes questioned it, but saw no reason to jump ship. Myparents are devout middle Anglicans. The evangelical emphasis, which is still very important to me, came throughattending camp. When I started doing my doctorate onPaul, one of the small but quite stunning things that happened was my realizing that Paul by no means legitimatesthe evangelical worldview. That is, the big question about

justification for Paul was not How do I find gracious God?but How do Jews and gentiles who believe in Christ sharetable fellowship?

You have made your own scholarship accessible to

the church and the wider public, as in the television

series you've worked on for the BBC on Jesus and

the Middle East and your new series of "New Testa-

ment Guides for Everyone." Is this work part of how

you understand your vocation?

C. S. Lewis once said that if you can't translate stuff intothe vernacular, you either don't understand it or you don'tbelieve it. Another Lewis-ism is this: we must never underest imate people's intelligence even as we mustn 't overestimate their information. In other words, if you leadthem step by step, most people can catch on. Just don't assume that they know who Josephus was or that they knowwhat happened in A.D. 70.

Fortunately, being in a church position, not an academic one, I've been able to write what I want to write. AndI've always wanted to write both popular and scholarly articles. Also, I come from a family that isn't particularly academic, and I'm married to a woman who certainly isn't anacademic, and I have four children whose regular comment is, "Dad, you're going to have to say it clearer thanthat in order to get hold of me."

Finally, by temperament I'm a big-picture person asopposed to a details person. Most biblical scholars are de-

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tail people. The problem with people like that is that whenthey are put in front of a class of first-year students, theywill start talking about the textual problems in Romans 2when students have no idea who Paul is.

How do you make the figure of Jesus come alive for

people these days?

One way is to urge people to become a character in thestory: You are on the edge of a crowd listening to Jesus.

And the sacraments are important. When scripture andsacrament meet, people are driven to the intimacy ofprayer and the life of discipleship.

It seems that people these days are more open to

spirituality. Do you find they are also open to the

spirituality of the church?

Under secularism, people felt embarrassed even tomention their religious hunger. And now, people arehappy to talk about it. The church needs to be able to say,Yes, we do actually know a certain amount about prayerand meditationthese are things deeply rooted withinour tradition. We should be running schools of prayer. Weshould advertise them as such .

However, if that s all we did or if that was the main thingwe did, we might be in danger of, as it were, pander ing toa split-level world, treating spirituality as a private hobby.So simultaneously the church has to be speaking and act

ing in political, public and social ways. That's terribly difficult, and it's always going to be risky. But that's one of thereasons that my political understanding of Paul is helpful.To say that Jesus is Lord means that Caesar isn't. Jesus isSavior, therefore Caesar isn't. The rhetoric about theRoman Empire in the first century has astoundingly closeresonances with the rhetoric of empire surrounding theU.S. today.

I recently read George Steiner s bookErrata, and it

struck me that he illustrates the modern spiritual situationwhen, at the end of the book, he's struggling with the question of God. He isn't sure that he believes in God, but hebelieves in original sin because of the existence of childtorture, abuse of animals, and all the absurdly evil thingsthat happen. He knows that this is not what creation wasmeant for. That is a profoundly Jewish and Christian reaction. Steiner is in effect rejecting the existential philosophy of Sartre without embracing theism. And it seems tome that is where postmodernism at its best gets us: itpreaches the doctrine of original sin to arrogant mod

ernism.But suppose there is somebody who has taken this tor-

ture, this meaningless, absurd evil, onto himself. That isGod's project. The Christian mission as I conceive it ispoised between the unique ministry of Jesus and the finalnew heaven and new earth. Our task is to implement thefirst and thereby to anticipate the second.

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