N. T. Wright’s “Surprised by Scripture”

N. T. Wright continues to produce an astonishing volume of excellent writing, targeted at Christian audiences at all levels of scholarship.

Most recently, Wright has released Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues, a collection of essays on various issues pertinent to life in the church.

These essays are written at a college level. They aren’t quite as easy to read as his New Testament For Everyone commentaries (a better, sounder set of commentaries serving much the same role as William Barclay’s venerable New Daily Study Bible). But they are far easier reads than, say, his Christian Origins and the Question of God series.

The essays were written for other purposes, and then later assembled into this collection. As a result, there’s a certain inevitable level of repetition, but not too much. And some of the arguments that he makes are made in other earlier works of his, so that a devoted reader such as myself will find himself covering very familiar grounds at times. Nonetheless, there much here that is new and needed.

Here’s the table of contents —

1. Healing the Divide Between Science and Religion
2. Do We Need a Historical Adam?
3. Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?
4. The Biblical Case for Ordaining Women
5. Jesus Is Coming —Plant a Tree!
6. 9/ 11, Tsunamis, and the New Problem of Evil
7. How the Bible Reads the Modern World
8. Idolatry 2.0
9. Our Politics Are Too Small
10. How to Engage Tomorrow’s World
11. Apocalypse and the Beauty of God
12. Becoming People of Hope

Some of these issues, such as whether we may ordain women, are very familiar to us in the Churches of Christ. And Wright has much to contribute to the discussion.

Other issues raise questions that we have been blind to, such as “Jesus Is Coming — Plant a Tree!” There is very little in the way of Church of Christ environmentalism. We see it as an American political issue, not a biblical question, and Wright explains why we’ve been wrong to think that way. (But his arguments heavily overlap those made in the extraordinary Surprised by Hope (which you must read)).

Just so, chapters 7 – 9, critique the American tendency to treat politics and warfare as somehow divorced from Christianity. Wright is not a pacifist, but he does think that we Americans are naïve for assuming that the American military can turn people into democracy- and capitalism-loving Westerners. We assume that everyone wants to be an American, and it’s just not true.

He also sees differing bad readings of the Scriptures as being behind American political differences.

Appeals for an integrated reading of the Gospels have met stiff opposition from both sides. Those who emphasize Jesus’s social program lash out wildly at any attempt to highlight his death and resurrection, as though that would legitimate a fundamentalist program, either Catholic or Protestant, while those who emphasize his death and resurrection do their best to anathematize any attempt to continue Jesus’s work with and for the poor, as though that might result in justification by works, either actually or at the existentialist metalevel of historical method. And these debates, which play out in supposedly neutral methods of Gospel study, simply reflect, however scholarly their proponents, the sterile antithesis between the twin tyrannies of secularism and fundamentalism. An integrated reading of the Gospels as they stand rejects both, offering not just a picture of what it would look like if the true God were running the world but the story— the history— of how that actually began to take place.

(Kindle Locations 2522-2529).

So that’s not exactly an easy paragraph for most people to sort through. Wright does not shy away from the technical terms  — “existentialist,” “metalevel,” and “antithesis.” And yet his point is both brilliant and needed. We have to learn to read the Gospels and the rest of scripture as applying to the entirety of our lives, not just our “spiritual” side. It’s all spiritual — even politics and war.

National healthcare policy, immigration, warfare, everything on the evening news and in the Drudge Report, is claimed by God as his own. Nothing is outside of God’s dominion. And yet we just so want to segregate our thinking between “spiritual” and “other” so that we can be kind and generous at church and mean-spirited and selfish at the ballot box.

The point is not, therefore, that we should vote for every hair-brained social program invented by the politicians, but that we must re-train ourselves to more fully integrate our Christianity into all of our thinking.

Indeed, if an outsider may venture a guess, I think the religious Right in the United States (we have really no parallel in Britain) may be construed as a clumsy attempt to recapture the coming together of God and the world that remains stubbornly in scripture but which the Enlightenment repudiated, and which fundamentalism continues to repudiate with its dualistic theology of rapture and Armageddon. It is as though the religious Right has known in its bones that God belongs in public but without understanding either why or how that might make sense; while the political Left in the United States, and sometimes on both sides of the Atlantic, has known in its bones that this God would make radical personal moral demands as part of his program of restorative justice, and has caricatured his public presence as a form of tyranny to evoke the cheap-and-gloomy Enlightenment critique as a way of holding that challenge at bay.

(Kindle Locations 2561-2568).

That is, the American conservatives want to push God into the public square, but haven’t really thought about the best way to do that. Do we really intend to teach that God cares about our sexuality but not our treatment of the poor?

Meanwhile, the American left wants to treat God as a tyrannical deity, so that his moral demands can be ignored.

Ultimately, the church must assume a prophetic role with respect to secular government.

However, the Christian vision of God working through earthly rulers makes the sense it makes only if the church embraces the vocation to remind the rulers of their task, to speak the truth to power, and to call authorities to account. We see this going on throughout the book of Acts and on into the witness and writings of the second-century apologists. And indeed, in the martyrs, because martyrdom (which is what happens when the church bears witness to God’s call to the rulers and the rulers shoot the messenger) is an inalienable part of political theology.

(Kindle Locations 2639-2643).

Our goal as the church is not to claim a seat of power by making donations and passing out voter guides. We must be willing to speak the truth of God to the leaders of the world (including those who elect them), regardless of the cost.

In particular, it is vital that the church learn to criticize the present workings of democracy. I don’t just mean that we should scrutinize voting methods, campaign tactics, or the use of big money in the electoral process. I mean that we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of democracy emerged precisely from that Enlightenment dualism, the banishing of God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi to fill the vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with the publicness of the kingdom of God.

(Kindle Locations 2653-2657).

In other words, just because the people want something, that doesn’t make it good and right. Jesus is our king, not the people or their democratically elected leaders.

It’s a challenging read, a scholarly work that, if carefully studied, could dramatically change how we view our Christianity and our places in the world.