#nt wright

[guiltywisdom]

Western Christians tend to think of "going to heaven" or "going to hell" as the framework for the Gospel, but the Bible story is not about us going somewhere, but the Creator God coming to live with us.

Nicholas Thomas Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham

[entanglingbriars]

Hi. Can you tell me about N T Wright's view on same sex marriage? I know he's opposed to it (which makes me incredibly sad as I really like Wright) but the way one of your posts described it makes me feel like it's probably worse than I know.

My knowledge of NT Wright is limited. I've never felt the desire to do a deep dive on his theology because I find him neither compelling (like I do CS Lewis) or absurd (like I do Lee Strobel).

Based on interviews reported by First Things and Religion News Service, Wright has a very high view of Paul's (and by extension to the Prophets') use of marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between the Church and God. He argues that the metaphor should be seen as bi-directional. Not only is marriage a mirror of God's relationship to the Church, but that God's relationship to the Church is a prescription for how marriage works..

This isn't an uncommon argument (although I think it pulls apart pretty easily), and it leads to another argument which is that binaries are fundamental to Christian theology. Sarah Moon contends that this view is fundamentally in tension with Wright's other theological writings, but I'm not qualified to judge.

Wright's other argument (at least in the materials I found by a very cursory DuckDuckGo search), is that allowing people of the same sex to marry each other is a word redefinition project and is comparable to the linguistic reforms of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Which is a pretty... extreme parallel to draw to say the least.

[thurifer-at-heart]

Rachel Held Evans: What is the kingdom of heaven?

When Jesus himself talks about the good news, he frames it primarily in terms of “the kingdom of God." … As N. T. Wright and other New Testament scholars have shown, it’s important to understand that kingdom terminology refers not to some faraway paradise filled with disembodied souls, but rather to the will and reign of God, unleashed into the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. "God’s kingdom in the preaching of Jesus,” explained Wright, “refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ . . . Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.” (Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, 19) What this means precisely remains something of a mystery, for Jesus’ favorite way to speak about the kingdom is through story, riddle, and metaphor. The kingdom, Jesus taught, is right here—present yet hidden, immanent yet transcendent. It is at hand—among us and beyond us, now and not-yet. The kingdom of heaven, he said, belongs to the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst for God. It advances not through power and might, but through missions of mercy, kindness, and humility. In this kingdom, many who are last will be first and many who are first will be last. The rich don’t usually get it, Jesus said, but children always do. This is a kingdom whose savior arrives not on a warhorse, but a donkey, not through triumph and conquest, but through death and resurrection. This kingdom is the only kingdom that will last.

—Rachel Held Evans, Inspired, p. 153-154

[deedsandcreeds]

In popular culture, inner feelings and motivations (“discovering who you really are” or “going with your heart”) are regularly invoked as the true personal reality over against mere outward “identities.” Some types of Protestantism have imbibed this deeply, supposing that “the gospel” is all about inner feeling, a disposition of the heart, and not at all about outward reality or actions, whether moral or “religious.” Sometimes people have thought that this is the one and only meaning of Paul’s teaching about “justification by faith not works.” But things were not nearly so simple. In this climate of thought it has been easy for us to imagine that we have understood why Paul was insisting that circumcision no longer mattered for membership in God’s family. Obviously, we think, he was interested in a person’s inner reality, over against those fussy legalists who thought you had to obey a string of ritual instructions! He believed, we say, in a message of love rather than law, of inward feeling rather than outward conformity, of faith in the heart rather than rule-book religion or liturgical performance. In particular, we suppose, Paul believed that God didn’t require a perfect moral obedience from people, because God in any case always preferred right feelings (including “faith”) to right actions (which might make you proud). And so we could go on. These caricatures are themselves full of contradictions. Anyone who thinks that having right “feelings” doesn’t make people proud is singularly blind to the currently fashionable notion that what matters is a correct “attitude” on the questions of the day.

N.T. Wright, “Paul: A Biography”

[lizardvangogh]

NT Wright lecture drinking game, take a shot when he says:

• jolly well

• etcétera

• it’s all gone horribly wrong

• well hang on

• [mentions one of his books]

• [mentions epicureanism]

[nathanschock]

Jesus told his followers that if they wanted to come after him, they would have to deny themselves and take up their cross. The only way to find yourself, he said, is to lose yourself (a strikingly different agenda from today’s finding-out-who-I-really-am philosophies). From the very beginning, writers, like Paul and John recognized that this isn’t just difficult, but actually impossible. We can’t do it by some kind of Herculean moral effort. The only way is by drawing strength from beyond ourselves, the strength of God’s spirit, on the basis of our sharing of Jesus’s death and resurrection in baptism.

N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, page 223

[digitaldion]

“You see, the reason Jesus wasn’t the sort of king people had wanted in his own day is—to anticipate our conclusion—that he was the true king, but they had become used to the ordinary, shabby, second-rate sort. They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate.”

- N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus

[blackswaneuroparedux]

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

- N.T. Wright, For All God's Worth