Three must-read articles: Kevin Hector, Michael Welker, Hugh Nicholson

Kevin W. Hector, “The Mediation of Christ’s Normative Spirit: A Constructive Reading of Schleiermacher’s Pneumatology,” Modern Theology 24:1 (2008), 1-22

This is a remarkably creative and provocative proposal for understanding the work of the Spirit as the mediation to believers of the norms of judgment which are required to know what constitutes following Christ. According to Hector, the Spirit’s work is immanent in human subjectivity – just as there are “no gaps” between the eternal Son and the man Jesus, so there are “no gaps between the Spirit’s activity and human activity.” We can thus understand the Spirit’s work “without having to appeal to shadowy substances, God’s inexplicable power …, or any other pseudo-explanations.” Among other things, I think this important proposal opens the way to a reconfiguration of the subject/object and God/world distinctions – distinctions which are misunderstood and misused in much contemporary Barthian theology. (Pardon the self-advertising, but my own forthcoming IJST paper on Bultmann is also aimed at a reconfiguration of these distinctions.)

Michael Welker, “Wright on the Resurrection,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60:4 (2007), 458-75

This is an excellent, incisive and wholly necessary critique of N. T. Wright’s understanding of the resurrection body. Welker questions Wright’s claim that the disciples witnessed Christ’s “still physical body.” He points out that Wright tends to collapse resurrection into mere resuscitation, and that he emphasises continuity between Jesus’ body and the resurrection body at the expense of the radical newness which pervades the NT witness to Christ. Welker’s sensitive reading of the NT texts leads him to observe: “It is characteristic of the resurrection appearances that they ‘establish a reality’. Or more precisely, there is a transformation of existence and reality which stems from them.” Jesus does not merely return to his physical body (“alive again,” as Wright puts it): “The pre-Easter life and body continues in a new way, extends far beyond itself, yet remains faithful to itself.” Whether or not you agree with Welker’s specific interpretation of the resurrection body, I think his critical questions to Wright are right on target. As I’ve occasionally complained in the past, the problem with Wright’s big book is that it says too much about Jewish traditions, empty tombs, physical bodies, etc, and too little about resurrection!

Hugh Nicholson, “The Political Nature of Doctrine: A Critique of Lindbeck in Light of Recent Scholarship,” Heythrop Journal 48:6 (2007), 858-77

I was talking with someone recently about Yale-School theology, and we agreed that its basic problem is its rationalism – its vision of Christian doctrine as a benign process in which grammatical rules are calmly and rationally expounded. Instead, perhaps theology is more like a power struggle, a (sometimes friendly!) contest between irreducibly different sets of passions and commitments. In this exceptional analysis, Hugh Nicholson (taking Talal Asad and Carl Schmitt as his points of departure) presents just such a critique of Lindbeck. His argument is that church doctrines “resemble the mobilizing slogans of political discourse more than … the grammatical rules governing Wittgensteinian language games.” Doctrine is thus a function of the social and relational antagonism through which Christian communities are constituted. In a very deft argument, he observes that even Lindbeck’s own linguistic analogy exposes the power-relations of doctrine: since we now know that the “standard form” of a language is simply the form which happened to achieve cultural dominance, a purely cultural-linguistic model of religion should lead us to conclude “that the religious mainstream is simply the faction that managed to establish hegemony over its proximate rivals” – i.e., that doctrinal “grammar” is never politically neutral, and is always structured by antagonistic relations. This is a brilliant and important essay which deserves a wide reading.

Tom Wright, folk singer

Who would have guessed that Tom Wright was not only an accomplished writer, speaker and bishop, but also (and most importantly) a folk singer?

At the opening of a recent lecture, the Bishop of Durham strapped on an acoustic guitar, and delivered a very nice rendition of Bob Dylan’s 1963 song, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Brian Brown has the details, and you can listen to both the song and the lecture here.

Tom Wright: Simply Christian

In his little book Simply Christian (London: SPCK, 2006), the distinguished New Testament scholar N. T. Wright offers a lively and refreshing introduction to Christian theology (and I’m grateful to SPCK for a review copy). In 16 short chapters, Wright outlines the broad terrain of Christian belief, beginning with general human experiences of longing (chapters 1-4), before discussing the story of the Old and New Testaments (chapter 5-10) and the meaning of the Christian life today (chapters 11-16).

The book’s central metaphor is that of “echoes.” In our longing for justice, our hunger for spirituality and relationship, and our delight in beauty, we are hearing “echoes of a voice” – and it is in the story of Jesus that we “recognize the voice whose echoes we have heard” (p. 61).

Wright points out that Christianity “is not about Jesus offering a wonderful moral example,” nor is it about Jesus “accomplishing a new route by which people can ‘go to heaven when they die,’” nor about “giving the world fresh teaching about God.” On the contrary, “Christianity is about something that happened” (pp. 78-79). Through Jesus, “God’s future has arrived in the present” – now, “[i]nstead of mere echoes, we hear the voice itself: a voice which speaks of rescue from evil and death, and hence of new creation” (p. 100).

Our unfulfilled longings are thus echoes of the voice that has now spoken in the resurrection of Jesus: “When Jesus emerged from the tomb, justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty rose with him” (p. 100). Further, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity derives directly from what took place in Jesus: “God, the true God, is the God we see in Jesus of Nazareth” – and this God “not only happens to love us,” but “he is love itself” (p. 118), so that “within the very being of this God there [is] a give-and-take, a to-and-fro, a love given and received” (p. 102).

In his discussion of worship, sacraments, prayer and scripture, Wright offers a generous and irenic approach, and he emphasises the importance of active participation in the life of the Christian community. Above all, he says, the Christian life is “the new way of being human, the Jesus-shaped way of being human, the cross-and-resurrection way of life, the Spirit-led pathway” – it is life lived in anticipation of “the full, rich, glad human existence which will one day be ours when God makes all things new” (p. 189). Thus Christian ethics is not about mastering certain rules and moral guidelines: “It is about practising, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God’s new world” (p. 189).

And what is God’s new world all about? It is the perfection of our created world, the fulfilment of all our longings for justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty. Our role is to be “agents” of this new creation in all that we do – “in symphonies and family life, in restorative justice and poetry, in holiness and service to the poor, in politics and painting” (p. 202). For the new creation does not lie only in the future: “new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian” (p. 202).

Tom Wright’s Simply Christian is a remarkably fresh, concise, and – in the best sense of the word – simple depiction of the Christian faith. It is grounded in a deep awareness of the fact that we learn who God really is only in the story of what God has done in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Your favourite Anglican theologian

After 137 votes, it seems that the favourite contemporary Anglican theologian is N. T. Wright (53%), followed by Rowan Williams (25%), and then Oliver O’Donovan (9%), John Milbank (7%) and Kathryn Tanner (6%).

Rowan Williams was very popular among voters from the United Kingdom, while Oliver O’Donovan was especially popular in Australia and New Zealand. In contrast, North American voters overwhelmingly preferred N. T. Wright (although, interestingly, people from the east coast of the US were more inclined to vote for Williams or O’Donovan). But on the whole it was a landslide victory for the Bishop of Durham.

Now that we’ve decided on the most popular Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican theologians, we might as well hold a poll in which you can vote for the finalists. But we need one more poll first to give us our five finalists. So what should the next poll be? Greek orthodox theologians? Heretics? Baptists? Methodists? Liberation theologians? Women theologians? Let us know if you’ve got any ideas for the next poll....

Resurrection controversy

Mike Bird has written a very nice response to my critique of his post on the resurrection. I suppose I’ll have to agree with him now, after all the flattering things he says about me!

In any case, flattery aside, Mike seems to express himself in a more balanced way in this response. He points out that the New Testament does not define the resurrection in any narrow way, but it only offers certain “boundaries” within which differing interpretations are possible. This is exactly how I see it too—there is no occasion for theological relativism, since the New Testament witnesses themselves (without defining resurrection in any narrow way) set the boundaries for how “resurrection” should be understood.

So I suppose Mike and I would simply disagree about where these boundaries lie. Certainly I would want to place people like Bultmann, Schillebeeckx and Borg within the boundaries (regardless of whether I agree with them), since in cases like these the issue is not whether “God raised Jesus from the dead,” but only the precise way in which this event should be interpreted.

For more discussion of this controversial topic, and for some attempts to adjudicate between Mike and me, see also the posts by Sean du Toit, Richard Hall, Denny Burk, Aaron Ghiloni and Ron Short.

And thanks especially to all those who contributed such marvellous comments in response to my earlier post. I found this discussion remarkably helpful, and it has given me a lot to think about. Has any other blog out there ever been graced with such brilliant and amiable readers?

Believing in the resurrection

In a very lively post, Mike Bird critiques N. T. Wright’s view that one does not need to believe in bodily resurrection in order to be a Christian. Wright says: “I have friends who I am quite sure are Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection. But the view I take of them—and they know this—is that they are very, very muddled.... I do think, however, ... that for healthy Christian life individually and corporately, belief in the bodily resurrection is foundational.”

To all this, Mike replies: “No!” He points out that according to early Christian belief, it is confession of Jesus as the “Risen Lord” that marks a person out as a Christian. He also notes that “the belief that Jesus ‘died and rose’ was the most basic and primitive Christian confession,” and that the resurrection is bound up with the gospel (as Paul argues in 1 Cor. 15).

On this occasion, I will have to side with N. T. Wright against Mike. I think Mike is exactly right about the centrality of resurrection in the primitive Christian kerygma. But the crucial question is whether any particular theological interpretation of resurrection belongs to the heart of the gospel. And it seems to me that the New Testament itself resists such a view. In fact, the New Testament witnesses don’t offer any precise theological interpretation of the resurrection. None of the Gospels tries to describe or explain the event of resurrection at all—rather, the resurrection is precisely the mystery at the centre of the story of Jesus.

The closest thing to a definition of “resurrection” in the New Testament is of course Paul’s discussion in 1 Cor. 15. But even here, Paul focuses sharply on the discontinuity between the physical body and the resurrected body, so that the precise meaning of “resurrection” is made all the more mysterious. Paul elucidates the concept only with the aid of various metaphors—and that is just the point! The precise meaning of “resurrection” remains unknown; it remains an event of the world to come, whose meaning lies beyond the horizon of our current understanding.

Resurrection is not a this-worldly reality; it is eschatological reality. We can grope toward its meaning through metaphors like resuscitation or awakening from sleep. We can grope toward its meaning through narratives like Mark’s story of the transfiguration (Mk. 9) and Matthew’s story of the opening of graves (Matt. 27). But we cannot define the concept of resurrection itself. When we speak of the resurrection, we are speaking of a mystery.

So to make any specific theological interpretation of “resurrection” an essential component of Christian faith seems to be at odds with the New Testament witnesses, and with the eschatological character of resurrection.

I myself believe in “bodily resurrection,” and I think this concept is the most faithful way of following the New Testament witnesses—but I could never tell you exactly what “bodily resurrection” means, and I would never want the term to become anything more than a metaphor. Other Christians interpret the resurrection using different terms and different metaphors; in different ways, they are still trying to affirm the resurrection of Jesus.

Needless to say, some interpretations of the resurrection are mistaken, and some are closer to the truth than others. But the one thing that matters ultimately is faith in the “Risen Lord”—not one’s ability to define this faith in correct conceptual terms.

N. T. Wright on faith and history

During the question-time after one of the lectures, I asked Bishop Wright about the relationship between faith and historical research. He responded to the question, and then he ended with these words:

“Some historians could do with a good dose of faith; and I know of many faithful Christians who could do with a good dose of history!”

An interview with N. T. Wright

During a coffee-break yesterday, Bishop Wright kindly agreed to participate in an interview for Faith and Theology. So I asked him to respond to the question: “Who do you think is the greatest modern New Testament scholar?” Instead of naming just one person, he named four. Here’s what he said (paraphrased slightly):

“Well, I greatly admire Albert Schweitzer. He had feet of clay, of course, but he really saw the big picture, and he got it right on some of the most important issues.

“The Canadian Catholic scholar, Ben Meyer, has been under-appreciated. But he did some very important work, with massive scholarly and philosophical apparatus. His loss was a tremendous blow to the field of New Testament studies. And some of his work is still only being implemented today.

“Then, among contemporary scholars, Richard Bauckham from the University of St Andrews is doing some work that is really unrivalled at the moment. Richard has an absolutely astonishing command of the first-century sources.

“Hmmm, who else? It’s silly that I can’t think of anyone else, since there are so many scholars whom I read every single day, with great appreciation.... Well, yes, there’s Martin Hengel. He’s said some rather intemperate things against the New Perspective, which is unfortunate, really, because he has done as much as anyone to contribute to our understanding of early Judaism.”

At this point, Wright was about to name a fifth person as well, but I insisted that he finish his cup of tea instead.

Some N. T. Wright highlights

Here are some memorable remarks from N. T. Wright’s lectures yesterday:

“The longer you look at Jesus, the more you are led into the mysteries of trinitarian theology.”

“Where Jesus is, there God’s sovereign, saving action is doing new creation—right before your eyes!”

“Part of the point of the New Testament is that we don’t know what the word ‘God’ really means until we look hard and humbly at Jesus of Nazareth.”

“When Jesus wanted to tell his disciples what his death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory—he gave them a meal.”

“Take the resurrection out of [the epistle to the] Romans, and the whole thing will collapse like a human being with the skeleton removed.”

“The resurrection is not an odd ‘blip’ within the old world. It is the prototypical and foundational event of the new world.”

A day with N. T. Wright

Here in Brisbane, I’ve spent a very enjoyable day listening to N. T. Wright lecturing on the historical Jesus. These lectures were a sort of one-day summary of Wright’s great book, Jesus and the Victory of God (1997), along with a closing lecture on the resurrection.

During one of the coffee breaks, Wright also kindly allowed me to interview him for Faith and Theology. I asked him: “Who do you think is the greatest modern New Testament scholar?” (naturally I was hoping he’d choose Bultmann). He had an interesting response, and I’ll post it tomorrow, along with some highlights and quotes from the lectures.

But for now, here’s just one highlight. Wright related the following anecdote about Karl Barth, and the room erupted in laughter:

After a lecture, a woman asked Karl Barth: “Is it true that the serpent really spoke?” And Barth replied: “Madam, it does not matter whether or not the serpent really spoke; all that matters is what the serpent said.”

N. T. Wright in Brisbane

The Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, is currently on his first lecture tour in Australia. Fortunately, although we Protestants were slow to act, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane has kindly persuaded Wright to visit Brisbane as well.

So he’ll be here in Brisbane for two full-day seminars on Friday 31 March and Saturday 1 April. On Friday his topic will be “Jesus’ Mission,” and on Saturday it will be “Christian Mission in a Postmodern World.” I have the greatest respect for Wright’s scholarship (in spite of my loyalty to Bultmann), and I’ll be going along on Friday to hear him talk about the historical Jesus. I’ll be sure to post something about the seminar afterwards.

If you’re in the Brisbane area and you’d like to come along, then you need to register by 24 March (see the details here).

Ecumenical colloquium in Durham

Last week an international colloquium of 140 senior church leaders and theologians from the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and Methodist churches met for six days at Durham University.

In the keynote address, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Walter Kaspar (pictured) stressed that “unity is symphonic”; unity in the New Testament is “unity in the diversity of charisms, offices, local churches, and cultures.” It is “communio sanctorum, that is, shared participation in the holy, in the life of God, in the Holy Spirit, in the Gospel, in the one baptism, and in the one eucharistic body of the Lord.”

On the first full day of the colloquium, N. T. Wright presided and Cardinal Kasper preached at an Anglican eucharist, and then Wright preached at a Roman Catholic eucharist the following day.

Catholic theologian Eamon Duffy described the colloquium as the most remarkable event in living memory. And N. T. Wright described it as theologically “jaw-dropping.” He remarked: “There are very serious voices within the Roman Catholic Church saying we are not three or four different Churches; we are all part of the one single Church which has some serious internal problems to be addressed. That’s a very different way of stating the ecumenical jigsaw than we have been used to.”

Other participants of the colloquium included Mario Conti, Terence Brain, Kevin Dunn, Michael Evans, Joseph Famerée, David F. Ford, Bernd Hilberath, Linda Hogan, Fergus Kerr, Nicholas Lash, Hervé Legrand, Andrew Louth, Paul McPartlan, Paul Murray, Brian Noble, Patrick O’Donoghue, Ladislas Örsy, James Puglisi, Thomas J. Reese, Stephen Sykes and Mary Tanner.

For further details of the colloquium, see the reports here and here.

N. T. Wright on Paul

Check out Edmund’s humorous post.

N. T. Wright and John P. Meier: Christopher McMahon responds

A few days ago I posted a brief critique of Christopher McMahon’s new article on N. T. Wright and John P. Meier. I invited Chris to say a few words in reply—here’s his response:

I would like to begin by affirming Ben Myers’ critique of my recent essay in New Blackfriars. Generally, he is correct to say that the methodological issues involved in the comparison of Wright and Meier are not fully addressed in the essay—more work needs to be done, and I cannot fault his recognition that my essay does not necessarily resolve the matter (especially for those who admire Wright).

But I do contend in my essay that Meier’s performance of historical Jesus research is, in some ways, far more critically realist than Wright’s. I make this judgment with an appeal to the work of Bernard Lonergan. Wright’s critical realist epistemology correctly accounts for the role of the human subject in the act of knowing, but his account of the role of hypothesis and verification is problematic. In a manner not altogether dissimilar to RO’s reading of modern philosophy, Wright narrates the history of NT scholarship so that he might dismiss its account of the formation of the NT.

I will grant that the philosophical commitments of the form critics often left a mark on their account of the NT; it does not mean, however, that one can simply abandon their insights. Wright’s decision to argue for Bailey’s reading of NT formation and his search for larger metanarratives to reconstruct the story-shaped world of the NT are not entirely without merit, but I find Wright’s arguments for the historicity of particular biblical passages largely unconvincing (e.g., Mk 13).

While Meier’s account of historical reconstruction is highly problematic (I think Tony Kelly and the late Ben F. Meyer have offered the best critiques of Meier in this regard), his performance of historical Jesus research lends itself to a critical realist reading (a Lonerganian critical realism). I think those who wish to further Wright’s project would do well to pay attention to Meier’s performance (admittedly with a grain of salt).

All the best,
Chris

Christopher McMahon, Ph.D.
Division of Philosophy and Theology
University of Mary
7500 University Drive
Bismarck, ND 58504

N. T. Wright and John P. Meier

The September issue of New Blackfriars is out, and it includes this article by Christopher McMahon: “Stories, Hypotheses, and Jesus: N. T. Wright, John Meier, and Historical Jesus Research,” New Blackfriars 86:1005 (2005), 537-45. (You can read the article online if your library subscribes to Blackwell Synergy.)

In the article, McMahon critiques Wright’s historical methodology and argues in favour of Meier’s method: “Meier’s project serves as the benchmark for the way historical Jesus research ought to be done—progressing from available sources to historical judgments about the data in those sources, and finally to the verification of a hypothesis about what is moving forward in the history reflected in the data” (p. 544).

Certainly this is one way of viewing the historical task—and McMahon’s critique of Wright rests squarely on this view of historical method. But this hardly settles the problem, since the question at issue is precisely whether such a historical method should be preferred over Wright’s critical realist method. Similarly, nothing would be resolved if Meier were critiqued on the basis of Wright’s critical realism, since this too would simply sidestep the basic methodological question.

It’s unfortunate that McMahon doesn’t attempt to analyse this fundamental difference in historical outlook that separates Wright and Meier. For it seems to me that only such a fundamental methodological analysis can hope to clarify the diversity of current historical Jesus research.

Wright or Bultmann? Your Verdict

Well, the votes are in. Who is the winner: the cheerful Bishop of Durham or the solemn man from Marburg? One fellow blogger answered: “Well duh.... Everyone knows it’s Rudolf Karl Bultmann, finest New Testament exegete of this or any century. Wright is well and good—but he can no more be compared to Bultmann than an ant can be compared to a man.” Well, I guess that was pretty much how I felt about it too, although I suspected all along that N. T. Wright would get the votes. So imagine my astonishment when the winner turned out to be—Rudolf Bultmann! Wright came in with 42.7% of the votes, while the man from Marburg cleaned up with 57.3%. Hardly a landslide, but still a respectable win. To view the results, click here, and then click the “view results” link.

Is N. T. Wright greater than Bultmann? Cast your vote!

My good friend Mike Bird from the Euangelion blog has made this clever contrast between N. T. Wright and Rudolf Bultmann: “As far as New Testament theologians go, many went to Marburg to sit at the feet of Bultmann, and behold, one greater than Bultmann is here.”

When Mike first showed me this lovely sentence, I told him that I could never agree: I found it impossible to believe that N. T. Wright is “greater than Bultmann.” Let me explain myself. And then you can decide by casting your vote.

Bultmann’s unique achievement was to ask new questions. Through profound intuition, Bultmann grasped problems which until then had not been conceived; he formulated questions which until then had never been articulated. These questions shattered existing paradigms and ushered in new ways of thinking about and practising historical research.

These were questions about the continuity between the Jewish man Jesus and the risen Lord of faith; about the relationship between faith and historical method; about the conceptual gulf between primitive and scientific worldviews. And perhaps most important of all was the question of how, in the first century, Jesus the proclaimer became Christ the proclaimed.

It was questions like these that transformed New Testament scholarship, and allowed later scholars to progress far beyond Bultmann’s own answers. For even if we disagree with all Bultmann’s answers, there is still no escaping his questions. Whether we love him or loathe him, we are all of his school.

In fact, doesn’t the significance of N. T. Wright lie, at least partly, in the fact that he has provided such gripping and compelling answers to Bultmann’s questions? Might we not even view Wright’s whole extraordinary “Christian Origins” project as a massive attempt to answer Bultmann’s question of continuity between the proclaimer and the proclaimed? And to this extent, isn’t Wright himself also of Bultmann’s school?

Don’t misunderstand me: N. T. Wright is a brilliant scholar, perhaps one of the most brilliant biblical scholars of recent times. It takes brilliance to provide compelling answers to profound questions. But it took genius to discover these questions in the first place.

Wright is a brilliant scholar—but Bultmann was a genius. And genius is above brilliance as the heavens are above the earth.

Of course I am being deliberately mischievous—just as Mike Bird is when he describes Wright as “one greater than Bultmann.” But what do you think? Is Wright greater than Bultmann? Well, let’s settle this democratically:

To cast your vote, click here (this will momentarily open a new window where you can vote). I'll announce the verdict in a couple of days.