By Christian / N. T. Wright
In the eighth chapter of N.T. Wright’s book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, the point is to become aware of the multi-layered, complex and rich content of the Gospels. Because in the past, exactly the opposite has happened.
Making the gospels ordinary
N.T. Wright formulates the problem as follows:
Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.
N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8
This happened, for example, because the topics “kingdom” and “cross” are considered separately, although the Gospels bring both together.
The separation of the kingdom and the cross
First of all, we need to recognize that the four gospels effortlessly bring together many things into a rich unity that later traditions separated from each other. For a long time, there have been the opposing positions of “Kingdom Christians” with their social gospel and “Cross Christians” with their “save your soul for heaven” agenda.
But first-century Greeks, Romans and Jews did not think in separate categories such as politics and religion.
Likewise, modern philosophers today separate the question of the “problem of evil” from what modern theologians call “atonement”. In the Gospels, the two topics are linked. N.T. Wright has written about this in his book Evil and the Justice of God, which I might do a series on at some point.
„But the problem we face lies deeper within the mind-set of the critical scholarship of the past two hundred years.“ If Jesus was talking about God’s kingdom, it was understood in terms of the usual armed revolution, and that couldn’t have happened yet. And if it was understood as a reference to the end of the world – well, that hadn’t happened yet either. Although the words in Mark 9:1 are quite clear: “Some people standing here, won’t experience death before they see God’s kingdom come in power.”
obscure, but because the philosophy of the European Enlightenment demanded that they close their eyes to it, was that Jesus announced and inaugurated a vision of God’s kingdom that he was constantly redefining, through actions and parables, and that would be inaugurated by his own vindication. The importance of Daniel 7, of the exaltation and vindication of the “one like a son of man,” cannot be over-stressed here—and of course it is at that very point that critical scholarship has again done its best to neutralize a central element of the evidence.
N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8
The writers of the New Testament, on the other hand, did their best to make this point clear. Matthew thought that Jesus had already achieved this: it: “All authority,” declares Matthew’s Jesus, “in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. (Matthew 28:18) You cannot understand Paul’s letters like Romans, 1 Corinthians and Philippians without this understanding. And in the Revelation of John, the sovereignty of Jesus is celebrated from the first to the last page. But of course, not for a second did any of these authors think that utopia had already arrived.
The early Christian writers were, of course, setting forth an eschatology that had been inaugurated, but not fully consummated; they were celebrating (Paul is quite explicit on this point in 1 Cor. 15:20–28) something that has already happened, but at the same time something that still has to happen in the future. They believed themselves to be living between Jesus’s accomplishment of the reign of God and its full implementation.
New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. “The ruler of this world” has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus’s triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the truth the past two hundred years of European and American culture has been desperately trying to stifle.
N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8
For the disciples of Jesus in the first century, this was the turning point in human history. Christianity was supposed to be an eschatology: “This is how history should turn out, despite appearances!” But since the thinkers of the Enlightenment to this day believe that their time is the turning point in human history, after which everything will be better, Christianity was reduced to a religion: “Here is a way to be spiritual.”
How did Christians react to this?
Christian reactions
One reaction over the past two hundred years has been to say that it’s not really that important, because we’re going to heaven anyway. But that is not at all what the evangelists thought; rather, it is closer to Gnosticism. You can find more about this in the series on N.T. Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope”.
Another school of thought says that the church should simply keep its house in order and be a shining example for others. And otherwise, please do not get involved in the world. However, this does not fit with Jesus‘ claim in Matthew 28 and runs the risk of ignoring the part of Christian thinking in relation to creation.
A third and fourth reaction has simply sanctioned the right or left wing of the political spectrum (especially in the USA).
Behind these different reactions, however, one can also recognize one of the modern contexts with which the Gospels are then read. But if we want to let the Gospels speak for themselves, then we have to read them in their context.
Power and empire within first-century Judaism
In the period after the exile and up to the first century, the Jews had a fairly clear idea of the relationship between God and the kingdom: although many were waiting for the predicted complete rule of God, they also believed that He was somehow sovereign over the nations even now. Since God did not want the world to plunge into utter chaos, He allows kings to rule. Even if he does put them in their place, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel.
The Jews assumed, on the basis of their strong creational theology, that the creator had made the world in such a way as to be properly ordered and run by human beings. The Jewish vision of theocracy, of God being in charge, was always one of a rule mediated through his image-bearers, that is, through human beings.
society. In a genuinely creational monotheism, the world works best when ruled by wise stewards, human beings who are humble before God and hence effective in bringing fruitful order to his world.
N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8
The Jews also didn’t seem to be particularly interested in how a ruler came to power, but rather in what he did afterwards. And the Jews in the first century also knew all about bad rulers – Jewish or pagan. What many wanted was a theocracy. But this was neither a theocracy like the one Calvin enforced in Geneva, nor like the one that is enforced today by no less radical Muslims. In the Psalms, in Isaiah and in many other biblical and later texts, the Messiah, the anointed king, is the central figure. And in Psalm 2, 72 and similar passages, it becomes clear that the Messiah would become the anointed king not only for God’s Jewish people.
N.T. Wright summarizes it as follows:
So, to sum up this very long but necessary introduction. Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth, was created as God’s temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in that temple. But the world was out of joint through the failure of humans in general and Israel in particular, so God the creator would have to act in judgment and justice to hold them to account. And the sign of that coming judgment was that at the heart of the world God had placed his covenant people, gathered around the Temple, which was the microcosm of creation, to celebrate his true order and to pray for it to come on earth as in heaven.
The significance of the Temple as the fulcrum of ancient Jewish theocracy, actual and eschatological, cannot be overemphasized.
N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8
That is the context of the people with whom Jesus spoke, and the context of Jesus‘ disciples and the evangelists.
As we turn now, none too soon, to consider the themes of kingdom and cross, we note that for all the evangelists, as for Paul, there is no sense of the kingdom not after all having appeared. Yes, it has been redefined. Yes, there is still more to do, as long as evil continues to stalk the earth. But the early Christians all believed that with Jesus’s death and resurrection the kingdom had indeed come in power, even if it didn’t look at all like they imagined it would. The hope had been realized, even though it had been quite drastically redefined in the process. A new theocracy had indeed been inaugurated, because the Temple where God lived among his people had been radically redefined. A new empire had been launched that would trump Caesar’s empire and all those like it, not by superior force but by a completely different sort of power altogether. And the place where this vision is set out is, to the great surprise of many who at one level know these documents well, the collection of the four gospels we find in the New Testament.
N.T. Wright How God Became King, chapter 8
Kommentar verfassen