The Challenge of Jesus
by N.T. Wright
I'm rereading N.T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus as a precursor to his earlier work, Jesus and the Victory of God. This book looks at the main arguments of the latter and makes them succinct and easy-to-understand for lay readers (such as myself). My hope is that my rereading this book, I'll be better geared for tackling these subjects in-depth when I get to Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright seeks to frame Jesus within 2nd Temple Palestinian Judaism, highlighting him as prophet and Messiah and locating him within the geo-political events of his day.
In Chapter One, Wright looks at the contemporary scholarly atmosphere regarding the study of Jesus, criticizing more liberal movements (such as the Jesus Seminar) and locating himself on the spectrum. He asks the question, "Why should we study Jesus afresh?" This question is pertinent, since more conservative Christians balk against any "fresh" readings of scripture (forgetting, perhaps, that their own Protestant leanings have their roots and foundation in that which they condemn). He writes, "Historical research... by no means tells us to throw away the Gospels and substitute a quite different story of our own. It does, however, warn us that our familiar readings of those Gospel stories may well have to submit to serious challenges and questionings and that we may end up reading even our favorite texts in ways we had never imagined." (27) Wright's aim is to shed light on Jesus' vocation, identity, and actions by looking at his context in 2nd Temple Palestinian Judaism; the consequent changes to how we interpret various texts (such as the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Sower, which he examines in Ch. 2) can be disturbing but also enlightening. As one reviewer of the book said, "Many Christians will find [Wright's] conclusions unsettling." But if the conclusions make sense, then we shouldn't be so apt to discard them in defense of preserving our cherished status-quo.
In Chapter Two, Wright lays out two foundational premises about Jesus: "First, he believed that the creator God had purposed from the beginning to address and deal with the problems within his creation through Israel. Israel was not just to be an 'example' of a nation under God; Israel was to be the means through which the world would be saved. Second, Jesus believed... that this vocation would be accomplished through Israel's history reaching a great moment of climax, in which Israel herself would be saved from her enemies and through which the creator God, the covenant God, would at last bring his love and justice, his mercy and truth, to bear upon the whole world, bringing renewal and healing to all creation." (35) The first point is that of election; the second is that of eschatology. Though the geographical exile in Babylon had ended, Israel's theological exile continued, since she was ruled over by pagan superpowers. The Jewish people yearned for the true end of exile, and this would come when God's kingdom broke forth. In this vein, Wright frames Jesus as a prophet of the "kingdom of God," a phrase pregnant with meaning, not least that of God's rule being brought to bear on the present world. Jesus' contemporaries believed that God's rule would be brought to fruition, but they disagreed on how. Some Jews were isolationist: separate from the pagan world and just wait for God to usher in His kingdom. Others were compromisers: connive with the pagan forces ruling over Israel and hope to accomplish what you can in this way. Still others were revolutionaries: these zealots believed that God's kingdom would come forth through holiness and a good amount of spilled blood. Throughout the gospels we see the second two options prominently, and the days of Jesus' ministry were marked by escalating revolutionary fervor that would culminate in flat-out rebellion a few decades after Jesus' crucifixion. Jesus, as a prophet of the kingdom of God, spoke against this revolutionary zeal, and he advocated a different way of being Jewish: not living by the sword but by turning the other cheek. Jesus abhorred violence, and he declared that those who lived by violence were forsaking their calling as Jews and would meet a violent end.
In Chapter Three, Wright paints a portrait of the Pharisees not as legalistic thought-police but as self-appointed teachers of Torah whose aim was to preserve Israel's purity and unity in the face of paganism. The Mosaic Law wasn't given, Wright argues, as a "code of conduct" by which one might scale the ladder to heaven; rather, the Law was given to preserve Israel from her pagan neighbors, and good Israelites respected the boundary-markers (the "works of the Law") that separated them from the pagans. Jesus stirred up controversy in many ways, not least of all by demolishing cherished boundary-markers, condemning the purists for missing the whole point of what it means to be a good Jew, and by threatening the purity of Israel itself by redrawing the boundary-markers around himself. Wright looks at some of the major "thought paradigms" in Jewish belief (the Sabbath, food laws, beliefs regarding the Israelite nation and its land, and the Temple) and shows how Jesus redefined them around himself. Much of the chapter revolves around Jesus' actions and declarations regarding the Temple as a focal point of his prophetic career. "[Jesus'] deepest belief regarding the Temple was eschatological: the time had come for God to judge the entire institution. [The Temple] had come to symbolize the injustice that characterized the society on the inside and on the outside, the rejection of the [Israelite] vocation to be the light of the world, the city set on a hill that would draw to itself all the peoples of the world." (64) Wright shows not only how Jesus prophesied the Temple's destruction through verbal prophecies and symbolic reenactments, nor does he stop at showing how Jesus' Temple-action condemned the Temple because of its focal point in Jewish nationalistic revolution, but he also shows how Jesus took the functions of the Temple--the place where YHWH dwelt and where forgiveness of sins could be procured--and wrapped them around himself. In Wright's words, "[During] his Galilean ministry, Jesus acted and spoke as if he was in some sense called to do and be what the Temple was and did. His offer of forgiveness with no prior condition of Temple-worship or sacrifice, was the equivalent of someone in our world offering as a private individual to issue someone else a passport or a driver's license. He was undercutting the official system and claiming by implication to be establishing a new one in its place." (65) This "new system" had Jesus at the center: forgiveness of sins was found in him, the dwelling place of God was found in him, and to be identified as a true Israelite wasn't to adhere to the Jewish boundary-markers but to be identified in him. "[Jesus' healings] were the symbolic expression of Jesus' reconstitution of Israel... His healings were the sign of a radical and healing inclusivism--not simply including everyone in a modern, laissez-faire, anything-goes fashion but dealing with the problems at the root so as to bring to birth a truly renewed, restored community whose new life would symbolize and embody the kingdom of which Jesus was speaking." (68-69) Wright summarizes his points in Chapter Three: "Jesus remained utterly anchored within first-century Judaism. His place there, however, was the place of a prophet, warning that Israel's present course was leading to disaster and urging a radical alternative upon her. His aim was to reconstitute the people of God around himself, to accomplish the real return from exile, to inaugurate the kingdom of God." (73)
In Chapter Four, Wright seeks to perform the historian's task by asking, "What was Jesus' motivation? What were his controlling stories? Who did he see himself being, and what purpose did he see in his death?" He begins with a succinct analysis of Jewish Messianic hopes, pointing out that no one expected the Messiah to be in any sense divine. Furthermore, Messianic expectations were muddled; there was no clear-cut consensus on what to expect. Given this, Wright offers a brief synopsis of the general Messianic expectations. The Messiah would be a royal king, and as such he would rebuild (or restore) the Temple and fight the decisive battle against God's enemies. The Messianic hopes were the "sharp edge of the hope of the nation as a whole, the hope for liberation, for the end of exile, for the defeat of evil, for YHWH to return to Zion." (76) Wright then looks at various Gospel texts illuminating Christ's vocation as Messiah, showing how he understood himself to be the Messiah but in a way no one else had expected. "He came as the representative of the people of YHWH to bring about the end of exile, the renewal of the covenant, the forgiveness of sins. He came to accomplish Israel's rescue, to bring God's justice to the world." (82) Wright examines the Last Supper, framing it as a renewed Passover meal: "The Last Supper was Jesus' own... kingdom-feast, the new-exodus feast." (84) Examining Jesus' crucifixion, Wright seems to take the christus victor approach to the cross: the cross was the moment and means by which God decisively defeated and dismantled the evil powers. "If we are to follow Jesus' own understanding of his vocation, it was the moment when the evil and pain of all the world were heaped up into one place, there to be dealt with once and for all." (93) Looking forward to the Christian life, Wright says, "When we speak of 'following Christ,' it is the crucified Messiah we are talking about. His death was not simply the messy bit that enables our sins to be forgiven but that can then be forgotten. The cross is the surest, truest, and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God; the more we learn about the cross in all its historical and theological dimensions, the more we discover about the One in whose image we are made and hence about our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living God is made known." (94-95)
In Chapter Five, Wright asks, "How did Jesus see himself? How did he understand his vocation?" The chapter's title, Jesus & God, catches the thrust of Wright's question: "Did Jesus believe he was God?" Wright reiterates that if we ask that question, we need to define our terms: if Jesus did believe he was God, he wouldn't do so with the Enlightenment's Deist god in mind but with the Jewish God, YHWH, whose identity is wrapped up in the Jewish themes of election and monotheism. Harking back to Exodus 6, Wright identifies this God as the Rescuer. "This God would be known as the rescuer, the one who would... accompany his people through the wilderness, leading them in the pillar of cloud and fire, and giving them his law, his own self-expression of the way of life for his people." (102) Jesus would be well aware of the Jewish hopes for this God's activity in history. "[There] was the expectation of the return of YHWH to Zion after his abandonment of Jerusalem at the time of the exile... [There] was the tradition of the enthronement of YHWH, and of one who somehow shared that throne." (103) Before plunging into the question he begged at the beginning of the chapter, Wright looks at early Christianity's perspective on Jesus' divinity. He demolishes the false trails that tell us Jesus' messiahship, and even his resurrection, prove his divinity. He gives several New Testament texts where Jesus' divinity is assumed and/or implied (1 Cor 8.1-6, the Kenosis Hymn of Phil 2.5-11, Gal 4.1-7, and the cosmic poem of Col 1.15-20). He shows that early Christians did indeed see Jesus as divine, on par with God. Such monotheism was indeed awkward, and trinitarian theology wouldn't develop for a few hundred years. At this point Wright asks the questions, "Did Jesus know he was God?" and "How did Jesus perceive himself?" Wright argues that "Jesus believed himself called to act as the new Temple. When people were in his presence, it was as if they were in the Temple. But if the Temple was itself the greatest of Israel's incarnational symbols, the conclusion was inevitable... Jesus was claiming, at least implicitly, to be the place where and the means by which Israel's God was at last personally present to and with his people. Jesus was... acting as if he were the Shekinah in person, the presence of YHWH tabernacling with his people." (113-114) He goes on, "Jesus in his entire career was acting as if he were bringing about the new exodus. God's people were in slavery; he had heard their cry and was coming to rescue them. Just as the first exodus revealed the previously hidden meaning of YHWH's name, so now Jesus would reveal the person, one might say the personality, of YHWH in action, embodied in human form. He would bring about the final redemption of God's people and thereby set in motion the fulfillment of Israel's destiny to be the light of the world." (115-116) Putting it in different terms, "In Jesus himself... we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Is 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do; the creator God, giving new life; the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures; the faithful God, dwelling in the midst of his people; the stern and tender God, relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress." (121) As to whether or not Jesus believed himself to be God, Wright speculates on pages 121-122, "I do not think Jesus 'knew he was God' in the same sense that one knows one is hungry or thirsty, tall or short. It was not a mathematical knowledge, like knowing that two and two make four... It was more like the knowledge that I have that I am loved by my family and closest friends; like the knowledge that I have that sunrise over the sea is awesome and beautiful; like the knowledge of the musician not only of what the composer intended but of how precisely to perform the piece in exactly that way--a knowledge most securely possessed, of course, when the performer is also the composer. It was, in short, the knowledge that characterizes vocation."
In Chapter Six, Wright looks at the resurrection of Christ. His mission isn't to determine the historical justifiability of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, but to ask, "If he was raised, so what?" (in other works he's done a fantastic job defending the historicity of the resurrection, but that's not his aim here). "Already by the time of Paul, our earliest written witness," Wright says on page 126, "the resurrection of Jesus is not just a single detached article of faith. It is woven into the very structure of Christian life and thought, informing (among other things) baptism, justification, ethics and the future hope both for humans and for the cosmos." Wright devotes a considerable amount of space to the rise of the early church, showing how it came about both as a "kingdom of God movement" and as a "resurrection movement," with the resurrection of Christ serving as the bulwark for the church's expansion and modus vivendi. The early Christian conviction regarding resurrection, which we see in the letters of Paul and not least in 1 Corinthians 15, isn't that it was "a matter of the opening up of a new religious experience. Nor was it proof of survival, of life after death. [The resurrection of Jesus] meant that the Scriptures had been fulfilled, that the kingdom of God had arrived, that the new age had broken in to the midst of the present age, had dawned upon a surprised and unready world... [The] entire biblical narrative had at last reached its climax, had come true in these astonishing events." (142) Through the lens of the New Testament, Wright establishes five things the early church believed regarding the resurrection (145):
(1) It was the moment when the creator God fulfilled his ancient promises to Israel, saving them from 'their sins,' i.e. their exile. It thus initiated the 'last days,' at the end of which the victory over death begun at Easter would at last be complete.
(2) It involved the transformation of Jesus' body: it was, that is to say, neither a resuscitation of Jesus' dead body to the same sort of life nor an abandonment of that body to decomposition. Paul's account presupposes the empty tomb.
(3) It involved Jesus' being seen alive in a very limited early period, after which he was known as present to the church in a different way. These early sightings constituted those who witnessed them as apostles.
(4) It was the prototype for the resurrection of all God's people at the end of the last days.
(5) It was thus the ground not only for the future hope of Christians but for their present work.
In the final chapter, Wright asks, "So what?" If this is the story of God seen in the story of Christ, what are we to do with that in our postmodern world? To set the scene, he sketches out three aspects of postmodernity on pages 151-152: knowledge and truth, the self, and the story. Taking them in order:
(1) Where modernity thought it could know things objectively about the world, postmodernity has reminded us that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. Everybody has a point of view, and that point of view distorts; everybody describes things the way that suits them. There is no such thing as objective truth. Likewise, there are no such things as objective values, only preferences. The cultural symbols that encapsulate this revolution are the personal stereo and the virtual-reality system: everyone creates his or her own private world.
(2) Modernity vaunted the great lonely individual, the all-powerful "I": Descartes' cogito sergo sum and the proud "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." But postmodernity had deconstructed the self, the I. The "I" is just a floating signifier, a temporary and accidental collocation of conflicting forces and impulses. Just as reality collapses inward upon the knower, the knower him- or herself deconstructs.
(3) Modernity told an implicit narrative about the way the world was. It was essentially an eschatological story. World history has been steadily moving toward or at least eagerly awaiting the point where the industrial revolution and the philosophical Enlightenment would burst upon the world, bringing a new era of blessing for all. This huge overarching story--overarching stories are known in this world as metanarratives--has now been conclusively shown to be an oppressive, imperialist and self-serving story; it has brought untold misery to millions in the industrialized West and to billions in the rest of the world, where cheap labor and raw materials have been ruthlessly exploited. It is a story that serves the interests of the Western world. Modernity stands condemned of building a new tower of Babel. Postmodernity has claimed, primarily with this great narrative as the example, that all metanarratives are suspect; they are all power games.
"Collapsing reality; deconstructing selfhood; the death of the metanarrative. These are the keys to understanding postmodernity." (152) Within this cultural climate, whatever is the church to do? Using an illustration from the disciples' walking on the Emmaus Road, Wright advocates telling the story differently. And what is this story? "The exile is over--not just Israel's exile in actual and spiritual Babylon but the exile of the human race, shut out of the garden. The new world order does not look like people thought it would, but they must get used to the fact that it is here and that they are not only its beneficiaries but also its ambassadors and witnesses." (164) He continues, "[The] Messiah himself has gone to the place of pain, the place where Israel and indeed the whole world was in deep distress. He has been cast down, oppressed by the enemy... He became the suffering Israel on behalf of the suffering Israel; he went into exile--Israel's exile, the human exile from the garden, the exile of the whole cosmos--to redeem those who were in exile." (165) Wright argues, "We must get used to telling the story of God, Israel, Jesus and the world as the true metanarrative, the story of healing and self-giving love. We must get used to living as those who have truly died and risen with Christ so that our self, having been thoroughly deconstructed, can be put back together, not by the agendas that the world presses upon us but by God's Spirit." (169) The Christian vocation, then, is to "tell the story, to live by the symbols, to act out the praxis, and to answer the questions in such a way as to become in ourselves and our mission in God's world the answer to the prayer that rises inarticulately, now, not just from one puzzled psalmist but from the whole human race and indeed the whole of God's creation: 'O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.'" (171)
In Chapter Four, Wright seeks to perform the historian's task by asking, "What was Jesus' motivation? What were his controlling stories? Who did he see himself being, and what purpose did he see in his death?" He begins with a succinct analysis of Jewish Messianic hopes, pointing out that no one expected the Messiah to be in any sense divine. Furthermore, Messianic expectations were muddled; there was no clear-cut consensus on what to expect. Given this, Wright offers a brief synopsis of the general Messianic expectations. The Messiah would be a royal king, and as such he would rebuild (or restore) the Temple and fight the decisive battle against God's enemies. The Messianic hopes were the "sharp edge of the hope of the nation as a whole, the hope for liberation, for the end of exile, for the defeat of evil, for YHWH to return to Zion." (76) Wright then looks at various Gospel texts illuminating Christ's vocation as Messiah, showing how he understood himself to be the Messiah but in a way no one else had expected. "He came as the representative of the people of YHWH to bring about the end of exile, the renewal of the covenant, the forgiveness of sins. He came to accomplish Israel's rescue, to bring God's justice to the world." (82) Wright examines the Last Supper, framing it as a renewed Passover meal: "The Last Supper was Jesus' own... kingdom-feast, the new-exodus feast." (84) Examining Jesus' crucifixion, Wright seems to take the christus victor approach to the cross: the cross was the moment and means by which God decisively defeated and dismantled the evil powers. "If we are to follow Jesus' own understanding of his vocation, it was the moment when the evil and pain of all the world were heaped up into one place, there to be dealt with once and for all." (93) Looking forward to the Christian life, Wright says, "When we speak of 'following Christ,' it is the crucified Messiah we are talking about. His death was not simply the messy bit that enables our sins to be forgiven but that can then be forgotten. The cross is the surest, truest, and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God; the more we learn about the cross in all its historical and theological dimensions, the more we discover about the One in whose image we are made and hence about our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living God is made known." (94-95)
In Chapter Five, Wright asks, "How did Jesus see himself? How did he understand his vocation?" The chapter's title, Jesus & God, catches the thrust of Wright's question: "Did Jesus believe he was God?" Wright reiterates that if we ask that question, we need to define our terms: if Jesus did believe he was God, he wouldn't do so with the Enlightenment's Deist god in mind but with the Jewish God, YHWH, whose identity is wrapped up in the Jewish themes of election and monotheism. Harking back to Exodus 6, Wright identifies this God as the Rescuer. "This God would be known as the rescuer, the one who would... accompany his people through the wilderness, leading them in the pillar of cloud and fire, and giving them his law, his own self-expression of the way of life for his people." (102) Jesus would be well aware of the Jewish hopes for this God's activity in history. "[There] was the expectation of the return of YHWH to Zion after his abandonment of Jerusalem at the time of the exile... [There] was the tradition of the enthronement of YHWH, and of one who somehow shared that throne." (103) Before plunging into the question he begged at the beginning of the chapter, Wright looks at early Christianity's perspective on Jesus' divinity. He demolishes the false trails that tell us Jesus' messiahship, and even his resurrection, prove his divinity. He gives several New Testament texts where Jesus' divinity is assumed and/or implied (1 Cor 8.1-6, the Kenosis Hymn of Phil 2.5-11, Gal 4.1-7, and the cosmic poem of Col 1.15-20). He shows that early Christians did indeed see Jesus as divine, on par with God. Such monotheism was indeed awkward, and trinitarian theology wouldn't develop for a few hundred years. At this point Wright asks the questions, "Did Jesus know he was God?" and "How did Jesus perceive himself?" Wright argues that "Jesus believed himself called to act as the new Temple. When people were in his presence, it was as if they were in the Temple. But if the Temple was itself the greatest of Israel's incarnational symbols, the conclusion was inevitable... Jesus was claiming, at least implicitly, to be the place where and the means by which Israel's God was at last personally present to and with his people. Jesus was... acting as if he were the Shekinah in person, the presence of YHWH tabernacling with his people." (113-114) He goes on, "Jesus in his entire career was acting as if he were bringing about the new exodus. God's people were in slavery; he had heard their cry and was coming to rescue them. Just as the first exodus revealed the previously hidden meaning of YHWH's name, so now Jesus would reveal the person, one might say the personality, of YHWH in action, embodied in human form. He would bring about the final redemption of God's people and thereby set in motion the fulfillment of Israel's destiny to be the light of the world." (115-116) Putting it in different terms, "In Jesus himself... we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the loving God, rolling up his sleeves (Is 52:10) to do in person the job that no one else could do; the creator God, giving new life; the God who works through his created world and supremely through his human creatures; the faithful God, dwelling in the midst of his people; the stern and tender God, relentlessly opposed to all that destroys or distorts the good creation and especially human beings, but recklessly loving all those in need and distress." (121) As to whether or not Jesus believed himself to be God, Wright speculates on pages 121-122, "I do not think Jesus 'knew he was God' in the same sense that one knows one is hungry or thirsty, tall or short. It was not a mathematical knowledge, like knowing that two and two make four... It was more like the knowledge that I have that I am loved by my family and closest friends; like the knowledge that I have that sunrise over the sea is awesome and beautiful; like the knowledge of the musician not only of what the composer intended but of how precisely to perform the piece in exactly that way--a knowledge most securely possessed, of course, when the performer is also the composer. It was, in short, the knowledge that characterizes vocation."
In Chapter Six, Wright looks at the resurrection of Christ. His mission isn't to determine the historical justifiability of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, but to ask, "If he was raised, so what?" (in other works he's done a fantastic job defending the historicity of the resurrection, but that's not his aim here). "Already by the time of Paul, our earliest written witness," Wright says on page 126, "the resurrection of Jesus is not just a single detached article of faith. It is woven into the very structure of Christian life and thought, informing (among other things) baptism, justification, ethics and the future hope both for humans and for the cosmos." Wright devotes a considerable amount of space to the rise of the early church, showing how it came about both as a "kingdom of God movement" and as a "resurrection movement," with the resurrection of Christ serving as the bulwark for the church's expansion and modus vivendi. The early Christian conviction regarding resurrection, which we see in the letters of Paul and not least in 1 Corinthians 15, isn't that it was "a matter of the opening up of a new religious experience. Nor was it proof of survival, of life after death. [The resurrection of Jesus] meant that the Scriptures had been fulfilled, that the kingdom of God had arrived, that the new age had broken in to the midst of the present age, had dawned upon a surprised and unready world... [The] entire biblical narrative had at last reached its climax, had come true in these astonishing events." (142) Through the lens of the New Testament, Wright establishes five things the early church believed regarding the resurrection (145):
(1) It was the moment when the creator God fulfilled his ancient promises to Israel, saving them from 'their sins,' i.e. their exile. It thus initiated the 'last days,' at the end of which the victory over death begun at Easter would at last be complete.
(2) It involved the transformation of Jesus' body: it was, that is to say, neither a resuscitation of Jesus' dead body to the same sort of life nor an abandonment of that body to decomposition. Paul's account presupposes the empty tomb.
(3) It involved Jesus' being seen alive in a very limited early period, after which he was known as present to the church in a different way. These early sightings constituted those who witnessed them as apostles.
(4) It was the prototype for the resurrection of all God's people at the end of the last days.
(5) It was thus the ground not only for the future hope of Christians but for their present work.
In the final chapter, Wright asks, "So what?" If this is the story of God seen in the story of Christ, what are we to do with that in our postmodern world? To set the scene, he sketches out three aspects of postmodernity on pages 151-152: knowledge and truth, the self, and the story. Taking them in order:
(1) Where modernity thought it could know things objectively about the world, postmodernity has reminded us that there is no such thing as neutral knowledge. Everybody has a point of view, and that point of view distorts; everybody describes things the way that suits them. There is no such thing as objective truth. Likewise, there are no such things as objective values, only preferences. The cultural symbols that encapsulate this revolution are the personal stereo and the virtual-reality system: everyone creates his or her own private world.
(2) Modernity vaunted the great lonely individual, the all-powerful "I": Descartes' cogito sergo sum and the proud "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul." But postmodernity had deconstructed the self, the I. The "I" is just a floating signifier, a temporary and accidental collocation of conflicting forces and impulses. Just as reality collapses inward upon the knower, the knower him- or herself deconstructs.
(3) Modernity told an implicit narrative about the way the world was. It was essentially an eschatological story. World history has been steadily moving toward or at least eagerly awaiting the point where the industrial revolution and the philosophical Enlightenment would burst upon the world, bringing a new era of blessing for all. This huge overarching story--overarching stories are known in this world as metanarratives--has now been conclusively shown to be an oppressive, imperialist and self-serving story; it has brought untold misery to millions in the industrialized West and to billions in the rest of the world, where cheap labor and raw materials have been ruthlessly exploited. It is a story that serves the interests of the Western world. Modernity stands condemned of building a new tower of Babel. Postmodernity has claimed, primarily with this great narrative as the example, that all metanarratives are suspect; they are all power games.
"Collapsing reality; deconstructing selfhood; the death of the metanarrative. These are the keys to understanding postmodernity." (152) Within this cultural climate, whatever is the church to do? Using an illustration from the disciples' walking on the Emmaus Road, Wright advocates telling the story differently. And what is this story? "The exile is over--not just Israel's exile in actual and spiritual Babylon but the exile of the human race, shut out of the garden. The new world order does not look like people thought it would, but they must get used to the fact that it is here and that they are not only its beneficiaries but also its ambassadors and witnesses." (164) He continues, "[The] Messiah himself has gone to the place of pain, the place where Israel and indeed the whole world was in deep distress. He has been cast down, oppressed by the enemy... He became the suffering Israel on behalf of the suffering Israel; he went into exile--Israel's exile, the human exile from the garden, the exile of the whole cosmos--to redeem those who were in exile." (165) Wright argues, "We must get used to telling the story of God, Israel, Jesus and the world as the true metanarrative, the story of healing and self-giving love. We must get used to living as those who have truly died and risen with Christ so that our self, having been thoroughly deconstructed, can be put back together, not by the agendas that the world presses upon us but by God's Spirit." (169) The Christian vocation, then, is to "tell the story, to live by the symbols, to act out the praxis, and to answer the questions in such a way as to become in ourselves and our mission in God's world the answer to the prayer that rises inarticulately, now, not just from one puzzled psalmist but from the whole human race and indeed the whole of God's creation: 'O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.'" (171)
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