The Last Word
by N.T. Wright
N.T. Wright's little book
The Last Word seeks to answer three questions: (1) In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? (2) How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? and (3) How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone the world?
In the Prologue, Wright paints a broad-brushed portrait of the church's attitude towards the scriptures during the first 1500 years of Christendom, how the Reformation affected the reading of the Bible, and how the scriptures have played a pivotal rule in the church's life, worship, and mission. Again painting in broad-brush strokes, Wright looks at scripture's relationship with culture, politics, philosophy, theology, and ethics; and he examines how these different spheres affect our reading of scripture even without us knowing it.
Chapter One seeks to identify, precisely, what "the authority of scripture" (a slogan thrown around by Christians of all denominational calibers) might mean. "Slogans and cliches," he writes, "are often shorthand ways of making more complex arguments. In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as 'portable stories'--that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church, and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us... [These cliches and slogans] are useful in the same way that suitcases are. They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases." (24-25) Wright argues that when the phrase "the authority of scripture" is unpacked, "it can have Christian meaning only if we are referring to scripture's authority in a delegated or mediated sense from that which God himself possesses and that which Jesus possesses as the risen Lord and Son of God, the Immanuel. It must mean, if it means anything Christian, 'the authority of God exercised through scripture.'" Wright then moves on to the connection between authority and story, presenting the scriptures not as a list of rules or as a compendium of true doctrine but as an overarching narrative about God, the world, and human beings. "Most of [the scripture's] constituent parts, and all of it when put together (whether in the Jewish canonical form, or in the Christian one), can best be described as story." (26) Stories, he argues, carry authority in many different forms. "A familiar story told with a new twist in the tail jolts people into thinking differently about themselves and the world. A story told with pathos, humor or drama opens the imagination and invites readers and hearers to imagine themselves in similar situations, offering new insights about God and human beings which enable them to order their own lives more wisely." (27) He adds, as a word of caution, that "for the Bible to have the effect it seems to be designed to have it will be necessary for the church to hear it as it is, not to chop it up in an effort to make it into something else."
Cognizant of the fact that "authority" is itself a word laden with baggage, against which postmodern sensibilities revolt for fear of a covert power-play, Wright redefines authority within the context of kingdom. God's kingdom, he writes, shouldn't be understood through the lenses of our culture but through the lens of the Old Testament and Jesus' day. "The biblical writers lived with the tension of believing both that in one sense God has always been sovereign over all the world and that in another sense this sovereignty, this saving rule, is something which must break afresh into the world of corruption, decay and death, and the human rebellion, idolatry and sin which are so closely linked with it... The Jewish hope was that God's Kingdom would break into their world, to set them free from oppression and put the whole world to rights." (29) Thus "God's authority, if we are to locate it at this point, is his sovereign power accomplishing [the] renewal of all creation. Specific authority over human beings, notably the church, must be seen as part of that larger whole."
On page 30, Wright asks, "What role does scripture play within God's accomplishment [of the renewal of all creation]?" He continues, "It is enormously important that we see the role of scripture not simply as being to provide true information about, or even an accurate running commentary upon, the work of God in salvation and new creation, but as taking an active part within that ongoing purpose." (30) Regarding the revelation of the scriptures, Wright broadens the horizons, writing, "A fully Christian view of the Bible includes the idea of God's self-revelation [in scripture] but, by setting it in a larger context, transforms it. Precisely because the God who reveals himself is the world's lover and judge, rather than its absentee landlord, that self-revelation is always to be understood within the category of God's mission to the world, God's saving sovereignty let loose through Jesus and the Spirit and aimed at the healing and renewal of all creation." (31-32) Authority, then, "is the sovereign rule of God sweeping through creation to judge and to heal. It is the powerful love of God in Jesus Christ, putting sin to death and launching new creation. It is the fresh, bracing and energizing wind of the Spirit." (33)
In Chapter Two, Wright looks at the role of scripture in Old Testament Israel. He spends a considerable amount of time investigating what it means that the scriptures are inspired. He writes that the inspiration of scripture is itself a shorthand akin to the "authority of scripture" slogan, except this slogan is "talking about the belief that by his Spirit God guided the very different writers and editors, so that the books they produced were the books God intended his people to have." (37) He adds that "[Some] kind of divine inspiration of scripture was taken for granted in most of the ancient Israelite scriptures themselves, as well as in the early beliefs of the early Christians. The emergence of a 'canon' of scripture, though it has been controversial in some respects in recent discussion, was at its heart an attempt to track the way in which these books had become formative for the life of God's people, to honor the fact that God had somehow given them to his people, and to remind Israel to honor them and attend to them appropriately." (37-38) The "word of God" in the Old Testament, however, didn't refer to the canonized scripture. The word of God, rather, was seen as "an enormous reservoir, full of creative divine wisdom and power, into which the prophets and other writers tap by God's call and grace, so that the word may flow through to do God's work of flooding or irrigating his people." (38) Putting it another way, "God, though utterly transcendent and different from the world which he has made, remains present and active within that world, and one of the many ways in which this is so is through his living and active word. This reflects God's own [nature]; it is a natural and normal thing for this God to speak, not some anthropomorphic projection onto a blank deistic screen!" A brief examination of the role of scripture in 2nd-Temple Palestinian Judaism (roughly the last 400 years BC) culminates in his observation that "[scripture]--read, studied, taught, prayed and sung, in the Temple, in the early synagogues, in the Qumran community, daily and weekly and at the great festivals and solemn fasts--became the key factor shaping Israel as the people who longed for the coming of the Kingdom. The multiple and widely varying types of Judaism in Jesus's day can be plotted in terms of different ways of understanding and attempting to live under scripture and thus to work, pray and wait for God to bring the story in which they were living to its proper conclusion." (41)
Chapter Three looks at Jesus' relationship with the scriptures (noting, of course, that the New Testament scriptures weren't around yet). Wright argues that "Jesus believed himself called to undertake the task, marked out in various ways in Israel's scriptures, through which God's long-range purposes would at last be brought to fruition... [In] and through Jesus evil is confronted and judged, and forgiveness and renewal are brought to birth. The covenant is renewed; new creation is inaugurated. The work which God had done through scripture in the Old Testament is done by Jesus in his public career, his death and resurrection, and his sending of the Spirit." (43) The early church came to "read the Old Testament story (including covenant, promise, warning, and so on) and its commands in terms of what they had discovered in Jesus." (44) When Jesus speaks of fulfilling scripture, he is essentially saying that he is the fulfillment of scripture. He is what scripture--what God's story--pointed to all along. This train of thought of is taken up in the New Testament.
Chapter Four begins in the period following Jesus' death and resurrection: the apostolic church. "The earliest apostolic preaching was neither a standard Jewish message with Jesus added on at the end, nor a free-standing announcement of a new religion cut off from its Jewish roots, but rather the story of Jesus understood as the fulfillment of the Old Testament narrative, and thus as the euangelion, the good news or 'gospel'--the creative force which called the church into being and shaped its mission and life." (47) Thus the authority of scripture meant, in the early church, that "what God had done in Jesus Christ was to be seen in terms of a character within a particular story, a portrait in a particular landscape, where everything in the story, or the landscape, points us to a key facet of who this central character is and what he has accomplished." (48) The "word of God" in the early church spoke to "the story of Jesus (particularly his death and resurrection), told as the climax of the story of God and Israel and thus offering itself as both the true story of the world and the foundation and energizing force for the church's mission." Wright argues that the early church's experience with the word of God energized and empowered its mission, so that we find "the roots of a fully Christian theology of scriptural authority: planted firmly in the soil of the missionary community, confronting the powers of the world with the news of the Kingdom of God, refreshed and invigorated by the Spirit, growing particularly through the preaching and teaching of the apostles, and bearing fruit in the transformation of human lives as the start of God's project to put the whole cosmos to rights. God accomplishes these things, so the early church believed, through the 'word': the story of Israel now told as reaching its climax in Jesus." (50)
When it comes to the New Testament, Wright says, things get prickly. However, "Recent study of the letters, and of the intention of the gospel writers, emphasizes the self-conscious way in which the New Testament authors believed themselves called to exercise their calling as 'authorized' teachers, by the guidance and power of the Spirit, writing books and letters to sustain, energize, shape, judge and renew the church." (51) Narrowing the focus onto the Apostle Paul in particular, "At precisely those points of urgent need (when, for instance, writing Galatians or 2 Corinthians) Paul is most conscious that he is writing as one authorized, by the apostolic call he had received from Jesus Christ, and in the power of the Spirit, to bring life and order to the church by his words." The writers of the New Testament believed that a certain power resided in the words they wrote, but this isn't to say that they were cognitively aware of how their writings would be collected and canonized. "But they were conscious of a unique vocation to write Jesus-shaped, Spirit-led, church-shaping books, as part of their first generation calling." (52)
Wright examines how the early church perceived the Old Testament. "They firmly believed that the Old Testament was, and remained, the book which God had given to his people--the covenant people who had spearheaded God's purposes for the world and from whom the Messiah, Jesus, had come. But from the very beginning they read the ancient scriptures in a new way. This new way resulted in their recognizing that some parts of the scriptures were no longer relevant for their ongoing life--not, we must stress, because those parts were bad, or not God-given, or less inspired, but because they belonged with earlier parts of the story which had now reached its climax." (53) Wright conducts a fantastic survey of continuity and discontinuity in the church's approach and implementation of scripture versus Israel's approach and implementation. Galatians 3.22-29 shows us at least one way the early church approached the Old Testament. Here "Paul argues that God gave the Mosaic law for a specific purpose which has now come to fruition, whereupon that law must be put aside, in terms of its task of defining the community, not because it was a bad thing but because it was a good thing whose task is now accomplished." (57-58) Never one to miss an opportunity for an analogy, Wright captures the heart of what Paul's saying: "When travelers sail across a vast ocean and finally arrive on the distant shore, they leave the ship behind and continue over land, not because the ship was no good, or because their voyage had been misguided, but precisely because both ship and voyage had accomplished their purpose. During the new, dry-land stage of their journey, the travelers remain [the very] people who made that voyage in that ship." (57) Thus as the Old Testament served as the covenant charter for Israel's stage in God's story, so "the New Testament understands itself as the new covenant charter, the book that forms the basis for the new telling of the story through which Christians are formed, reformed and transformed so as to be God's people for God's world." (59)
In Chapter Five, Wright looks at the church’s evolving use of scripture up into the brink of the Enlightenment. He defends the canonization of scripture, writing, “The canonization of scripture, both Jewish and Christian, was no doubt complicated by all kinds of less-than-perfect human motivations, as indeed in the writing of scripture in the first place. But canonization was never simply a matter of a choice of particular books on a ‘who’s-in, who’s out’ basis. It was a matter of setting out the larger story, the narrative framework, which makes sense of and brings order to God’s world and God’s people.” (63) Over the course of several centuries, Wright says, “[the] notion of ‘authority’ which we have sketched in terms of ‘God at work powerfully through scripture to bring about the Kingdom, by calling and shaping a new covenant people and equipping its leaders to be teachers and preachers,’ became gradually flattened out into two things in particular.” (64-65) Scripture began to be seen as (a) the source-book or rule-book from which we determine our doctrines and ethics, and (b) meditating on scripture to hear God’s voice through personal and private devotions. Wright sketches the evolution of scripture through the medieval era into the Reformation, and then he pays particular attention to how scripture evolved with the Reformation. “The Reformers [set] scripture over against the traditions of the church, [and they set] the right of ordinary Christians to read scripture for themselves over against the protection of the sacred text by the Latin-reading elite. They did so in order to insist that the church had gotten off the right track and that the living God was using scripture itself to get it back on the right one. Scripture was not just a resource to be brought in to back up, or to knock down, a particular idea. When expounded faithfully, with proper attention given to the central New Testament emphasis on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the turning-point of all history—it happened once and once only, they stressed, and could not be repeated with each Mass—God’s word would once again do a fresh work in the hearts and lives of ordinary people.” (72) Wright then turns to his home island of England, noting the strict legalism of the Puritans (they said that only those things explicitly mentioned in scripture could have a place in the life of a Christian and in the life of the church) and how Richard Hooker argued against them. Hooker praised the idea of rationalism, and though he would roll over in his grave if he saw how the Enlightenment took that term and used it, he applied it to the life of the church. He argued that “all reality is governed by natural law, which is itself supremely rational, deriving from and being the expression of God’s own supreme ‘reason’… Human society develops and changes, he pointed out, and the church, itself at one level a human society, has an organic rather than a static life, and must grow and change appropriately. As it does so, it will inevitably go beyond what scripture explicitly teaches, as, for example, the great creeds themselves undeniably do. The methods of church government, one of the particular points at issue at the time, will inevitably change and develop as well. Hooker’s insistence on ‘reason’ was therefore not at all a way of undervaluing scripture, but rather of ensuring that the community which based itself on scripture could have an appropriate healthy life and growth, not blundering forward as [if] it were in the dark, but moving ahead by the light of reason, itself informed by scripture and in harmony with the natural law which stemmed from the creator God in the first place.” (79-80) Hooker argued for a “holistic worldview which insists, not that scripture should be judged at the bar of ‘reason’ and found wanting, but that in reading and interpreting scripture we must do so not arbitrarily, but with clear thinking and informed historical judgment.” (80-81)
The beginning of the Enlightenment, the “Age of Reason,” didn’t take Hooker’s holistic approach to reason and scripture. Chapter Six looks at how scripture was affected by the evolution of rationalistic thought in cahoots with the Enlightenment. "The Enlightenment (whose leading thinkers include Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and Kant) was, in fact, for the most part an explicitly anti-Christian movement... [The] Enlightenment insisted on 'reason' as the central capacity of human beings, enabling us to think and act correctly; it therefore regarded human beings as by nature rational and good. Reason was to be the arbiter of which religious and theological claims could be sustained." (83) Thus, Wright says, "Enlightenment thinkers tended toward atheism. Those who retained some belief in a divine being tended toward an abstract, non-trinitarian theism, or simply deism (acknowledging a distant, remote God), rather than mainline Christian belief." While Hooker's take on reason was that exegesis must make sense within the wider scope of God's story, the Enlightenment thinkers made Reason a category all its own. This gave birth to rationalism "with its manifold reductive and skeptical readings which scorned the previously held central beliefs of Christians as 'out of date,' 'premodern,' etc.--a scorn still often expressed in both popular and scholarly circles, despite the attacks that have increasingly been mounted against the whole Enlightenment project." (86)
Wright examines the Enlightenment's alternative views of history's climax (or, to put it another way, modernism's eschatology). "All history, declared Voltaire, had been a progressive struggle toward this new, reason-based culture. Indeed, the idea of progress is one of the Enlightenment's most enduring legacies." The Enlightenment, scorning the eschatology offered by Christianity, embraced an eschatology rooted in human progress. While mocking Christianity's eschatology as wild and radical, the Enlightenment blindly trumpeted that "we know better now", and this mantra obscured the fact that the Enlightenment's eschatology fared no better. The idea that world history had been immersed in darkness until the Enlightenment, and that modernism's light opened the floodgates to humanity being all they were meant to be, has been shown up as a nauseating dream in the face of what the Enlightenment actually produced. The problem of evil, as modernists see it, is that "people are not thinking and acting rationally, and Enlightenment rationalism is going to teach them how to create the social and political conditions to make it happen." (88) Recently, modernism's most vocal critics have insisted that Reason, over against Religion, is the cure to humanity's ailments; such writers harp on horrific chapters in religious history while seeking to obscure or trivialize the reality that the birth of the Enlightenment and its humanistic view of the world has caused far more suffering on a much wider scope than the religious horrors of the preceding centuries. It seems to me (as an aside) that human beings are evil, and modernism's license to this evil beget centuries of death, carnage, and mayhem which the world had not yet seen. This, of course, is, somehow, an indictment on religion rather than on modernism's imperialistic and humanistic thought paradigm.
Wright examines the effect the Enlightenment has had on Christian thought in the last two hundred years. He argues that the Enlightenment has softened the reality of the kingdom of God and made Christianity into a private, personal religion. "Jesus' death, at the most, [is seen as] the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future--leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining of the world." (88-89) He continues, "This political agenda, by the way, was of course a vital part of the Enlightenment project: kick 'God' upstairs, make religion a matter of private piety, and then you can organize the world to your own advantage. That has been the leitmotif of the Western world ever since, the new philosophy which has so far sustained several great empires, launched huge and horribly flawed totalitarian projects, and left the contemporary world thoroughly confused... Scripture itself, meanwhile, is muzzled equally by both side. It is squelched into silence by the 'secularists' who dismiss it as irrelevant, historically inaccurate, and so on--as you would expect, since it might otherwise challenge their imperial dreams. Equally worrying, if not more so, it is squashed out of shape by many of the devout, who ignore its global, cosmic and justice-laden message and treat it only as the instrument of personal piety and the source of true doctrine about eternal salvation. Secular and sacred readings--and the scholarship that has jostled between the two--have connived to produce the shallow readings which [constitute] our immediate problem." (89)
In Chapter Seven, Wright goes over common misreadings of scripture from both the Right and the Left (noting that the disparity between the Right and Left is itself a product of the French Revolution). Chapter Eight is the "So What?" chapter of this little book. Here Wright looks at a myriad of ways that the church ought to be utilizing scripture in line with its overarching purpose and place in the ongoing story and mission of God. His "integrated" approach is dependent upon the Spirit, and "it needs to keep as its central focus the goal of God's kingdom, inaugurated by Jesus on earth as in heaven and one day to be completed under that same rubric. It must envisage the church as characterized, at the very heart of its life, by prayerful listening to, strenuous wrestling with, humble obedience before, and powerful proclamation of scripture." (114)
