Category Archives: Biblical theology

N. T. Wright. Evil and the Justice of God

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N. T. Wright. Evil And the Justice of God. InterVarsity Press, 2006.

N.T. Wright, the British New Testament theologian and Anglican bishop, has become a bit of an industry. We may note this simply in how this rather slight book (less than 170 pages of text with generous white space throughout) found release in hardback and remains unavailable in paperback. Wright has continued to crank out books of this size and scope in great numbers while presumably also readying the next massive volume in his Christian Origins and the Question of God series (supposedly on the writings of Paul).

In spite of (or is it because of?) his extraordinary productivity, Wright almost always has worthwhile things to say–he certainly does in Evil and the Justice of God. We may wonder how much more useful and insightful his contribution addressing the important issues he takes up in this book might be had he spent more time on it. But we can be thankful for what we have.

The core of this book, and Wright’s distinctive contribution to thought on the problem of evil, is his chapter on Jesus’ crucifixion and how that provides a framework for Christian understanding of evil and of God’s response. I greatly appreciate Wright’s summary of the core theme of the Bible (“the entire Old Testament…hangs like an enormous door on a small hinge, namely the calling of Abraham in Genesis 12,” p. 46)–that God’s is working in a long-suffering way consistent with God’s just love to bring healing in the face of human evil. Jesus’ life that led to his crucifixion and God’s vindication of this life by raising Jesus from the dead tells us what we need to know about God’s creative work in the face of evil and what God expects from people of faith as their role in this work.

I like Wright’s theology a great deal. I like that as a biblical scholar he is informed and bold concerning the big theological themes and perfectly willing to address them. And address them he does, doing so in a way that keeps the biblical message at the center. He expresses a strong commitment to the Bible’s message of shalom. If he’s not quite a full-blown pacifist and social and political radical, he’s generally close enough (despite some irritating brief seemingly pro forma digs at various expressions of “liberalism” in the early part of the book when he is setting out our current cultural setting for addressing the themes of the book).

I do have one significant concern, though. In reading much of what Wright has published and in listening to him speak several times, I am left with the impression that while working very hard (and largely successfully) at placing prophetic biblical concerns at the center of his theology, he still does remain a bit of a Constantinian.  That is, for Wright, the church retains a sort of ontological privilege in his schema of salvation history. I would think that someone as immersed in the recovery of the prophetic message of the Bible would recognize how far Christendom departed from the agenda of biblical prophets (from Moses to John of Patmos). The community gathered around Torah in the Old Testament and the messianic assembly in the New Testament both stand in judgment of the church.

Certainly, Christians have the calling to work within their communities to recover and embody the biblical message of shalom and to fulfill the calling of Abraham’s descendants to bless all the families of the earth. However, the church as an institution has long ago forfeited its standing as the steward of this message. Wright’s sanguine assumptions about the church as the center of God’s work in the world weaken his arguments about the tasks followers of the biblical God face in embodying God’s justice in our present time.

 

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Christopher D. Marshall. Crowned with Glory and Honor

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Christopher D. Marshall. Crowned With Glory and Honor: Human Rights in the Biblical Tradition. Cascadia Publishing House, 2001.

This is a splendid little book. Marshall, a New Testament scholar who teaches in New Zealand, provides a concise but thorough account how the Bible and biblically-based theology may strongly affirm a commitment to human rights. In doing so, he shows conclusively that modern notions of human rights such as reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are fully compatible with Christian thought.

Along the way, Marshall does critique Enlightenment-based notions of human rights, but his intent is to build bridges more than pit Christian theological language against human rights language as is lamentably done by some Christians. Marshall’s strengths include a thorough understanding of the biblical message that allows him to provide an outline for a general biblical theology (Old and New Testaments) that serves as the basis for his affirmation of human rights. He helpfully focuses on the big picture in the Bible rather than isolated proof-texts.

Marshall also does a fine job in introducing the general arena of human rights thought as it has emerged in moral philosophy and political realities. In doing so, he gives Christians an excellent primer on the intersection of their theology with the public policy world–and he gives those unfamiliar with theology a good sense of how the Bible can be seen as friendly to their human rights concerns.

Yet another strength is Marshall’s economy of expression. His main text runs slightly less than 100 pages, but he is quite thorough in his discussion (beyond the main text we have 13 pages of informative endnotes and a 9-page bibliography). Certainly he could have said much more (and we could use a large tome on this subject). But what he presents is quite adequate and persuasive–Christians have every business strongly advocating human rights and human rights advocates from outside Christianity have every business welcoming biblical thought as part of their rationale for their advocacy.

 

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Triumph of the Lamb: Revelation Four and Five

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The book of Revelation continues to gain a great deal of attention–for better and for worse. Back in the 1980s I paid sustained attention to this amazing piece of literature and wrote a short commentary.  Here is the commentary’s discussion of chapters four and five, from Triumph of the Lamb (Herald Press, 1987; reprinted by Wipf and Stock).

Garry Wills. What Paul Meant

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Garry Wills. What Paul Meant. Viking, 2006

Garry Wills is an American treasure–a great historian, especially of American presidents, a political and religious progressive, a powerful critic of many of the failings of hierarchical Catholicism, a perceptive commentator on current events, and a prolific writer of always useful books.  As a kind of sidelight late in life, he has written a series of books on the New Testament–one on Jesus, one on Paul, and one of the gospels.

The second of the series, What Paul Meant, provides a clear, concise, and informative look at the great Apostle. One strength of the book is its accessibility combined with its reliability. Wills is not a New Testament scholar, but he is attentive to some of the best of Pauline scholarship and does a fine job summarizing some of its key insights. Another strength of the book is Wills’ clear and forceful placing of Paul firmly in first century Jewish debates. He rightly, and importantly, asserts that Paul was not a “Christian” because such a thing did not exist until after Paul’s death. Paul was a Jew arguing with other Jews about the best understanding of their tradition–from within that tradition.

Somewhat of a weakness, in my opinion, is that Wills does write as a historian–even if one seeking (successfully) to speak to a general audience.  That is, he is more descriptive than prescriptive, focusing more on what Paul “meant” then, than on what Paul means for us now.  One somewhat distracting element of this historical focus is the energy Wills spends on debunking Luke’s Acts of the Apostles as a useful source of information about the historical Paul. In such a short book (again, its brevity is a strength for Wills’ intentions with this book), it seems too bad that he would focus on this negative tangent. I don’t necessarily disagree with his judgment of Acts as history (though I think he presents the evidence as more clear and certain than it probably is) so much as think that if one wants to focus on Paul’s own writings as the basis for reconstructing the central elements of his life and thought one should simply do so and not spend much time justifying the exclusion of Acts from consideration (it would be different should this book be aimed at a more scholarly audience).

Nonetheless, while I was disappointed that Wills did not reflect more on Paul’s meaning for today (which would have seemed natural for one who pays such perceptive attention to the American political scene), I would recommend this book as a great introduction to the historical Paul.  And, in the end, Wills gets it exactly right, in my opinion, when he links Paul with Jesus, summarizing the message of both: “Both were at odds with those who impose the burdens of ‘religion’ and punish those who try to escape them. They were radical egalitarians, though in ways that delved below and soared above conventional politics. They were on the side of the poor, and saw through the rich. They saw only two basic moral duties, love of God and love of neighbor. Both were liberators, not imprisoners–so they were imprisoned. So they were killed. Paul meant what Jesus meant, that love is the only law” (175).

 

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Biblical Bases for Restorative Justice

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Over the past 30 years, the United States has increased our prison population ten-fold, from in the neighborhood of 200,000 to over 2 million. This transformation from a bad situation to a terrible situation has been catastrophic for too many in our society and the catastrophe continues to spread. One small response that has been emerging is the restorative justice movement.  Here is a recent lecture I presented on, “Biblical Bases for Restorative Justice.”

This lecture was paired with a lecture from my friend and colleague, Howard Zehr on the historical dynamics that have created our problems.  I  highly recommend Howard’s books in these themes:Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Christian Peace Shelf) and The Little Book of Restorative Justice (The Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding).

Triumph of the Lamb: Revelation Two and Three

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The book of Revelation continues to gain a great deal of attention–for better and for worse. Back in the 1980s I paid sustained attention to this amazing piece of literature and wrote a short commentary.  Here is the commentary’s discussion of chapters two and three, from Triumph of the Lamb (Herald Press, 1987; reprinted by Wipf and Stock).

Jesus and Herod: Two Kinds of King

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One of the central issues that Christian theology and ethics must face is the question of why Jesus, who by all accounts was an extraordinarily kind, generous, and merciful person, found himself is such conflict during his life–ending with his execution in the most torturous, humiliating way imaginable. To take this question seriously is to engage the issue of our own faith and the role it plays in our way of living in the world.

Here is an article I published about ten years ago that reflects on this issue.  Jesus came to be seen as the Christ, a title that literally meant “King.” In the story of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s gospel, we encounter another king, known as Herod the Great. Comparing and contrasting these two kings, especially in relation to the categories of scarcity and abundance, provides important insights into Jesus’ way of life, his conflict with the powers that be, and the shape lives modeled after his might take.

Triumph of the Lamb: Revelation One

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The book of Revelation continues to gain a great deal of attention–for better and for worse. Back in the 1980s I paid sustained attention to this amazing piece of literature and wrote a short commentary.  Here is the commentary’s discussion of chapter one, from Triumph of the Lamb (Herald Press, 1987; reprinted by Wipf and Stock).

Paul’s Deconstruction of Idolatry

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One of the Apostle Paul’s central concerns in his letter to the Romans is to confront the tendency of human beings to put their trust in idols rather than in God and God’s way of healing.  I address this theme in a paper I presented to the “Bible, Theology, and Postmodernity” session at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Chicago, November 2, 2008.

This paper, “Paul’s Deconstruction of Idolatry,” comes out of my interest in Christianity and violence, focused especially on biblical and theological materials that point toward ways of overcoming violence.  The biblical story often portrays violence and injustice having roots in idolatry.  I believe that we find in the biblical critique of idolatry perspectives that are important, even essential for responding to the problems of violence in our world today.

In the first three chapters of his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul offers an analysis and critique of idolatry that I believe remains useful today.  Paul takes on two types of idolatry.  First, he criticizes what I will call the idol of lust in the Roman Empire that underwrites violence and injustice.  And, second, he critiques the claims of those (like Paul himself before he met Jesus) who believed that loyalty to the Law requires violence in defense of the covenant community.

Our present-day analogs of the forces Paul critiques—nationalism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism—all gained power with the rise of modernity in the Western world.   The much-heralded turn toward post-modernity may offer a sense of awareness to help us break free from such totalisms that foster so much violence in our world.

Our task of resisting demands for ultimate loyalty unites biblical prophets (including Paul) with present-day Christians seeking to further life in the face of death-dealing violence.  Modernity did not create death-dealing idolatries so much as give them new impetus.  The task of breaking bondage to the idols of injustice that Paul engaged in remains ours today.

Triumph of the Lamb: Introduction

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The book of Revelation continues to gain a great deal of attention–for better and for worse. Back in the 1980s I paid sustained attention to this amazing piece of literature and wrote a short commentary.  Here is the introduction to the commentary, which was called Triumph of the Lamb (Herald Press, 1987; reprinted by Wipf and Stock).