mmm. breakfast
June 30, 2006
Book Review: The Last Word NT WRIGHT
June 28, 2006
Like school children bickering over the spot where the ball has landed, inside or outside the box, in a game of four-square, the church for the past 60 years or so has wondered about the role of scripture in the life of the believer and how any text could have authority on this side of modernity. The difficult road for the postmodern church is the road through the path of textual deconstruction, authorial question, and the type of “naive realism” that Wright exposes. The enlightenment myth of history as fully knowable and discoverable has overshadowed a deeper problem of the church: fear of scholarship. Since Galileo, the church has been skeptical of where history and science often lead us. Wright has pointed out that though our method of exegesis is still very basic, it is nonetheless still subject to potential errors. While our goal should always be to know, “what the text said” and therefore “what might it say to me,” we must come to terms with the reality that well-meaning people have gotten it wrong on both accounts at several moments in history.
“there is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is “true” after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of scripture, remain open to what scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes.” —pg. 95
All in all, we need to stop trying to support the theological categories as they have come to us from prior generations, and be open to a new and fresh reading of the scripture ourselves, allowing it to tell us things we might not have known were there all along, and some things that we hoped we wouldn’t find. To think that all the historical work has been done in the modern period and therefore to resolve ourselves to embracing “modern” categories, is to make a category mistake. If we find pieces of history that help us understand better the historical document that we have before us, say, a letter of Paul’s to the Romans, we should look to understand the letter as it is written, in light of our historical finding, irregardless of what our present or past reading of the letter might be.
The authority of scripture rests on the way in which we agree to come underneath the story that it tells and live in light of and part of the story. God has not given scripture for the sole purpose of saving human beings, “but to renew the whole world” (pg. 29). Authority, for Wright, is not defined by us as we stand on the outside and say of the text, “this has authority because it is from God.” Authority is recognizing that God has given us a story that communicates the ways in which he has acted, and, if we are attentive and have the kind of ears for hearing, we will live as faithful characters of the same play, being the arms and hands of a sovereign God who aims to heal the world of sin and death. The authority comes from acting alongside and remaining faithful to the story.
Wright’s gives a most helpful analogy to unpack the very difficult term of “authority”. He calls it the “five-act” hermeneutic.
“The bible itself offers a model for its own reading, which involves knowing where we are within the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. The acts are: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and the church; they constitute the differentiated stages in the divine drama which scripture itself offers….Within this scheme I am proposing, we are currently living in the fifth act, the time of the church…..Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story….We must act in the appropriate manner for THIS moment in the story; this will be in direct continuity with the previous acts (we are not free to jump suddenly to another narrative, a different play altogether), but such continuity also implies discontinuity, a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen. We must be ferociously loyal to what has gone before and cheerfully open about what must come next.” (pp. 121,122, 123)
Living in the fifth act means living faithfully to the story-line, immersing ourselves enough in the story to become familiar with the play so as to live a life of faithful “impromptu” in particular contexts and settings. The story “stiffens our resolve, as we work to implement the resurrection of Jesus, and so anticipate the day when God will make all things new…” (pg. 115)
Lost in the Cosmos….
June 1, 2006
A few weeks ago I finished reading Walker Percy’s book LOST
IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK.
From the inside flap:
Lost in the Cosmos
The last Self-Help Book
Or
How you can survive in the Cosmos,
about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself,
this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million
fundamentalist Christians
Or
Why is it that of all the billions
and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—nova, quasars, pulsars, black
holes—you are beyond doubt the strangest?
Or
Why is it possible to learn more in
ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,00 light-years away,
than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with
yourself all your life?
The book ends with a series of questions, both addressing a
particular situation in the book, and candidly, the reader:
Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought
help? If you did, did help come? If I did, did you accept it? Are you
out of trouble? Are you out of
trouble? What is the character of
your consciousness? Are you
conscious? Do you have a
self? Do you know who you
are? Do you know what you are
doing? Do you love? Do you know
how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate?
There is now no genre for what this book is and what it
does. It’s not a self-help book,
though wryly suggests itself as such. It is helpful, however, in the discovery process of
the SELF. The “I” in
statements that begin with “I am (this or that) …”
The brilliance of the book, it seems to me, is the numerous
“thought experiments” that Percy creates.
“Image you are this, or that person in this, or that situation…the
following conditions apply….(listing various conditions about which he has been
writing)…choose a response.”
Percy lets us say it more than he says it himself:
The SELF, is lost.
In sex, in distraction, in worry and anxiety. Lost in all the things that we find ourselves getting
into, wanting so badly to get
out…debt…hurt…distraction…lust…boredom…anger…etc. Lost.
I think it is both interesting and telling that what the
television show LOST is about, is not so much about being lost on an island and
surviving the conditions. There is
so little about survival. So
little food-gathering, and water-drinking—it’s all about the self and the
individual “selves” trying to find a way to not be so Lost and confused about
who to love and trust and hate and manipulate.
