Book Review: The Last Word NT WRIGHT

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 If we find pieces of history that help us understand better the historical document that we have before us, say, a letter of Paul’s to the Romans, we should look to understand the letter as it is written, in light of our historical finding,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)