God in my box

At the end of the day, I think we've all got God in a box...some of us are just learning to leave the lid open.  

N.T. Wright Interview @ The Gospel Coalition

This is an excerpt from an interview with N.T. Wright by Trevin Wax on his blog, hosted on The Gospel Coalition website.  In the same interview, Wright is asked about Steve Chalke's book, The Lost Message of Jesus.  This is a wonderful introduction to Wright at a time when he was just finishing up some great work and was on the cusp of publishing one of his best known books to date, Surprised By Hope. Enjoy!

Trevin Wax: In your opinion, has scholarly criticism of the New Perspectives in America, such as Carson, Piper, Moo and others, have they been fair? Or have they misunderstood the New Perspective?

N.T. Wright: I think Carson has misunderstood it. The big book, the first volume that he edited, Justification and Variegated Nomism, a collection of fine essays by fine scholars. But I have to say, in the bit at the end, where Carson sums it up, he actually goes way beyond what those essays actually say. And it’s interesting… he takes a few swipes at me there without even footnoting. It’s as though I’m sort of hovering in the background as a big boogeyman who’s going to come and pounce on people and so, he’s got to ward him off.

And I know Don quite well. We were graduate students together, he in Cambridge and I at Oxford in the 1970′s. We’ve been friends on and off for many years. And I just don’t understand why this is eating him the way it is.

Piper is in a different category. He graciously sent me an advance manuscript of his book which is critiquing me and invited my comments on it. I sent him a lengthy set of comments. I’ve only just got on email about two days ago the book in the revised form and I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. So I cannot say whether he’s being fair or not at this stage.

But I do know that he has done his darndest to be fair and I honor that and I respect that. People have asked me if I’m going to write a response, and the answer is that I don’t know. I’m kind of busy right now. But I maybe should, sooner or later.

Moo is in a different category again. Doug Moo, I would say, is a much greater Pauline scholar than either of the two I just mentioned. One of the things I really respect about Doug Moo is that he is constantly grappling with the text. Where he hears the text saying something which is not what his tradition would have said, he will go with the text. I won’t always agree with his exegesis, but there is a relentless scholarly honesty about him which I really tip my hat off to.

Being Fully Human As Jesus, Not Just Jesus, Is The Answer

"To depend on Jesus too much forfeits our ability to actually become like Jesus. To become like Jesus too much forfeits our ability to really depend on him."

What is the problem then? To truly encounter the living, embodied and relational Christ is to do so as one pursues full humanity.  As humans we are prone to seek out cultural heroes that will replace our responsibility in the world.  We project onto to them qualities, powers and superhuman strength that allows us to forfeit the strength that we as humans actually have for something that doesn't exist in order to avoid the difficult encounters that we as humans are requires to have in our strength.  Our heroes exist as buffer zones between us and the Real.  The Real wants us to realize that which we already have, potential bound up in the human race and to become fully human in order to discover that strength.  The problem is - we don't want that, so we look to super-humans to do if for us.  


In-between our incompetent humanity and super-humanity, there is a place that God calls us to called full humanity.  So why don't we want to be there?


I think the problem is that we don't really want to encounter the "other" more than we encounter ourselves. We truly don't want to have a true encounter, we want the benefits of an encounter, but not all the comes with the encounter.

So the solution is and has been, to be fully human. To be fully human is to not depend on Christ so much that we cannot become like him, but also not be so much like him that we cannot depend upon him. Somehow there's a balance in the midst of that tension that we should be seeking to experience, though the journey there will never allow us to "finally arrive." I think the journey of holding the tension between the desire for transcendence and immanence is like a metronome and our wisdom grows as we cross the center of the metronome more frequently.


Christ's mission wasn't just to save us, but also to release us into what it means to be fully human as he became fully human after the resurrection. That longing to be fully human is the balance between transcendence and immanence. We forfeit that longing when we shortchange ourselves for only (or mostly) attaining the benefits of primarily transcendence or primarily immanence. Conservatives generally focus more on the benefits of transcendence (God's glory is everything) and Progressives tend to focus more on the benefits of immanence (Human Flourishing is everything). Holding a tension between the two for our experience in the world seems to be the best solution rather than prizing one more than the other.


So, the impulse to focus mostly on "God" can actually shortchange our ability to really worship him with all of us (embodied human experience) as Scripture guides us to do. Love of God and love of Neighbor are one and the same in the Greatest commandment

The Canon of the Church is not Closed

Arguments and positions abound regarding the authority of Scripture.  The basic argument for its divine authority is that for a period of time, God authorized the inspiration of human authorship for his divine revelation in written form.  God gave a window of time through which the Bible could be authoritatively authored by human beings on his behalf.

That time closed at a point when the last New Testament book was what theologians call, "canonized" or "canonization."  When you hear people speak about the Canon of Scripture - "Canon" basically means that a fulfilled library of texts are collected, ascertained as to their authoritative nature (by the historic church) and then given a status of being "canonized" thereby closing off other options for what can be authoritative.  When it comes to the Bible, the current belief is that that time of decision making for which books belong and which don't, closed up shop long ago.  It's a done deal.

So what about the Canon of the Church?

Many believe that church tradition is one of the authoritative voices that coincides with Scripture's authority while others believe that the tradition of the church is at least authoritative on some level even if it isn't on par with Scripture.

Whether that is true or not, if we are understanding the authority of the church in a similar paradigm that Scripture itself operates in, then we need to honor the fact that the Canon of the Church (tradition) is not closed.

Church tradition only offers us one side of the coin that Church as an interpretive community has to offer. If we are truly supposed to worship God in the New Creation as every tongue tribe and nation, then the "Church" universal has not completed its maturity into a full worshipping community.

The regnant voice of authority in Church tradition is lop-sided, incomplete, many times inconsiderate and ultimately juvenile.

Kenton Sparks in his new book, Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture, appeals to Alasdair MacIntyres argument in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?  which states that healthy traditions are able to interrogate their own boundaries.  Sparks follows MacIntyre arguing that

"...the church needs to be vigilant not only in guarding its tradition (something it has often done well) but also in carefully considering where the tradition might be mistaken (something it has often failed to do)." pg 5.

If the church universal is the Church and the historical and local expressions of that body are adequate, yet radically incomplete shadows of the Church, then any tradition that espouses their own veracity and authority to the elitist exclusion of others both existent and forthcoming, does so with great audacity, insecurity and arrogance.  To mine the depths of a tradition in order to gain a sense of depth, authority and historical accuracy in one's worship and theological interpretation is absolutely necessary.  To assume that this gives one's community authority over others' communities of faith, ignores the Biblical trajectory of what the church, in its full expression, actually is.  

We are not the "Church triumphant", we are the "Church adolescent," still wet behind the ears with the infant baptism of the Church's birth.  For us to claim authority through our traditions, mere historicity, historical interpretive frameworks all the while ignoring the Church who are yet to arrive, to speak into reality and to interpret from their context, is naive.  

The witness of every tribe is needed to fully express our authority as a community.  The certainty of forthcoming contexts of the coming communities of faith only invalidate our high claims to authority in our communities.  

Without the voice of Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Australia's First People, Native America, Southern Asia, etc. - there is no voice of final authority in church tradition - the canon of the Church is not closed.  

The question remains - how then do the current local and historical expressions of the church claim authority through their tradition without making the mistake of impatience and regnant audacity discussed above?