Evil and the Justice of God

I very much liked N.T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God. The chapter on the cross struck me most. Here are a few selected quotations:

“[The Last Supper] was Jesus’ own chosen way of expressing and explaining to his followers, then and ever since, what his death was all about. It wasn’t a theory, we note, but an action (a warning to all atonement theorists ever since, and perhaps an indication of why the church has never incorporated a specific defining clause about the atonement in its great creeds). p. 91

“What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it’s there, nor a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it.” p. 93

“The ‘problem of evil’ is not simply or purely a ‘cosmic’ thing; it is also a problem about me. And God has dealt with the problem on the cross of his Son, the Messiah. That is why some Christian traditions venerate the cross itself, just as we speak of worshiping the ground on which our beloved is walking. The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost.” p. 97

The Spirit

I just finished reading N.T. Wright’s Justification–a book I’ve had on my list for some time. I’ve read quite a bit of Wright, including all his big, synthetic scholarly works, and I appreciated Justification even though I’m not sure I got it all. As somewhere C. S. Lewis asked, would it have been too much to ask of Paul that he write more clearly? I’m looking forward to reading Wright’s big book on Paul, when it comes out. (We’ve been waiting for a long, long time!)

One element that struck me is Wright’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its comparative neglect within the traditionally reformed scheme of justification and salvation. He claims Paul’s theology doesn’t work if you neglect the Spirit, because justification makes a present judgment that we belong fully in the covenant family, but the Spirit equips us to live the kind of life that will affirm that in the final judgment.

What also struck me is how Wright thinks of the Spirit. Here’s a quote from page 189:

“The more the Spirit is at work the more the human will is stirred up to think things through, to take free decisions, to develop chosen and hard-won habits of life, and to put to death the sinful, and often apparently not freely chosen, habits of death….[Freedom in the Spirit is] a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.”

More normally, I think of the Spirit as…. fluffier. The Spirit in much theology-lite overwhelms us, takes our breath away, makes us giddy, makes us happy. Not so much the way that Wright describes the Spirit.

But–this is my thought–what would we expect from the Spirit of Jesus? Jesus was not fluffy. He was a tough-minded dude. So the Spirit of Jesus must be a tough-minded dude. Jesus made his disciples think; life with him was no swoon. So life with the Spirit will be hard-thought and carefully lived. Jesus expected a great deal from his disciples. He accepted all people on their terms, but those who followed him were challenged to live bigger. So the Spirit of Jesus will lift us to be bigger than we would be without him.

I’m deeply grateful for the way Pentecostalism has re-awakened Christians to the living, powerful Spirit. But Wright made me think of myself, Your Spirit is too small. 

More on Heaven

I like this piece from Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary. While agreeing completely with N.T. Wright’s stress on the earthly reality of our ultimate destination, he notes two differences in emphasis. One is that the “intermediate” state–life after death with Jesus, but before we are resurrected–is very much to be appreciated, not deprecated. The second is  the reason for the first: our focus ought to be not simply our new sphere of activity in God’s new earth, but the real presence of the Lamb. To be with Jesus, whether in the in-between or in the Kingdom, is devoutly to be desired.

Most Influential Books

Ross Douthat’s blog features (here) what he says is a hot blogosphere trend—writing up the ten most influential books of your life. This blog is definitely devoted to hot trends, so here goes.

It’s not a contest over best books, or even favorite books. It’s more autobiographical than that, and may include books that you now believe are awful. I’ve tried, at Douthat’s suggestion, to stay roughly chronological.

Absalom, Absalom (or anything else) by William Faulkner. When I was in high school I stumbled onto Faulkner. Nobody told me to read him; I found him at the library. His detailed, convoluted, passion-strewn, obsessional world caught me like a bee in molasses. I was an introverted boy, living in a society that didn’t discuss art or literature or psychology or rock and roll or really much of anything beyond sports. (Not even girls.) I got from Faulkner that the world offered much more than the bland surfaces of high school.

Anything by C.S. Lewis. Not quite anything—I’ve never cared for his adult fiction. I started reading Lewis in college and, like so many young Christians, I found myself in the company of the smartest thinker and clearest writer I had ever encountered. He was also gracious, widely educated, and glad to find common ground with those who saw life differently. And he was an orthodox, believing Christian! His ideas still influence me, but his writing style and his generous stance do even more.

The Greening of America, by Charles Reich. I read this when The New Yorker published it in 1969. I was studying in France. My economics professor thought it was a brilliant work. I remember feeling vaguely uneasy, though I wasn’t bright or confident enough to disagree. The book seemed too easy. Consciousness I replaced by Consciousness II, and then (right in our decade!) Consciousness III, the world becoming bright and happy as effortlessly as one species evolves into another. Next year I happened to read E.B. White’s delicious send-up (also in The New Yorker, God-bless-em) The Browning-Off of Pelham Manor. I think that was the moment when I realized the whole thing was silly. Ever since I have been much quicker to trust my gut in treating stuff as ludicrous, even when it comes out of the mouth of experts and sages.

Roger Angell on baseball. While we’re on the subject of The New Yorker, it was there, not in books, that I read Roger Angell. I wish I could write as well as Angell, and I hope his prose shaped mine. But certainly the way he read a baseball game, as an artifact to be savored and analyzed as deeply as any ornate Victorian novel, made an immense intellectual impact on me. Among other things I learned that it’s not just the stuff in books and movies that is worthy of study. Life deserves our full attention, even games.

Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I clearly remember when I fell into Middle Earth. I was backpacking in the southern Sierra, up high where you see mostly rock, ice and sky. Reading every afternoon and evening in my tent, often while the rain came down hard, I found that my backpacking life and the life of Frodo were merging. Carrying my pack up the steep terrain during the day, eating meager meals by a stream at lunch, I got confused. Was I a hobbit, or a human? Almost all of the fiction I had enjoyed (and still enjoy) was realistic, most of it in the twentieth-century style full of disappointing endings and troubled, alienated humanity. Tolkien awakened my intuition and imagination. He suggested a wider world than the twentieth century suspected. Oddly, I believe he prepared me for Victorian novels.

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. What can I say? I am suspicious of anyone who does not include this in his list of most influential books. Simply the greatest novel ever written, so utterly engrossing, so utterly human and so utterly hopeful. Discovering this was better than finding a million dollars by the road. I mean it.

Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch. I’ve read a lot of history, but this is by far the most fun of any. It tells the story of the early years of the Civil Rights movement, mainly revolving around Martin Luther King’s participation but with occasional diversions. I couldn’t put it down. I laughed and I cried. I learned our nation’s most heroic moral tale, which gave me hope in the possibility of change.

Hope for society is the most basic difference between liberalism and conservatism. I have a lot of conservatism in my fundamental social philosophy, but Parting the Waters and the story it tells enhanced my liberalism. Without it I might have ended up sour and skeptical about everything, a real curmudgeon.

Foolishness to the Greeks, by Lesslie Newbigin. This little book changed my understanding of the relationship between western civilization and Christianity. I thought we were fighting a rear-guard action to preserve what was left—a losing battle, as it happened. Newbigin helped me see us the western church not as a preservation society but as a mission society—and a mission society preaching to a tough tribe. That’s a very big change in mindset.

Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright. Wright made me read my gospels all over again. It induced a true paradigm shift, which had to do with seeing Jesus as a historical character, and thus as a movement leader, a thinker, a politician, a Jew. The texts began to explode in unfamiliar ways.

Jane Austen, George Elliot, Charles Dickens. Okay, I know that’s cheating. I read a few English Victorian novels in college and beyond, but I only really discovered them a decade after leaving school. They changed my life, giving me literature I never grow tired of.  I can’t say that of anything written in the last one hundred years

The Aubrey-Maturin Series, by Patrick O’Brian. Except for this, that is. Twenty books that are really 20 chapters of one book, written in English narrative prose worthy of Jane Austen. They get treated with disdain because they are sea stories. Most women don’t find them interesting. (They are mostly about men and men’s activities). I won’t argue about their value, any more than I would argue about whether my wife is beautiful. I just don’t want to live life without them.

Eating Humble Pie

I’ve eaten quite a lot of humble pie in the last few years. I’m not going to go into the details—it’s bad enough to eat it, without vomiting it up in public. Suffice it to say that I’ve had to rethink my belief in my invincibility.

Which may be a good thing, though I can’t say I find it to be much fun.

Eating humble pie has led me to think about the shape of life. All along I’ve had an internal narrative similar to Hardy Boys novels, in which I consistently and heroically come out ahead in the end. Setbacks I tended to see as temporary, creating narrative tension as to how I would overcome them.

Humble pie, however, has led me to ponder two inescapable facts. First, success is far from inevitable. Second, the shape of life leads to decay and death.

I know it’s not an original observation, but it’s one that I certainly have kept well hidden from myself. So, I think, do most people. Perhaps we have to, because it’s not a comfortable thing to consider. For all of us, whether “successful” or not, the visible shape of life is extremely discouraging. In the end you die, and in the leadup to that event you lose your animal vigor, your drive, your agility, your sex appeal, your sex drive (some at least), your mental acuity (again, some), and just about everything else that you hold precious. No amount of money, no number of prizes, makes much difference in this downward spiral. The death rate is 100%; the number of long-term survivors is zero.

Philosophy and religion deal with these realities—or try to. Most people, religious or not, cope with death through a mixture of stoicism and epicureanism. (Forgive me, philosophy students, if those terms are wrong.) I mean, we try to find pleasure in each day as a way to stave off the coming darkness. And, we try to show some dignity in the face of it, demonstrating courage and fortitude. Both of these strategies rely on thinking day to day, and not too much about the end result.

Religions may try to reframe the narrative. For example, Hinduism (I believe) seeks to offer a bigger picture in which our personal dramas are lost in an unchanging vastness. Some versions of Judaism stress a yet-invisible coda to the story, in which all God’s people will be raised from the dead to life in a perfected world. Animistic religions offer a wider view of the universe in which the visible and invisible exist side by side; decay and death represent merely a shifting from one realm to another.

These religious responses do not question the basic narrative of life-to-decay-to-death. They add to the story—a wider context, an unseen ending, an invisible context.

Only Christianity, I believe, claims an exception to life-to-decay-to-death. That is why the resurrection is so critical a doctrine. It indicates how fundamentally materialistic Christianity is. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile….” (1 Corinthians 15:17) All coping aside, all reframing aside, Jesus’ resurrection challenges the basic premise that the number of long-term survivors is zero.

Now, noticing the distinctiveness of this claim is one thing. Finding reason to believe it is another. It’s no small thing to put your faith in an exception to the rule of death, especially when the purported exception took place two millennia ago.  If someone really wants to look at this, I strongly recommend N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It attempts, among other things, to carefully examine the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and it’s about as thorough and fair-minded as you are likely to find in this life.

Whether you believe in Jesus’ resurrection or not, you can see why Christianity made such a shocking impact in the first century. It wasn’t one more religion or philosophy, as such were generally known. It was a claim that the facts of the visible universe needed revision.

An Appreciation of N.T. Wright

I’m a great admirer of N.T. Wright.  For those who have only read his popular works, I’d cautiously recommend his scholarly stuff—particularly Jesus and the Victory of God and The Resurrection of the Son of God. Cautiously, because this is real scholarship, 800 pages with all the requisite footnotes and the detailed arguments that can make you cry, Uncle! It’s worth it, at least to me. These books have changed the way I read the Bible.

He is a brilliant mind, and (what is almost but not quite the same thing) an original mind. I was thinking of that when I saw the ads for his recent book Justification. For some time a small group of conservative Reformed pastors have had it in for Wright because he doesn’t follow classic reformed doctrine of the atonement. They’re very vocal and quite articulate, and of course they’re concerned about a very important theological matter.  I confess that I haven’t kept up on this debate, so I can’t pronounce on a winner. (I’m sure you’re disappointed.) What I like, though, is seeing such excitement over what seemed, until recently, a very sleepy subject. Suddenly there is fire on the blogs.

Best of all, the argument is fiercely scriptural.  Scott McKnight is quoted this way in the ads for Justification: “Tom Wright has out-Reformed America’s newest religious zealots—the neo-Reformed—by taking them back to Scripture and its meaning in its historical context. Wright reveals that the neo-Reformed are more committed to tradition than to the sacred text. This irony is palpable on every page of this… study.”

McKnight put it in a rather incendiary way, but he’s on to something. The neo-Reformed are committed to a tradition of scriptural interpretation. They’re sure it’s right and they read the Bible by looking through those lenses. And what drives them nuts is that Wright is as fiercely scriptural as they are. He doesn’t quote scholars, he quotes the Bible. He has a new way of reading Paul, and he defends it not on the basis of its usefulness or its responsiveness to modern needs, but on the basis of the Bible itself. He may be right or he may be wrong, but to argue with him you have to read those texts and think them through again.

That’s exactly what I have appreciated about his scholarly works. He has a way of looking at biblical texts with fresh eyes, of exposing the unexamined assumptions you bring to the them, and shining light on words that you have glossed over. At the very least, he’s a great stimulus to renewed Bible study.

By the way, there’s a good N.T. Wright website (http://www.ntwrightpage.com/#) that collects articles and interviews and media presentations. You could get lost in this stuff. Wright is amazingly prolific.

Which brings me to my favorite N.T. Wright story. I was interviewing him a few years back about his book Simply Christian. I asked him how he came to write it. He told me that several publishers had been urging him to write an updated version of Mere Christianity, more or less. He never could get to it. “And then Maggie [his wife] said, ‘Tom, I’ve booked the cottage for the week, and we’re just going to go up there and get it done.”

After a short pause I said, “Tom, you don’t mean to say you wrote Simply Christian in a week.”

He said, “All but the last two chapters.”

And I’m quite sure he thought that was the most ordinary thing in the world. I guess so, for him.