false55579518123444716500008308169339780830816934224<![CDATA[Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament]]>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172339368m/165000.jpg
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/165000.Knowing_Jesus_Through_the_Old_Testament
959254.251022920falseSat Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008Sun May 10 11:40:35 -0700 2009Sun May 10 11:45:18 -0700 2009 Wright delineated his manuscript into five areas in which Jesus is considered in light of the Old Testament: the Old Testament story, promise, identity, mission, and values. He emphasized that the Old Testament sheds light and additional “levels of significance” on the “full understanding” of Jesus, just as He in turn “sheds light backwards” on the Old Testament. The history of Israel is particularly unique and relevant to the understanding of Jesus as a series of “redemptive acts of God in [H:]is dealings with a people in a covenant relationship with [H:]imself”. The unique salvation history of the Old Testament has “universal effects” and is directly connected to and completed by Jesus.
The Old Testament story which Jesus completed also declares the promise which Jesus fulfilled, according to Wright. Israel’s existence “was the substance of the promise”, and that promise extended to a “universal blessing to all the nations” through Israel. The Old Testament promise is inherently interactive because that promise requires an act of acceptance on the part of the people. God repeatedly took the initiative by making a promise and the humans involved responded to that promise. The Old Testament portrays a strong history of covenants which follow a consistent pattern of a promise made, the acceptance of the promise by the people, the fulfillment of that promise, and a fresh promise made in response. Wright is definitive in his determination that the promises of the Old Testament were figurative in nature, not literal; the as yet unfulfilled promises of the Old Testament are not literal predictions of things to come, but rather have been transformed into new living promise fulfillments in God’s “unwavering intention to bless”.
Wright clearly expressed that Jesus determined His identity through an interactive understanding with the Old Testament. Jesus absorbed three Old Testament figures into His identity: the Davidic King, the Son of God, and the Servant. Although Jesus was aware of being God’s Son, the baptismal experience affirmed that reality. The Old Testament further contributes to an understanding of Jesus’ identity as a macrocosmic metaphor which depicts Jesus’ relationship to God the Father via the sonship of Israel.
The key to Wright’s understanding of Jesus is in a study of His mission as seen through His titles. Wright purports that Jesus “derived” His Messiahship from reading the Scriptures; a Messiahship which was radical in that, ultimately, Jesus was the personification of Israel. Jesus learned of and claimed His titles from the Old Testament, including that of the Son of Man from Daniel 7, while He “interpreted [H:]is mission […:] in terms of Isaiah 53.”
The values of Jesus were innately the values of the Old Testament, according to Wright, for Jesus placed Himself in relative place of the law while restoring its essence. The teachings of Jesus were essentially Old Testament teachings, including to love one’s neighbor, to imitate God’s mercy, to be different from the world, and the need for a full reorientation to enter the Kingdom of God. The law, which is by design a universal blessing, follows a scale of values which Wright argued that Jesus affirmed. That scale of Old Testament law places God first, emphasizes that people “matter more than things”, and that “needs matter more than rights”.
Wright’s intention with Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament was to establish the Old Testament as the source of Jesus’ insights into God the Father and Jesus’ roots to His personal identity and mission. Wright purported that Jesus saw Himself in constant relation to the Old Testament; indeed, that Jesus determined His very path by reading the Old Testament texts. Wright broached a curiously humanist perspective in his presentation of Jesus’ relationship with the Scriptures. The occasional element of humanism can be explained by the culture of the modern Anglican Church in which Wright teaches and ministers, but his overriding approach to Jesus’ self-consciousness was consistent in its assertion of His lack of omniscience. Wright’s perspective guided his research, and subsequently the entire text suffers from an awkward and theologically errant attempt to establish Jesus’ historical self-awareness.
Wright argued extensively that Jesus determined his identity, mission, and values from the Old Testament. Such a stance removes from Jesus the omniscience accountable to Him as a co-equal part of the triune Godhead. Jesus is proclaimed by Wright as “Lord” and indicates that He is deserving of worship only in the concluding paragraph of the book, while the Jesus presented throughout the rest of Wright’s text is remarkably human. Wright even went as far as to narrate an imagined scenario in which a traveling, yet studious, Jesus observed the inadequacies of His contemporary society, entered a synagogue and read a passage of Scripture, and “launched his new ministry on the basis” of that Scripture. Jesus is depicted as an incredibly good human whose relationship with God is such that it demands the use of father/son language and who deliberately, and voluntarily, chooses to step into the role of the Messiah. The reader is left to wonder: to what extent does Wright consider Jesus to be God?
Jesus is said to have interpreted, absorbed, and learned from the Old Testament, and almost no indication is given that as part of the Godhead Jesus was integral to the origination, inspiration, and writing of the Old Testament. Wright therefore places Jesus in direct subjugation to the Scriptures, whereas sound biblical theology demands that Jesus was their true and then fulfilled that which He had written. Wright’s humanist perspective weighs heavily on his work and significantly limits its theological impact.
Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament does, however, benefit from Wright’s well-written and clearly presented links between Old Testament concepts and Jesus’ purpose. Wright implemented a frequently wonderful clarity in his articulation of the Old Testament grounds and references for Jesus’ many titles, the unique moral value scales in biblical theology, and the Bible’s covenantal history. Additional elements were included into the work, including a brief but sufficient overview of the role of typology in biblical analysis as it relates to Jesus in light of the Old Testament.
Peer reviews of Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament find little middle ground in the consideration of Wright’s work. V. Philips Long of Regent College in Vancouver wrote in the Presbyterion that Wright’s book was “clear”, “informative”, and “exhilarating”, and was “ideal” for “Christian students embarking on a course of biblical and theological study”. Stanley M. Horton of Springfield, Missouri, however, wrote in his review for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society that Wright took too great a liberty in his expression of replacement theology and labeling of many Old Testament promises as being figurative – “‘living’ and ‘transformable’” – rather than literal. Frank Thielman, of Beeson Divinity School of Birmingham, Alabama, published a review in Christianity Today in which he described Wright’s work as “illuminating” but less detailed in analysis than Walter Kaiser’s The Messiah in the Old Testament.
Ministers can find insights in eloquent passages which frequently present familiar ideas in relatively fresh contexts. One such example, seemingly tucked into the latter regions of the text, would have served as an excellent introductory passage to the book as it proclaims monotheism to be a “fighting faith” which demands a basic reorientation of humanity towards God and relates to the law under God’s terms – an orientation which Jesus proclaimed and fulfilled. All such insights must always be held in check, however, by remembrance that Wright both limited Jesus’ self-awareness of divinity and labeled swaths of covenantal promises as being figurative, not literal, when the biblical texts themselves make no such indications. The mature reader should be capable of discerning between valuable insights and illogical misrepresentations of Scriptures. The scholastic usefulness of Wright’s book is limited to an additional degree by Wright’s determination to eschew the use of footnotes. His included bibliography is to be appreciated, but scholars will be stymied in their pursuit for further depth. Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament does not present new information or ideas, but rather provides interesting insights into preexisting content. Footnotes to his work would have been valuable as they might have provided a bread trail guiding backwards into his bibliography with greater focus.
Christopher Wright achieved to an introductory degree his goal of expressing the placement of Jesus in the context of the Old Testament. Wright’s placement is off-target, however, because Jesus is depicted as being subservient to the Scriptures rather than their divine Author. The humanistic misrepresentation is significantly unsettling. When read with discernment, however, Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament can be a valuable primer for those new to evaluating Jesus in light of the Old Testament and for experienced Christians, ministers, and scholars the book can be a source for fresh insight from a perspective outside of modern conservative evangelicalism.