The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

The second model was proposed by the ‘biblical theology’ school of the 1950s and 1960s.35 In philosophical terms, this school opposed the idealism of Bultmann with a kind of realism. The New Testament is given authority not because it witnesses to timeless truth, but because it witnesses to the mighty acts of the creator god within history, and especially in the events concerning Jesus. The text is then revelatory, and hence authoritative, insofar as it bears witness to the ‘real thing’, that is, to the event(s).

A further problem for both models is caused by the diversity of the material. In order to produce a ‘normative’ statement out of the New Testament it is practically inevitable that one will emphasize one part of the text at the expense of the rest.

This is not to say that one should not operate with some kind of an inner canon: all interpreters do, whether they admit it or not, in that all come to the text with some set of questions that begin the encounter. The question then is: what should we do with this starting-point? Should we use it simply as a way in to the material, remaining conscious of its implicit bias?

It is the odd nemesis of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura that one of the basic models to which it has given rise has little place within its hermeneutical structure or authority-system for Jesus himself, since he was the author of no New Testament book. From this point of view, Bultmann was perfectly correct in the famous opening sentence of his New Testament Theology: ‘The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.’

Here we see the line that runs from Melanchthon to Bultmann and beyond: once we grasp the pro me of the gospel, the idea that God is ‘being gracious to me’, we no longer need Jesus to be too firmly rooted in history.

Some would say that the real Jesus can not be rediscovered at all, being now so thoroughly overlaid with the evangelists’ theologies; others would say that he should not be searched for at all, since to look for Jesus behind the evangelists is to look for a historian’s construct (or another ‘ideal’ figure) rather than the Lord whom the earliest Christians worshipped and followed.

It has been customary to say that the New Testament writers ‘did not think they were writing “scripture”;’ and though, as we shall see, that formulation may need to be revised, not least in the light of recent redaction-criticism, it is certainly true to the extent that for them the place where Israel’s god had acted decisively for the salvation of the world was not in their taking pen and ink to write gospels, but in their god’s taking flesh and blood to die on a cross. Their own work was conceived as derivative from and dependent upon that fact.

Within any traditional Christian scheme—invoked here not as an a priori to settle historical matters, but as the necessary foundation for showing how traditional Christian judgments have in fact worked—all authority belongs ultimately to the creator god; and if (as traditional Christianity has gone on to say) this god is made known supremely in Jesus, then Jesus, too, holds an authority that is superior to all writing about him. Many, of course, will suppose this to be a false antithesis, since what we know about Jesus we know precisely in these writings. But this will scarcely hold within mainline ‘New Testament theology’, in which, as we have seen, it is axiomatic that the gospels do not give us direct access to Jesus, but only to the theology of the evangelists and their predecessors. If all authority belongs to the creator god, it is a matter of some delicacy to describe how such ‘authority’ comes to be vested in the New Testament, and what the limits of this might be.

We must try to combine the pre-modern emphasis on the text as in some sense authoritative, the modern emphasis on the text (and Christianity itself) as irreducibly integrated into history, and irreducibly involved with theology, and the postmodern emphasis on the reading of the text. To put it another way, we need to do justice, simultaneously, to Wrede’s emphasis on serious history (including the history of Jesus), Bultmann’s emphasis on normative theology, and the postmodern emphasis on the text and its readers.

This first volume, then, in one sense introduces the entire project at hand, but in another stands by itself. It argues for a particular way of doing history, theology, and literary study in relation to the questions of the first century; it argues for a particular way of understanding first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity; and it offers a preliminary discussion of the meaning of the word ‘god’ within the thought-forms of these groups, and the ways in which such historical and theological study might be of relevance for the modern world.

Many of the debates which have occupied scholars as they have crossed the terrain of gospels and epistles have not been so much the detailed exegesis of this or that passage, but the larger issues as to which view of history, or of theology, they will take, and which pieces of territory they can then annex with a claim of justified allegiance.

The basic argument I shall advance in this Part of the book is that the problem of knowledge itself, and the three branches of it that form our particular concern, can all be clarified by seeing them in the light of a detailed analysis of the worldviews which form the grid through which humans, both individually and in social groupings, perceive all of reality. In particular, one of the key features of all worldviews is the element of story.

On the one hand there is the optimism of the positivist position.5 The positivist believes that there are some things at least about which we can have definite knowledge.

People thus assume, within the world of post-Enlightenment positivism, that they know things ‘straight’. At what many regard as a common-sense level, this position may be called ‘naïve realism.’

The positivist conceives of knowing as a simple line from the observer to the object. This results in the following model: Observer------------------------------------------> Object —simply looking at objective reality —tested by empirical observation —if it doesn’t work, it’s nonsense

The phenomenalist, however, tries this model out and discovers that all results bend back on to the knower: Observer------------------------------------------> Object —I seem to have evidence of external reality <------------------------------------------------------------ —but I am really only sure of my sense-data

This is a way of describing the process of ‘knowing’ that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence ‘realism’), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence ‘critical’).12

This path leads to critical reflection on the products of our enquiry into ‘reality’, so that our assertions about ‘reality’ acknowledge their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower.

Critical awareness reveals three things at least about the process of knowing, all of which challenge either a naïve realism or a mainline positivism. First, the observer is looking from one point of view, and one only; and there is no such thing as a god’s-eye view (by which would be meant a Deist god’s-eye view) available to human beings, a point of view which is no human’s point of view.14 Second, and consequent upon this, all humans inevitably and naturally interpret the information received from their senses through a grid of expectations, memories, stories, psychological states, and so on.

Thirdly, and most importantly, where I stand and the (metaphorical) lenses through which I look have a great deal to do with the communities to which I belong.

instead of working from the particulars of observation, or ‘sense-data’, to confident statements about external reality, positivistically conceived, critical realism (as I am proposing it) sees knowledge of particulars as taking place within the larger framework of the story or worldview which forms the basis of the observer’s way of being in relation to the world.

Instead of working as it were upwards from empirical data, in however chastened and hence cautious a fashion, knowledge takes place, within this model, when people find things that fit with the particular story or (more likely) stories to which they are accustomed to give allegiance.

There must always be a leap, made by the imagination that has been attuned sympathetically to the subject-matter, from the (in principle) random observation of phenomena to the hypothesis of a pattern.

Equally, verification happens not so much by observing random sense-data to see whether they fit with the hypothesis, but by devising means, precisely on the basis of the larger stories (including the hypothesis itself), to ask specific questions about specific aspects of the hypothesis.

Human life, then, can be seen as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another.

Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview.

all worldviews contain an irreducible narrative element, which stands alongside the other worldview elements (symbol, praxis, and basic questions and answers), none of which can be simply ‘reduced’ to terms of the others.

The stories which characterize the worldview itself are thus located, on the map of human knowing, at a more fundamental level than explicitly formulated beliefs, including theological beliefs.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life—for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

The reason why stories come into conflict with each other is that worldviews, and the stories which characterize them, are in principle normative: that is, they claim to make sense of the whole of reality.

There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ proof; only the claim that the story we are now telling about the world as a whole makes more sense, in its outline and detail, than other potential or actual stories that may be on offer. Simplicity of outline, elegance in handling the details within it, the inclusion of all the parts of the story, and the ability of the story to make sense beyond its immediate subject-matter: these are what count.

When, therefore, we perceive external reality, we do so within a prior framework. That framework consists, most fundamentally, of a worldview; and worldviews, as we have emphasized, are characterized by, among other things, certain types of story.

The hard-and-fast distinction between objective and subjective must be abandoned as useless. If anyone, reading that sentence, at once thinks ‘so there is no such thing as objective knowledge’, that merely shows how deeply ingrained the positivist tradition has become in our culture, just at the moment when its perpetrators have finally admitted that it was wrong. What is needed, I have argued, is a more nuanced epistemology,

knowledge has to do with the interrelation of humans and the created world. This brings it within the sphere of the biblical belief that humans are made in the image of the creator, and that in consequence they are entrusted with the task of exercising wise responsibility within the created order.

To know is to be in a relation with the known, which means that the ‘knower’ must be open to the possibility of the ‘known’ being other than had been expected or even desired, and must be prepared to respond accordingly, not merely to observe from a distance.

The critical realism offered here is therefore essentially a relational epistemology, as opposed to a detached one. The stories through which it arrives at its (potentially) true account of reality are, irreducibly, stories about the interrelation of humans and the rest of reality (including, of course, other humans).

This critical-realist theory of knowledge and verification, then, acknowledges the essentially ‘storied’ nature of human knowing, thinking and living, within the larger model of worldviews and their component parts. It acknowledges that all knowledge of realities external to oneself takes place within the framework of a worldview, of which stories form an essential part. And it sets up as hypotheses various stories about the world in general or bits of it in particular and tests them by seeing what sort of ‘fit’ they have with the stories already in place.

All epistemologies have to be, themselves, argued as hypotheses: they are tested not by their coherence with a fixed point agreed in advance, but (like other hypotheses, in fact) by their simplicity and their ability to make sense of a wide scope of experiences and events.

The German scholar G. Strecker has recently published a book on the Sermon on the Mount.9 On the back cover we are told, with an air of triumph, that the Sermon on the Mount does not represent what Jesus said, but rather contains Matthew’s own theology. That, I submit, is not primarily an exegetical or even a historical judgment: it is a philosophical one. Strecker is inviting us to move from the risky ground of making claims about Jesus himself to the apparently safer, more secure ground of saying that this is the state of Matthew’s own mind.

Even where form-criticism has given way to redaction-criticism, study of the evangelists has often focused simply on their church and community setting. ‘Community’ has thus functioned as an alternative sort of referent, beyond or behind the text: Reader 13 Text [Author] Community -------> ---------> --------->

Much modern study of literature has simply rejected the idea that we have access to the mind or intention of a writer.

Part of the difficulty, clearly, lay in the fact that many nineteenth-century poets were basically talking about their own states of mind and emotions, and this lured critics into imagining that to discover such things was the normal business of all literary criticism. Thus was the text freed from the burden of the author:

First, it has been a commonplace of mainline Western hermeneutics, at least since Schleiermacher, that it is possible, indeed likely, that the poet, or the evangelist, was writing at one level, of conscious intentionality, but that we can detect within the poem levels of meaning of which, in the nature of the case, the writer was unconscious.

may be that we can see, with the advantage of hindsight or psychological analysis (Freud is read these days as much by literary critics as by psychologists), that he or she was internally or externally influenced without realizing it, so that the poem points in directions which have only subsequently become clear, and perhaps could not have been imagined by the writer. We may actually know more about the author than was, and that could have been, present to his or her mind at the time.21 This, of course, is in itself a kind of pseudo- or shadow-intentionality, and may well be thought not to have escaped from the problems of the ordinary sort.

Or, second, it may be that, by projecting a similar method on to a wider screen, the poem might serve as evidence for the deep structure of all human thought, which then becomes the real object of the critical enquiry, to be organized, along with other anthropological data, into conclusions about the nature of human beings and their societies. This is the way in which the movement known as ‘structuralism’ proceeds: from text to deep structures of thought, and thence to conclusions about a reality which lies beyond ordinary consciousness.

Such structuralism appears as one of the modern versions of Platonism—the attempt to get behind the phenomena to...

Critics have tended to ask two sorts of questions: (a) What event does the text refer to, and what do those events mean? (b) What theological ideas did the author of this text have? ‘Meaning’ is located, in these models, in the one case in the events themselves, in the other in the beliefs of the writers. The newer formalist or structuralist literary criticism, however, looks for meaning in neither of these, but in the literary form or structure itself.

Third, there is an analogy between this level of enquiry and the suggestion, sometimes made within more traditional biblical exegesis, that there exists, over and above the author’s meaning, a sensus plenior, by which an ‘inspired’ text actually says more than the author realized at the time, with the Holy Spirit filling in the blank of authorial ignorance, or bringing about an ‘unintended’ prophecy by which (for instance) Caiaphas speaks a word of the Lord even when intending to say something else.

We thus have a new range of possibilities: Reader Text non-authorial meanings -------> -------> ‘more than the author intended’ -------> deep structure -------> sensus plenior

It remains, at least in principle, possible to know an author’s basic intention, and to know that one knows it; for instance, by checking one’s reading with the author in person