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

by N.T. Wright

Granted, then, that we are interested in ‘what actually happened’, we (and by ‘we’, I here mean historians in general) are also interested in why it happened. That question, in turn, opens up to reveal the full range of explanations available within any given worldview, including (in the case of answers available within first-century Judaism) the intentions not only of humans but of Israel’s god.

Just as the gospels and epistles embody genres somewhat apart from their closest non-Christian analogues, so the study of them, and of their central figures, are tasks which, though they possess of course several analogies with other closely related disciplines, require specialized tools, that is, a theory of knowledge appropriate to the specific tasks.

If, moreover, the Christian claim were after all true—and it would be foolish to answer that question either way in advance when dealing with preliminary method—we might perhaps expect that in studying Jesus himself we would find the clue to understanding not only the object we can see through the telescope, the voice we can hear on the telephone, but the nature of sight and hearing themselves. Studying Jesus, in other words, might lead to a reappraisal of the theory of knowledge itself.

just as I reject the subjective/objective distinction, so I reject the nature/supernature distinction which is equally a product of Enlightenment thinking. Indeed, it is precisely the stories that are modelled on these distinctions, whether in a ‘conservative’ or a ‘liberal’ manner, that I believe will be subverted by the story which I propose to tell. The tools of thought which we need, then, cannot be those of pre-modernism any more than those of modernism.

If we are eventually to mount a new theory of knowledge itself, we will also need a new theory of being or existence, that is, a new ontology.

Wrede paid dearly for the simplicity of his basic (and simple) idea—that Jesus did not think of himself as Messiah—at the cost of ultra-complexity everywhere else, and even then there was a lot of data which still refused to fit.

The more one knows about any event, the more complex one realizes it to be. Simplicity is much easier to project on to events when little evidence is to hand. Thus, though there will be an eventual or ultimate simplicity about a good historical hypothesis, and though one should not rest content with odd complexities, inclusion of data is ultimately the more important of the first two criteria.

A good deal of New Testament scholarship, in fact, and within that a good deal of study of Jesus, has proceeded on the assumption that the gospels cannot possibly make sense as they stand, so that some alternative hypothesis must be proposed to take the place of the view of Jesus they seem to offer. It has been assumed that we know, more or less, what Jesus’ life, ministry and self-understanding were like, and that they were unlike the picture we find in the gospels.

But, as has been shown powerfully in recent years, the simplicity of Baur’s idealist scheme was deceptive. The time available for it to have taken effect is simply too short; there is too great a multitude of data to which it has to sit loose (the fact, for instance, that our main evidence for ‘Jewish Christianity’ as such is late, and for ‘Gentile Christianity’ very early); and its pet theories about history-of-religions derivations, especially in the area of christology, have collapsed entirely.

To begin with, history involves not only the study of ‘what happened’ in the sense of ‘what physical events would a video camera have recorded’, but also the study of human intentionality. In Collingwood’s language, this involves looking at, or at least for, the ‘inside’ of an event.55 We are trying to discover what the humans involved in the event thought they were doing, wanted to do, or tried to do.

By aim I mean the fundamental direction of a person’s life, or some fairly settled subset of that fundamental direction. This aim is thus the directional aspect of an individual’s mindset, by which I mean the individual subset of, or variant on, the worldview held by the society or societies to which the individual belongs.

By intention I mean the specific application of the ‘aim’ in a particular (and in principle repeatable) situation.

By motivation I mean the specific sense, on one specific occasion, that a certain action or set of actions is appropriate and desirable.

History, then, includes the study of aims, intentions and motivations. This does not mean that history is covert psychology.

Finally, if history involves all these things it must clearly involve them not just at the level of individuals, whose mindsets are involved directly, but also of societies, whose worldviews are at stake.59 But how do we study societies and their worldviews? By means of their symbols, their characteristic behaviour, and their literature, particularly the stories they tell explicitly and implicitly.

Symbols provide the interpretative grid through which humans perceive both how the world is and how they might act within it: they provide a vision of reality and a vision for it.

As Ben Meyer argues, it may be ‘in the tradition generated by Jesus that we discover what made him operate in the way he did’.

largest. First, the meaning of a word (following Wittgenstein) I take to be its use in a context, or an implicit context; that is, its use or potential use in a sentence or potential sentence.

Second, the meaning of a sentence is its place in a story or implicit story.

Third, the meaning of a story is its place in a worldview.

Thus, at every level with which the historian is concerned, from individual words right up to whole sequences of events, ‘meaning’ is to be found within a context—ultimately, within the context of worldviews.

Practice without theory is blind, but theory without practice is dumb.

And at this level we cannot escape the constant task, important in the study of second-temple Judaism as much as anywhere else, of reconstructing the worldview which informed and underlay not only this or that particular writing but the society as a whole. We need to plot, and understand, the stories that Jews of the period were telling themselves and one another about who they were, about what their god was up to, about what the meaning of it all might be. There can be no going back to the cheap generalizations that characterized earlier scholarship. But nor should we shrink back from referring to, and indeed giving a detailed account of, the prevailing strands that went to make up the complex entity that may yet be called the overall first-century Jewish worldview.

The model of ‘mere history’, in particular, is inadequate for a full appreciation of any text, and particularly one such as the New Testament.

The aim of this chapter is to suggest what might be involved in a ‘theological’ reading that does not bypass the ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ readings, but rather enhances them; and to explore one possible model of letting this composite reading function as normative or authoritative.

There are therefore two levels at which we pass beyond ‘mere history’. First, in order to answer the question ‘Why?’ in relation to the past, we must move from the ‘outside’ of the event to the ‘inside’; this involves reconstructing the worldviews of people other than ourselves. Second, in doing this we cannot stand outside our own worldviews, any more than we can see without our own eyes.

It is a solidly established datum of history that Jews and Christians in the first century regarded the actual events in which they were taking part as possessing, in and of themselves, ultimate significance. They believed strongly that the events concerning Israel and her fate were not ‘bare events’, but possessed an ‘inside’, a ‘meaning’, which transcended mere chronicle.

Worldviews have to do with the presuppositional, pre-cognitive stage of a culture or society.3 Wherever we find the ultimate concerns of human beings, we find worldviews.

‘Worldview’, in fact, embraces all deep-level human perceptions of reality, including the question of whether or not a or gods exist, and if so what he, she, it or they is or are like, and how such a being, or such beings, might relate to the world.

There are four things which worldviews characteristically do, in each of which the entire worldview can be glimpsed. First, as we have seen throughout this Part of the book, worldviews provide the stories through which human beings view reality. Narrative is the most characteristic expression of worldview, going deeper than the isolated observation or fragmented remark.

Second, from these stories one can in principle discover how to answer the basic questions that determine human existence: who are we, where are we, what is wrong, and what is the solution?

Third, the stories that express the worldview, and the answers which it provides to the questions of identity, environment, evil and eschatology, are expressed (as we saw in the previous chapter) in cultural symbols.

Fourth, worldviews include a praxis, a way-of-being-in-the-world.

Worldviews are thus the basic stuff of human existence, the lens through which the world is seen, the blueprint for how one should live in it, and above all the sense of identity and place which enables human beings to be what they are.

we may say that culture denotes particularly the praxis and symbols of a society, both of which are of course informed by the controlling story, and reflect particular answers to the worldview questions.

Second, the slippery word religion likewise focuses upon symbol and praxis, but draws more specific attention to the fact that symbol and praxis point beyond themselves to a controlling story or set of controlling stories which invest them with wider significance.

Third, theology concentrates on the questions and answers, and focuses specifically o...

Fourth, imagination and feeling can be plotted on the line between story and symbol, giving depth in different ways to praxis and questions.

Fifth, mythology is, in many cultures, a way of speaking which reflects ‘a conception of reality that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience by sacred forces’;8 that is, a way of integrating praxis and symbol with story and, at least implicitly, with answers to the key questions.

literature, which at the level both of reading and of writing is of course part of praxis, is a complex phenomenon in which, both explicitly and implicitly, stories are told, questions are raised and answered, praxis is exemplified, and symbols are either discu...

Theology thus tells stories about human beings and the world, stories which involve either a being not reducible to materialist analysis or at least a provocative space within the story-line where such a being might, by implication, be located. In the light of this story-telling activity, theology asks questions, as to whether there is a god, what relation this god has to the world in which we live, and what if anything this god is doing, or will do, about putting it to rights.

Recognition of god-language as fundamentally metaphorical does not mean that it does not have a referent, and that some at least of the metaphors may not actually possess a particular appropriateness to this referent. In fact, metaphors are themselves mini-stories, suggesting ways of looking at a reality which cannot be reduced to terms of the metaphor itself.

Actually, this might be better expressed, in the Christian case, as being-for-the-world, since in the fundamental Christian worldview humans in general are part of the creator’s designed means of looking after his world, and Christians in particular are part of his means of bringing healing to the world.

The overall point here is that a good deal of what is called ‘Christian theology’ consists of discussions and debates at the level of basic belief or consequent belief, not necessarily at the level of the Christian worldview itself.

All worldviews, the Christian one included, are in principle public statements. They all tell stories which attempt to challenge and perhaps to subvert other worldview-stories. All of them provide a set of answers to the basic questions, which can be called up as required from the subconscious, and discussed. All commit their hearers to a way of being-in-the-world or being-for-the-world.

Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play, most of whose fifth act has been lost. The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a remarkable wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged. Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own. Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.

This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist—could not consist!—in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier parts of the play over and over again. It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, containing its own impetus and forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in an appropriate manner. It would require of the actors a free and responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

Thus: 1—Creation; 2—Fall; 3—Israel; 4—Jesus. The writing of the New Testament—including the writing of the gospels—would then form the first scene in the fifth act, and would simultaneously give hints (Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end. The fact of Act 4 being what it is shows what sort of a conclusion the drama should have, without making clear all the intervening steps. The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer an improvisatory performance of the final act as it leads up to and anticipates the intended conclusion.

Indeed, it might appear that the retelling of the story of the previous acts, as part of the required improvisation, is a necessary part of the task all through.

We are not searching, against the grain of the material, for timeless truths. We are looking, as the material is looking, for and at a vocation to be the people of God in the fifth act of the drama of creation.