Marginal Christianity

N. T. Wright recently offered a response to some efforts to explain the coronavirus pandemic in terms of a divine judgment for human sins and idolatries (“ Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To,” //time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/). He opines that the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign? These are knee-jerk would-be Christian reactions in a culture which, generations back, embraced rationalism: everything must have an explanation.” They, heirs of rationalists and Romantics, want clarity and relief through understanding what is going on. Christians, however, must eschew such “dodgy explanations” and turn instead to the practice of lament over these tragic and horrible happenings in our world. Indeed, this seems the only response that is biblically warranted in Wright’s judgment. “It is no part of the Christian vocation,” he writes, “to be able to explain what’s happening a...

Emboldened by Jesus’ announcement of the coming of the kingdom of heaven (4:17), his direction for living through this period of crisis and judgment (chs.5-7), and a litany of ten demonstrations of power by Jesus proving his authority to act as the Messiah and agent of God’s coming kingdom (chs.8-9). Now we come to his transferal of his own authority to his disciples and sending them out to spread the news of the coming kingdom throughout Israel (ch.10). It is crucial to read this passage in light of this 1 st century context. Jesus explicitly delimits this mission to Israel: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near’” (10:5-7). This inter-Jewish mission is a key component of Jesus’ effort to regather and reconstitute Abrahamic Israel under the shadow of God’s coming judgment of his people. Unlike the so-called Great Com...

Identity and Vocation of Israel (5:13-16)   Jesus details the passions that ground God’s people in faithfulness, a flourishing life, in the Beatitudes. In the short section that follows he addresses their identity and vocation (vv.13-16), their deepest convictions about God, themselves, and their calling in the world, their priorities. “Jesus is calling the Israel of his day to be Israel indeed, now that he is there. What he says here can now be applied to all Christians, but its original meaning was a challenge to Jesus’ own contemporaries. God had called Israel to be the salt of the earth; but Israel was behaving like everyone else, with its power politics, its factional squabbles, its militant revolutions. How could God keep the world from going bad – the main function of salt in the ancient world – if Israel, his chosen ‘salt’, had lost its distinctive taste?” [1] Wright’s reference to “chosen” salt gives us the clue we need. Chosen here means covenant. Salt, th...

In this, his follow-up to Simply Jesus, Tom Wright offers perhaps his most important contribution to understanding Jesus and the Bible to date. His thesis is that we have forgotten what the gospels are really about and created answers to their purpose that may contain some elements of truth but fundamentally distort and obscure their true intent. Because these are the foundational stories on which Christianity is built this is no idle charge – it cuts right to the heart of everything we hold true and real! In Part One (chs.1-3), Wright analyzes how and why we have gone in reading the gospels. Other ideas and influences have so colored our reading of them that we have in effect, according to our author, not really read the gospels at all! The church’s creeds are a key element in our un-reading of the gospels. A quick look at either the Apostles’ or Nicene Creeds show that Jesus’ life is notable by its absence. They jump from Jesus’ virginal conception to his suffering and de...