Note: the following is part 4 in an on-going encore presentation of a series that appeared last summer on my former blog, Sibboleth.
The Structure of the Universe (Part 4: WDJD?)
There you were, 12 years ago, having gotten your hands on a copy of Jesus and the Victory of God. You and all your cigar smokin’, whiskey drinkin’, Southern Presbyterian friends were starting to develop man crushes on N. T. Wright.
Then it happened: What Saint Paul Really Said came along, in close proximity to “The Shape of Justification,” and the hatred with which you hated him became greater than the love with which you loved him.
What happened?
The picture of the cosmos on offer in the conservative Reformed tradition is based almost entirely on a particular reading of Paul. (Check out the footnotes to the Westminster Confession sometime: the legal structure of the universe is a theological axiom built on reading Galatians 3 as referring to Adam where the text is clearly referring to Moses.) This picture of the cosmos is, of course, tied up with a reading of Paul’s view of the solution to humanity’s problem: we need to be justified in the heavenly courtroom, Jesus’ life and death enables that justification, Rom 3 says so, etc.
As I mentioned yesterday, this leaves the question of Jesus’ ministry wide open as, in fact, we see that in the Reformed Tradition and the evangelical heritage it’s spawned we have traditionally had very little idea what to do with the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels.
So, when N. T. Wright stepped in, this is what he offered: (1) A reading of Jesus that connected his ministry deeply with the covenant(s) God had made with Israel. This was an instant point of affinity for Reformed types. (2) A reading of Jesus that emphasized the kingdom of God–something that Reformed types had been made aware of through the work of Herman Ridderbos et al. (3) A reading of Jesus that stuck it to the minimalist historical Jesus scholars–a purportedly “historical Jesus” work that never says that any piece of data from the NT isn’t historical. Here, surely, was a friend!
But the picture of salvation that Wright drew was dependent on a different view of the structure and order of the cosmos–one in which the particulars of God’s covenant relationship with Israel are the particulars through which God is going to exercise a universal saving action to restore the entire world to Godself. In other words, this reading of Jesus depends on a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos than the law-based picture of Reformed Theology, but folks in the Reformed world were able to appropriate it unawares because conservative, traditional Reformed Theology did not have any stake in the Gospels. Its adherents didn’t see the crack in the door because they were only dealing with Jesus.
Because here’s the thing that happened with What Saint Paul Really Said: Wright simply took his understanding of the cosmos in need of restoration, Israel as God’s agent, and Jesus as the one fulfilling the destiny of Israel (i.e., his reading of the story of the Gospels) and read that same narrative off the pages of Paul. But now he was coming into direct conflict with passages in which the Reformed folk had a stake. And the jig was up.
When Wright wants to set the stage to answer the question, “What did Jesus do?”, he, in step with the Reformed tradition he came out of, began his answer with an assessment of the connection between creation and covenant. But…
There are two crucial differences: (1) Wright sees in the OT’s assessment of the “problem” not only sin but also injustice, persecution, groaning creation, etc. In other words, the restoration of the cosmos is going to have to deal with the powers that war against God’s good purposes–powers that are greater than the sum of the rebellion lodged in persons’ hearts.
(2) For Wright the covenants made by YHWH to deal with the problem are covenants established with people in time. This points to the most significant underlying difference in perspective: For scripture and for Wright what matter are the actual things that God does in history. Confessional Reformed Theology has taken the covenant language of scripture, translated it into extra-biblical ideas of non-historical covenants of works and of grace, and then read those extra-biblical ideas back into the biblical accounts of how salvation works. Israel doesn’t matter in the least, it all could have been done without her.
What did Jesus do? For Wright, Jesus restored the reign of God, overcoming the powers of sin and death, dying to absorb the penalty due for sin, replacing humanity in its seat as rightful ruler of the world on YHWH’s behalf–and all this as a way of saying, “Fulfilled Israel’s vocation to restore humanity, became the faithful God-honoring second Adam, and offered restoration from ‘exile’.”
For the Reformed world, Jesus kept the law for us, died to take our condemnation, and rises to… well… that doesn’t really matter. And all this as a way of saying, “Jesus fulfilled Adam’s vocation to be obedient so we could be rewarded under the provisions of the covenant of works.”
What does it mean to be second Adam? Does Israel have a place in the story? Is the original vision of humanity’s purpose being to rule the world on God’s behalf significant? Are the narrative threads of creation’s curse, of broken human relationships, of broken relations between humans and the created order–do these play into the work of Jesus? Are they part of the structure of God’s cosmos which Jesus came to restore?
When the universe is understood to be structured in a relationship to God that sustains all these other relationships, those questions become the heart of the question “What did Jesus do?” When the moral law is understood to be the structure of the universe, those are back-burner questions, questions that do not demand our attention as followers of Jesus, things for which we can simply wait and hope so long as we have been made right with God.
N. T. Wright is correctly drawing our attention to the fact that being made right with God comes hand in hand with the restoration of the cosmos. This is what Jesus did. We can’t have one without the other–and having both as our “gospel” should markedly affect how we view our vocation, and how we assess whether we and our communities are living faithfully.
