Nearly Everything Wrong with N.T. Wright Summed Up in One Chapter Heading

John Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton and author of the Lost World of Genesis 1, has a new book coming out this Spring. The new book, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate, is summarized this way by the publishers:

For centuries the story of Adam and Eve has resonated richly through the corridors of art, literature and theology. But for most moderns, taking it at face value is incongruous. And even for many thinking Christians today who want to take seriously the authority of Scripture, insisting on a “literal” understanding of Genesis 2–3 looks painfully like a “tear here” strip between faith and science.

How can Christians of good faith move forward? Who were the historical Adam and Eve? What if we’ve been reading Genesis—and its claims regarding material origins—wrong? In what cultural context was this couple, this garden, this tree, this serpent portrayed?

Following his groundbreaking Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton explores the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis 2–3, creating space for a faithful reading of Scripture along with full engagement with science for a new way forward in the human origins debate. As a bonus, an illuminating excursus by N. T. Wright places Adam in the implied narrative of Paul’s theology.

The Lost World of Adam and Eve will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand this foundational text historically and theologically, and wondering how to view it alongside contemporary understandings of human origins.

While there is much to be said about this book and the theological positions taken by the author (you can read the chapter headings here), what caught my attention was the “illuminating excursus by N.T. Wright.” Here is the full heading for Wright’s chapter, “Paul’s Use of Adam Is More Interested in the Effect of Sin on the Cosmos Than in the Effect of Sin on Humanity and Has Nothing to Say About Human Origins.”

This single chapter heading is truly amazing. It has successfully encapsulated almost everything that’s wrong with Wright’s theology. Let me explain what I mean. This chapter heading contains Wright’s low view of Scripture, his re-interpretation of Paul’s writings, his minimizing the importance of the salvation of individuals, his emphasis on the redemption of the cosmos, and his belief in the evolutionary origins of humanity.

First, the chapter heading illustrates Wright’s low view of the inspiration of Scripture. He speaks, here and in his other works, of “Paul’s use” as if Scripture is mainly the work of the human authors. It may seem like a stretch, but over and over again the repeated use of “what Paul means” or “Paul’s use of the Old Testament” or “Paul’s purposes,” etc. emphasizes the human author and de-emphasizes the work of the Holy Spirit in the writing and preserving of Scripture.

As far as inerrancy is concerned, Wright would not call himself an inerrantist and views the debate on inerrancy and inspiration to be an American preoccupation:

“…the insistence on an ‘infallible’ or ‘inerrant’ Bible has grown up within a complex cultural matrix (that, in particular, of modern North American Protestantism) where the Bible has been seen as the bastion of orthodoxy against Roman Catholicism on the one hand and liberal modernism on the other. Unfortunately, the assumptions of both those worlds have conditioned the debate. It is no accident that this Protestant insistence on biblical infallibility arose at the same time that Rome was insisting on papal infallibility, or that the rationalism of the Enlightenment infected even those who were battling against it.” Simply Christian (183)

Of course, Wright also believes the debate over the historicity of Adam is mainly an American preoccupation, so I’m not sure why he felt called to address it now.

Second, re-imagining and re-interpreting what Paul really meant is what Wright does. Wright has made his mark as part of the New Perspective on Paul. It should come as no surprise that Wright’s contribution to Walton’s book would be to explain to us how we’ve misunderstood and misused what Paul wrote.

What have we misunderstood this time? Two main things are mentioned in the chapter heading:

• The effect of sin on the cosmos is more important than the effect of sin on humanity.
• Paul had nothing to say about human origins.

I read an article this week that critiqued Wright’s “overstatement” on the importance of the cosmos as compared to humanity. The author is convinced that Wright simply overstated his case and that everyone knows that Scripture teaches that humans are more important than things. Unfortunately, the overemphasis on the importance of the cosmos is part and parcel of Wright’s theology.

Wright truly does believe that the cosmos are more important in the grand scheme of things. He believes that we have become way too focused on saving people and lost sight of our role in redeeming the cosmos:

to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world – may be to make a mistake similar to the one made by the Jewish people in the first century.

To focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all. Surprised by Hope (164 ebook)

Not only have we misunderstood the purpose and overarching theme of redemption, we’ve misunderstood the Gospel. When Scripture says that Jesus came to save His people from their sins, Wright believes that it’s not so much about individuals being saved from their moral failures, but rather, that Jesus had to come to put God’s rescue plan for creation back on track.

God has made a plan to save the world. Israel is the linchpin of this plan; but Israel has been unfaithful. What is now required, if the world’s sin is to be dealt with and a worldwide family created for Abraham, is a faithful Israelite. This (Jesus) is what God has now provided. Justification (68)

And,

Embedded within the earliest strands of Christian tradition we find an already formulaic statement: the messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures. … It was not, first and foremost, a way of saying that the moral failures of individuals had been atoned for in some abstract theological transaction. That would come, and quickly; we find it already in Paul’s mature thought.

But in the beginning it was a claim about what Israel’s God had done, in fulfillment of the scriptural prophecies, to bring Israel’s long night of exile to its conclusion, to deal with the “sins” that had kept Israel enslaved to the pagan powers of the world, and to bring about the real “return from exile,” the dawn of the new day, for which Israel had longed (The Meaning of Jesus, 98).

And that is how we get to the final point from the chapter heading, Paul’s use of Adam has nothing to say about human origins. In a review of Wright’s book, Surprise by Scripture, the author explains how Wright’s understanding of salvation and his re-interpretation of Paul’s use of Adam are connected:

There is a commonly held approach to salvation which posits that a perfect creation was marred through Adam’s sin, and Jesus came to pay the penalty for sin, thereby allowing us to go to heaven when we die. Adam’s role in that story is crucial: “no Adam” means “no reason for Christ to come.” But according to Wright, that is not the story that Paul tells, and it is a distortion of the Gospel. Instead, Paul connects our salvation to the story of Israel—their being placed in the Promised Land, given a commission to bless all nations, then breaking the Law and being exiled. Paul uses Adam to retell Israel’s story: “placed in the garden, given a commission to look after it; the garden being the place where God wanted to be at rest, to exercise his sovereign rule; the people warned about keeping the commandment, warned in particular that breaking it would mean death, breaking it, and being exiled. It all sounds very, very familiar” (p. 37). Not much hinges on the historicity of Adam on this account. Lots of other Jewish authors around the time of Paul appropriated Adam to get their points across too. The genre of this literature was not historical journalism.

So there you have it. According to Wright, there’s no need for a historical Adam. Of course, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the review appeared on the BioLogos website. Wright and Walton both are featured on BioLogos and share their belief in an evolutionary explanation for human origins. For all three, Wright, Walton, and BioLogos, I truly believe their interpretation of Scripture is driven by their commitments to science, politics, and their own worldviews rather than the reverse.

And that brings us back full circle to the first point. Everything hinges on your view of Scripture. Either Scripture will be the lens through which you view the world or the world (science, politics, worldview, etc) will be the lens through which you view Scripture. Ultimately one or the other will be your authority.

N.T. Wright’s New Perspective on Christmas

Jesus’ birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants. Christmas looms large in our culture, outshining even Easter in the popular mind. Yet without Matthew 1—2 and Luke 1—2 we would know nothing about it. Paul’s gospel includes Jesus’ Davidic descent, but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John’s wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God’s glory is revealed, not in the manger, but on the cross. …

If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different.

N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, pgs. 171, 178

Is N.T. Wright Wrong on Jesus?

“I do not think Jesus “knew he was God” in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself, ‘Well, I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!’ ( N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, 154).”

I have found from time to time that the Jesus I knew by faith seemed less and less like the Jesus I was discovering by history (The Meaning of Jesus, 25).

N.T. Wright, formerly Bishop of Durham, is well-known for his association with the New Perspective on Paul (NPP) and for his staunch defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I was first introduced to Wright’s books through a pastor who thought Wright had been unfairly criticized. The pastor encouraged me to read him for myself and not to be swayed by unfavorable reviews. He told me that Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, was the best he’d read on heaven. So I began to read Wright. I started with Surprised by Hope, and I found much that concerned me on a number of topics.

Instead of agreeing with the pastor, I was shocked that any Reformed pastor who had read the book would recommend it, given how far off-base Wright was on many different issues. I continued to read Wright’s books and articles, and I also began researching what others had written in critique of his work. I discovered that the one area I found the most troubling almost no one had written about: Wright’s Christology.

Early on in my reading, I began to wonder if Wright really believes that Jesus is/was God. This article is the result of two years of research into what Wright believes, or at least has written, about Christ. The books and articles I’ve read and will quote here are: Surprised by Hope, The Meaning of Jesus, Simply Jesus, Jesus and the Victory of God (I’ve read portions, but not the whole of this one), “Jesus and the Identity of God“, and “Jesus’ Self Understanding“.

To help explain why I began this research, here is Wright’s answer for “Is Jesus God?”

When people ask “Was Jesus God?,” they usually think they know what the word God means and are asking whether we can fit Jesus into that. I regard this as deeply misleading (The Meaning of Jesus, 144).

And,

I do not think Jesus “knew he was God” in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself, “Well, I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!” ( The Meaning of Jesus, 154).

This article will look first at what Wright has written concerning Jesus generally and then specifically at how Wright interprets the major events in Jesus’s life.

First, N.T. Wright is very concerned, in all his writings, that modern readers of the Bible pay attention to the historical setting and context of the books. For the New Testament, he writes that  it is important to understand what a first-century Jew would have believed about God, salvation, Israel’s history, and Israel’s future. This, then, is the way he approaches understanding Jesus:

We have to make a real effort to see things from a first-century Jewish point of view, if we are to understand what Jesus was all about (Simply Jesus, 9).

Wright recognizes that his understanding of Jesus and many key doctrines are not traditional, but he says that’s a good thing:

This way of looking at the climax of Jesus’s story is not, to be sure, the standard, traditional, “orthodox,” “conservative” reading, though it highlights from a new angle the “traditional” dogmas of “incarnation” and “atonement.” My contention is that it enables us to understand the original, historical reality for which those dogmas are later, often dehistoricized, abstract summaries (Simply Jesus, 172).

He then briefly outlines common views within Western Christianity that he says need to be rethought:

Here we find the classic Western Christian myth about Jesus, which is still believed by millions around the world. In this myth, a supernatural being called “God” has a supernatural “son” whom he sends, virgin-born, into our world, despite the fact, that it’s not his natural habitat, so that he can rescue people out of this world by dying in their place. As a sign of his otherwise secret divine identity, this “son” does all kinds of extraordinary and otherwise impossible “miracles,” crowning them all by rising from the dead and returning to “heaven,” where he waits to welcome his faithful followers after their deaths. … In the Protestant version, Jesus commissions his followers to write the New Testament, which reveals the absolute truth about Jesus and, once more, how to get to heaven (Simply Jesus, 30).

He goes on to explain the error of this understanding:

[I]t will not do to suppose that Jesus came to teach people “how to get to heaven.” That view has been immensely popular in Western Christianity for many generations, but it simply won’t do. The whole point of Jesus’s public career was not to tell people that God was in heaven, and that, at death, they could leave “earth” behind and go to be with him there. It was to tell them that God was now taking charge, right here on “earth”; that they should pray for this to happen; that they should recognize, in his own work, the signs that it was happening indeed; and that when he completed his work, it would become reality (Simply Jesus, 146).

And,

[M]ost important, we must avoid jumping to the conclusion, from all that has been said above, that Jesus was doing things that “proved his divinity” – or that the main point he was trying to get across was that he was the “son of God” in the sense of the second person of the Trinity (Simply Jesus, 149).

Wright is, of course, aware that many theologians have used the title, “Son of God,” to refer to Jesus’s divinity. He cautions against using it in that way:

Peter Enns: “the gospel is not about how you get saved”

Peter Enns has a recent blog post answering the question: What is the gospel? According to Dr. Enns, Martin Luther (and all the Reformers and all pretty much all the church since the time of the apostles) were wrong. The gospel is not about how people are saved from their sins:

Rather, the common Christian way of answering the question–like the example I give above–misses a lot of what the New Testament says about the gospel. Which, if true, is a big problem.

That is what Williams is getting at in his posts, and they’re well worth reading.

Williams points out that “gospel” as it is commonly understood, at least among conservative Protestants, is tied to issues that were big during the Reformation. Martin Luther and others were struggling with the question of how we are made right before God, or as we might put it today, “how do you get saved?”

To make a long and complicated story short and simple, Luther argued that we are justified before God by faith alone, not by works. As we might put it today, “good deeds don’t get you to heaven.” Luther got that idea from the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters–or better, how Luther understood Paul’s letters given the kinds of questions he was asking, but I digress….

Here is the point: How Luther understood “gospel”–how someone gets right with God–is not really “the gospel.” Rather, it is part of the gospel, an implication of the gospel. Luther talked about the gospel the way he did to address a theological concern of his time, but that doesn’t mean Luther’s definition gets to the heart of the matter. In other words,

…the gospel is not about how you get saved.

If the gospel is not about how you get saved, then what is it about? According to Dr. Enns (and N.T. Wright, among others):

According to the Gospels, the gospel is not about the afterlife, but what “kingdom” you belong to here and now. Jesus talks a lot about the “kingdom of heaven” (or “of God”), and this is commonly misunderstood as a kingdom “up there” somewhere. But read what Jesus says about the kingdom. It is about the rule of God on earth, with Jesus as king. “Kingdom of heaven” doesn’t mean “kingdom that is IN heaven” but “kingdom FROM heaven.” God’s reign, though King Jesus, is setting up shop here and now. The question Jesus asks the people is, “Do you want in or not?”

I once asked a pastor two questions to clarify what he was teaching on the gospel: what is the gospel, and what is the mission of the church? He answered that the gospel is the Good News that Jesus has broken into history and has ushered in the Kingdom of God and begun His work of redeeming the cosmos. The mission of the church, according to this pastor, was to invite people to join in this work of redemption. What about salvation and the forgiveness of sins? Well, that’s part of the whole thing, of course, just not central. That’s when we decided to leave.

The church has one thing it can offer that no one else can: forgiveness of sins and salvation. Any secular organization can rectify social ills, provide basic human necessities, and build parks and schools. I’m not saying that these are not worthy goals. We should not forget about the physical needs of the people we minister to. What I’m saying is that if we forget that we have a mission and that that mission is preaching the Good News of salvation and the forgiveness of sins, then we are salt that has lost its savor. If we are not reconciled to God, no amount of clean water, social justice, and redistribution of wealth will save us. We will have stored up our treasure here on earth and kept the most important treasure hidden from those we are helping.

Is our sin so minor a thing that our salvation can be treated so contemptuously? May God have mercy on us all.

A Eulogy for a Blog

Pastor Wes White announced yesterday on his blog that he is retiring from the blogosphere. He plans to focus more of his time and energy on local ministry. I can certainly attest to the amount of time it takes to maintain a blog of that size, but I am very sad to see him close up shop. I thought I’d share a bit of my own story and how Pastor Wes’ blog played a role in it.

A couple of years ago, my family and I were happily ensconced in a good-sized PCA church. We were very active in the various ministry opportunities, and we had lots of friends there. We had never really heard of Federal Vision or New Perspective on Paul. We knew N.T. Wright’s name, but only had a vague idea who he was or why anyone would care what he had to say. We were fairly happy in our ignorance.

Then we began to notice a shift in the messages. It was subtle and hard to pinpoint, but something seemed off to us. We started reading and researching to understand what this new emphasis was and where it was coming from. That led us to N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. After we left that church and began to look for a new church, we continued to read and research to understand the issues within the PCA and to give us a better idea of what to look for in our next church. God has blessed us with a wonderful church now. We are truly grateful to hear the Gospel proclaimed so clearly.

It was during this time that I came across Pastor Wes’ blog. He had so much information and discussion on the very issues I had been researching. I contacted him to ask for some additional resources. He was very gracious in responding and helping me. This is when I began to research and write for the blogs. Pastor Wes gave me my first opportunity to publish my thoughts. He has been a great source of encouragement and support.

We will all miss Pastor Wes’ blog very much. I have been honored to have been a part of it. I know there are many people like me who have been helped and encouraged through his words and through the other commentators there. I pray that I can be a help to others through my work here.

Do the People in the Pews Still Matter?

In the Church today, there is a move by some to “correct” an overemphasis on the individual believer. The desire is to focus on the corporate aspects of Christianity. A good example would be the work of N.T. Wright, formerly Bishop of Dunham. In his book, Surprised by Hope, Wright explains that the Church has misunderstood the Gospel and the mission of the Church. According to Wright, the Gospel is not about saving souls from Hell, but rather about how God is using His people to redeem the cosmos:

But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about.

The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context-not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being “fellow workers with God”) within that larger picture and purpose.

The question ought to be How will God’s new creation come? And then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world? …

If what I have suggested is anywhere near the mark, then to insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question – to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world – may be to make a mistake similar to the one made by the Jewish people in the first century.

To focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all. (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, New York: HarperCollins, 2008, 184-185)

Wright recognizes that his interpretation of the Gospel and salvation will have an impact in the work of the Church:

As long as we see salvation in terms of going to heaven when we die, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for that future. But when we see salvation, as the New Testament sees it, in terms of God’s promised new heavens and new earth and of our promised resurrection to share in that new and gloriously embodied reality … then the main work of the church here and now demands to be rethought in consequence. (197)

So what happens when pastors and churches decide that what really matters is what the people of God do to redeem the world around them? What happens when pastors start looking at their congregation as a means to an end instead of a flock to shepherd? What happens when sermons become about what Christians need to do to redeem the cosmos, engage the culture, and transform the city?

From what I’ve seen and heard, although thankfully not from our current church, what happens is that the needs of the congregation are overlooked. Pastors have lost sight of their role as shepherd. Instead, they see their role as motivating and equipping believers to go out and transform the world, but not through the preaching of the Word. Pastors don’t know who’s hurting, whose marriages are in trouble, which families desperately need jobs, or how to pray for their people. What I mean is that pastors are too busy to counsel couples whose marriages are falling apart, but not too busy to organize an outreach program to show how much their church loves the city.

And what about sanctification? Well, if salvation is about God using people to redeem the world, then does it really matter where individual Christians are in their walk? In fact, the whole idea that salvation should have an effect on the personal piety of a believer is obviously outdated. What good can Christians be in the transformation of culture if they aren’t watching, reading, and listening to everything their non-Christian neighbors enjoy? If Christians dress differently, talk differently, and act differently, then they are surely not winsome and contextualized enough. Racy sermon illustrations and foul language? Just part of being authentic.

It is often said these days that “the church is the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members,” but is that really true? Don’t we exist to encourage each other, bear each others burdens, pray for each other, care for each other, minister to each other, teach each other, and most importantly worship together? The Church needs to reach out to non-believers, to preach the Word, and to help those in need, but it must not forget the needs of those in the household of faith.

Was Jesus Born of a Virgin? Does it Matter?

The doctrine of the virgin birth, that Jesus did not have a human father, is one that most professing Christians have considered central to an orthodox understanding of who Jesus is. The Apostles’ creed says Jesus was “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.” The Nicene creed says He was “incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary.” Yet many modern scholars have sought to either deny the virgin birth of Christ as foolishly unbelievable or to diminish the importance of the doctrine. So, does it matter whether or not Jesus was born of a virgin? Here are two well-known writers very different answers.

N.T. Wright, Anglican bishop and New Testament Scholar, wrote an essay for the book, The Meaning of Jesus, on the subject of the virgin birth. Here is a short excerpt of that essay:

Jesus’ birth usually gets far more attention than its role in the New Testament warrants. Christmas looms large in our culture, outshining even Easter in the popular mind. Yet without Matthew 1—2 and Luke 1—2 we would know nothing about it. Paul’s gospel includes Jesus’ Davidic descent, but apart from that could exist without mention of his birth. One can be justified by faith with no knowledge of it. Likewise, John’s wonderful theological edifice has no need of it: God’s glory is revealed, not in the manger, but on the cross.

If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different. (171, 178)

John MacArthur, pastor and writer, took a different approach in his book, God With Us: