Festooned With Ribbons

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Wright begins chapter one by telling a parable against his interlocuters, acknowledging that to do so might be dicey. “Now I can well imagine that, as with the Pharisees listening to Jesus’ Parable of the Wicked Tenants, there may be some readers who will at once be angry, realizing that I have told this story against them” (p. 4). The story is about a poor sap who believes that the sun goes around the earth, and he happens to visit a more knowledgeable fellow, one who knows the truth. They spend the evening discussing, debating, making models on the coffee table, and so on. The evening ends in a stalemate, and first thing in the morning, the educated protagonist is awakened by his tenacious friend, taken out for a walk, and shown the true facts of the case, viz. the sun coming up. “Better to stay with tried and tested truth, with the ground firm beneath our feet. Aren’t you happy we came on this walk?” (p. 5).

Since I am clearly a guy who can fit right into that parable, allow me to take this opportunity to set the record straight. I was not saying that the sun goes around the earth, but was rather maintaining, till I was blue in the face, that the sun rises in the east. And every time I tried to explain that fact, my friend, who can be patronizing it must be admitted, would again say that my education had sadly let me down, and then he would make the coke can go around the coffee cup again. Exasperated, I took him out there that morning to settle the thing once for all, which it didn’t. My ancestors, who were geocentric, knew that the sun rose in the east, and I, heliocentric to the bone, also know that it rises in the east. Some things don’t change, being timeless truths. Now it is not that my friend denies that it rises in the east, but rather that he will never say so outright, and always regards vigorious defenses of this orientalism as some form of closet geocentrism. I don’t follow it either, but there it is.

Once past the egregious parable, Wright starts to say a number of wonderful things. First, as to method, he wanted to soak himself in the Bible, and get it into his bloodstream “by every means possible” (p. 6). He scores a strong sola Scriptura point when responding to Piper’s statement that according to Wright, the church had been on “the wrong foot for fifteen hundred years” (p. 6).

He also says, gloriously, that the Christian faith is not “all about me and my salvation” (p. 7). “We are not the centre of the universe. God is not circling around us. We are circling around him” (p. 7, emphasis his). Of course, Piper would agree with this, given his emphasis on the glory of God over all things.

And this brings us to the problem with many of Wright’s wonderful observations — he has a tendency to level these pungent criticisms at those who have been in the forefront of resisting these very same errors. For Wright, “geocentric theology and piety” are all about me and my salvation (p. 9). Or, as Tom T. Hall put it on various country music stations a decade or three back, “Me and Jesus got our own thing going, me and Jesus got it all worked out.”

“And with that sometimes wilful ignorance there has crept back into theology, even into good, no-nonsense, copper-bottomed Reformation theology, the snake’s whisper that actually it is all about us, that ‘my relationship with God’ and ‘my salvation’ is the still point in the centre of the universe” (p. 9).

Here is the difficulty. There is a stream of pietistic thought that is all about getting our sorry little hinder parts into heaven, and that’s the end of the story. But Piper, and others like him, have been the principals leading the charge against this kind of “pietistic geocentrism.”

Wright is like a wonderful three-point shooter in American basketball, but one who can’t be troubled to find out who is wearing what uniform, or which team is supposed to be going in what direction, so when he takes to the floor, he scores a dazzling series of points — sixteen for the home team, and twenty-four for the visitors. One can be simultaneously impressed and wish that he would just stop it.

The copper-bottomed Reformed theology that I am familiar with is the kind that asks, repeatedly, “what would the truth be if you had never been born?” So I do not take issue with Wright’s point at all, but protest its misapplication.

At the same time, I don’t want to be too hard on Wright here because he does sense, at some level, a kindred spirit of this nature in Piper. “It is because I sense that picture in John Piper’s work, and because, unlike some of my critics (including some of those whose words are quoted on the back cover of his book!), he has been scrupulously fair, courteous and generous in all our exchanges” (p. 11).

I make this point nonetheless because the Copernican revolution for which Wright is pleading is in robust health in the Reformed world of North America, and is found both in critics of Wright and fans of his. Piper is not the odd-man-out anomaly that Wright thinks he is. There are narrow Reformed pietists out there, but Wright really ought to quote them, and cite the chapter and verse. I could suggest some names for him if he would like. If you are painting miniatures, don’t use the ten-inch roller like you were working on the side of a barn or something. And secondly, I am glad to see that Wright noticed who blurbed Piper’s book, and I would refer you back to my comments about Wright’s blurbers, some of whom wouldn’t recognize the Pauline gospel if we left it on their front lawn festooned with pink ribbons.

And now to Wright’s main point, a glorious one, and again misapplied. Two quotes will suffice.

“Paul does indeed think of history as a continuous line, and of God’s purpose in history sweeping forwards unbroken from Abraham to Jesus and on through himself and his work, in the mission of the church” (p. 18).

It is central to Paul, but almost entirely ignored in perspectives old, new and otherwise, that God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centred upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah” (pp. 18-19, emphasis his).

This is great stuff, but it is hardly Columbus planting the flag on a virgin continent. Find me one word in that summary that would not bring forth a chorus of amens from B.B. Warfield, Jonathan Edwards, or any Reformed stalwart between the years, say, 1550 and 1900. Take that phrase “almost entirely ignored” and hold it up to the light in wonderment. So where did I obtain the tall stack of books that I read that persuaded me of this view long before I had ever heard of N.T. Wright? Wright really needs to get out more, and stop acting like he has discovered things that many Christians have known and taught over the course of generations.

I have read a lot of Wright, and I don’t recall ever reading the word postmillenial anywhere. There is probably some instance of it somewhere, but the comparative absence is telling. The postmill vision is a first cousin (at least) to what Wright is talking about, and it is either a cousin to whom he needs to be introduced, or it is a cousin that Wright needs to stop ignoring. This question really needs to be asked of him and soon. In what way is this not a strong variant of postmillenial eschatology?

This is not to dispute that Wright is saying a number of these things in a fresh voice, and in a fresh way. He certainly is, and I love reading him on the subject. But I love reading him on this stuff because it resonates so wonderfully with scores of other writers I have read. And when he says things that make it sound like he is the first one to have this grand vista open up before him, it simply clanks.

Perhaps this is because his insights have emerged in a fresh place — his environment of mainstream Anglicanism — which has perhaps been misleading to him. Anglicans are surprised when they discover that their bishop believes in God, and when they go on to discover a published faith in the resurrection, they begin to teeter. Is nothing stable anymore? So then when Wright surfaces in their midst as a kinder, gentler Rushdoony, nobody quite knows where to look. If you are treated like a green space alien for years, it is perhaps excusable to begin thinking you are one.

Another factor that has may have thrown him off is that his other native realm is that of academia, yet another insulated community, one cut off from the outside world. Those guys only stay alive in there because we shove food under the door. So Wright certainly may be an anomaly where he lives, but he needs to recognize that he doesn’t live everywhere. He really needs to start doing a bit of opposition research before getting into this kind of debate.

One last thing, because I said I would come back to it again and again. What was it that enabled Abraham to see the vision that Wright sets before us? The Bible tells us that it was his faith. God told Abraham that he would inherit the nations, and Abraham believed that promise (Rom. 4:13). Abraham was a man of faith, and we know this through what he believed . . . and not just the fact that he believed. Now I said in the previous post that the real issue is why Saul of Tarsus didn’t get it. Wright acknowledges this earlier Saul in this chapter — “despite Paul’s own earlier expectations” (p. 18). But what hindered him? Why did Abraham get it, and Saul did not get it? It was because Saul, even though he was up to his neck in covenant boundary markers, did not have faith. If he had had Abraham’s faith, he would have seen what Abraham saw, and would have rejoiced just as Abraham did. When he was eventually converted, it was then that he came to see. Saul of Tarsus did not believe in Jesus for the same reason that Edmund hated the name of Aslan the first time he heard of it. He was unconverted, and a man of the flesh.

And here is the vital intersection between the grand story and each individual story. Wright is very clear that personal faith and piety are good things, and are most necessary. He says, “Salvation is hugely important” (p. 7). But what he does not seem to see is that personal faith and piety are a hermeneutical necessity also. Of course, if we fail to have these things, one result is that we will be personally lost, and from that truth (in isolation) has come the misplaced focus on “geocentric piety” that Wright rightly rejects.

But what Wright needs to recognize is that men cannot see what he is pointing to — the city whose maker and builder is God — if they don’t have eyes. Jesus did say that unless a man is born again he will not enter the kingdom (John 3:5). But He also said that unless a man is born again he cannot even see it (John 3:3). And all the pointing in the world won’t help.

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