I just had the pleasure of finishing a new book from N.T. Wright on the authority of Scripture. In many important ways, it was fantastic, and far better than his earlier article on the same subject. The book is called The Last Word, and is subtitled “Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture.” In this book, Wright accomplishes many important things. Unfortunately, he does not fulfill the promise of the subtitle, about which more in a little bit.
If the book does not accomplish the stated purpose, what is good about it? I would recommend the book, with the caveats stated below, and I think any fair-minded reader will find much to commend. I will list three important things about it that are most helpful, but the understanding should be that there are numerous others.
First, N.T. Wright sees clean spang through the pretensions and thin smoke of postmodernism. “Postmodernity’s effect on contemporary Western readings of scripture is thus, as with much else in the movement, essentially negative. Postmodernity agrees with modernity in scorning both the eschatological claim of Christianity and its solution to the problem of evil, but without putting any alternative in place. All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) sympathy . . . Indeed, challenges are routinely dismissed as an attempt to go back to modernity or even premodernity, leaving us with a fine irony: an ideology which declares that all ideologies are power-plays, yet which sustains its own position by ruling out all challenges a priori” (p. 98). Not only does Bishop Wright have postmodernism’s number, he has it logged in his cell phone.
Second, Wright has done a superb job in advancing an essentially postmillennial view of the kingdom of God. In all that I have read from him, I do not believe I have ever read the word postmillennial, but all the essentials are there. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that Wright is interested in eschatology in any chronological train-schedules kind of way. He does not spend any time drawing diagrams of the book of Revelation. But his view of the kingdom of God is preeminently scriptural, and that kingdom is cosmic, historical, expansive, complete, and of the increase of Christ’s government and peace there will be no end.
And third, Wright offers us a much-needed corrective in calling us back to an understanding of the Bible’s narratival flow. His model of human history is that of a five-act play, with Scripture giving us the first four acts, along with the first part of the fifth. We are to understand our role in the story, and we are called to read the story as a story, and not as though all scriptural truths must function in the same way that axioms in Euclid function. All of this is good, and the Church today really needs to hear it.
Unfortunately, as things are currently configured, I don’t believe that the Church will. This is because while the shortcomings of the book are not so great as to keep it from being edifying to a discerning reader, they really are deal-breakers when it comes to Wright’s stated desire to get us beyond the “Bible wars.”
Part of Wright’s desire for peace comes out in simple assertions, for which he provides no argument. This is odd, because it is precisely here that argument is necessary in order to get beyond any Bible wars. For example, here is one assertion: “Equally, not all who question some elements of New Testament teaching, or its applicability to the present day, are ‘liberals’ in the sense pejoratively intended by North American conservatives or traditionalists” (p. 93, cf. p. 95). And the conservative response to this would simply be, “Why not?” Someone who denies certain elements of New Testament teaching may be a well-intentioned liberal, or a nice liberal, but why would he not be a liberal in the pejorative sense used by conservatives? And by pejorative, I do not mean that we should all be in a spitting contest, but we do think that teachers of the Bible should believe the Bible. We take it amiss when they don’t. We point it out. If Scripture is to do what Wright is arguing for here (Scripture is “that through which God exercises Kingdom-establishing power,” p. 103), then it simply will not do to have teachers in positions of authority within the Church who are actively working to subvert this. And a simple pronouncement that these people who deny Scripture are not “liberals” in a way destructive of the scriptural design and intent will not satisfy anybody on the conservative side of things. We could ask Wright this: “How much of Scripture does someone get to deny before they become a liberal in the pejorative sense?”
Another issue raised by Wright is something I have seen repeatedly asserted, and I have not yet seen a substantive argument for it. This is the view that fundamentalism is essentially modernist. “The protest of that kind of fundamentalism against the ‘liberalism’ of so-called modernist biblical scholarship (which often held the form of religion but denied its power) is simply a battle between one kind of Enlightenment vision and another” (p. 92). I do not raise this point because I am carrying any water for fundamentalism, but I think there is a real confusion here. I am prepared to say any number of uncomplimentary things about fundamentalism, e.g. that it is truncated, reactionary, and coupled with esoteric systems like dispensationalism. To say that fundamentalism is blinkered makes perfect sense to me. But the claim that fundamentalism is modernist is a charge that (when I have seen any argumentation) proceeds on the assumption that their commitment to objective truth makes them modernist. But modernity ushered in idolatrous objectivity, not objectivity. Wright says nothing about this one way or the other, but he does pass on the charge. Now I confess that it is one of history’s high ironies that the vast majority of those in the 20th century who believed the words of the Apostles’ Creed in the same way they were believed from the 2nd to the 19th century were also the kind of people who believed that Hal Lindsey knew what he was talking about. Okay, so God has a sense of humor. But I think it more accurate to describe all this as a rude and unlettered reaction to modernity than an expression of it.
Wright argues against ‘timeless truths,” but not in the relativistic way that is so common in pomo or pomo-friendly circles. “Whether or not one adopts this particular scheme of interpretation, it is vital that we understand scripture, and our relation to it, in terms of some kind of overarching narrative which makes sense of the texts. We cannot reduce scripture to a set of ‘timeless truths’ on the one hand, or to mere fuel for devotion on the other, without being deeply disloyal, at a structural level, to scripture itself” (p. 122, cf. p. 31.). But this is confusing. He is clearly rejecting a particular kind of “timeless truth.” I assume he is talking about the practice of taking Bible verses out of context and using them as axioms in proofs that offer up their conclusions by good and necessary consequence. And there are abuses created by this kind of timeless truth mindset. But Wright goes on to argue for a more nuanced approach to timeless truth (overarching narrative, structural level), which is good because it is exactly what we need around these parts. But this should be made more explicit. The overarching narrative is the roof for all temporal events in history, and is not itself one of those events. There is a crucial sense in which it is timeless. The structural level of Scripture is the concrete foundation for everything that goes on in the house of history. The concrete foundation is not itself an item on the coffee table in the living room, which is certainly okay by me.
One last criticism. In careful defenses of biblical authority, written by conservatives, one of the staple arguments is the assembly of scriptural passages that show how people within the Bible spoke about other portions of the Bible. The phrases would include things like, “It is written, as God says, that it might be fulfilled,” and numerous others. Wright is nervous about what he considers simplistic affirmations — simple phrases like, “The Bible says . . .” (p. 21). But to return to his illustration of the five-act play, why should we be nervous about speaking in the latter half of the fifth act in the same way that God’s people have spoken throughout the entire play up to this point?
All this said, I appreciated this book very much. I have learned much from Wright about Scripture, and the purposes of God for His kingdom. But he is a very nice man, and I believe him to be more than a little too complacent about the destructive impact of faithless scholars on the Church. Even if those scholars behave themselves within the Guild, their presence in this project presents no small threat to it.