Wright is Right

I've been reading two excellent books from N.T. Wright this summer: Evil and the Justice of God, and The Last Word, Scripture and the Authority of God--Getting beyond the Bible Wars.

He has so many important things to say, I thought I'd share a few quotes:

From Evil and the Justice of God:

Having decreed that almost all sexual activity is good and right and commendable, we are all the more shrill about the one remaining taboo, pedophilia. It is as though all the moral indignation which out to be spread more evenly and thoughtfully across many other spheres of activity has all been funneled on to this one crime. Child abuse is of course stomach-turningly disgusting, but I believe we should beware of the unthinking moralism which is so eager to condemn it simply because we hate the thought of it rather than on properly thought-out grounds. "Morality" like that can be, and often is, manipulated. Lashing out at something you simply know by intuition is wrong may be better than tolerating it. But it is hardly the way to build a stable moral society. (pg. 27 )

What psychiatry, according to [M. Scott] Peck, ought to confront is the fact that it is possible for humans to be taken over by evil, to believe a lie and then to live by it, to forget that it is a lie and to make it the foundation of one's being. (pg. 36-37)

The Old Testament isn't written in order simply to "tell us about God" in the abstract. It isn't designed primarily to provide information, to satisfy the inquiring mind. It's written to tell the story of what God has done, is doing and will do about evil. (Pg. 45)

The Old Testament never tries to give us the sort of picture the philosophers want, that of a static world order with everything explained tidily. At no point does the picture collapse into the simplistic one which so many skeptics assume must be what religious people believe, in which God is the omnicompetent managing director of a very large machine and ought to be able to keep it in proper working order. What we are offered instead is stranger and more mysterious: a narrative of God's project of justice within a world of injustice. (pg. 73)


from The Last Word:

But in scripture itself God's purpose is not just to save human beings, but to renew the whole world. This is the unfinished story in which readers of scripture are invited to become actors in their own right. "The authority of scripture" is thus a sub-branch of several other theological topics: the mission of the church, the work of the Spirit, the ultimate future hope and the way it is anticipated in the present, and of course the nature of the church. Failure to pay attention to all of these in discussing how scripture functions is part of the problem, as we can see when people, hearing the word "scripture," instantly think of a rule-book--and then, according to taste, either assume that all the rules are to be followed without question or assume that they can all now be broken. (pg. 29-30)

Those who refuse the attempt to think freshly about the Bible are often shutting themselves up inside one particular kind of post-Enlightenment Western worldview--the "fundamentalist" one, in which all kinds of things in the gospels and Paul have been screened out, despite the claim to be "biblical." Such screened-out features include the inescapably political dimension of the New Testament, and (not unconnected with this) the messiahship of Jesus (fundamentalism normally jumps form the word "Christ," not to first-century meanings of "Messiah," but to the divinity of Jesus, which the new Testament establishes on quite other grounds). (pg. 92)

"Experience" is what grows by itself in the garden. "Authority" is what happens when the gardener wants to affirm the goodness of the genuine flowers and vegetables by uprooting the weeds in order to let beauty and fruitfulness triumph over chaos, thorns and thistles. An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and "judgmental" forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as "law" ans so celebrating any and every weed as "grace." (pg. 104)