PUBLIC THEOLOGY: N T Wright on public theology

"Public religion," Sightings' constant theme, includes "public theology." This week The Christian Century (June 12) offers a challenge on that theme from the Anglican Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright, as noted a New Testament scholar as is being read and heard these days. The article condenses his lecture last November to the Society of Biblical literature.

He always speaks and writes clearly, so it is hard to duck his point. He aims negatively at "the extraordinary inverted snobbery of preferring gnostic saying-sources to the canonical documentation" and at over-worked scholarly "source and form criticism." Taking the two together, he regards them as efforts to see the four Gospels "patronized, muzzled, dismembered and eventually eliminated altogether as a force to be reckoned with." Strong stuff. Wright is then obliged to make his positive case, which is no less likely to jolt many interests who engage in scholarship and "public theology."

Here it is: "The central message of all four canonical Gospels is that the Creator God, Israel's God, is at last reclaiming the whole world as his own, in and through Jesus of Nazareth. That, to offer a riskily broad generalization, is the message of the kingdom of God, which is Jesus' answer to the question, What would it look like if God were running this show." Which God? Not the one Nietzsche or Christopher Hitchens denounces, their "celestial tyrant" who is badly "running the world." No, "the whole point of the Gospels is that the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and dehumanizing tyranny, bur rather the confrontation of alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God—the God recognized in Jesus—who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking justice aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness."

Sightings 16 Jun 2008