Tom Wright's untimely born review of Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (HT Mike Bird) is an worthwhile read. Ironically given one of his regular gripes with critics is that they require you "to say everything all the time" (e.g. here), one of the refrains of the review is that Lewis fails to mention lots of important matters (Easter, Kingdom of God, etc). But I do like his main criticism that the book plays down the personal historical Jesus, in favour of a more Platonic theism.
This criticism of Lewis led me to engage in some self-criticism, when he discussed Lewis’s famous argument that "Jesus must have been bad or mad or God". Wright comments:
What Lewis totally failed to see—as have, of course, many scholars in the field—was that Judaism already had a strong incarnational principle, namely the Temple, and that the language used of Shekinah, Torah, Wisdom, Word, and Spirit in the Old Testament—the language, in other words, upon which the earliest Christians drew when they were exploring and expounding what we have called Christology—was a language designed, long before Jesus’ day, to explain how the one true God could be both transcendent over the world and living and active within it, particularly within Israel.
Lewis, at best, drastically short-circuits the argument. When Jesus says, "Your sins are forgiven," he is not claiming straightforwardly to be God, but to give people, out on the street, what they would normally get by going to the Temple.
For Wright, understanding "Judaism’s incarnational principle…enables [the claim of Jesus to be God] to be at once nuanced into a proto-Trinitarian framework".
The 'claim' of Jesus to be God in Mark 2:5 is familiar territory for anyone who has run evangelistic courses on the Gospel of Mark. It is clear to most participants that Jesus is not "claiming straightforwardly to be God", because God to them is Unitarian – and as Jesus talks to, and about, God as distinct from him, he can’t be God as well. But to the Jews of the time, which did not have a Unitarian view of God, Jesus was clearly claiming to be God in such a straightforward way that the scribes felt he was blaspheming.
But was Lewis wrong to short-circuit this Jewish/OT background? Wright feels that if you don’t first lay the Jewish/OT background "you will inevitably put him in a different one, where he, his message, and his achievement will be considerably distorted." That is no doubt true, but is that an irredeemable distortion? As you fill modern Brit’s concept of ‘god’ with Jesus Christ, couldn’t the God-who-is-there slowly redefine the word/framework as he refuses to be contained by our false concepts?
I’m sure there has to be a balance found, and I tend to think that simply reading the Gospels is the best way to get that balance. You can’t read the Gospels without discussing the Jewish/OT background, but equally you’re not spending limited time and energy studying that background directly before you hear about Jesus himself.
That’s one reason why I like introducing non-Christians to Gospels, courses based on Gospels (e.g. Christianity Explored on Mark), and books based on Gospels (e.g. Mike Cain’s Real Life Jesus).
But that’s something to reflect on more.
It's a helpful rhetorical shift, I've often found myself using his line many people come to Jesus as though God is the one we know, and Jesus is the one we don't know. In fact it's just the other way round - Jesus is the one we can access, and God is the unknown. look at Jesus, and think, "God", that's what the incarnation means.
ReplyDeleteNow, I like that. I use it, I use it so often that that's my internalised verbatim of a way that Tom Wright puts it - I picked it up a while ago and it's stuck cos I like it. BUT that brings with it a whole load of conceptual framework, and so systematic terms are still relevant (and I fit non christian views of what God is, although not who God is into that category). Such is what Lewis is doing. Think of his apologetics as doing systematics with people with a set of false doctrines. (is God everything? is God nothing? is God personal?, can God be touched? etc).
ps don't overload the gospel rhetoric. Why not for the same reason do an evangelistic course on the evangelistic preaching in acts? Or for that matter, the letters of Paul, or Revelation?
plus, People don't know Jesus "except by the spirit". So you could turn the same thing back on Tom and do the same in terms of "historical" Jesus.
ReplyDeleteoptions are either Barthian positivism (which in reality is a myth because we can't avoid bringing OURSELVES into the JESUS we are apparently presenting plainly), or a critical realism, where yes, systematics, historical apologetics, the story of God's economy, etc have their place, but never exhaust the fact that the gospel is news, proclaimed in terms that we can in some sense recognise, of something we could never have guessed.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteI think I agree with all you say, although not sure I fully understand your second para.
I think there is still something unique about the Gospels, but I think you're right I don't want to overload the rhetoric. I have a soft spot for The World We All Want for example.
which 2nd para?
ReplyDeleteNow, I like that. I use it, I use it so often that that's my internalised verbatim....
ReplyDeleteParticularly the "BUT..."
Freakin typical Wright...
ReplyDelete"What Lewis totally failed to see—as have, of course, many scholars in the field"
Apart from me cos I'm so very clever see.
—was that Judaism already had a strong incarnational principle ..."
How does he know that Lewis 'failed to see this'; it's really not that difficult to see and anyone who was as exposed to scripture as much as Lewis was would be aware of it.
I am sure Lewis wouldn't have expected his mad, bad, god point to have become such a trope constantly reeled off by over-zealous evangelists. But he was exaplaining theology in a way understandable to his audience - which is more than can be said for Wright most of the time.
Nicely put Steve :-)
ReplyDeleteI sadly agree. And it is sadly because I think Wright's rhetoric/arrogance gets in the way of me learning as much as I should from him.