The New Testament and the People of God - Knowledge: Problems and Varieties

In this chapter Wright outlines the three basic areas that affect New Testament interpretation: literature, history and theology. Wright will spend a considerable amount of time discussing each of these sections independently. Against modernism and post-modernism, Wright advances a critical realist position (one that he is happy to say he has not invented or been the first to consider).

Modernism, Wright argues, calls back to positivism. In its desire to have objective truth, optimistic positivism sacrifices human experience. Tastes, mood, ethics, etc. cannot be talked about within positivism: "Aesthetics and ethics are reduced to functions of the experiences of one or more people׃ 'beautiful' and 'good' simply mean 'I/we like this' or 'I/we approve of that'" (p. 33). This positivism can be likened to the recent scienctism we have experience a la Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al. Along with Ayer, they would call all god-talk nonsensical from the word "go." We should consider seriously what Wright says,

"In the New Testament field, some critics have made a great song and dance about the fact that the details of Jesus' life, or the fact of his resurrection, cannot be proved 'scientifically'; philosophical rigor should compel them to admit that the same problem pertains to the vast range of ordinary human knowledge, including the implicit claim that knowledge requires empirical verification" (p. 34).

Against the optimistic (positivist) view, Wright contends that the postmodern view (pessimistic) view is only aware of its own "sense-data". With this sense-data only view, every is called into question (to the extent that even the thing from which you are collecting sense-data is questioned).

"When I seem to be looking at a text, or at an author's mind within a text, or at the events of which the text seems to be speaking, all I am really doing is seeing the author's view of events, or the text's appearance of authorial intent, or maybe only my own thoughts in the presence of the text...and is it even a text?" (p. 35)

And against both of these, we have critical realism. "This is a way of describing the process of 'knowing' that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence realism), while also fully acknowledging that only only access we have to this reality lies along the spiraling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence critical)" (p. 35).

The New Testament and the People of God - Christian Origins and the New Testament

Along with Church Dogmatics, this Christmas I gave myself the gift of N.T. Wright's Christian Origins and the Question of God. Furthermore, to increase the frequency with which is write (blog), I will blog my way through this trio. With more reading and more writing, I hope to do more than summarize the chapters as I read them.

Christian Origins and the New Testament

In the preface to this volume, Wright warns us with something some of us are all too familiar with:

I frequently tell my student that quite a high proportion of what I say is probably wrong, or at least flawed or skewed in some way which I do not at the moment realize. The only problem is that I do not know which bits are wrong (p. xvii).

In chapter one, Wright sets out to first deal with the question of New Testament hermeneutics. He categorizes the hermeneutics of centuries past four ways: pre-critical, historical, theology and postmodern (p. 7). Which is the most appropriate way to understand the New Testament? "...We need to do justice, simultaneously, to Wrede's emphasis on serious history (including the history of Jesus), Bultmann's emphasis on normative theology, and the postmodern emphasis on the text and its reader" (p. 27)

Certainly the task of a New Testament theology or introduction is nothing new, but the task that Wright has created for himself is something unseen. What has started as a two volume set has become three and then six. In Wright's mind, the divide between New Testament studies and theology is not only unnecessary but is also misleading (p.13). I do not doubt that this series will be of great help and encouragement.