"The Day the Revolution Began" - Wright or wrong? (10)

Chapter 9

In this chapter Wright gets in to “how did the first Christians interpret the death of Jesus?”. Again there is a lot of talk about it being so much more than going to heaven. He seems to pay undue attention to gnostic “gospels”. The gnostic gospels were mostly written in the second and third centuries, so they are not gospels at all. They are also complete nonsense. Go and read the Gospel of Thomas (it is easily found on the internet), and in parts you may well wonder what drugs the writer was on. He does make the point that most works on the atonement pay limited attention to the gospels themselves. He draws attention to the point that the gospels themselves do not seek to explain the atonement. Here, and frequently in the book, there then seems to be the subtext “and so substitutionary atonement is not valid”. An alternative hypothesis would be that they assumed atonement. Leviticus makes it very clear that paying for sin was a key element of the sacrifices, and Jesus was the supreme sacrifice, the One to whom all the Levitical law was pointing. At least that is what the writer of Hebrews thought.

On Hebrews (at Loc 2547), Wright says “For Hebrews, that (the purification) happened not at Jesus’s death, but after His resurrection and ascension”. I am not sure that this correct, isn’t it more the case that the resurrection proved that Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient?

Wright is back to failings (in my opinion) already referred to. At loc 2652 he says “At the centre of the whole picture we do not find a wrathful God bent on killing someone, demanding blood”. Nor do we evangelical/reformed theology! So why does he keep on repeating this gross caricature?

At loc 2702 he says “In what sense and by what means would Jesus's Death effect “forgiveness of sin”?” Are we now going to get the answer? Well, yes and no. Wright next says “The answer must lie - can only lie - in Jesus’s own creative reinterpretation of Israel’s scriptures.” What sort of an answer is that?

All in all I find Wright’s answers deeply unsatisfying. He seems to end up saying because all these other things flow from the cross, then atonement isn’t one of them.  Or, if you say atonement is at the heart of the cross, then you are ignoring all the other things that flow from the cross.

Wright’s view offers no solution at all to the problem of my sin and my sinfulness. There is the guilt of our sin (of which we do not appreciate the full enormity, and will not do so until the last day), and there is the fundamental twistedness of our nature (total depravity, to put it in Calvinist terms).

As you will have gathered, I am fairly critical of this book. Now N T Wright is a most eminent scholar, and one far more widely read than I, so in writing this stuff I frequently wondered if I was missing something, or barking up the wrong tree. Well, yesterday I found a review by Dane Ortlund (Senior VP for Bible publishing at Crossway), and this review raised pretty much the same issues that I have been raising. In fact, I could have saved the bother of writing this, and you could have saved the time of reading it, by simply going to his review! However, I’ve started so I’ll finish!