The Last Word
I finally finished reading The Last Word by N.T. Wright. I started it a bit after Christmas, but had to put it down because I got swamped with reading for school. This week I had a bit of a break in stuff that I had to read for school and I wanted to use some of the ideas from the book for a message, so I managed to find a few hours to finish it up.
Wright expands on an idea that I had first read about in a lecture that he gave several years ago on the Authority of Scripture. That lecture really stretched my thinking and I went through it probably 4 or 5 different times with 4 or 5 different groups of people to talk about what it meant, the implications of looking at the Scriptures that way, and if it was really off base or exactly what we needed to hear. So, anyways, that lecture led me to read this book.
Here’s a few general thoughts on the book (which i really enjoyed by the way)…
- The phrase “authority of Scripture” should be understood as shorthand for the authority of God exercised through Scripture. He talks about this in his lecture, but elaborates on it here. The Scriptures have authority in a delegated or mediated sense. We cannot lose sight of the real authority, the authority of the triune God when we recognize the authority of the Scriptures…or more accurately, the authority mediated through the Scriptures.
- Scripture does not just provide information about God’s work in the world, but it plays an active part in that work. This is a part of the recognition that the Scriptures are living and breathing. There is some mysterious thing about the Scriptures that God’s power is unleashed through them. That in some way they play a part of the actual renewal of all things.
“The apostolic writings, like the ‘word’ which they now wrote down, were not simply about the coming of God’s Kingdom into all the world; they were, and were designed to be, part of the means whereby that happened, and whereby those through whom it happened could themselves be transformed into Christ’s likeness.”
pg. 51
- Wright also goes through the last 2,000 years of the church and talks briefly about how the Scriptures were viewed in different times. I appreciated this brief survey of the usage and interpretation of the Bible historically, but one of the things that I most appreciated about this section was his understanding of what the Reformers meant when they talked about understanding the Scriptures in the ‘literal’ sense. “For them, the ‘literal’ sense was the sense that the first writers intended…” pg. 73
- What I appreciated most about the book, is also what I appreciated most about his original lecture. Wright’s analogy of Scripture as a 5 act play. Creation, Fall, Israel, Jesus and the Church. We are now in the 5th act, which began at Pentecost and we are living in the continuation of that. My understanding of how he talks about this analogy being lived out is that the NT doesn’t necessarily give us exact directions as to how church should be done (such as presenting a blueprint of how a church should be structured), but it gives us a picture of how the people of God were living out the story of God, which we are now also a part of doing as well.
The question that always gets brought up as I talk with people about this is, “how do you control it…how do you keep Christianity from becoming whatever anyone wants it to become, then?” Which I think is a totally valid question. I’ve been giving the wikipedia answer…it’s a totally open source encyclopedia, but when someone writes something that isn’t true or isn’t appropriate for an encyclopedia, the community corrects it. It’s self-correcting. I read in Wired once that misinformation in articles are corrected in an average of something like 7 or 8 minutes. I think the same would be true of living out the Scriptures in this way. There is already a community of Christ Followers who understand God and His Story as it is told in the Scriptures, and to live in a way that is incongruent with that story is subject to correction from the community.
Wright is able to expand on this in his book, which he wasn’t able to do in the lecture. He says,
How can we be sure that our understandings and ‘improvisations’ of scripture facilitate the Spirit’s working in and through us, as individuals, congregations, and the larger church? We do so by a reading of scripture that is (a) totally contextual, (b) liturgically grounded, (c) privately studied, (d) refreshed by appropriate scholarship, and (e) taught by the church’s accredited leaders.
