The Weekly Wright: Stories of the Second Temple

Two weeks ago I re-started reading through N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. I'm in the middle of the horrendously long chapter 2. Today I want to review pp. 108-39. I apologize for how boring this post is.

1. I'm beginning to see the structure of chapter 2. Wright is reconstructing a Jewish worldview (and especially what he sees as a Pharisaic worldview) in the categories that he developed in The New Testament and the People of God. There he suggested four components to a worldview. Pages 90-108 cover two of them--praxis and symbol. Now in pages 108-79 he covers the other two--story and basic questions.

So in the pages I've covering today, we have his basic introduction to the analysis of story (108-14) and his analysis of the basic Jewish story (114-39).

2. "Despite the danger of generalization, we can and must say that most Jews of Paul's day perceived themselves, at a deep, worldview level, as living in a story in search of an ending" (109). "Any narrative analysis of the letters he would write as Paul the apostle... has to begin with a proper understanding of the stories in which he had lived all his life."

I think I would have really liked these statements twenty-five years ago, but they drive me a little crazy today because of how far Wright takes them. He just seems to generalize too much for me.

So, given the last 100 years, you might think that the second coming has dominated the thinking of Christians for the last 2000 years. But in reality, it was only in the late 1800s that the imminent second coming of Jesus became a central feature of much Christian thinking, perhaps even since the time of the New Testament itself.

You can create a metanarrative out of specific texts that you stretch out for all of history and it can make a lot of sense in terms of ideas. But it may not match what real people thought at real times and places.

Does it make sense, in terms of an idea system, to think that all Jews were waiting for Messiah to come, that they were waiting to return from exile. It makes perfect sense as a set of ideas. And we do have evidence of some messianic expectation here and there. Some Jews probably were thinking these sorts of things. Wright has convinced me of some things.

But his sweeping, two-dimensional metanarrative is the stuff of the classroom, not of real people (especially real ancient people) with their inconsistencies and practical existences. Wright's ideological balloon too easily becomes un-tethered, and that massive genius of his gets carried away into some Platonic realm.

He's responded and will no doubt continue to respond to this critique. But I suspect the critique will continue to be true, no matter how much more he writes, digging in his heals.

3. So his introduction plays out the basic Jewish story using Greimas' actantial model. I've used it myself, so I don't oppose the model. He makes three claims at the end of the introduction to this section:

• "There is every indication that the kind of Jew who became a Pharisee was implicitly aware of living in a continuous story going back to Abraham, perhaps even to Adam, and on to the great coming day" (113).
• They did not expect the decisive moment to come "to involve the collapse or disappearance of the universe of space, time, and matter" (114).
• The Pharisees saw their current time as being one of continuing exile.

He has convinced me of the second bullet (or rather, his Doctor Father, G. B. Caird, has). Apocalyptic, "sun darkened, moon turned to blood" language was never meant literally. Not as powerful but similar is when we speak of "earth-shaking" events.

I am quite willing to believe that some Jews saw themselves currently in a kind of exile, but I don't think we have nearly enough evidence to say that Pharisees did. Frankly, I think we can make a better case that many Essenes felt that way. I think many Jews did expect a royal figure to rise soon, but perhaps not necessarily in a way that was well-connected to Abraham or Adam. I see these more as separate mini-narratives that weren't necessarily well connected to each other.

The first one is Wright once again going metanarrative. It is hard enough to say that Paul himself thought in terms of a single narrative, so that makes the idea of a single proto-Pharisaic narrative all the more problematic.

4. So on page 114 he gets down to business with his single story. He reminded me a little of the method Bultmann used to come up with a Gnostic Redeemer myth. Wright sees pieces of the overall story popping up here and there. Now mind you, it is hard to find the whole story in any one place. :-) But he is just sure it is there below the surface. Everyone's thinking it, even though they don't really come right out and say it. "They were, in other words, snatching items at random as miscellaneous examples or warnings" (117). Classic.

But, alas, I do agree that the backdrop at least to some of the earliest forms of Christian faith was some limited version of what Wright is saying, and that he does see patterns, even if his personality can't help but over-systematize them.

Here are his concluding points to this section:

• "There are considerable and obvious differences between the examples we have studied" (135). Great!
• "Despite the considerable differences there are also remarkable commonalities." 
• "In more or less all cases the story being told is a story in which the writer believes that he and his readers are still participants" (136).
• "Most of these long and varied accounts of Israel's history are the very opposite of success stories" (137).
• "The Messiah will precisely bring the story of Israel to its goal" (138).

I apologize that I have not been able to capture why so much of this is just bad business to me. I think it's because he's not talking specific people at specific times. He's trying to speak of a whole people over a large period of time.

5. I just finished a section of a chapter on Jewish views of the temple at the time of the NT, especially Philo and Essenes. In the case of Philo, I had several passages where I could draw evidence about him. I knew of events in his life that arguably could have altered the intensity of his attachment to the temple as well as other Jews. We know when he lived and that it was about the time of Jesus.

As far as the Essenes, we again have several texts that mention the temple, including a Temple Scroll. We have solid hypotheses about the Dead Sea Scrolls and can locate them in time in relation to the NT. We don't view even them as a single point of view but recognize them as a set of documents that covers as much as a century, with various events potentially altering their circumstances during that period.

My point is that we can talk reasonably about the point of view of these specific people toward the temple around the time of Christ. What Wright does is abstract the question of story from real people at specific times and places under specific circumstances. As such, his overarching narrative becomes detached from history and becomes something else, something abstract and theological.

The balloon becomes untethered from history, IMO, and becomes somewhat of a two-dimensional caricature.

Wednesday Wright - Paul and the Faithfulness of God, chapter 2

Dare I say that I've restarted reading N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God? I finished chapter one in January of 2014! Wright has a book coming out this Fall on the history of the interpretation of Paul that I'm very much looking forward to, but may I find the strength to continue through this Leviathan until then.

So here are some observations from chapter 2 to jump start myself. My last post was here.

1. The title of chapter 2 is, "Like Birds Hovering Overhead." It comes from Isaiah 31:5: "Like birds hovering overhead, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it" (NRSV). So this 122 page chapter is going to be on the Jewish background to Paul.

Wright has already covered much of this territory in the first volume of the series: The New Testament and the People of God (NTPG). So in this chapter, he hopes especially "to bring out the way in which the faithfulness of Israel's God functions as a theme throughout so much of the period" (77) of the New Testament (the Second Temple Period or early Judaism).

2. So how about the Pharisees? Twenty years ago I found Wright's version of the Pharisees compelling. Mind you, if he was cautious to weigh in around greats like E. P. Sanders and Jacob Neusner, you can imagine how foolish I feel to have an opinion.

Nevertheless, I find his sense of them to make good sense. They were very popular and influential. He were active in promoting their perspectives. They were far more than a pure-food club but many were highly active politically. Wright largely divides the active from the non-active between the School of Shammai (active) and the School of Hillel (non-active).

So if we are to see the pre-believing Paul, if we are to see what zeal for the Law looked like, we need only turn to 1 and 2 Maccabees. Ioudaismos meant, "not simply the practice of a 'religion', but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life and its defense against attack whether from outside (as in the case of Mattathias) or inside (as in the case of Saul of Tarsus)" (89).

3. The third section of this chapter is the last I want to hit today. "Torah is a symbol which by its very nature is about praxis" (91).

There's some material on the temple here, which is of great interest to me. Wright goes a little too far, I suspect, when he says that "when you went up to the Temple, it was not as though you were 'in heaven'. You were actually there" (97). That comment just sounds ridiculous to me, at least when it comes to the overwhelming majority of Jews. I'm sure there were some heady Jews like Wright who thought that. But how many farmers or blue collar workers in your congregation would have thought that?

In general, I was disappointed with the next few pages (102-107).

a. Temple = cosmos.
b. Temple is connected with David.
c. Restoration of king = restoration of temple = new Genesis = new Exodus

"To those who pored over Torah night and day, looking for the consolation of Israel, this combination of motifs - Temple, presence, glory, kingship, wisdom, creation, exile, rebuilding, and unfulfilled promise - would be part of their mental and emotional furniture. Touch one and you would touch them all" (107).

Show me the texts. He is filling in too many gaps, seeing too much system. Are these all potentially related themes? Yes. But in reality groups tend to focus on some and not others. People aren't consistent, even thinkers, unless you're N. T. Wright. (P.S. There aren't many of those.)

In short, there seems to be a lot of ahistorical hermeneutic here disguised as a historical one. He is constructing too many connections between ideas in texts and not listening enough to the individual particularity of texts in history. It's not that I don't think there are some Jewish expectations to be found in the literature. It's that he just seems to take it too far, to reconstruct too much "common Jewish expectation" here.

More perhaps next Wednesday.

In the Wright

I've decided to take a Schencky approach to my depressing reading list. Since I know I can't read through the list from start to finish--simply the realities of my life--I'm going to pop in and out of them.

So tonight I popped into the Introduction to Part III of N. T. Wright's tome, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. This is the beginning to the second book of this "one book." This is where he gets to Paul. The first book is background and context.

1. His goal in this second book is to show the central concern and inner logic of Paul. He emphasizes the coherence of Paul's writings. I'll confess that I much prefer Dunn to Wright. Dunn builds up patterns from the text up. Wright has a tendency to presuppose a metanarrative and then see it everywhere, implicit in passages even at times when he can't point to a verse.

I actually wonder if his earlier work on Paul was more helpful before he had looked at Paul so long that he began to see all these complex patterns everywhere. Also I think his Paul articles on specific passages are more helpful.

2. His reduction of Second Temple Jewish theology to monotheism, election, and eschatology is interesting (Dunn had four pillars--monotheism, election, covenant, and land; Eisenbaum has worship, Torah, and redemption). I'm not sure how prevalent eschatology was at all times but it obviously plays a large role for Wright.

"Paul remained a thoroughly Jewish thinker" (611). Fair enough.

Early Christianity reworked monotheism, election, and eschatology around Jesus the Messiah and the Holy Spirit (612). Definitely on the first. I wait to see what he means by the second.

3. Wright and I will no doubt soon find ourselves in tension over how much of the OT context Paul presupposes in his use of Scripture. My dictum is, "As far as the intended meaning, see no more meaning in the words than is necessary." Wright will rather see lots of resonances and a deep theological richness. I have no problem with that as a reader response, a "theological interpretation." I just think it goes beyond what Paul himself was likely thinking. I call it promiscuous exegesis.

Wright: Finishing chapter 1

Well, here's the rest of chapter 1 of N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, finished reading it about three weeks ago. :-(

Preface

Chapter 1
1. The Basics of Philemon
2.i-iii. Philemon and Christian Worldview
iv. History, Exegesis, "Application"
v. Sources

vi.Worldview, Theology, History
Summary
In this section, Wright finishes setting up his analytical system. He has already reminded his reader of the components of worldview he uses: story, praxis, symbols, and basic questions. He has also set up a quasi-matrix for analyzing Paul: history, exegesis, theology, and "application." Now he tries to connect the two.

In a person or community, there are basic beliefs (theology) that flow out of a person's worldview. These basic beliefs provide a person or community's basic aims (history). As a natural consequence of such basic beliefs, there are consequent beliefs (theology) that are a natural by-product and play out in more detail. These are more negotiable and lead to our more specific intentions in life (history).

Then to complete the loop back to earlier in the chapter, basic beliefs/consequent beliefs/theology all relate to the worship dimension of a community. Aims/intentions/history then relate to the culture of a community.

Finally, Wright brings in the complication that no interpreter is objective. There is a gap between us and the text. We have our own worldviews, worship, and culture that get in the way of seeing the text. We tend to infect our reading of Paul with what we are looking for or from him.

Reflection
How complicated! The real world is complicated, but I can't imagine that this Rorschach has any staying power. Wright is brilliant. He has tried hard to upgrade his initial idealist software with numerous real world plug-ins, but the result is clunky.

Wright's fundamental personality and bias remains very rational, despite the way he has tried to take on board all the correctives and insights of philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. His account of worldview is light years ahead of van Til but for all Wright's distancing from these arch-presuppositionalists and antihistorians, he is still their child. He still assumes that real life aims and intentions flow from underlying beliefs.

So he has all the elements, but he remains a structuralist in his thinking. He sees the underlying pattern as more primary than the world from which he abstracts it. Rather, human thought is epiphenomenon, a mechanism for living in the world. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs gives a more accurate picture of what stands behind human aims and intentions. Behind our lives are more fundamentally drives, not ideas.

Our ideas are collections and clumpings of family resemblances, not deductive masterpieces. Our identity-giving stories are more often short vignettes than large metanarratives. Human thought is much more atomistic and a front for more basic urges than anything like tidy systems.

vii. Philemon as Allegory
Wright ends the chapter with a fun allegory, which of course is not the meaning of Philemon but we are delighted at this intentional sensus plenior. Philemon represents theological orthodoxy. Onesimus is the Enlightenment project of historiography. Some historical approaches have left the Paul of faith behind. Meanwhile, some (John Piper) do not want the Paul of history to come back.

Paul himself knows that he must unite his whole self. He must send history back to theology. A unified Paul--both of faith and history--can be recovered. Such is Wright's aim.

Wright - Exegesis is historical in nature 3

More on chapter 1 of N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God in bits. Thus far,

Preface

Chapter 1
The Basics of Philemon
Philemon and Christian Worldview

iv. History, Exegesis, "Application"
Summary
Thus far in this section, Wright has been trying to create a framework within which to approach Paul's worldview. He has also tried to create a framework for connecting worldview with theology and culture. He continues his prolegomena in the next section by clarifying the nature of history, exegesis, and application of a text, three other tasks normally undertaken when Paul is studied.

His historical method is sound and he is quite insistent that the historical task cannot be ignored. "The normal charitable assumption is that the words were written by writers who were doing their best to say, more or less, what they meant" (53). "The historical task remains central and non-negotiable" (55).

Exegesis is the second task and "is a branch of history" (52). Wright wants to avoid reductionism, which in his view would isolate the task of interpretation from history, theology, or application. Application is the third task and has to do with connecting the meaning of the text with our context.

Wright reiterates his critical realist perspective. We avoid on the one side the naive realism that imagines we can see the text with a God's eye view and, on the other side, the narcissistic reductionism that thinks all perception is projection. "History is possible" (50), even though what we have is "a seemingly random selection of Paul's writings, in which each letter contains some striking material not found in any of the others." "Real advance in historical knowledge is possible" (53).

The proper method of historical investigation is to 1) account for the data, 2) do so with appropriate simplicity, and 3) shed light on areas outside the subject-matter of the inquiry (54).

Some of the final sentences of this section are worth quoting at length. Although the study of Paul must begin with the interpretation of his actual letters, "Only when we have understood Paul's worldview do we understand why his theology is what it is, and the role it plays precisely within that worldview. Only when we understand Paul's theology do we understand why he believed himself called to do what he did... Only then, in fact, do we really stand a chance of approaching the tasks of exegesis itself... with any deep overall understanding" (55).

Reflection
It seems to me that Wright's general sense of things in this section is helpful. It is helpful more as individual insights than as a systematic scaffolding. Wright is, as it were, creating a grand recit next to any text--and that structure is vulnerable precisely because it is a systematic metanarrative. His individual claims are helpful and ring true, but he cannot resist creating an overarching system, quite possibly reflecting his early engagement with structuralism. At some points he seems vulnerable to the very characteristics he critiques in others.

A far more helpful (and simple) model for approaching texts is that of Paul Ricoeur, the "three worlds" of the text. The 1) world within the text is the text itself. It never exists as a text-in-itself, to be sure, because anyone who reads it already informs the words with meanings from another world.

The 2) world behind the text is all the things Wright is concerned with--history, culture, "worldview," "mindset," theology. These are the elements that informed the intended and assumed meanings of the text originally. Meanwhile, the 3) world in front of the text is my world as a reader, all the elements of "worldview," "mindset," theology, and so forth that I see in the text by drawing on my world, usually without realizing it.

Ricoeur's model is a heuristic model at best, because in reality it is all mixed together in ways we can never parse out entirely. Wright has no penchant to separate the meaning of a text from that which was originally intended. Certainly he recognizes the reality of polyvalence, but I strongly suspect he has no desire to treat non-original meanings to the text as true meanings.

Yet he is surely spot-on when it comes to critical realism over naive realism and "narcissistic projection." Exegesis is a worthy goal and historical investigation is to some extent possible. Whether it is non-negotiable we can debate, but it seems a quite worthy task. All truth is God's truth, and so all truth is inherently valuable and a blessing, whether we see the immediate benefit or not.

It is in the nature of Protestant and evangelical identity to be interested in the historical meaning of the text, even if this quest tends to deconstruct somewhat in its own pursuit. For mainline Protestants, it deconstructed into liberalism. For evangelicalism, it logically leads to polyvalence. Everything else is transitional, a hermeneutic not taken to its logical end.

Wright's historical method could perhaps be expressed better. Good historical investigation does indeed 1) draw on as much data as possible, 2) formulate hypotheses that account for as much of the data as possible with appropriate simplicity and elegance, and 3) continues to test such hypotheses against new data and over and against competing hypotheses. For a theist, possible explanations include not only the normal cause and effect hypotheses (cf. Troeltsch) but also the possibility of divine intervention.

In general, the role of the divine should be left in the category of the mysterious, unless there is good reason to suspect supernatural interruption. It is not reductionistic to suppose the normal workings of cause and effect when they seem to explain the data appropriately. At the same time, room must always be left for a divine element in the equation.

I find the final sentences from this section of Wright a bit troubling. I am consoled by his caveats that the texts themselves must be the ground for all discussion of Paul's meaning.  I would translate his statements into the need to know the deep assumptions behind Paul's words before we can fully understand them. I completely agree.

However, Wright still seems to have a hangover from his pre-chastened modernist days in his penchant to see worldviews and theologies as coherent systems. His early engagement with structuralism is probably revealing here. A worldview is more a collection or family of related perspectives and impulses than a grand recit or system. By building such a magnificent meta-scaffolding alongside Paul, Wright is setting himself up for skew at some point, in my opinion.

Wright: Philemon and Worldview

The journey through N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God continues. Thus far,

Preface
The Basics of Philemon

2. Philemon and the Study of Paul
Summary
Wright believes that there is a worldview coming to expression in Philemon (23). Here he draws on his earlier work especially in The New Testament and the People of God. "One of the extraordinary achievements of Paul was to turn 'theology' into a different kind of thing from what it had been before in the world either of the Jews or of the pagans. One of the central arguments of the present book is that this was the direct result and corollary of what had happened to Paul's worldview. Paul effectively invented 'Christian theology' to meet a previously unknown need, to do a job which had not, until then, been necessary" (26).

Wright's understanding of worldview involves four core components: 1) an underlying narrative or story, 2) habitual actions or praxis, 3) symbols, a symbolic universe, and 4) common answers to certain worldview questions like "Who are we?" "Where are we?" "What's wrong?" "What's the solution?" "What time is it?" He seems to add "Why?" with this book, and indicate that the why questions point to theology. As he has already set, he considers a mindset to be an individual or sub-cultural perspective within a broader worldview.

Wright is aiming at a "thick description" of Paul. This is a term from anthropologist Clifford Geertz that aims at understanding actions in their deepest, culturally embedded sense, "to attempt to discern those things which people knew easily and without effort even if such 'knowledge' is remote for us and hard to reconstruct" (29). Cultural assumptions are often those of which we are least aware and yet are generally held in common by a whole culture. These assumptions are most key to understanding someone from another culture and yet they are least likely to be stated explicitly because they are so deeply assumed.

The core elements of worldview are "not likely to be topics of regular conversation, whether in a family or in a culture; they are the presuppositions which enable people to make sense of everything else" (33). "Story, praxis, and symbol generate and sustain a set of implicit answers to the five questions. People normally do not talk about these four elements of their worldview... [except] when something has gone wrong [or] when an outsider issues a challenge or a new question..." (33-34).

"The study of Paul's worldview leads to a striking, dramatic conclusion: this worldview not only requires a particular 'theology' to sustain it, but also requires that 'theology' itself play a new role, integrated with the worldview itself" (30). The why question, when addressed to the components of worldview (story, praxis, symbol, basic answers) leads to an underlying theology. "This theology cannot be reduced to a system of ideas" (31).

Two other dimensions quickly come into play. First, culture draws together narrative, praxis, and symbol into particular patterns. Culture brings to expression beliefs and perceptions that either reinforce the prevailing worldview or stand in tension with it.

Second, Wright uses the word "worship" instead of religion so as not to assume the division of religious and secular created in the period of the Enlightenment. "'Worship' is a specific activity in which the other elements of the worldview are caught up, colouring praxis, shaping and influencing narrative, generating symbols, and frequently offering answers to the key questions" (36).

The next part of the chapter discusses how Paul's worldview could only be sustained by constantly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully addressing the question of who the one true God is, what he has done and is doing, and what his doings mean for the community of faith in the Messiah. At the center of this theology, for Wright, is a "Jewish-style (but christologically redefined) monotheism" (37). "I shall propose... that monotheism is indeed at the heart of Paul's theology... as the integrating theme which explains and gives depth to all the others."

The rest of this section goes through some of the "centers" of Paul's thought that have been proposed over the years. "Salvation" was implicitly the center for most of the time since the Reformation (justification by faith). Albert Schweitzer (and now Douglas Campbell) have emphasized participation in Christ as the center. Other "organizing" elements have also entered the scene, vying for attention (Wright has another entire volume coming out on the interpretation of Paul).

First there is the idea of salvation history, the idea that history is the outworking of God's plan of salvaiton. Second, there is the category of apocalyptic, the breaking in of the heavenly realm into the events of the earth. Third is the notion of covenant, that the events concerning Jesus are the fulfillment of ancient promises.

Then there are questions of how history impinges on Paul. Is Paul more a Hellenistic or Jewish thinker? Unfortunately, "he is so many-sided that he can be appealed to this way or that on all kinds of issues, not only in theology and ethics but in culture and philosophy..." (42).

Is Paul more doctrinal or ethical? Wright thinks this false distinction owes much to Kant. Wright himself thinks there was also a politically subversive dimension to Paul. All these aspects of Paul have to be brought into dialog with each other. Wright aims to jumble them all together, "like pieces of the same jigsaw puzle that had somehow found their way onto quite separate tables" (43).

We also need to distinguish between the derivation of Paul's ideas (where they came from) and how he used them in the confrontation of his world (where they were going to). How did Paul use elements of his "history-of-religions" world in the engagement of his world?

We can't choose between sharp antitheses any more. "There is indeed a way of analyzing and understanding Paul in which these several multi-layered dichotomies can be resolved..." (45).  "We are looking, not so much for a 'centre' to Paul's thought-world (and his worldview in the sense explained), as a vantage point, a summit from which we can survey, and see the way to explore, the landscape of the letters and their implicit worlds" (46).

What is this vantage point? First, "Paul remained a deeply Jewish theologian who had rethought and reworked every aspect of his native Jewish theology in the light of the Messiah and the spirit, resulting in his own vocational self-understanding as the apostle to the pagans" (46). Jews do not have a theology in the way Paul and subsequent Christian theology has. But derived from Paul's Jewishness, he confronts and engages his new context in a way that draws on three key elements of his native Jewish  world.

"The three categories are monotheism, election, and eschatology: one God, one people of God, one future for God's world" (46). Paul approaches his world from these three theological peaks, with creational monotheism at the center of his thinking. The either-or distinctions of the past focus on the valleys between rather than the key vantage points.

Reflections
You can easily see that Wright's desire to be all-encompassing has resulted in significant complexity. He is doing his best to take into account all the pitfalls of past discussion, and the result is indeed like a collection of puzzle pieces he has mixed together on a table--maybe even a mixture of several related puzzles. One of the most instructive aspects of the chapter, if you can see it, is the way he has tried to avoid every extreme.

So he does not want to treat Paul as just a thinker or a practitioner. He wants to take into account "thick descriptions" and "social imaginaries" of worldview and distinguish them from culture and individual mindsets. He does not want to limit Paul to his Jewishness or to Hellenism. He wants to avoid the old, "Is it justification by faith or participation in Christ" dichotomy. He wants to avoid the mistakes of so much "center of Paul" debates, choosing instead the more complicated model of peaks, ridges, and valleys.

All of this prolegomena is to get us ready, and we will see how it plays out. You wonder how this chapter would have been written if he wasn't, to some extent, bound by frameworks he set up twenty years ago. For example, he is too far along to shift comfortably from his earlier language of worldview to Charles Taylor's more sophisticated "social imaginary" (cf. 28, n.80).

It is ironic to me that while he recognizes and criticizes the pitfalls of idealism (27), of reducing reality to a set of ideas or privileging ideas over "real life," he still has a strong tendency to treat ideas in abstraction from the real world in which they are meant to help us operate. He does well to speak of thick descriptions and such, but in my opinion he still ultimately treats the structures of his method as more than heuristic tools. He tends to treat them as realities-in-themselves.

Nevertheless, Wright arguably has all the pieces here, in all their complexity. His categories are far superior to a lot of worldview talk that must surely be considered incredibly superficial and two-dimensional.  A lot of talk of ideas is really about social groups and traditional practices. As Wright implies, ideologies often emerge only when those traditional boundaries and practices are attacked or called into question.

Symbols, practices, stories that provide the significance of those symbols and practices, or the answers to the questions our group asks--these are all part of our "worldviews" and "mindsets." But the ideas are not primary. They are abstractions from our lived-lives in the world. They are the way we anticipate what is to come and how we process change. Ideas are the scaffolding some of us build from which to engage our world. Others simply climb the walls of the world without much scaffolding.

Wright: Starting with Philemon

Looked about a week ago at the Preface to N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Now the book begins.

Chapter 1: Return of the Runaway?
1. A World of Difference
Summary
Wright begins our journey with the small letter to Philemon. To begin, he gives the classic background text, a letter from Pliny the Younger in which Pliny advocates for a slave who had come to him because his master was angry with him. Wright's goal is to show that, while there are some superficial similarities between the two letters, the worldview and way of life that informs Philemon is quite different from that which informs Pliny's letter.

A brief look at Pliny's letter gives way to a brief analysis of Philemon and its issues. Was Onesimus a runaway slave or just a slave with which Philemon was angry?  Wright favors a runaway slave.

Did Onesimus run into Paul by chance or did he seek him out? Wright thinks it more likely that he had sought him out, trying to be reconciled to his master. Wright also considers it now the majority opinion that Paul was imprisoned at Ephesus when he wrote Philemon and dates the letter to not long before Paul leaves and writes 2 Corinthians.

For what is Paul asking? Mere forgiveness for Onesimus? For Philemon to send him back to help Paul? For Philemon to set Onesimus free? Forgiveness, yes. To send him back, probably? Freedom? Wright does indeed think so. He brilliantly sees an ironic allusion to Exodus 21:2-6 where a slave could decide to be a slave forever. Philemon can receive Onesimus back forever in a quite different sense.

But Wright is Wright. He will not be satisfied with less than abstracting some exquisite and eternal truths from this interaction. Indeed, that is why he has started here. If only he could distinguish between his theological ponderings and exegesis of the text. Philemon and Onesimus are now members of the messianic family, and the central symbol of the Christian worldview for Paul is unity (11).

Philemon is about attempting a new way of life (6). The order things come in the letter (poetic sequence) is not as important as the implicit narrative (the referential sequence) (7). Faith generates and defines fellowship (17). Fellowship is an "energizing principle" that produces the reality of which it speaks.

And here it comes--Wright's signature--"Two thousand years of history, from the call of Abraham to the time of Jesus, are collected up like light in a prism and focused onto the royal representative in whom their meaning and purpose is fulfilled" (17). "Messiah" is something like a collective noun--"Messiah-and-his-people." This is what is in the bubble above the word Messiah, and when Paul prays that the fellowship of Philemon's faith might be active in the knowledge of every good among them "into Christ" (1:6).

Reflections
Insert the usual comments on Wright's pensive style and cute chapter titles. I deeply appreciate Wright's sense that "Sometimes it is better to get your hands dirty at once rather than approach a topic with lofty generalizations" (6). Of course we get to the lofty generalizations quickly enough.

I'm sympathetic to Ephesus as point of origin, but if it's late in Paul's stay, he doesn't do what he said and come visit. After Ephesus, Paul heads north toward Macedonia. I do wonder if Paul's quick departure from Ephesus in Acts 18:19 hides a quick, initial imprisonment after he first arrived there. He would then have gone on to visit Colossae. Obviously this is complete speculation.

It seems like there is often a point in Wright where the historical grasp on the balloon is let go and it floats away into dreamy abstraction. One wonders, in the end, whether Wright will ever be able to really get Paul because Paul was far too grounded in the end, and Wright can't help being contemplative. The referential world behind Paul, the one Wright seeks, was not an ideological system.

Was unity the center of Paul's worldview? If you mean the inclusion of the Gentiles, then the answer is probably yes. But notice the difference between "unity," which tends toward the abstract, and "the inclusion of the Gentiles," which is a concrete missiological problem. Did faith generate and define fellowship? Shared faith did provide common ground.

Did fellowship relate to a world in which both Philemon, Paul, and Onesimus were all "in Messiah"? I suppose so, theologically, but I suspect we would need to explain what we are saying to Paul. Wright is the king of theological overload. Paul is merely saying that Christian family fellowship entails some things, including the fact that Philemon needs to forgive Onesimus. These dynamics take place in the light of Christ. There are concrete truths here on how we should relate to one another, yes.

As for Christ incorporating Israel, I have yet to see any exegetical evidence that Paul thought in those terms. This is the spark of Wright's early brilliance and the pariah he has never been able to shake. It is brilliant theology, but most scholars remain unconvinced that any of the New Testament authors thought of Christ in this way.