The second volume of Wright's series, Jesus and the Victory of God, focuses in on the person of Jesus Christ. He starts by engaging with the Jesus scholarship of the past two centuries, focusing his criticism especially on Borg and Crossan and the Jesus Seminar. He is careful to praise the advances in scholarship represented by the members of this association, but he is not shy in soundly defeating many of the presuppositions and methodological flaws within their work. For anyone who has been interested in the Jesus Seminar, this criticism, brought on historical grounds (their own "turf"), shows their conclusions to be largely without merit.
Wright looks at the history of Jesus scholarship over the past two centures, and divides it into two categores, following two major scholars who have investigated Jesus, Wrede and Schweitzer. Roughly, this translates into dividing scholars into the category either of Wrede and his thoroughgoing skepticism (examples are Bultmann and his demythologizing, as well as Crossan and the Jesus Seminar), or of Albert Schwietzer and his thoroughgoing eschatology (he places the "third quest largely in this category. While understanding this taxonomy to be superficial and inexact, he uses it to illumine some of the methodological commonalities between groups of scholars over the last two hundred years, and shows many current scholars are revisiting (even if in new ways) old ideas. It allows us to see similarities between scholars across the years. And it proves rather instructive. His catalogue of scholars and how the fit into this scheme is admirably complete, and I will not reproduce that here, instead referring you to the book (or the Facet by Wright also published by Fortress press which takes up these matters in a less-expensive form by exerpting from Wright's much larger work).
After this look at the history of Jesus scholarship over the past years, he turns tohis own constructive historical work. Wright structures his investigation around the understanding of worldview. This takes the form of asking a number of questions about Jesus: who are we? where are we? what's wrong? what's the solution? and what time is it? These questions help establish the worldview of Jesus by looking at how Jesus would answer these questions.
Due to the almost encyclopedic nature of Wright's study, I will not seek to reproduce all of his answers to these worldview questions, nor will I seek to lay out his arguments, even in outline. Instead, it is worthwile to look at some of the important features of Wright's understanding of Jesus, and of the enterprise of looking at Jesus historically and theologically.
One very important aspect of Wright's inquiry is that he sees both the teachings and the actions of Jesus as essential to a complete understanding. In fact, he sees the two as being inseparable. The sayings, he argues, often interpret and complement the actions. One instructive example is Jesus's Temple-action, overturning the money-changers' tables, and Jesus' s saying regarding the payment of taxes to Caesar. On the surface, the saying is a clever way out of a trap, and is also a statement about giving proper loyalty to God and proper loyalty to Caesar. Yet, when Wright sets this saying along side the temple action, it is given a deeper meaning. Instead of just talking about taxes, it is a critique of the current Jewish understandings of Messiahship and of the coming kingdom. For many Jewish Messiahs to have come before and who existed around the time of Jesus, the coming kingdom took the shape of an earthly kingdom, and the overthrow of Rome. Jesus Temple action demonstrated his judgment of the current temple system and the misunderstanding of the Judaism of the day of what it means for him as Messiah to replace the temple and the corrupt nationalistic ideas of the Jewish establishment. The saying about taxes to Caesar, set in this temple-action setting, is not just about giving God his due and Caesar his, but instead is a very strong critique of the Jewish nationalistic ideal, with the frequent call for non-payment of taxes and other revolts against Roman rule. Instead, Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom of God is much more radical than that, for the kingdom is coming in himself, through his death. This is one of a number of instances where Wright weaves story and symbol, action and words, theology and history, together in an intricate tapestry as he reconstructs Jesus's life, his aims, and his message.
Wright finds Jesus to be remarkably similar to an "orthodox" picture of who Jesus was and is, and he critically but constructively incorporates most, if not all, of the synoptic material in this clear study. But there are a couple aspects of his study that will strike readers as being rather new, or at least non-traditional. The first is his assertion, first made in The New Testament and the People of God and carried through into Jesus and the Victory of God, that the Jews of Jesus' day believed themselves to be still in exile. Even though they inhabited the promised land and worshiped at the temple in Jerusalem, they still understood God's great promises of exile and return to be unfulfilled. They were still awaiting YHWY's return to Zion, the coming of the Davidic Messiah, and the true return from exile to occur. Wright goes on to place Jesus within this implicit story, which provides an interpretive key to many of Jesus' actions. Scholars have met this proposal with both acolade and resistance, but it clearly warrants special attention, and may prove in the end to be at the least a neglected stream of thought contemporary to Jesus, and may provide a fertile ground for further study, but it must be carried out carefully, with the assertion that Judaism in Jesus day certainly wasn't monolithic, and keeping in mind that it would be suprising (though not impossible) for this theme to have been as central to Judaism as Wright has asserted since it has gone almost totally undiscovered in the intervening years.
A second controversial aspect of Wright's portrait has to do with Eschatology. Wright is critical of the work of Schweitzer, who understood Jesus to be expecting an apocalyptic end-of-the-world event to come shortly, and is also critical of the school who claim Jesus was not really an eschatological prophet, but instead taught timeless truths. But in his constructive propsal, as he makes clear that he, in a sense following Schweitzer, feels that the apocalyptic is inseprable from Jesus ministry and message. Departing from Schweitzer, though, he asserts that Jesus didn't expect any type of end of "space-time" but instead was looking forward to a this-worldly event to come, namely the destruction of the Temple and the scattering of the people. This proved to be a decisive moment of God's judgment upon the world. Wright does leave room for further expectation in the Christian life, but it isn't yet clear what the "not yet" of the Church, that comes from Paul and ultimately from Jesus, may consist of, and I await with expectation further volumes from his pen.
Wright's own contribution is the working-out of his assertion that history has an important role to play in theology. He illustrates his understanding by comparing theology and history two the two sons in the parable of the prodigal son. History, the prodigal, has strayed far from home and squandered its wealth; theology, meanwhile, the older son, has stayed home, faithfully working for the father. Now the prodigal, history, is coming home, and the prodigal father shows prodigal love by accepting him again. The older son, meanwhile, disdains the prodigal son for his past failures, and is reluctant to allow him home. Wright has a very clear desire to see history take its rightful place as a legitimate contributor to the study of Jesus. This means acknowledging where it has overstepped its bounds in the past, but also realizing the constructive contribution it can make to a more complete understanding of Jesus.
Wright asserts, "I wish the present work to share the concern of the former for rigorous historical constructions, and also to work towards a new integration of history and theology which will do justice, rather than violence, to both." It is important to realize at this stage, that we are looking at the relationship of theology to science, in this case, historical science. That can even be seen in Wright's language. He speaks of integration between the discplines, and integration is one of the four major categories of relationship that Ian Barbour has outlined in his landmark writing in the field of religion and science. I also think that it is important to analyze Wright's endeavor on these grounds. In his project, he freely acknowledges the pitfalls and failures of past historical inquiries into the life of Christ, but puts these down to a number of flaws in the history, such as presuppositions and impositions of worldview on to historical inquiry. Yet, he seems content to leave the method essentially alone, in that history remains a difinitive partner in the dialogue, with power to alter, or even change, theological understandings. Wright's whole understanding of Jesus is firmly rooted in his historical understanding of the Judaism of the time, and of the worldview of first century Jews, as he understands it. This historical construction is determinative of his understanding of Jesus. While I applaud his historical study, for it proves to be an immense and informative look at a world far removed from our own, I believe he subjects theological claims to historical study, on at least an even plain, without clearly delineating the bounds of the historical inquiry of theology. It would seem that he conflates the two, without making clear that there are historical studies that are informed by theology, but which are not determined by it, and further that there are theological studies that are informed by theology, but which are not determined by it. In the end, I see this as the primary weakness of what is otherwise an extremely strong study. The amount of knowledge there is to gain from Wright's study is immense, but in the end, this conflation of disciplines means that his conclusions are not what should be termed "theological," but "historical."
As I hope I have made clear, there is an immense amount to value in Wright's study. It will serve as a valuable resource of historical construction that can inform our understanding of Jesus, and his mindset and worldview. But, it should not be thought that through this study we can know who Jesus was, or what he thought, or what his aims were. Finally, we must rest in Scripture. This can and should mean that we are informed by the best of historical scholarship to help us understand the language and setting, but we should never let provisional historical reconstruction trump the truth we find in Scripture. Although historicla inquiry seems to put us on firm ground for understanding Jesus, resting our understanding on it will ultimately be little better than resting our theology of Creation on a Newtonian (or evolutionary or Einsteinian) understanding of the universe. Clearly, in the case of both historical inquiry of Jesus and scientific/cosmological inquiry into the origins of the universe, we are driven to dialogue and interaction by our theology, and are assertions that Jesus truly was a historical figure and that creation was a "scientific" occurrence, but we must at the same time acknowledge that God is not subject to scientific inquiry, by either the physical or historical sciences, and we will never verify or arrive at genuinely theological conclusions if we are bound to these other disciplines. We can and must learn from them, Wright's study of Jesus clearly included, but we must never depend upon them.
I look forward to rereading and learning more from this informative volume, and the other volumes in his work, but clearly we must be careful to always return to the source and norm of our theology, the Bible, and always keep close at hand the traditions of the orthodox and catholic church, which also inform our understandings, even as we dialogue with and seek coherence with sciences, both historical and physical.
