N. T. Wright and Classical Orthodoxy

Yesterday, I ended my post on the two recent conferences (T4G and Wheaton) by commenting on William Evans' assessment of the weaknesses in N. T. Wright's theology as follows:

While I agree with Evans that Wright is an Evangelical who is trying to be biblical, it is somewhat ironic that an Anglican of all people should, in the end, have his high ecclesiology undercut by, of all things, that old Evangelical habit of biblicism. In the end, Wright may be a temptation for Evangelicals precisely because they recognize a kindred spirit at this very point. And that, it seems to me, is where the historically-oriented confessionalism of the Neo-Reformed becomes absolutely necessary if we are going to be faithful to the biblical Gospel.

In this post I want to unpack the meaning of these rather cryptic remarks a little bit. I've just been listening to Wright's lecture on historical Jesus studies from the Wheaton conference and I hit the pause button because Wright just said something that I find utterly astonishing. Before I tell you what it is, let me quote something else that William Evans wrote about Wright's response to his critics in the panel discussion earlier on the same day as this lecture.

In response to Richard Hays question about how his [i.e. Wright's] view of Jesus relates to the confessional history of the church, Evans describes Wright responding as follows:

He also claimed that he was not trying to find a Jesus behind the Gospel accounts, but rather to do justice to those accounts. In a rather telling comment, Wright then asserted that his account of Jesus is more true to the canonical witness than the confessions of the church!

So it seems that Wright is not only making the astonishing claim that the Protestant Churches from the 16th century on have all misunderstood Paul on justification and that the whole Reformation has just been one large mistake, and this, I might add, at a point in history when even Roman Catholic theologians have recognized the authentic insights into soteriology that were gained by the Reformers. What Protestants have said for 400 years is wrong, says Wright. This is why, by the way, many people have viewed Wright's theology as a bridge into the Roman Catholic Church insofar as it removes the necessity of making everything rise and fall on the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

But it gets worse. As Evans says above, Wright thinks that his account of Jesus is more true to the canonical than the confessions of the Church. And he is not talking here merely about Protestantism. He is talking about the Augustinian-Thomist tradition of the Western Church that is the foundation of both modern Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. But it gets even worse. He is actually talking about the creedal tradition (Apostles', Nicene, Chalcedonian) that comes out of the first five centuries and forms the basis for both the Churches of the East and those of the West.

In other words, Wright is saying that his reading of the Gospels utilizing the historical methods developed in the 18th century and refined through three quests for the historical Jesus has resulted in a new understanding of Jesus that is superior to that of the traditional Church. I just heard him say this in his lecture practically in so many words.

We should not view Wright as a crypto-Catholic at all. If anything, his viewpoint is more antithetical to that of Rome than it is to the Reformers. In actual fact, it would seem that Wright is picking up on one of two tendencies within the history of Protestantism, that is, on the skeptical and critical one as opposed to the genuinely reforming one.

The skeptical tendency is found in the early Luther and the Anabaptists and it begins with a strict biblicism that eventually degenerates through the employment of critical methods into a fragmented liberalism that is overwhelmed by the authority of individuals (eg. Bultmann, charismatic faith healers) or classes (eg. black liberationists, feminists). The genuinely reforming one is found in the later Luther and pre-eminently in Calvin and the Reformed tradition and it begins with a shared theological heritage and seeks to correct this heritage at certain points with better exegesis using the same methods of reading the Bible that were used in the pre-Reformation period (supplemented by humanistic methods coming out of the Renaissance) and resisting the historical-critical methods as they developed in the 17-18th centuries.

I see Wright as dangerous to Evangelicals precisely because of the many conservative conclusions he draws on so many topics, such as for example, the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But his deeply modern method of reading Scripture and his apparent disdain for the tradition he is sworn to uphold as a bishop is deeply worrying. You can bet that his pupils and followers will not, in all cases, be as conservative as he is. But that is not to say that Wright is consistently conservative on all matters. To the contrary, he is anything but on a significant number of theological issues. His low regard for the Trinitarian and Christological orthodox tradition is manifested in a number of theological and ethical positions that he adopts. But that is a topic for another post. Maybe tomorrow.