INTRODUCTION
In his
book, Knowing Jesus Through the Old
Testament, Christopher J. H. Wright argues that a complete understanding of
the person and work of Jesus is dependent upon an appreciation of His
understanding and relationship to the Old Testament. While the subject matter and Wright’s
presentation are captivating, the theological ramifications of his assertions
range from deeply thought-provoking to troublingly unorthodox.
In his
preface, Wright succinctly and passionately declares that “in reading the
Hebrew scriptures I am handling something that gives me a closer common link
with Jesus than any archaeological artefact [sic] could do.”[1] Wright is an accomplished author and pastor,
as well as the head of Langham Partnership International (John Stott Ministries
in the U.S.A.). His book seeks to guide
the reader to a deeper understanding of Christ by shedding Old Testament light
on His place in history and the grand plan of God, as well as Jesus’ own values
and understanding of His identity and mission.
His contention is that “the deeper you go into understanding the Old
Testament, the closer you come to the heart of Jesus” (Wright, ix).
BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE
BOOK
In this particular work, Wright
digs deep into the narratives of the Old Testament to uncover the cultural
expectations and messianic thought that set the stage for Jesus’ entry into the
world and then coalesces all of it in light of the full New Testament
revelation to show the redemptive purposes of God woven throughout. Addressing this in terms of Jesus’
fulfillment of both the story and the promise of the Old Testament, Wright
shows Jesus as the pivotal point in all of history both in terms of fulfilling
the historical expectation of Israel for a deliverer, and as the culmination of
God’s plan to bring blessing and salvation to the nations of the world. The author then moves to show how this
placement of Jesus within the context of historical Israel shaped his own
understanding of both his identity and mission, and applies this to the mission
of the Church. Finally, Wright analyzes
how an understanding of the Old Testament aided Jesus in living out his
identity as He faced the challenges of his convictions, sorted out the
“whirling confusion of thought” in His mind, and wrestled “with the future
direction of his [sic] own calling” (Wright, 182-186).
CRITICAL INTERACTION
The initial points of Wright’s book are very
compelling. He sets the advent of
Christ into the greater historical picture of Israel, building a historical
pedigree of Jesus as not only a Jew and a Davidic heir, but as the divine agent
of blessing through Israel to the
rest of humanity (Wright, 4). The
author’s point, which becomes a seminal theme throughout book, is that God’s
plan from the beginning was to use
Israel as a conduit of blessing to all nations.
In this light, and drawing on parallels in language and structure
between Matthew and Genesis, Wright argues that Matthew was intentional in
painting his portrait of Christ as an unmistakable “new creation”, the pivotal
point of human history, “the end of the beginning” and “the beginning of the
end” (Wright, 8). His application of
passages throughout the Pentatuch, the Psalms, and the Prophets paints a very
clear picture of the intention of God to bring salvation to all nations, rather
than bringing it to them only as a result of Israel’s inability to exist as the
people He intended. This is an important
point because the picture of Israel being the people of God while He allows the
rest of the world to suffer in ignorance as the objects of His wrath is a
common criticism by opponents of the Old Testament. Through his analysis, Wright reconciles the
God of the New Testament with that of the old in pointing out that even the
destruction of nations such as Canaan served the greater purpose of creating an
Israel through which He could bless the entire world with salvation through
Christ.
A controversial matter arises
several times in the book when Wright deals with prophecy. Particularly in the second chapter, the
author refers to an analogy of a father promising his son a horse, but in the
meantime a car is invented, which the father presents to his son instead. Wright uses this to talk about the promises
of God, saying that “because it is the relationship behind it that matters, the
material form in which it is fulfilled may be quite different from the original
form in which it was originally made”, thereby allowing for God’s promises to
be fulfilled in ways unimaginable at the time the promise was initiated
(Wright, 70). While this may indeed be
valid in the application Wright cites, the principle itself can easily be misapplied
if it is appropriated to prophecy carte
blanche. Additionally, it reflects a
troubling modern tendency to attempt to apply prophecy (particularly
eschatological prophecy) in a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship with
particular events and figures using human reasoning. The promises of God are true, and will be
fulfilled in His timing and by His methods.
These will likely often defy all human pattern-matching ant
finger-pointing as God weaves His tapestry of history.
The primary difficulty of the book
arises very early (toward the end of the first chapter), but is easily
overlooked amidst the promising arguments that surround it. Here, Wright writes of Jesus, “the New
Testament presents him to us as the Messiah,
Jesus the Christ. And the Messiah ‘was’ Israel. That is, the Messiah was Israel
representatively and personified” (Wright, 44).
If this is not an obvious reflection of a skewed Christology upon the
first reading, it takes on that character in light of the rest of the book. As the author moves into his third chapter, Jesus and His Old Testament Identity,
Wright’s Christological nuances become much more bold and assertive. Throughout the remainder of the book, Christ
is painted as having learned of His identity, mission and values from the pages
of the Hebrew Scriptures. In other
words, “it was the Old Testament that helped Jesus to understand Jesus. . . The answers came from his Bible, the
Hebrew scriptures in which he found a rich tapestry of figures, historical
persons, prophetic pictures and symbols of worship” (Wright, 108). Jesus is said to have taken “upon himself a
staggering identity with awesome personal consequences” by “internalizing three
Old Testament figures”, namely Davidic King, Son of God, and Davidic Messiah
(Wright, 109). Elsewhere, Jesus is painted
as using the Scriptures as the means by which Jesus “understood his own
essential identity” and “gave depth and colour to his primary self-awareness as
the Son of his Father God” (Wright, 135).
Using these statements, Wright creates an image of Christ almost akin to
the old heresy of adoptionism where Jesus learns of His identity and mission
gradually as He matures following His baptism.
This understanding, wright contends was revealed to Christ at the
baptism, with the words of The Father being as much for Jesus’ instruction as
the crowds’ (Wright, 105). Then Jesus
developed a further understanding of His mission “from a deeper reading of his
scriptures” (Wright, 145). This progressive
revelation within the mind of Jesus serves to undermine his divinity even to
the extent that it implies He did not know what His mission on Earth was for
the first three decades of His life. We
are then left with two alternatives.
Either we must conclude (as with adoptionism) that Jesus was not divine
prior to His baptism, or that He was divine, but His knowledge was so limited
by His assumption of humanity that He did not know fully who He was. These are both utterly unacceptable
alternatives, as a Christ who was both divine and human from the moment of His
conception are taught clearly both in the Scriptures and in the earliest canons
of the Church. Insult is added to injury
as Wright repeatedly comments on the incompleteness of Christ divinity with
comments about a “whirling confusion of thought in the mind of Jesus” (Wright,
184) and His “wrestling with the future and direction of His own calling”
(Wright, 187). The very idea that Christ
learned from the Scriptures is a denial of His pre-existence and the fact that
the Scriptures are His words. If “the Word” was indeed in the beginning
with God, and “was God”, then how could this Word incarnate go to the
Scriptures to derive anything at all, since He is the source of those very
Scriptures? If Jesus is “the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8), how could He possibly have
needed to learn anything about His identity or mission? Though this fallacy in the author’s line of
reasoning soured the last half of the book for me, the validity of Wright’s
arguments in the first sections still stands.
This book as a whole is one I would
hesitate to recommend to a general lay reader due to the deviant Christology
that permeates its second half. That
being said, the first one hundred or so pages offer an insight into understanding
the Old Testament in the light of Christ, and vice-versa, that is quite
enlightening. I would recommend it for
advanced readers with a solid Christological base, and suggest that its better
principles be taught second-hand rather than being given cover-to-cover to the
layman.
CONLCUSION
Christopher J. H. Wright set out on a noble and
necessary pursuit with Knowing Jesus Through
the Old Testament. Along the way, he
accomplished his goal of presenting a compelling and detailed argument for the
inseparable link between the story and promise of the Hebrew Scriptures with
Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, he also
went down paths of reasoning that are very deviant from an orthodox
understanding of the person and nature of Christ. This produced a work that is at the same time
profound and profane, holy and heretical, and is not suitable for casual
reading except by the forewarned and critical mind. This theological briar patch serves to
overshadow what otherwise would be a very insightful treatise.
[1]
Christopher J.H. Wright, Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament (Downers
Grove, Il: IVP Academic, 1995), ix.
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