NT Wright's Post-Liberal Gospel: 'How God Became King' (Book Review)
According to Wright, the problem began with the great creeds of the church which ignored the life of Jesus because they were hyper focused on countering rising heresies. As the church fought heretics, however, it lost track of the original gospel. While defending the divinity of Jesus, for example, we lost the original meaning of Jesus' humanity. The creeds also cut out the Old Testament's "Jewish" meaning of Jesus' messiahship and kingship and focused almost exclusively on the New Testament and gentile philosophy.
For Wright, the real meaning of the gospels is that Jesus is the new universal king of all nations. Israel's God has been enthroned at last, and the promise of the Davidic Israelite king becoming the universal king is finally completed. The nations will finally come to the new temple, which is Jesus, from every corner of the planet and bow down to Israel's God. This is the message that the gospels attempt to convey with their accounts of Jesus' life (rather than just skipping from his birth to his death/resurrection as the creeds do).
Wright goes into detail about how Jesus' titles: "messiah" (Christ), "Son of Man", and "Son of God" can only be understood by looking back at the Old Testament books of Psalms, Isaiah, and Daniel. It's only through these messianic and apocalyptic books that we can begin to see what Jesus means when he talks about himself and his mission.
Modern Reformed atonement theology misses the point because it practically ignores the gospels in order to focus on what it thinks Paul and the epistles say about Jesus' death for the forgiveness of sins. Wright returns over and over to the distortions that occur in our soteriology when we fail to use the gospels as the center of scripture and instead begin with the book of Romans or some other epistle. The gospels are the beginning of sound theology, not the epistles.
Part of Wright's purpose in writing this book is that he wants to undermine Enlightenment liberalism and especially the sharp distinction between religion and state. Wright says that liberal theory, upon which the entire global order is founded, should probably be scrapped entirely so that we can begin with something new. He writes on page 164:
"Like all movements, [liberalism] called itself 'justice' and 'freedom', however many new slaveries it introduced. Our own present rhetoric about democracy and legitimacy, about systems of voting and reforms of institutions, still sloshes around in the muddy waters left behind by the receding tsunami of the eighteenth-century revolutions. We would do better, philosophically speaking, to clear the whole area and rebuild from scratch."
By reading Jesus' kingship as the real meaning of the canonical gospels, Wright seeks to recombine church and state while helping us think about new creative ways of organizing society that take seriously the radical claims of Jesus inaugurating a new kingdom on earth. Christians are the new people of God, we are the new Israel that has been saved from the demonic grip of secular world empires represented by Jewish temple leaders, Pilate, and Caesar. Secular authority has been totally delegitimized by the reign of Jesus, and new forms of authority, especially the ideal of the suffering servant, have replaced them.
I have read several of Wright's books and was also influenced by his ideas in college through a professor who really liked him. I've always found his ideas helpful and challenging. 'How God Became King' has many interesting insights, such as Wright's claim that those God chose to sit on Jesus' right and left hands were not James and John but the two thieves who flanked him during his crucifixion enthronement. I also appreciate his call for a post-liberal rethinking of the relationship between church and state. I believe it's now obvious that the current status quo is breaking down, secular states increasingly cannot function morally or institutionally without a religious foundation upon which to justify their laws and values.
Unfortunately, 'How God Became King' also has several flaws that detract from its effectiveness. There's a glaring anti-American bias that runs through all of Wright's books. He constantly portrays American institutions, actions, and ideas in a negative light. Pax Americana, which has dramatically reduced the statistical amount of global warfare since 1945, is portrayed as a violent bomb dropping thugocracy. Classical American liberalism, upon which the United States is founded and justified, is dismissed as some kind of foolish historical spasm. American religion is routinely faulted for all kinds of eccentric tendencies and anti-intellectualism. All the good that America has done in the world is barely mentioned and certainly not regarded as important.
My biggest problem with 'How God Became King', however, is that Wright fails to explain, or even give suggestions about, how we can truly change things in a way that would align more with the kingship of Jesus. Wright condemns what we're doing now, claiming that dropping bombs was a dumb response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks, but he never provides any kind of alternative except the "suffering servant" ideal which he does not flesh-out in practical detail. What kinds of legitimacy could replace democracy? What kind of police actions are legitimate to protect the national and global order? Wright never comes close to giving any real answers to these questions and merely suggests that we need to get creative and invent new solutions. I fail to see how the "suffering servant" ideal can be directly applied to rooting out a cave hive of mentally damaged terrorists who enjoy raping and killing. At some point, responsible loving people are going to have to use bombs to protect innocent lives and preserve order.
Finally, another flaw is Wright's apparent belief that Christians who do not accept his interpretation of the "true" gospel message don't even know the meaning of Christianity. This is a big claim, especially when he repeatedly writes that the vast majority of Christians throughout Western history have not agreed with his interpretation since at least AD 500. Is Wright suggesting that all these people were lost? Is he saying there were no Christians from the Middle Ages to modern times? Did Jesus' kingdom cease to exist until Wright wrote this book in 2012? I'm sure he would not make such blatant claims, but the tone of this book makes it sounds like he is. A little more humility would help the book's tone and make it easier to take seriously.
Wright is at odds with just about every tenet of mainstream Church of Christ teaching. Where Churches of Christ condemn "premillennialism", Wright asserts a resurrection body and renewed earth. Where the Churches of Christ lean heavily on atonement theology, Wright dismisses it in its modern form. The Churches of Christ were founded at the end of the Enlightenment period, and our founding fathers, especially Alexander Campbell, were deeply influenced by the progressive liberal theory that Wright hopes to overturn. 'How God Became King' might serve as a good introduction to Church of Christ members seeking to expand outside their traditional theology whether in pursuit of new perspectives or simply to learn about what some denominational thinkers are up to.