Elliot Ritzema

Tag: Jesus

  • Book Review: Jesus and the Victory of God

    I started reading this about a year ago, and finally finished it early in December. N.T. (Tom) Wright has become a book machine over the last few years, sometimes publishing three or four per year. Some of these are popular level re-workings of ideas that he has written about elsewhere, but Jesus and the Victory of God is one of his more massive and academic works. Published in 1996, it is the second volume in his “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series (the first is The New Testament and the People of God, the third is The Resurrection of the Son of God, and the fourth, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, is forthcoming).

    The underlying argument of the book is that the “historical Jesus” and the “Jesus of faith” don’t have to be separated, as they have been in so much recent scholarship. You can do rigorous historical study and end up knowing something about how Jesus presented himself to his contemporaries. That’s not to say that the book is devotional in tone. It is academic through and through. Wright simply says that it is possible to know with some degree of confidence who Jesus believed himself to be, and who his earliest followers believed him to be. This means that he invites criticism from two sides: scholars who think that he is too confident that historical questions have answers, and believers who don’t like historical studies that seek to fit Jesus into a first-century milieu. Wright begins with an overview of Jesus studies over the past 100 or so years. Then he argues that Jesus’ public persona was that of a prophet, and the content of his proclamation was the kingdom of God. Then he looks at what Jesus believed his role was with regard to Israel, and the reasons for his crucifixion. Finally, he argues that Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem was intended to act out symbolically YHWH’s return to Zion.

    This is a fascinating book, and well worth the time and effort spent in reading it. Those less academically minded may find especially the initial review of Jesus studies tedious, but those already familiar with the likes of Schweitzer, Wrede and Bultmann will find it interesting. There are things about this book that I love and things that I am not sure about (e.g., that some of Jesus’ parables that the Church has traditionally thought are about his second coming are really about YHWH’s return to Zion as enacted by Jesus). Wright doesn’t talk much about Jesus’ resurrection in this book, but not because he doesn’t think it is important. It is because there was too much material to deal with it in one book, so he wrote The Resurrection of the Son of God over the next seven years. I’d recommend this book to anyone seeking to gain a greater understanding of how Jesus fit into first-century Judaism, and especially those who may be either enamored or troubled by proclamations from the likes of the Jesus Seminar or Bart Ehrman.

  • Book Review: The King Jesus Gospel

    The problem that Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel is intended to address is that the way evangelical Christians preach the gospel doesn’t often lead to lives characterized by discipleship. Evangelical evangelism has been geared toward getting people to make decisions (“accepting Jesus into your heart”), but “we lose at least 50 percent of those who make decisions” (20, italics in original). People become “saved,” but they don’t become disciples of Jesus. Clearly, the evangelical understanding of gospel and evangelism is not leading to changed lives as often as it should.

    After calling attention to this problem, McKnight asks, “What is the gospel?” He turns to the New Testament–Paul, Jesus, and Peter–and concludes that the gospel “is declaring the story of Israel as resolved in the Story of Jesus” (79). He argues that Christianity left behind the emphasis on story in favor of an emphasis on salvation during the Reformation; the story-formed Creeds were de-emphasized in favor of confessions (McKnight mentions in particular the Augsburg Confession and the Genevan Confession). He takes pains to point out that the Reformers can’t be blamed for the “salvation culture” that we’ve ended up with. However, the seeds of a salvation culture were planted during the Reformation’s shift from an emphasis on story (of which salvation is a part) to an emphasis on salvation (without the rest of the gospel).

    McKnight closes the book with five things that are necessary to regaining a gospel culture:

    1. We have to become people of the Story (153).
    2. We need to immerse ourselves even more into the Story of Jesus (153).
    3. We need to see how the apostles’ writings take the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus into the next generation and into a different culture, and how this generation led all the way to our generation (155).
    4. We need to counter the stories that bracket and reframe our story (157).
    5. We need to embrace this story so that we are saved and can be transformed by the gospel story (158).

    I would recommend this book, but not on its own. It needs other books to flesh out the full picture. It does a good job of arguing that evangelical understandings of the gospel have led to a salvation culture rather than a gospel culture, but doesn’t go into detail about what a gospel culture looks like when it is lived out (McKnight himself has written a book on that subject called One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow). Also, and this is not really a fault of the book, but I am concerned that as a result of McKnight’s argument there may be people who get an impression that the gospel is “either/or”: that is, it is either the story of Jesus fulfilling the story of Israel, or it is salvation. In reality, salvation is part of the gospel. McKnight makes that point (88), and I think it is very important that we do not lose sight of it.