The Last Word 7

In chapter six of The Last Word, N.T. Wright faces the challenge of the Enlightenment and its influence in how we read and understand Scripture. He begins by discussing the role of reason as the 'central capacity of human beings' and the 'arbiter of which religious and theological claims could be sustained'. In reading the Bible through the lens of the Enlightenment, Wright sees two challenges. First, the Enlightenment challenged the church to read Scripture historically, looking for original meanings in the text. Second, some theologians intentionally sought to prove that in discovering the original meanings, the Bible would be proved faulty and the central claims of Christianity would be disproved. Much of Biblical scholarship since has been attempts to rationally 'disprove' the Christian faith with an equally strong rebuttal of those who use the same methodology to 'prove' it to be true.

According to the Enlightenment, we need to understand Scripture according to Enlightenment values. The problem of evil is that 'people are not thinking and acting rationally' which reduces the importance of Jesus to simply moral teaching. The Kingdom of God becomes only hope for heaven after we die and Jesus' death is simply a 'mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future', which leaves the rationalists in charge of everything else in the world. God is 'kicked upstairs', making religion only about personal piety and personal forgiveness. Scripture is abused by both sides: dismissed by secularists who deem it irrelevant and inaccurate; equally misused by devout Christians who ignore many of the cosmic and global teachings and reduce Scripture to personal piety and the source of doctrine about eternal salvation.

What are we to think of the authority of Scripture in this climate? Often the appeal to the authority of Scripture means nothing more than, "Stop talking with all those big theological words! Stop thinking! All we need is the Bible (read through the lens of 16th and 17th century theologians)." This irony is that "fundamentalists" and "liberals" essentially approach Scripture in the same way: conveniently ignoring the passages that make them uncomfortable, albeit different passages for each. Wright states, "There is a great gulf fixed between those who want to prove the historicity of everything reported in the Bible in order to demonstrate that the Bible is 'true' after all and those who, committed to living under the authority of Scripture, remain open to what Scripture itself actually teaches and emphasizes." In other words, it is very easy to attempt to prove the Bible true or untrue and far less easy to actually live under its authority.

Wright then shifts to the postmodern climate that we currently find ourselves in. He claims that postmodern readings of scripture have rightly noted the 'cultural imperialism' that we have tended to read into the Bible, but also notes that deconstruction has failed to replace it with anything helpful. He talks about the role of 'experience' as an illegitimate source of authority because for Christians, 'experience' is itself something that happens in the context where 'the reading of Scripture exercises its authority'. Experience cannot be a separate source of authority because it is shaped and formed by submission to the reading of Scripture. However, experience and context cannot be ignored either. Wright uses the following illustration to help flesh out this idea:

Experience is what grows by itself in the garden. Authority is what happens when the gardener wants to affirm the goodness of the genuine flowers and vegetables by uprooting the weeds in order to let beauty and fruitfulness triumph over chaos, thorns and thistles. An over-authoritarian church, paying no attention to experience, solves the problem by paving the garden with concrete. An over-experiential church solves the (real or imagined) problem of concrete (rigid and 'judgmental' forms of faith) by letting anything and everything grow unchecked, sometimes labeling concrete as 'law' and so celebrating any and every weed as 'grace'.