My Top Twelve Books of 2016 - #9 "How God Became King"

My number nine book of this year is NT Wright's "How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels." The basic message of this book, as the subtitle suggests, is that we have lost the central message of the gospels and that we need to recover it. Today, Christians tend to think of the "gospel" as the good news of justification by faith--that because we believe in Jesus, he gives us right standing with God. Yet, when we look to the books called "the gospels," we are hard pressed to find that message on the lips of Jesus. Of course justification by faith is taught in the Bible, but was it the message of Jesus? What is the gospel in the gospels?

Why did Jesus go through thirty-three years as a human? Ask an average Bible nerd and his answer will probably be that Jesus life was all about perfectly obeying the law of Moses so his obedience could be counted to us. But where does Jesus say that? Of course Jesus obeyed the law perfectly and I do believe that Jesus obedience is counted to us, but was this the topic of Jesus's preaching?

This question gets at the heart of Wright's book. The church has, for some reason, lost the primary emphasis of the gospels. In what way? Wright tells of an American friend who said,

[M]ost Western churchgoers treat the gospels as the optional chips and dip at the start of the evening. They are the cocktail nibbles. Only after that do we sit down at the table for the red meat of Pauline theology. (21)

What has brought about this attitude toward the gospels? I would argue that it is a result of the church's move away from history and toward bare ideas. Readers of this blog (hi, Mom) will remember that I touched on this theme in my most recent post. We like Paul because his books are didactic--a seminary word that means teachy. Even in the teachy sections of the gospels, Jesus keeps on telling stories about seeds and servants, trees and talents. We want pure ideas that we can absorb into our brain-clouds; don't bother us with stories. But Jesus doesn't care what we think we want--thank God.

So, what is Jesus's message? What is "The Forgotten Story of the Gospels"? Their story, argues Wright, is "the story of how God became king of the world." I can imagine two different Christians with two different objections to this. The first says, "But God has always been king. To say that God has become king is to say that he wasn't king before Jesus came. Whaddayasaydathat?" The second says, "God become king? You obviously haven't been paying attention. Just watch the news for half an hour and then tell me again that God has become king. Plus, all that kingdom stuff is for the future. God become king. Gimmeabreak." No matter which of these is closer to your own thoughts, this book is for you.

Though I can't reproduce Wright's entire argument here, I will give some of my favorite quotations and direct you to the book. For now I will say that the message of this book has the potential to revolutionize not only how you read the gospels, but how you live your life as a Christian. Here are some highlights:

On Christ's ascension:

We have...understood the ascension in vague terms of supernatural glory, rather than in the precise terms (as in Matt. 28:18, Acts 1:6-11) of Jesus authority over the world. In fact, the ascension, for many people, implies Jesus's absence, not his universal presence and sovereign rule. And this time it isn't only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who will raise objections; it's Paul, Hebrews, and Revelation as well. They all think that Jesus is already in charge of the world. (Check out, for instance, I Cor. 15:20-28; Heb. 2:5-9; Rev. 5:6-14.) That was what they understood by "God's kingdom." (16)

On the "Enlightenment" and "theocracy":

At the heart of "the Enlightenment" was a resolute determination that "God"-- whoever "God" might be--should no longer be allowed to interfere, either directly or through those who claimed to be his spokesmen, in the affairs of this world. Once "man had come of age," there was no room for theocracy. It was as simple as that. God was pushed upstairs, like the doddering old boss who used to run the company, but has now been superseded. He has, no doubt, a notional place of "honor," a cozy office where he can sit and imagine he's still in charge. But nobody is fooled. The new generation is running the business now. They know it, and his supporters had better get used to it. Thus, for the European and American Enlightenment, God was superannuated to a position of totally ineffectual "honor." (34)

This philosophy was not new...On the contrary, the mainline philosophy of the Enlightenment was simply one version of the ancient philosophy of Epicurus, who taught that the gods, if they existed at all, were a long way away from the world of humans and did not concern themselves with it. As a result, the world we know grows, changes, and develops under its own steam, as it were from within. Apply this to the scientific study of origins, and you get Darwinian evolution--again, not a new idea, but one that followed logically from the absence of divine control or intervention...Apply it to political science, and you get democracy: society ordering itself according to its own internal wishes and whims, fears and fancies. (34-35)

Theocracy wasn't wanted either by the skeptical reformers or the pious "orthodox," who were content...to abandon the vision of God's kingdom on earth and retreat into a world of private piety...(36)

On "The Kingdom of Heaven":

Millions of readers, when they hear Matthew's Jesus talking about doing this or that "so that you may enter the kingdom of heaven," assume, without giving it a moment's thought, that this means "so that you may go to heaven when you die."

But that is not at all what Matthew, or Jesus for that matter, had in mind. Matthew makes it quite clear, and I think Jesus made it quite clear, what the phrase means. Think of the Lord's Prayer, which comes at the center of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. At the center of the prayer itself we find Jesus teaching his followers to pray that God's kingdom might come and his will be done "on earth as in heaven." The "kingdom of heaven" is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth. When Matthew has Jesus talking about heaven's kingdom, he means that heaven--in other words, the God of heaven--is establishing his sovereign rule not just in heaven, but on earth as well. (42-43)

Notice that Wright does not say that Jesus will establish his sovereign rule on earth. Jesus is king now and he will reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet in history. Then he will return to defeat the last enemy--death (1 Cor 15).

On the centurion's confession:

Calling Jesus, "God's son" echoes, of course, the voice at Jesus's baptism. But when a Roman centurion says those words, we assume he didn't know what had happened on that day. For him, the phrase "God's son" would normally have meant one person and one person only: Tiberius Caesar, son of the "divine" Augustus. That's what the coins all said--including the coin they showed Jesus a few days before. (94-95)

On the gospels generally:

These are not merely antiquarian documents telling a strange story about a powerful but now long-gone moment of history. They are the moment of sunrise on a new morning, casting a strange glory over the landscape and inviting all readers to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, and come out to enjoy the fully dawned day and give themselves to its tasks. (121-122)

On Jesus's saying, "My kingdom is not of this world.":

Jesus explains that his kingdom is not the sort that grows in this world. His kingdom is certainly for this world, but it isn't from it. It comes from somewhere else--in other words, from above, from heaven, from God. (144)

On "Kingdom" and "Cross":

We have lived for many years now with "kingdom Christians" and "cross Christians" in opposite corners of the room, anxious that those on the other side are missing the point, the one group with its social-gospel agenda and the other with its saving-souls-for-heaven agenda. The four gospels bring these two viewpoints together into a unity that is much greater than the sum of their parts...In fact, what we call "politics" and what we call "religion"(and for that matter what we call "culture," "philosophy," "theology," and lots of other things besides) were not experienced or thought of in the first century as separable entities. This was just as true, actually, for the Greeks and Romans as it was for the Jews. (159)

On "New Creation":

New creation itself has begun, [Matthew, Paul, Revelation, and John] are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. "The ruler of this world" has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus's triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the truth the past two hundred years of European and American culture has been desperately trying to stifle. (162)

On the message of the cross:

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more. It is the moment when the story of Israel reaches its climax; the moment when, at last, the watchmen on Jerusalem's walls see their God coming in his kingdom; the moment when the people of God are renewed so as to be, at last, the royal priesthood who will take over the world not with the love of power but with the power of love; the moment when the kingdom of God overcome the kingdoms of the world. It is the moment when a great old door, locked and barred since our first disobedience, swings open suddenly to reveal not just the garden, opened once more to our delight, but the coming city, the garden city that God had always planned and is now inviting us to go through the door and build with him. The dark power that stood in the way of this kingdom vision has been defeated, overthrown, rendered null and void. Its legions will still make a lot of noise and cause a lot of grief, but the ultimate victory is now assured. This is the vision the evangelists offer us as they bring together the kingdom and the cross. (239-240)

Amen.