Steven Carr

http://home.hiwaay.net/~kbush/Wright_God_Caesar.pdf
WRIGHT said :-
God and Caesar 1
Festschrift for Dr Wesley Carr, 2003
GOD AND CAESAR, THEN AND NOW
by Dr N. T. Wright, Canon Theologian, Westminster Abbey
(from June 30 2003: Bishop of Durham)
'The crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth is God’s Messiah, Lord of the world;
he is already reigning at God’s right hand; he will reappear to complete this rule by abolishing all enemies, including sin and death themselves.
The classic statement is in 1 Corinthians 15.20–28.'


CARR
Here is the passage '23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.'

I thought that Wright was a preterist and that when Matthew and Mark spoke about Jesus returning, they were simplky talking about Jesus being vindicated by the destruction of Jerusalem , as he prophesied.

How come Paul knows NOTHING about this prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem? Wright says it is one of the main themes of Jesus's teaching, yet Paul only knows of one 'return' or 'coming' of Jesus, and it is when death and sin will be conquered, not when Jerusalem will be conquered.

Wright continues :-
'Everybody knew that God’s kingdom didn’t refer to a place, perhaps a place called ‘heaven’, where God ruled and to which God’s people would be gathered, well away from the wicked world, at the end of their
lives. Only a Deist could think like that. God’s kingdom, said Jesus, was coming, and people should pray for it to come, on earth as in heaven; and here he was, on earth, making it happen before people’s very eyes.'

CARR
Surely this contradicts Paul who is convinced that the kingdom of God would only appear at the final resurrection of the dead, not during any destruction of Jerusalem.

WRIGHT
What none of them could figure out, and what even Jesus’ closest associates had difficulty understanding, was what kind of a challenge Jesus intended to pose: what sort of a kingdom he was advancing, and what kind of a king he considered himself to be.


The answers begin to emerge when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem and symbolically purges the Temple, pointing ahead to its imminent destruction.

CARR
Again, why does Paul know nothing of this imminent destruction? Wright makes it the centre of Jesus's teaching. It heralds in God's kingdom.

Why does Paul never realises that the Law was about to be abolished in a BIG way? It makes all his arguments in Romans and Galatians look stupid if the centrepiece of the old Law - the Temple - is about to be demolished, and that Jesus had said so himself.

WRIGHT continues :-
1 Peter 2.9 declares that Christians form a royal priesthood. Well, then,
we conclude, they owe no loyalty to any other royalty or priesthood. On the contrary, says Peter (2.13–17): you must respect the rulers; fear God, honour the Emperor. So, we conclude, he’s saying that earthly rulers are always right. Not so; the next paragraph (2.18–25) discusses what
to do, not when justice is done, but when injustice is done, resulting in suffering.

CARR
1 Peter 2 says 'Show proper respect to everyone: Love the brotherhood of believers, fear God, honor the king.'

How can an apologist like Wright turn clear statements like honour the king into subversive talk that only Jesus was the king and that kings were not to be submitted to? (Wright has just praised Polycarp for not submitting to Caesar)

How can Peter ignore the fact that the Roman Empire had Jesus killed? 1 Peter would certainly have mentioned this fact in talk about emperors.

Wright tries to imply that the next passage (1 Peter 2:18-25) is about earthly rulers in his sense of kings and emperors.

It is not.

It says '18Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. 19For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God.'

1 Peter talks about the suffering of Jesus , not in connection with earthly rulers, but in connection with slave owners.

1 Peter says rulers were sent by God to punish only the wicked (although they killed Christ), and gives the example of Jesus patiently suffering , not to Christians being attacked by emperors, but to slave-owners.

Presumably slave-owners were upset when their slaves converted to the new religion.

But how can Wright turn 1 Peter into a statement even remotely connected with his major thesis that Jesus preached a forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem as a sign that earthly authorities were about to be swept away , to be replaced by the Kingdom of God with Jesus as true Lord?

Perhaps some of our resident Wright-praisers can answer these questions?

Steven Carr

Perhaps I should add that if Wright sees no break between 1 Peter 2's talk of earthly rulers '13Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men:' , and the talk of slave-owners in verse 18, then this is saying that slavery was something approved of by God.

capnkirk

The answer that Occam's razor demands is that Paul didn't know about this prophesy because it is a fabrication of GMark which won't be written for another 18 years after 1 Corinthians.

GMark's prophesy invention (perfectly fulfilled because it wasn't even written until after the fulfilling event) is accepted by Wright because he accepts GMark at face value. Paul died before GMark was written so he didn't have that privilege.

Paul preached that the Law (of the Torah) already HAD been abrogated. His letter to the Galatians (a church HE had founded) was a response to news that other persons had come to Galatia saying that Galatian Christians would have to be circumcised (so these weren't Jews but gentiles). Paul developed two arguments in response to this issue: (1) That he had successfully defended his gospel in debate with James and Peter. AND (2) Since these "Judaizers" had challenged his gospel straightforwardly, it forced Paul to attempt a major revision of the Israel epic. If gentiles did not need to become Jews, how in the world could they claim to be Jews? Paul's strategy was to go back to the stories of Abraham and find a way for them to be able to claim to be "children" of Abraham. Paul's letter is actually a lengthy, passionate, and convoluted argument in support of that claim. It is the earliest recorded revision of Israel's history that tries to align the Christ myth with that history. It is the first systematic argumentation that the covenants foundational to Israel were set in anticipation of the coming of the Christ. And it documents the first serious effort to research the Hebrew scriptures as the way to support such a claim.

Paul's letter to the Romans is a theological essay to an existing church that he had never been to, quite different from his letters to churches where he had been active. Romans is a programmatic essay of the type the Greeks called protreptic, or a reasoned argumentation for a particular philosophical position where Paul repackages the same arguments noted in Galatians to explain how gentiles can claim the benefits of being one of God's chosen people without becoming Jewish and coming under the Law.

From these arguments, it should become clear that they don't impinge on whether Paul did or needed to know that the Law was going to come to an end in a big way at all. He had already outflanked that issue completely.

__________________
Enterprise...OUT.

Steven Carr

It still is hard to explain why Paul spends so much time talking about the Law and ignores the biggest reason why the Law has been abolished.

In Galatians 4, Paul writes 'Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says?' He then uses allegory about Hagar and Isaac to argue that the present Jerusalem is in slavery (to the Law presumably).

Why not use the cornerstone of Jesus's teachings, rather than a rather contrived allegory?

It is , naturally, because there was no such prophesy by Jesus against Jerusalem, and our resident Wright-defenders have gone very silent on the issue.

Or is that an argument from silence?