N.T. Wright on the Christological “Leap” for Theology

Last updated on: March 21, 2016 at 1:29 am by Michael F. Bird

N.T. Wright on the Christological “Leap” for Theology 2016-03-18T01:03:29-04:00 Michael F. Bird

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I’m habitually reading back over N.T. Wright’s beast PFG and you keep getting hit with these dazzling quotes, like these:

What Paul has done (or what someone else has done, which Paul is here quoting) is [in Cor 8:6] to separate out theos and kyrios, ‘God’ and ‘lord’, in the original prayer [of Deut 6:4], adding brief explanations: ‘God’ is glossed with ‘the father’, with the further phrase about God as source and goal of everything, ourselves included, and ‘lord’ is glossed with ‘Jesus Messiah’, with the further phrase about Jesus as the means of everything, the one through whom all was made, ourselves included. ‘One God (the father), one lord (Jesus Messiah).’ A small step for the language; a giant leap for the theology. Jesus is not a ‘second God’: that would abrogate monotheism entirely. He is not a semi-divine intermediate figure. He is the one in whom the identity of Israel’s God is revealed, so that one cannot now speak of this God without thinking of Jesus, or of Jesus without thinking of the one God, the creator, Israel’s God.

The best word for this might be ‘explosive’. Paul must have known exactly what he was doing. At the centre of his Jewish-style monotheism is a human being who lived, died and rose in very recent memory. Jesus is not a new God added to a pantheon. He is the human being in whom YHWH, Israel’s one and only God, has acted within cosmic history, human history and Israel’s history to do for Israel, humanity and the world what they could not do for themselves. Jesus is to be seen as part of the identity of Israel’s God, and vice versa. Israel had longed for its God to return after his extended absence. Paul, like the writers of the gospels, saw that longing fulfilled in Jesus.

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