NT Wright's Lambeth lecture about scriptural authority reveals his exaggerated view of humanity's importance

At the decennial Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, traditionalist English bishop N.T. Wright (known as Tom) gave a lecture yesterday about the authority of Scripture. He reportedly spoke to a packed house. The lecture is worth reading in its entirety; it's a wonderful blend of erudition and foolishness. (Hat tip: Thinking Anglicans.)

An unsupportably-provincial view of history

Bishop Wright urges us to read the Bible as though it were a five-act play. Hmm, an interesting concept. He says the play has "Creation and Fall as the first two acts, then Israel, then Jesus himself, and then the act in which we ourselves are still living, whose final scene we know from passages like Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 21 and 22."

In other words, according to Wright, the story of the universe revolves around a collection of tribes wandering the land bridge between northeast Africa and southwest Asia. The climactic event — the execution of one Jesus of Nazareth, and its aftermath — has already occurred.  Since then, all the universe has been killing time waiting for the grand finale.

We're familiar with this view of history, of course. For nearly 2,000 years, that's been the narrative taught by the church.

The church fathers might have been excused for taking such a provincial view. In their day, humanity knew virtually nothing about the universe outside the earth's atmosphere. We knew nothing at all about the origins of our planet, and of our species. (Correction:  What we thought we knew was proved inadequate by later-revealed evidence.)  Indeed, it's not evident that the fathers, so focused on Israel and its putative history, were much aware even of other human cultures to be found in, say, China, India, and the Americas. The Jerusalem church fathers been taught that Israel was the Chosen People, and (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) that's all they needed to know, except of course "Christ and Him crucified."

We of today can't justify taking such a narrow, self-centered view of history. Unlike the church fathers, we know that on our planet alone, all kinds of diverse peoples each have their own history, and there's no plausible reason to privilege any particular one of those histories as the essential narrative of the creation.

Let's also consider that it might not be just our own planet that deserves our attention on this point. Astronomers are busily discovering planets orbiting other stars; it's estimated that some 10% of sun-like stars may have planets.  And we're fairly confident that what we used to think of as "the Sun" is but one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and that our galaxy is but one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies. Our observations (for example, this week's discovery of water on Mars) give us reason to think that the conditions for life may well exist on more than just our planet.

With all this in mind, you don't have to be a cultural relativist to be unconvinced that the folk tales of a single small people are truly the central narrative of the universe. Bishop Wright seems content to assume that it is, however, and that nothing else we have learned about the history of the universe is of any real consequence.  His Lambeth lecture reveals what Paul Zahl might call an extraordinarily-high anthropology; others might refer to it less charitably as cultural egotism.

For hundreds of years, humanity has been blessed with the steadily-increasing ability to observe the reality God wrought. We've likewise been blessed with inspirations about how those observations can be fitted together into coherent, testable models of the universe. Moreover, it seems eminently reasonable to conjecture that we are expected to put these gifts into the service of the continuing creation.

Yet the church insists on continuing to espouse an overly-simplistic narrative based on an exaggerated view of humanity's importance in the cosmic scheme of things. At best, this is self-indulgence; at worst, a breach of the First Commandment.

Wright's strong point: The unfinished narrative

Bishop Wright does come close to making an excellent point:  He argues that:

... scripture offers precisely the unfinished narrative of God’s heaven-and-earth project, God’s great design, as Paul puts it, echoing the Law and the Prophets, to join everything in heaven and earth into one in Christ. And the unfinished narrative functions like an unfinished play, in which those who belong to Jesus Christ are now called to be the actors, taking forward the drama towards its intended conclusion.

Within that unfinished play, he says, we human actors are supposed to be improvisers, "which as any musician knows doesn’t mean playing out of tune or out of time but rather discerning what is appropriate in terms of the story so far and the story’s intended conclusion."

Comments

[Russell Roberts]

If God's people are defined by faith (and they are), then you are certainly not one of them.

[Chris Demaree]

Re: Russell,

Contrary to what many seem to think, faith need not be blind; rather it is a strong conviction or belief based on very personal experiences; or, for those lucky enough to be so blessed, it is a gift of the Spirit. We do not always have insight into why others believe what they do, which is what makes it seem like a "trust me."

My own faith long ago passed from "this sounds plausible" to "I am convinced," and yet I still have no "proof" I could hold up for scientific scrutiny.

The faith we as Christians hold so dear is in the very personal relationship we have established with our Lord and savior, not the specifics of the history of one people; that simply provides additional context. I believe that difference is really the point of the post, though it goes out of the way to make it.

Also, we as God's people are not simply defined by faith. What remains is faith, hope, and love... and the greatest of these is love. A little compassion and understanding for the faith of others is not just a liberal hippie position, it is our calling. It is our actions based on faith, hope, and love that truly define us as Christians.

YBIC,
Chris

[bls]

Actually, D.C.: the evidence, so far, is completely on the side of the geo-centrists.

So according to science itself, we are completely justified in taking the view that human life on earth is very important - unless, of course, we are operting merely on our own unsupported faith.

[D. C. Toedt]

BLS, I think you mean "geoexceptionalists," not "geocentrists" (at least literally). The evidence to which you refer is known as Fermi's Paradox; in May of this year I wrote a post about a recent thumbsucker piece on that subject by Nick Bostrom of Oxford University:

That we have not detected signs of intelligent life elsewhere, says Bostrom, suggests that there is a Great Filter that has prevented life from making it that far into space. The filter could be that life itself is extremely hard to get started. That would be good news for us, inasmuch as we've already made it past that hurdle; it would mean that the Great Filter lies behind us in our existence as a species.

The bad news would be if life proved comparatively easy to start, but difficult to sustain long enough to colonize interstellar space. This implies that existential doom may well await us in the future.

In other words, the evidence doesn't quite suggest that humans are exceptional, but only that the absence of evidence of extraterrestrial cultures is puzzling.

And even if humans were exceptional in the cosmos, that still wouldn't justify the Judeo-Christian assumption that certain tales told about one tiny segment of humanity comprise the essential story of the Creation.