2
" Most Bible-readers of a conservative stamp will look askance at deconstructionism. But its proposed model is in fact too close for comfort to many models implicitly adopted within (broadly speaking) the pietist tradition. The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously—often, in fact, there above all—there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels. The modes of reading and interpretation that have been followed are, in fact, functions of the models of inspiration and authority of scripture that have been held, explicitly or (more often) implicitly within various circles, and which have often made nonsense of any attempt to read the Bible historically. The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelists, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellow in the world of literary epistemology. "
― N.T. Wright , The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #1)
8
" The gospels, then, are ‘myth’ in the sense that they are foundational stories for the early Christian worldview. They contain ‘mythological’ language which we can learn, as historians, to decode in the light of other ‘apocalyptic’ writings of the time. But they have these features because of their underlying, and basically Jewish, worldview. Monotheism of the creational and covenantal variety demands that actual history be the sphere in which Israel’s god makes himself known. But this means that the only language in which Israel can appropriately describe her history is language which, while it does indeed intend to refer to actual events in the space-time universe, simultaneously invests those events with (what we might call) trans-historical significance. Such language is called ‘mythological’, if it is, not because it describes events which did not happen, but because it shows that actual events are not separated from ultimate significance by an ugly ditch, as the whole movement of Deist and Enlightenment thought would suggest, but on the contrary carry their significance within them. "
― N.T. Wright , The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #1)
9
" Increasingly, as early Christianity develops, there is a strong sense that new claims are being made at this fundamental level, not only in language but also in symbol and praxis, not least in the symbolic praxis of reading the Jewish scriptures in a new way: It is the contention of [the New Testament writers] that with the coming of Jesus the whole situation of mankind has so altered as to change the semantic content of the word ‘God’.3 This fact about the New Testament, I suggest, provides one of the best clues to explain why, even when the question of god has not been explicitly raised, these writings have been felt to contain a power and appeal, an intrinsic authority. They are written, in their different ways, to articulate and invite their hearers to share a new worldview which carries at its heart a new view of ‘god’, and even a proposal for a way of saying ‘God’. "
― N.T. Wright , The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #1)
13
" What evokes persecution is precisely that which challenges a worldview, that which up-ends a symbolic universe. It is somewhat threatening to other first-century Jews to regard your community as the true Temple, and perhaps it is just as well to keep such ideas within the walls of an enclosed community in the desert; but since the belief, as held in Qumran, involves an intensification of Torah, the vicarious purification of the Land, the fierce defence of the race, and the dream of an eventually rebuilt and purified physical Temple in Jerusalem itself, one can imagine Pharisees debating it vigorously but not seeking authority from the chief priests to exterminate it. It embodied, after all, too many of the central worldview-features. The equivalent belief as held within Christianity seems to have had no such redeeming features. No new Temple would replace Herod’s, since the real and final replacement was Jesus and his people. No intensified Torah would define this community, since its sole definition was its Jesus-belief.28 No Land claimed its allegiance, and no Holy City could function for it as Jerusalem did for mainline Jews; Land had now been transposed into World, and the Holy City was the new Jerusalem, which, as some Jewish apocalyptic writers had envisaged, would appear, like the horses and chariots of fire around Elisha, becoming true on earth as it was in heaven.29 Racial identity was irrelevant; the story of this new community was traced back to Adam, not just to Abraham, and a memory was preserved of Jesus’ forerunner declaring that Israel’s god could raise up children for Abraham from the very stones.30 Once we understand how worldviews function, we can see that the Jewish neighbours of early Christians must have regarded them, not as a lover of Monet regards a lover of Picasso, but as a lover of painting regards one who deliberately sets fire to art galleries—and who claims to do so in the service of Art.31 "
― N.T. Wright , The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #1)
18
" There is, in fact, an essential irony to Bultmann’s analysis of the material in the gospels. He was right to see apocalyptic language as essentially ‘mythological’, in that it borrows imagery from ancient near eastern mythology to clothe its hopes and assertions, its warnings and fears, in the robes of ultimacy, seeing the action of the creator and redeemer god at work in ‘ordinary’ events. But he was wrong to imagine that Jesus and his contemporaries took such language literally, as referring to the actual end of the space-time universe, and that it is only we who can see through it and discover its ‘real’ meaning. This is the mirror-image of the mistaken idea that the stories about Jesus, which are prima facie ‘about’ Jesus himself, were really, in the sense described above, ‘foundation myths’ and nothing more. Bultmann and his followers have read metaphorical language as literal and literal language as metaphorical. "
― N.T. Wright , The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, #1)
