N.T. Wright Chapter 15 - The Truth of the Gospel and Christian Living.

WORSHIP AND MISSION. In his portion of the book's conclusion, Wright makes a more personal and powerful statement. It is in daily living that understanding all the preceeding debate comes together. He sees the two poles of this as worship and mission. His statements are so excellent that this summary generously uses his own words. "Glad, rich worship of the God revealed in Jesus invites outsiders to come in, welcomes them, nourishes them, and challenges them." Together these two create a "context for .. Christian living" that he discusses under 4 headings: spirituality, theology, politics, and healing.

SPIRITUALITY.includes "the various practices of prayer, meditation, contemplation, spiritual reading, and the like that have characterized Christians from the very beginning." It is deeply rooted in Judaism, this meaning devotion to the creator, it is is sacramental and not magical. Christian spirituality is focued on Jesus, the messiah of Israel, believing the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history to be one and the same. It looks to the world in love, and is not self-centered. "The Christian is called to love the world as God loves the world, joyfully celebrating its beauty, its majesty, its curious detail, its flahes of divine glory - and bitterly grieving over its wounds, its horror, it tragedy, its crucifixions."

THEOLOGY."Christian theology from the first was oriented toward both worship and mission.." "The key issue in all theology is how to speak truly of God." "... a quite shocking claim is proposed: not that we know what the word God means ... ; rather that, by close attention of Jesus himself, we are invited to discover, perhaps for the first time, just who the crator and covenant God was and is all along." "My point remains that the genre of the gospels, and of the individual stories in which Jesus figures, lies along the continuum of history and beiography, not of parable." "Whether the stories really did happen is another (and very difficult) matter; but everyone who told them thought that they did."

POLITICS. "... the Enlightenment offered a way of peace, though at a cost: make religion a matter of private opinion, and we will sort out the world without reference to God." " ...leaving the powerful, the politicians, the imperialists, and the industrialists to carve up the world how they wanted." "The Jesus of whom I have written stands over against all such split-level universes. I come back full circle to my opening chapter: within Jesus' world, and his message and ministry, God's sphere and the human sphere belong inseparably together. Thy kingdom come, he taught us to pray, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. ... in the here and now. ... That language, both then and now, enters the arena known as politics, and any attempt to remove it from that arena falsifies and belittles it."

HEALING. "By healing I mean a wide range of phenomena. Physical healing, certainly; but also psychological healing, inner healing, healing of memories, and the like; and also the healing of societies and institutions." "Thus the church is called to be for the world what Jesus was for Israel: not just a moral lecturer, nor even a moral example, but the people who, in obedience to God's strange vocation learn to suffer and pray at the place where the world is in pain, so that the world may be healed."

JESUS AND INTEGRATION. Wright uses the word integration to sum it all up. He means to integrate the pre and post Easter Jesus. He notes that Christians may attempt 1 or 2 or even 3 of the 4 aspects above, but total integration of all 4 is the goal. He means to integrate history and faith. Then he asks what is the end of this endeavor. Surely not just a new set of pat answers, but to find new life and direction to our worship and mission.

Summary notes - Jock McTavish

26 November, 2000