The Mission of God X

In his zeal to show the continuity between the testaments, Wright has not (to my mind) sufficiently accounted for the difference between them. Marcionitism was attractive precisely because it has a point: in Christ, something new comes to pass. Or at least, the themes and concerns of the Old Testament are presented in a surprising new way. This is true of Wright’s particular emphasis on mission. It is precisely because of the revelation of Christ that it becomes possible to read the Old Testament in the light of mission. That this is an emphasis of the Old Testament becomes apparent on a re-reading of this text after the fact of the encounter with the New Testament. If reading the New Testament must be a canonical business, then so also must reading of the Old.[1] It simply will not do to read off a concept or theme found in the Old Testament, and apply it to the church without careful theological qualification. The church is not Israel. Wright is of course well aware of the danger of this kind of application. He insists: ‘[W]e are not Old Testament Israelites living within a theocratic covenant bound by Old Testament law’ (see p. 304-5). He rightly complains about the tendency of liberation theologians to do this with the exodus. But I am not convinced that he himself has completely evaded it. Especially, this comes into play in his discussion of the jubilee, one of his favourite biblical themes (p. 290ff). Wright says: ‘Mission belongs to God - the biblical God. The message of mission is to be drawn from the whole of God's biblical revelation. So we cannot simply relegate the powerful message of events such as the exodus or institutions like the jubilee to a bygone era. They are an integral part of the biblical definition of God's idea of redemption and of God's requirement on his redeemed people’. (p. 306) Certainly, Wright is right: relegation is not an option for a full-orbed biblical theology. But how are we to handle the transition between the social legislation directed to Israel and the era of the Church? Wright’s response to that question would be that the New Testament explicitly declares some Old Testament material to have been provisional – the food laws, for example, and the sacrificial system. There is an explicit rationale for our nonobservance of these ‘matters’ (p. 305). In other words, for Wright, ritual requirements are made particular to Israel’s own identity in time and space; whereas, the ethical principles gleaned from the Old Testament are universalised. But can this distinction be so easily sustained from reading the Old Testament itself? Wright seems to overlook the fact that the Jubilee itself was not merely an ethical teaching or principle, but precisely a ritual practice with an ethical and theological meaning that Israel was to engage in on regular occassions. Which is to say: the line between ceremonial and ethical command is not so easily drawn as Wright imagines. The critique of the latter prophets was not against ritual practice per se but against ritual practice set against a context of injustice and idolatry. Isn’t the charge that is frequently made against Calvin’s division of the law into moral, ceremonial and civil law – that it is an arbitrary division not found in the text, which for its part simply speaks of the whole as torah – also a charge that can be made to Wright’s proposed reading of the Old Testament ethical material? Certainly, many theologians in the history of the church have made proposals for criterion by which the Old Testament material ought to be received by Christians A further query I have along these lines is as to what Wright makes of holy war in the Old Testament. The relationship of Israel to the other nations surrounding her was frequently marked by armed struggle at the command of Yhwh. If there was an international perspective on view it was that that the defeat of the nations and their submission to the Lord’s anointed one was to be the way in which Israel would carry her mission to the nations. There was then a definite negative side to Israel’s mission: she was not merely the bearer of divine blessing to the nations, but also the bringer of divine curses. This too had been promised in the Abrahamic covenant of course. How is this negative aspect of the mission translated into the era of the church?