Nov 24 2007
Paul and the politics of the Wright
Despite the plethora of posts about the SBL, most of the lucky bibliobuggers who were there have said comparatively little about the content of what was actually delivered and a great deal about food, hotels, book-buying and weather conditions. One of the few remarked on debates/presentations was that between Tom Wright and John Barclay, by Loren Rosson and Mark Goodacre among others. The good news is that there’s an opportunity to listen to this (scroll to the bottom), and I intend to take it soon.
The other big issue around involving Tom Wright is nothing to do with SBL, but is the ongoing reaction against his work on Paul by those of a conservative Reformed view. I commented briefly on this here. In listening to some of the debate on Wright’s version of the New Perspective, one is struck, over and over, by the way in which Wright seems to be doing a better job of appealing to sola scriptura in articulating his views, while his opponents are found to be reiterating the tradition they’ve received. As I noted before, Jacob Paul Breeze, who sadly has given up blogging, commented delightfully:
If you observed the art on the two Dr.’s books you’ll see the presuppositions: Piper has Luther on the cover and Wright has Paul on the cover.
It strikes me that Wright’s argument for Paul’s coded references to empire, which has always seemed a little over-egged to me, is the negative flip-side of Wright’s sola scriptura emphasis. He wants, in my view rightly, to encourage Christians to reflect on the serious political implications of the gospel. Rather than appeal to broader and more theological work, he chooses to find them encoded in Paul’s language, so he can present them as “what the Bible teaches” in a straightforwardly expository way. The problem is, of course, that once his exegesis is unpicked, then it looks as though he’s lost the political implications. There are all sorts of ways in which Wright is not a conventional or straightforward evangelical, but in this overemphasis on finding everything in the “plain”(!) text of scripture, he surely looks like one.