I finished reading “The Challenge of Jesus” and since it’s the first book that I’ve read cover-to-cover in quite a while (which is somewhat embarrassing considering the number of books that I’ve started), I’ve decided to do a chapter-by-chapter summary with some brief reflections. Well, that’s not actually the reason. I’m taking the time to do this to make sure that I’ve carefully contemplated the information that I’m to take with me on the retreat this summer, and by forcing myself to express my thoughts in complete sentences in a semi-public way, I will be more successful than if I simply rely on my internal thought processes to reach their appropriate conclusions on their own.
This will be too long if it’s just a single post, so it will be done in a series of posts (which I will hopefully finish).
Chapter 1: The Challenge of Studying Jesus
Wright’s primary thesis is the following: the continuing historical quest for Jesus is a necessary and nonnegotiable aspect of Christian discipleship. After noting some level of controversy as to what that might mean (and I do not think it should be all that controversial), he goes on to lay out several reasons for the necessity of this “quest.”
I find his fourth reason, “the Christian commitment to mission,” to be the most compelling. If it is true that Christians are supposed to communicate some sort of message from Jesus to the rest of the world, then it makes sense that we be fully informed about who Jesus was and is, what he said and did, and what it all means. And if we believe that Jesus was a historical person, living in a first century Jewish world, shouldn’t the Jesus we’re putting forth include that first century Jew complete with his own first century context, and not some 21st century re-imagining of the first century Jew? Yes, we do need to put Jesus into a 21st century context so that it can be understood by the 21st century world, and Jesus is alive and active in this 21st century world, but everything is (or at least should be) grounded in the reality of the message of the historical person of Jesus, who is confined to a narrow slice of time and space. (I’m reminded of Dr. Bob Pratt from First Baptist Church in San Diego who had an entire lesson titled “Think like a Hebrew, not like a Greek.”)
Wright spends the next few pages talking about the influence of the Enlightenment on contemporary Christian thought. I think he’s actually drawing some rather deep ideas or insight into play here, but it’s a little lost on me. I think I lack a sufficient historical perspective on the Enlightenment to really connect with the observations. The primary conclusion is simply emphasizing that we need to see the first century Jesus in his own first century context.
This leads to the next point, which is a question of what useful statements can be made about Jesus? It’s clearly not a task of idle speculations about Jesus. As a historian, he wants to take look at Jesus from the point of view of a historian. This means drawing from a large background of extra-biblical knowledge. But it also means admitting that there might be some errors that have crept into Christian thought during the last two millennia. To be clear, this is understood in the sense that what we think of Christianity today is almost surely not precisely what the first disciples thought of Christianity. There might be ways that we understand certain passages which turn out to be different from what the original speaker (ie, Jesus) meant. And the only way to fix these things is to pay close attention to who Jesus was and who he was speaking to; that is, we must know the historical context.
He closes the chapter with 5 questions that he wants to address in the book:
1) Where does Jesus belong within the Jewish world of his day?
2) What, in particular, was his preaching of the kingdom all about? What was he aiming to do?
3) Why did Jesus die? In particular, what was his own intention in going to Jerusalem that last fateful time?
4) Why did the early church begin, and why did it take the shape it did? Specifically, of course, what happened at Easter?
5) How does all this relate to the Christian task and vision today? How, in other words, does this historical and also deeply theological approach put fire into our hearts and power into our hands as we go about shaping our world?
