N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright

1. Jesus is the true messiah - Biblical times, Jewish people expected a Messiah to descend from King David who would comet unite the Jews and save them from the oppressors.

   • Rejects attempts to shrink or rescue the message that Jesus was the true Messiah by viewing him as just a moral teacher.

2. Critical Realsim - How we perceive things.

   • Naïve realsim - sense perception tells us things as they really are.
   • Phenomenalism - we can only know our own perceptions, never things as they really are.
   • Accepts elements of both approaches. Says there is a reality that can be known as separate from ourselves as observers and our own world view, colours of our sense perception and prevents us from seeing objectively.

3. Everyone is affected by a world view as it is the way a culture looks at the world - the symbols or stories we tell to make a sense of universal ideas such as justice, relationships etc.

   • Modern society is influenced by an enlightenment world view. Intellectual novelty shines a light onto facts and history, keeping God distant from the world
   • New Testement world view has a messier relationship with God an the world. Says God is passionately present in history, not big and sepate occasionally intervening. Faith is linked to history and politics.
   • Analogy - Glasses. We look through the lenses, not at them, to see the world. We are aware of the lenses only when something goes wrong and we struggle to see clearly.

4. Wright argues that there should be dialogue between the object we encounter and our world view. - like cleaning glasses and readjusting our view.

   • Historical Jesus was a Jewish prophet, a political figure from a religious tradition that had an eschatological expectation
     • God had a play for the world that was about to be fulfilled. God is involved in Jewish history throughout the covenant between them. By declaring the Kingdom of God, he was initiating a political movement.
   • Jesus believed he was the Messiah.
   • Jesus' death required a reinterpretation of what a messiah was:
     • Rejected violent revolution, drew upon the tradition of Jewish suffering to bring redemption and Jesus himself began to view death as part of messiahship.

5. What is involved in an enlightenment world view? Looking at reason over religious revalation. Take into account more modern findings about the world to from a better idea of religion.

6. How is New Testament world view different? God establishes a covenant with God's people and thinks that it is important and not separated for one another.

7. What does Critical realism require us to do? To recognise that there is a knowledgeable objective reality but that it is interpreted from our own viewpoint.