How God Became King, by N. T. Wright

This post will try to focus on the parts of the book that caught my attention, but it does not intend to be a full book review.

Part of the tragedy of the modern church, I have been arguing, is that the “orthodox” have preferred creed to kingdom, and the “unorthodox” have tried to get a kingdom without a creed. It’s time to put back together what should never have been separated. In Jesus, the living God has become king of the whole world. These books not only tell the story of how that happened. They are the central means by which those who read and pray them can help to make that kingdom a reality in tomorrow’s world. We have misunderstood the gospels for too long. It’s time, in the power and joy of the Spirit, to get back on track.

This is the central idea of the book as it tries to talk to Christians who focus too much on the ancient creeds and forget some major parts of the Bible. We cannot read the Bible through the creeds, otherwise we would put tradition over scriptures. The problem, the author says, is that the creeds were created to focus on the parts with controversies among early Christians, but they morphed into a syllabus of what the church would preach.

The canonical gospels give us a Jesus whose public career radically mattered as part of his overall accomplishment, which had to do with the kingdom of God. The creeds give us a Jesus whose miraculous birth and saving death, resurrection, and ascension are all we need to know.

This part was stuck in my head for some time. Whenever we are asked about the gospels, we often say its main message is that “Jesus came into the world in a virgin birth, died in the cross, resurrected, and ascended into the heaven to be with the Father”. But this is excluding the vast majority of the gospels’ verses! Jesus’ kingdom started with His ministry on Earth and all his teachings and miracles were already part of it. So N. T. Wright tries to get us all back to the forgotten story of the gospels:

My case throughout this book, then, is that all four canonical gospels suppose themselves to be telling the story that Paul, in some of his most central and characteristic passages, tells as well: that the story of Jesus is the story of how Israel’s God became king. This is how, in the events concerning Jesus of Nazareth, the God of Israel has become king of the whole world. This is the forgotten story of the gospels. We have not even noticed that this was what they were trying to tell us. As a result, we have all misread them.

He summarizes the message of the gospels in four main areas:

• The Story of Israel: “The gospel writers saw the events concerning Jesus […] as bringing the long story of Israel to its proper goal. […] The story has been completed — the story of creation, the story of God’s covenant with Israel. Now new creation can begin, as it does immediately afterwards with Jesus’s resurrection.”
• The Story of Israel’s God: “Jesus goes about doing and saying things that declare that Israel’s God is now becoming king — Israel’s dream come true. But Jesus is talking about God becoming king in order to explain the things he himself is doing. He isn’t pointing away from himself to God. He is pointing to God in order to explain his own actions.”
• The Launching of God’s Renewed People: “The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, ‘the Christian Messiah.’ […] It is wrong to imagine that the gospels (or Jesus, for that matter) were concerned with ‘founding the church,’ which is the way some people have said it. There already was a ‘people of God.’”
• The Clash of the Kingdoms: “The difference between the kingdoms is striking. Caesar’s kingdom (and all other kingdoms that originate in this world) make their way by fighting. But Jesus’s kingdom — God’s kingdom enacted through Jesus — makes its way with quite a different weapon, one that Pilate refuses to acknowledge: telling the truth”.

Another very good point is that the kingdom of God is already established through the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is not something to come, some future hope: it is already here. Early Christians realized the kingdom has come in a very different way from what they expected.

And then he gives a very thoughtful explanation on how most of us have misunderstood the “coming of the kingdom” that Jesus mentions in Matthew 16:28: “Some of those standing here will not taste death until they see ‘the son of man coming in his kingdom’”.

An assumption that … is deeply misguided, … that “the coming of the son of man” in the New Testament refers to the “coming” to earth of one presently in heaven. … The text of Daniel 7, which is obviously being invoked at this point, indicates very clearly that the direction of travel is, so to speak, upward, not downward. In Daniel, “one like a son of man,” in other words, “a human figure,” “comes” from earth to heaven to be presented before the “Ancient of Days.” It is a move from suffering and humiliation to enthronement and sovereignty.

I have never read the text in this way and maybe some of you could comment what you think about this interpretation. He finally ends the book with a gospel-centric reading of the Apostle’s creed.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Here the wise worshipper will celebrate the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, knowing that this confession of him as “father” resonates back to the Jewish scriptures

And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord…

[…] “Christ” means “Israel’s Messiah” and that with that title the whole history of Israel is brought into one place — as Paul says, “when the fullness of time arrived” (Gal. 4:4). … When we call Jesus God’s “son,” we not only hail him as the second person of the Trinity, but we celebrate him as the one spoken of in Psalm 2, the one enthroned over the nations of the world. To call Jesus “son” is to celebrate him as the agent of the kingdom of God.

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.

The virginal conception of Jesus thus speaks of the living God coming precisely to establish his sovereignty, dependent on no human agency; the attempt to make Mary’s “Fiat” (“Let it be”) into a kind of equal and opposite contribution to that of God misses the point entirely and makes another that leads us a long way off track. … We must now read the statement of Jesus’s suffering, death, and burial as the climax of this project, rather than some other.

He descended into hell.

And to his death and burial we then join “descended into hell”; those who know the single biblical reference to this (1 Pet. 3:19) know that it is not simply (though it may be this too) a statement of Jesus’s sharing in our worst nightmares. It is principally a statement of Jesus announcing to the “spirits in prison” that through his death God has won the ultimate victory.

The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

If Jesus is the one who is carrying the destiny of Israel, and if Israel is the people who are carrying the ultimate purposes of God to bring his justice and new creation to birth, then the resurrection of Jesus is the launching of the new world in which that justice and new creation have arrived at last, on earth as in heaven.

From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

“From thence”! This is a direct allusion to Philippians 3:20–21, in which Jesus comes “from heaven,” from his place of utter sovereignty, to complete the work of establishing that sovereignty on earth.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins…

The Holy Spirit is given not simply so that God’s redeemed people may be blessed with his presence and love, though that does indeed follow, but so that we may be witnesses to Jesus and his resurrection, so that we may be for the world what Jesus was for Israel. […] “Forgiveness of sins” is not a purely negative term, getting rid of the moral stain and guilt that we all incur, though it is that too. It is the positive presence of God and the Lamb, the Lamb whose shed blood has wiped the record clean.

…the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth — then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the “you” you are at the moment into a being — a full, glorious, physical being — who will be much more truly “you” than you’ve ever been before. Sin, by distorting and downgrading our specific God-given capacities and vocations, makes us more and more alike in our degradation. Jesus makes us more and more alive in our uniqueness, and the resurrection will complete that in a great act of new creation.

I hope you have find this helpful, either for you to decide to read the book, or as a way to summarize the ideas in it. I have given a 5-star review of this book in Goodreads and definitely recommend to the ones seeking to read the gospels better.

Please, make your comments below and tell me what I need to improve in my text. I hope to have more posts in the near future. I am currently reading “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview”, but as this is a very deep technical book in philosophy, so I’m reading it slowly. That said, I’ll probably start another (easier) one in the next days. Stay tuned!