where Wright goes wrong.

for the last year or so, i have sloooowly been making my way through N.T. Wright's massive trilogy (which, as i understand it, is about to become a tetrology and then hopefully his predicted pentology).

well, mostly i've been working my way through the first volume, when school and life have been giving me time off.  but now i'm on to the second! yay me.  and i've had some of his other books as textbooks for classes.  anyway.

he has a lot of good things to say.  in the late 20th century line of bringing in the jewish background to the new testament and taking it seriously, his scholarship is nearly unmatched and he brings a much-needed corrective to white, european, christian views of the bible and themselves.

but there are places where i disagree with him, and i think it's because... he's not jewish enough.  he is a white, european christian, and not only that, but a bishop in an established state church.  and as he points out himself, you can never remove a person or an author from their context.  and i think it's this context that leads him to make some mistakes in his biblical interpretation.  i am giving him the benefit of the doubt here and not speculating that he purposely interprets things to give his own situation the best standing :)

but here is an example.  in his book Jesus and the Victory of God, he takes the parable of the prodigal son and interprets it so that it will function as a paradigmatic narrative for his whole project in the book.  except the interpretation just doesn't work.

Wright insists that the parable would have been heard by its 1st century CE jewish audience, and especially the pharisees that Luke refers to, as the narrative of israel's exile and restoration, and an indictment of those who stayed in the land.  the prodigal son, Wright says, represents the exiled israel who strayed from faithfulness in contrast to the faithful remnant who remained in the land.  Wright sees this as supported by the narratives in Ezra and Nehemiah, as well as other 2nd temple jewish literature.

"Israel went into exile because of her own folly and disobedience, and is now returning simply because of the fantastically generous, indeed prodigal, love of her god... Those who grumble at what is happening are cast in the role of the Jews who did not go into exile, and who opposed the returning people... There are, perhaps, other echoes, of quarrels between two brothers which left the younger vindicated and the elder angry and disinherited" (Jesus and the Victory of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1996) 127).

i am not sure that this works.  for one, the parable of the prodigal son is placed next to two other parables of losing, searching, and finding.  the three parables in luke 15 emphasize the search for anyone who is lost.  in telling these parables to the pharisees, Jesus seems to be reinforcing his statement from luke 5 that "it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."  instead of creating a pure in-group, like the qumran community or the pharisees, instead Jesus is extending full citizenship in his new society to everyone, even those who are traitors to their own community.

but there's even a bigger problem.   Wright's project is to investigate the beginnings of the church, and establish "the church" as "the people of god."  he is softly and gently supersessionist.  in order to maintain his interpretation of the prodigal son that maintains the younger son as the favoured one of god, he has to ignore one clearly explicit line in the parable:

"‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”  

the older son is not disinherited, and quite explicitly not disinherited.  everything the father has is his, and his status as only heir is maintained.  there is no inheritance left for the younger son.  he has taken it and spent it.  he has only his father's ridiculous, generous, prodigal love and grace.  but he has no future outside of that, for the rest of the inheritance is explicitly given to the older son.

this parable is anything but supersessionist.  the older son is not replaced.  instead, against all law, custom, and normal human feeling, the family is expanded to include the one who cast them off and left.  i believe Wright is correct in seeing the parable as a story of exile and redemption, but i don't think it's israel's story.  or rather, it's only israel's story insofar as since the return from exile, israel has become obsessed with who is in and who is out, with observing boundaries and purity.  Jesus is casting all that aside and claiming that not only is it the impure and traitors who must be welcomed as siblings into the family, but also, as the younger son was forced to feed pigs, gentiles.  no one is cast aside in this parable.  those who stand outside, stiff and angry and insulted, stand outside of their own choice, and they miss the party.  but they are not cast aside.  this parable won't allow that reading.