N.T. Wright and Bart Ehrman: New Stories and Resurrection (Part 2 of 2 by Melvin Bray)
[Continued from part 1]
I pondered what I might offer to spotlight the significance of such a dialogue and the future it foretells. Then I ran across this exegesis of Luke's account of the evening of Jesus' resurrection. It's by Debbie Blue.
With the wryest of humor, Blue contextualizes the two men walking the road to Emmaus, which may be tantamount to saying they were heading nowhere fast, considering scholars haven't been able to confirm the existence of an actual town named Emmaus. (What an amazing metaphor for our despair in the face of suffering, and the difficulty of being reconciled to each other and God afterwards.) The two men meet a stranger along the way who asks them why they are aggrieved. Their response is to almost reprimand the stranger's cluelessness: "Do you not know what happened this weekend. We lost hope." To which the stranger replies with reciprocal exasperation, "Did you not know that the whole story has been driving toward this irredeemable act of shared suffering—the death of God—so that the unprecedented hope of resurrection might come?"
Blue says it this way:
Jesus is like, 'Fools and slow of hear to believe. Can't you see that this all had to happen: that the mechanisms of the social order that lead to violence had to be undone, the self-deceptive and ferocious need to make ourselves out as innocent, the rat race, the ladder climbing, the fear of a violent God who demands blood and vengeance? Can't you see that all that had to be undone? You're free! Quit holding onto the bars and rattling them. The cage doors are open; walk out.' Jesus comes back from a wholly different place than they've ever been, and he walks right up to them and he reveals a whole new story. [Yet they don't recognize it.]
He walks with them, and they stop just shy of nowhere. And Jesus doesn't lecture them, judge them, condemn them, dislike them. He doesn't express a sense of betrayal and disappointment. He doesn't talk about how hopeless and ugly the whole lot of humanity is. He breaks bread. And he feeds them. And he tells them to go out and preach mercy to the world.
He becomes present to these people, people totally caught up, as we all are, in the reigning social, political and economic structures, in order to help them see or live or feel an alternative—to help them die and live again. He becomes present so that little by little they will be enabled to walk out of the cages… So that they might be able to tell new stories instead of the same old predictable stories…
The bread has been broken and the bread's been blessed. It may not seem like it, but we're free to get off the road and eat.
Ehrman and Wright may have very different ideas of what suffering in life means and address it with different hopes of what is to come. But like Brian McLaren, I too am immensely glad both men have entered into dialogue—giving us a beautiful example of how to jump off the road to Emmaus, share a meal with a stranger and write new, life-giving stories together.
Melvin Bray is a devoted husband, committed father, learner, teacher, writer, storyteller, lover of people, connoisseur of creativity, seeker of justice, purveyor of sustainability and believer in possibilities. As founder of Kid Cultivators, he lives, loves, works and dreams with friends in Atlanta, Georgia.
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Comments
Thank you Melvin. Even in the midst of a futile dialogue it really is great to be reminded of that signature breaking of the bread.
Posted by: frankie | May 2, 2008 3:26 PM
Your story brings "thinking out of the box" to my mind. However, the story of the Emmaus trip by the two perplexed walkers and Jesus is not about "thinking out of the box" on the subject of the resurrection; nor is the"breaking of the bread" a solution. The story of ressurection of Jesus by Jesus is what Jesus was affirming them, personally, because their reasonable minds were unwilling to accept the illogical fact: Jesus rose from the dead. To us, the challenge in our times, is not about diloguing on the subject of the ressurection and feel good about our willingness to tolerate our different perspectives on God and sufferings. As it was on the road to Emmaus, it would help us to derail from focusing on our misseries and focus on "Jesus."
Posted by: CH Lee | May 5, 2008 12:15 AM
I very much enjoyed the dialogue between Wright and Ehrman. Melvin, I think you made some interesting comments, but I disagree with you and the others that Ehrman somehow missed Wright's point. I think he acknowledged Wright's very powerful and moving interpretation of the meaning of human suffering within the context of the resurrection. However, his point was that, even if you ascribe to Wright's view of resurrection, you still have to deal with all of the Scripture which undeniably explains human suffering as punishment. I have never felt that these horrendous acts of God could be explained by simply putting them into the context of a unified narrative of Scripture which wraps up everything neatly and sort of washes God clean of the blood of innocent children. This has always created a real dilemma for me as a believer because it's truly hard to love a God who would act in that way. Nevertheless, the Christian faith is about a relationship with God, which requires love for God from his people. Jesus?--easy to love; the Hebrew God at any point in history except when He acted through Jesus?---not so easy.
Posted by: Brooks von Biberstein | May 5, 2008 5:13 PM
This is a little beside the point, but a former pastor of mine once pointed out that, 20 centuries of Christian art to the contrary, the "two disciples" on the road to Emmaus, who invite Jesus to "their" home to break bread with them, were probably a couple, a man and a wife, not two men.
This makes so much sense to me that I find it shocking that it never occurred to me earlier. I'm not a believer in a Da Vinci Code-like conspiracy by the church to keep women down, but it's nevertheless upsetting that small insults like assuming the "two disciples" are both male have been so enduring over time.
Posted by: sangerinde | May 5, 2008 5:50 PM
I just want to add in response to the comment from CH Lee: I appreciate your faith and what I presume to be your aversion to wallowing in misery. I agree that merely focusing on misery is not helpful. However, I think that the approach proposed by you--stop focusing on misery and focus on Jesus--might not really work for some people, for this reason: "Focusing on Jesus" means, for me at least, helping "the least of these." This, in turn, leads to direct and constant confrontation with human suffering. So it's very difficult to focus on Jesus without focusing on human anguish. The resurrection does go a long way toward sort of puzzling out the nature of God with regard to human suffering, but it does not, for me, completely resolve the discomfort I feel about a God who would act in the way the Bible says He acts. And I think lots of believers probably have feelings similar to mine on this issue, so perhaps dialogue about this particular issue is not really a waste of time for us. Instead, maybe such dialogue is a kind of reaching out--a search for others who deeply desire to be able to love God with all their hearts but who stumble in this quest because they are grappling with this issue.
Posted by: Brooks | May 6, 2008 2:50 PM
sangerinde, thank you so much for that insight. i struggle to divorce myself from the sexism that unconsciously invades my reading of scripture.
brooks, i can appreciate how hard it is to be comfortable with the traditional interpretations of the God of the OT. i dare say we all should be very uncomfortable with anyone who commits the random acts of violence often attributed to GOD.
many have tried to better understand the God of the OT. walter brueggeman calls GOD a recovering domestic abuser. as he explains in his dialogue with ehrman, wright sees GOD as interacting and responsive to human suffering rather than the source of it. neither ignores suffering, but sees it working differently than many have in the past.
one way some have arrived at a different reading of scripture is by recognizing the way narrative (story) works to form and inform a community. even inspired narrative honors the conventions of good story. story is contextual (time, place, culture). story has point of view (sometimes the author's, sometimes GOD's, sometimes the protagonist/antagonist). story has plot progression (which means that there are things learned by the end and along the way that were not understood in the beginning). story doesn't always work in a straightforward manner (there is imagery and irony and the "good guy" is not always the protagonist). and story not alone memorializes, but often deconstructs/reconstructs what previously a community thought it knew.
this last thing is something that has truly become poignant to me this past week. i don't know how i missed it before, but i am now fascinated by the way the 2nd half of the book of Jonah totally deconstructs the 1st. a friend of mine recently noted that the story of abraham negotiating with GOD for sodom is a much younger story than that of lot on the eve of sodom's destruct, and it deconstructs the concept of the innocent dying for the sake of the guilty, by offering an alternative of the guilty being saved for the sake of the innocent. these have me wondering to what extent perhaps the hebrew sacrificial system might have been intended to deconstruct the canaanite systems of sacrifice. such an interpretation would add to rationale of GOD repeatedly saying, "I take no delight in sacrifice."
my point is that this isn't just a way of seeing one bible story differently (i.e. the resurrection), it is a different (missional) way of seeing the whole biblical narrative--each and all. the goal isn't to put it all "into the context of a unified narrative of Scripture which wraps up everything neatly and sort of washes God clean of the blood of innocent children" (i'm suspicious of that myself), but the hope is to be as intellectually honest as we can about these stories handed down to us (even to the point of saying, "i don't know" about them), forcing ourselves to grapple with the issues such honesty creates, instead of struggling in perpetuity to make strawmen out of skeptics and "unbelievers".
again, i am drawn to a sermon by debbie blue that grapples with this kind of thing very well in my opinion:
http://www.houseofmercy.org/content/view/315/40/.
Posted by: melvin bray | May 8, 2008 9:07 PM
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