Scripture and the Authority of God

This is a remarkable little book. I have a few tiny quibbles here and there, but I cannot argue with how forcefully and how well Wright's perspectives are argued. I appreciate how he tries to navigate a middle way between the extremes of right and left. The historical survey of how people have viewed scripture is somehow both robust and succinct, and he makes sure to show how both fundamentalism and deconstruction fall short of their stated aims and actually closer to one another than they think.

I knock a star off the rating for two reasons. First, I still think the book is a little longer than it needs to be. This book is an expansion of an incredible article that Wright wrote in the '80s, I believe. And that article contains most all of the most important points found here. Other than a few historical sections and answering some rebuttals, I don't see how his additions here were worth a whole book's length project.

Secondly, I don't know if Wright really has answered the question of the relationship between God's authority and scripture. He definitely gives a beautiful account for how we can live and treat scripture with the assumption that it is authoritative in some sense. And he effectively shows how other accounts of this relationship are inadequate even as they are full of their own certitude. But still, he doesn't quite nail down how this authority functions through scripture. He makes it a point time and again to say that scripture itself does not have the authority, but God exercises his own authority through it. This is undoubtedly right. But he doesn't get much more specific than that, I feel. Maybe he does, and it is pretty subtle. But the exact theological mechanics are still a mystery, and they may always be.

My one other quibble here is that he makes that same move that a lot of fundamentalists do where they assume that anytime the Bible says the phrase “word of God”, we can automatically apply that to the written Canon of scripture we have with us today. I think that is a huge error that leads to a lot of bad theology around scripture. Sometimes, when scripture says this, it is talking about the law in one sense or another. Sometimes it's referring to a very specific word that God spoke at a specific time. Sometimes it is the word of the prophets. Sometimes it is simply talking about the way that God communicates his presence to us and guides us in a more mystical sense and not in literal written words. But obey and over again, Wright here cites versus to support his claims that I do not think are talking about scripture. Again, this is more of a quibble than a broad criticism, but it's hard for me to know exactly where his tendency to do this may have led to conclusions I otherwise disagree with.

But still, I am so grateful that NT Wright is around and is offering the church books like this. In spite of any of my disagreements, I would not hesitate to put this book in the hand of any Christian or person seeking a framework to understand these questions. He is clear, he is faithful, he is balanced, and he refuses to settle for easy answers to complex questions. If every Christian used this book as their starting point for their theology of scripture, then subsequent adjustments or refinements would be much healthier and much more helpfully done.

Short review: This is the best theology book I have read this year. What I appreciate about Wright is that he is not just an academic, he is a pastor. You can tell from his writing that his real interest is in serving the church. This is a re-working of his 2005 book “The Last Word”. The main text is not supposed to be much different from The Last Word, but Wright added two chapters at the end to help illustrate how we should work our in real life a scriptural issue. The two chapters are about the Sabbath and Monogamy vs Polygamy in marriage. These are not pressing controversial issues for most people so I think he does a good job of helping people really think through how to read scripture and how to understand the whole of scripture.


My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/scripture-authority-wright/