Insights from N.T. Wright's Inaugural Lecture: Imagining the Kingdom of God

Last night I had the opportunity to listen to Professor Tom Wright (a.k.a. N.T. Wright) give his Inaugural Lecture as Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity here at the University of St Andrews. Professor Wright has actually been at the university a year now and has previously given major public addresses here, but I guess this one is more official.

I share here my notes from the lecture. Please be aware that the following is based on rather skimpy hand-written notes, and so does not do justice to Wright’s elegant and precise handling of the English language, but I hope I have preserved the thrust of his arguments.  The speech was entitled:  ”Imagining the Kingdom: Mission and Theology in early Christianity.”

Wright begins by outlining how the four Gospels are remarkable documents that are still largely unknown to us. We are failing to understand the thrust of the Gospels. We need to apply our imagination and look beyond the boundaries of the various philosophies that guide our views.

–

(Wright will present a fresh thesis about the Gospels)

The Gospels all tell the story of Jesus as “how God became King.” They are talking about the setting up of a theocracy over the world. Westerners react strongly to the idea of a theocracy, but this is what is meant by the talk of the “Kingdom of God” in the Gospels. The idea was that the kings of the worldly nations would be replaced with God as king. The notion of the Kingdom of God does not relate to a heavenly kingdom alone, as some have thought — we remember Jesus’ desire for things to be “on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

–

Wright suggested that we should understand that the Gospels are biographies and that they do describe life in the early Church, despite the continued claims of some to the contrary. The story of Jesus doesn’t come out of thin air, but is the continuation and climax of the story of Israel. There is narrative continuity here — history may be cyclical, but it is also moving progressively toward an end — the Messianic age. Many Second Temple documents reflect this idea, including Ezra and Daniel. In Daniel, we have the expectation of the coming of the Messiah after 490 years. Different groups had different ways of calculating this. The Essenes expected it to coincide with the time of King Herod’s death. The Rabbis had a different, later calculation.