The Slavery of Death: Part 18, N.T. Wright on Christus Victor

A lot of people are listing N.T. Wright's recent book Simply Jesus on their "Best Books" lists for 2011. I agree, it's a great book and a lot of the book nicely supplements the work we've been doing in this series, particularly the work with Christus Victor theology. Recall, in the last few posts we've been thinking about the role of "the satanic" in human relations through the work of Walter Wink and William Stringfellow (and earlier in this series the Church Fathers and Eastern Orthodox theology).

What is the book Simply Jesus about? Simply stated (he he!), the book is trying to get into the head of Jesus. What did Jesus think he was doing during his life and ministry? How did he see himself? How did he envision his task? That's the question the book starts off with. The very opening lines:

Jesus of Nazareth poses a question and a challenge two thousand years after his lifetime. The question is fairly simple: who exactly was he? This includes the questions, What did he think he was up to?...

You'll have to read the book to find out all the in's and out's of the answers to that question. What I'd like to do is underline the Christus Victor themes from the book that supplement and reinforce what we've been talking about in this series. Specifically, Wright argues, rightly in my opinion, that Jesus primarily saw himself as doing battle with the devil.

1 John 3.8b
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

This conflict was framed by the Second Exodus expectations that Jesus invoked as he described his life and ministry. As Wright describes it, the Exodus story had seven themes:

1. Wicked tyrant
2. Chosen leader
3. Victory of God
4. Rescue by sacrifice
5. New vocation and way of life
6. Presence of God
7. Promised/inherited land

By invoking this story, in announcing the inauguration of a Second Exodus, Jesus uses the seven themes (the Exodus narrative/paradigm) to describe his own life, teachings, and eventual death and resurrection.

So the question becomes who is the "Wicked tyrant"? Who is playing the part of Pharaoh in Jesus's dramatic retelling of the Exodus?

For a lot of the Jews Rome and Caesar would have been the obvious contender. But as we know, Jesus didn't say much of anything about Roman occupation and oppression.

So who is Pharaoh?

Well, this is where the Christus Victor themes come in. Here is Wright, after many chapters working through New Exodus material, finally turning to the battle with the Wicked tyrant:

[W]herever we look, it appears that Jesus was aware of a great battle in which he was already involved and that would, before too long, reach some kind of climax.

This was not, it seems, the battle that his contemporaries, including his own followers, expected him to fight. It wasn't even the same sort of battle--though Jesus used the language of battle to describe it. Indeed, as the Sermon on the Mount seems to indicate, fighting itself, in the normal physical sense, was precisely what he was not going to do. There was a different kind of battle in the offing, a battle that had already begun. In this battle, it was by no means as clear as those around Jesus would have liked who was on which side, or indeed whether "sides" was the right way to look at things. The battle in question was a different sort of thing, because it had a different sort of enemy.

Who was that enemy? Wright continues...

The battle Jesus was fighting was against the satan.

After citing passages to support this claim (Mark 1.13, 27, 34; 3.11-12, 22-27; 5.1-20; Luke 10.18; 13.16; 22.31; John 13.2,27), passages I pulled together (along with others) in Part 3 of this series The Gospel as the Christians First Understood It, Wright goes on to discuss how many modern Christians have wanted to deemphasize this understanding of Jesus's mission:

Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme, but we can't expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it all; that's one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from "traditionalists," insisting on seeing everything in terms of "supernatural" issues, hardly helps either. As C.S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to reality. I'm with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsession, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do.

Wright then goes on, as I have done in this series, to bring the work of Walter Wink into the conversation in the effort to help us moderns think about "the demonic":

You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this [a dark force taking over people, movements and countries], but many still choose to resist the conclusion--despite the increasing use in public life of the language of "force" (economic "forces," political "forces," peer "pressure," and so on). In recent scholarship, Walter Wink in particular has offered a sharp and compelling analysis of "the powers" and the way they function in today's world as much as in yesterday's.

Readers following this series will recall that we recently reviewed Wink's analysis in Part 16 To Destroy the Devil's Work. Wright then goes on to discuss how this understanding of the demonic can help us better describe, from a Christian perspective, what is going on in our lives:

Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of "good" and "bad" in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast "people like us" as basically good and "people like them" as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an "axis of evil" and then go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and "the other lot" into demons; we "demonize" our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding to have to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior.

But when you take seriously the existence and malevolence of non-human forces that are capable of using "us" as well as "them" in the service of evil, the focus shifts. As the hazy and shadowy realities come into view, what we thought was clear and straightforward becomes blurred. Life becomes more complex, but arguably more realistic. The traditional lines of friend and foe are not so easy to draw. You can no longer assume that "that lot" are simply agents of the devil and "this lot"--us and our friends--are automatically on God's side. If there is an enemy at work, it is a subtle, cunning enemy, much too clever to allow itself to be identified simply with one person, one group, or one nation. Only twice in the gospel story does Jesus address "the satan" directly by that title: once when rebuking him in the temptation narrative (Matt. 4:10), and again when he is rebuking his closest associate (Mark 8:33) for resisting God's strange plan. The line between good and evil is clear at the level of God, on the one hand, and the satan on the other. It is much, much less clear as it passes through human beings, individually and collectively.

Wright then brings us back to how Jesus understood his mission and vocation. What did Jesus think he was doing?

Somehow it appears that Jesus's battle with the satan [begun with his temptation in the desert], which was the battle for God's kingdom to be established on earth as it is in heaven, reached its climax in his death. This is a strange, dark, and powerful theme to which we shall return. For the moment the point is clear: Jesus is indeed fighting what he takes to be the battle against the real enemies of the people of God, but it is not the battle his followers or the wider group of onlookers was expecting him to fight. Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel's king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God's sovereign and saving rule, through his own suffering and death.