Are you enlightened, a romantic or an existentialist? Take your pick, and you’d still be wrong!

I’ve been listening to a range of lectures by N.T. Wright and lots of times I have found he has brought deep and new insight to my view of the bible and how I approach it.

You can find the podcasts here: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/7177871033466698832/posts/default

I actually typed out part of one address because it was so important in being able to stand back and have a look at where I might have accidently slipped into seeing things in an unhelpful way..

He unpacks the three great movements of thought since the reformation and how they have shaped the churches theology. That might not sound interesting, but I wonder whether you can see yourself in any of the three movements?

Since the reformation three great cultural movements have occured, none of them owing much directly to the bible or the gospel, but all of them providing a new spin for how we hear reformation language, and indeed Pauline language.

First the enlightenment with its ugly ditch between ideas and facts, between the eternal truths of reason upstairs and the contingent events of history downstairs. The split of religion and real life grows from this, giving the impression that what matters in religion is the ideas you have in your head rather than the things that happen or that you do through your own body.

Luthers antithesis between faith and works, suddenly becomes the antithesis between ideas and bodily reality, allied to the enlightenments subtle privatization of faith and its removal from the public political arena. There is a great deal of enlightenment rhetoric in the church today.

Second, the romantic movement. What matters now is feeling rather than form, the heart rather than the head. Of course this can plug into some New Testament Language: the promise of the renewed heart, the Spirit turning us inside out in that way. Thats there in Judaism as well, in Deuteronomy, in the scrolls, in the Rabbis.

What the romantic movement was saying was different to what the New Testament said. It invited you to look within and see what feelings you had, to make them the center of your world, rather than seeing the love of the heart for the true God as the gift of God through Gospel word and spirit.

The romantic movement never took account of Jeremiah’s warning, repeated in the New Testament, that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

Third, the existentialist movements of the 20th Century, which in many ways have taken us right back to Gnosticism. Each of us now has a “true self” hiding inside somewhere. It has been long buried but now can be discovered and enabled to flourish. This actually is a form of pelagianism.

What you need if you are an existentialist or a Gnostic, is not to be confronted by the Gospel and redeemed from your present state, but to be helped to discover who you really were all along. Huge swathes of contemporary culture are built on that premise, and the churches both liberal and conservative, have bought into it hook line and sinker.

Perhaps I might add as an aside is that one of the great triumphs of the movie the Lord of the rings is that it takes precisely the opposite line, urging us to find our true selves by following and staying loyal  to  the vocation that we wouldn’t have chosen that comes to us from outside.

But the snare of existentialism is that it appears before us wearing the robes of a sixteenth century reformer. telling us that all pressures from the outside are law and which must be abolished if we are to live authentically.

The enlightenment, the romantic movement, existentialism, have all thus tapped into the rhetoric of the reformation to press their own quite different agendas, and watch what happens. The result is that today in many churches, not least those within the reformation or evangelical traditions, we find in all kinds of ways a complex of agendas which owe everything to these three cuckoos in the nest, almost nothing to the reformation and nothing at all to the New Testament.

NT Wright (Calvin College Lecture series, 2002)