by Robert Stewart

N. T. Wright is one of the more significant biblical scholars in present-day

Protestant theology.1 The first two volumes of his proposed six-volume New

Testament theology series,2 Christian Origins and the Question of God have

been widely read and very influential. Richard Hays writes concerning the

series:

The sweep of Wright’s project as a whole is breathtaking. It is impossible

to give a fair assessment of his achievement without sounding grandiose:

no New Testament scholar since Bultmann has even attempted—let

alone achieved—such an innovative and comprehensive account of

New Testament history and theology.3

This article will first describe Wright’s hermeneutical method. The next issue

will include an overview of his conclusions concerning the historical Jesus

and evaluate how his hermeneutical method affects his conclusions as to

who the historical Jesus was.

Wright’s hermeneutic integrates several different methods into a harmonious

whole. Examples include narrative structural criticism, worldview analysis, and

a critical-realist epistemology. This section will answer four major hermeneutical

questions, after first considering Wright’s epistemology—critical realism.

Wright consistently approaches knowledge from the perspective of critical

realism. Critical realism is a term borrowed from the philosophy of science4

and carried over into theology and biblical studies. Critical realism is, in van

Huyssteen’s words:5

…neither a theological nor a scientific thesis, it is a philosophical, or even

more accurately, an epistemological, thesis about the goals of scientific

knowledge and the implications of theoretical models in science. Hence it

should not be seen as a theory about truth, but rather as a theory about

the epistemic values that shape scientific rationality.6

N. T. Wright’s Hermeneutic:

An Exploration

Wright’s Critical-Realist, Worldview Hermeneutic

Critical realism is both post-Kantian and post-Kuhnian in that it recognizes

that one can never have knowledge of the thing-in-itself and that all

knowledge is necessarily theory-based in nature. Critical realism recognizes

that all knowledge is socio-historical in nature, but rejects the claim that

?religious language provides only a useful system of symbols that can be

action-guiding and meaningful for the believer without being in any sense

reality depicting in its cognitive claims’.7 Yet advocates of critical realism are

quick to insist that all knowledge is provisional, and thus subject to revision.

Related to the efficacy of language, critical realists do not hold that words

are derivative of an objective world, only that they represent and refer to an

objective world.8

Wright’s brand of critical realism forges a middle road between epistemological

certainty as characterized both by pre-modern dogmatism and modern

subject-object dualism, on the one hand, and post-Kantian phenomenalism

and postmodern deconstruction, on the other. The former view, which Wright

labels positivism, is na ¯ve, while the various forms of phenomenalism often

lead to solipsism.9

Critical realism retains the strengths of each position. Like positivism it

recognizes the reality of objects ‘out there’. Like phenomenalism it recognizes

that all knowledge is mediated. Critical realism thus acknowledges the reality

of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence “realism”),

while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies

along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the

knower and the thing known (hence “critical”).’12

Wright is not asserting that critical realism leads to certainty, only to

knowledge. All assertions that critical realists make are provisional in nature,

and thus subject to revision.14

The crucial question that must be addressed is—are there sufficient similarities

between scientific theorizing and historical reconstruction to justify the

translation of critical realism from one field (philosophy of science) to the

other (historical Jesus research)? Wright believes that there are. He writes that

historical knowledge is subject to the same caveats as all knowledge in general.15

All knowledge is arrived at through the process of hypotheses, or imagination,

tested by asking particular questions of the available data.16 One area in which

the two are similar is access to the details of events. In both science and history,

the objects of investigation are often beyond the realm of direct observation

or literal description. Yet both the physicist and the historian are able to write

meaningfully about phenomena that they cannot directly observe.17

The critical realist recognition that all knowledge is culturally situated in

nature leads Wright to the conclusion that one’s worldview serves as the

grid through which hypotheses are formed and data evaluated.18 This leads

Wright to build his hermeneutic around the idea of evaluating worldviews

according to specific criteria. In this way he consistently applies his criticalrealist

epistemology to historical Jesus research. In every area of his project

it is either the explicit or implicit epistemology from which he forms his

hypotheses and by which he draws his conclusions.

Wright maintains that texts are ‘best conceived as the articulation of

worldviews, or, better still, the telling of stories which bring worldviews into

articulation’.19 All texts, with the possible exceptions of tickets and directories,

communicate an implied narrative—a story that at least conceivably may be

discovered within the text.20 Worldviews are expressed through: (1) stories

that order one’s view of reality; (2) symbols (shorthand statements of the

stories); (3) answers to four ultimate questions (who are we, where are we,

what is wrong, and what is the solution?); and (4) praxis, a way of being in

the world. In any of these the entire worldview can be glimpsed, although

stories contain the fullest expression of a worldview.21 Texts contain these

expressions of worldviews, which provide the reader with a fundamental tool

with which to discern the meaning of the text.

The hermeneutical positivist believes that through the proper application

of critical methods the right meaning can be found while the hermeneutical

phenomenalist denies that any such meaning exists. Wright, in contrast to

both, posits that:

A critical-realist reading of a text will recognize, and take fully into account,

the perspective and context of the reader. But such a reading will still insist

that, within the story or stories that seem to make sense of the whole of

reality, there exists, as essentially other than and different from the reader,

texts that can be read, that have a life and a set of appropriate meanings

not only potentially independent of their author but also potentially

independent of their reader; and that the deepest level of meaning

consists in the stories, and ultimately the worldviews, which the texts thus

articulate.22

In short, texts do not put one directly in touch with the thoughts or feelings of

an author. That is a positivist dream, whether the positivist is a rationalist or

a romanticist. Yet they are not entirely removed from the author because they

express the worldview in which the author is situated. One must understand

that, for Wright, worldviews are never understood individually until they have

first been understood corporately.23

In The New Testament and the People of God, Wright reconstructs the

worldview of Second-Temple Judaism.24 This step is foundational for

The Nature of Texts about Jesus

everything Wright does in seeking the historical Jesus. Wright thus insists

that one discover the worldview of a text from within the text itself, not impose

a Sitz im Leben derived from outside the text upon a text.25

Because a critical-realist reading is by definition provisional and constantly

subject to revision, knowledge of the worldview the text communicates is

provisional, and constantly open to revision. This means that a text may refer

to persons, objects, or events beyond itself, but the reader can never be

certain that he or she has correctly grasped that to which the text refers.26

Against the backdrop of a particular worldview, however, some readings are

more appropriate than others.27

More…

http://www.churchsociety.org/churchman/documents/Cman_117_2_Stewart.pdf