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Thursday, November 29, 2012
Thursday Thinking - N. T. Wright on Psalms
As I mentioned in Tuesday's post, I'm currently reading N. T. Wright's book, Simply Jesus. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I watched this N. T. Wright lecture on the canonical Psalms and found it to be a helpful complement to the book. This is no surprise because all of Wright's books and lectures work together to support his view of the overarching narrative that runs throughout the whole of scripture and the life and mission of Christ. In the lecture, Wright masterfully describes how the Psalms help us to understand the history, expectations, and hopes of the Jewish nation, and how they anticipate the mission of Jesus and God's saving hope for all people and all nations. It's about an hour, but well worth every minute.
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Thanks, Dave! Wright never ceases to amaze me, whether I read his work or hear it spoken. He clearly has grasped aspects that we can only hope to hear more often taught through the church worldwide. His description of the Psalms as "The Great Epic Poem" of [God reconciling himself with the world] -- my paraphrase -- hits a loud, resounding tone. Applying the Psalms to anybody's Christology, no matter who you are, makes the Psalms come alive not as poems out of First Temple and prior Judasim that are about prior or current relationships with God, but as a big "signpost", as Wright puts it, pointing directly to Jesus. One of my favorite quotes early on in his lecture was that the Psalms "resonate with Jesus because he was the one who stood by divine appointment."
ReplyDeleteI also have great appreciation for the 3-D dimensional view of the Psalms Wright uses in the exposition of his thesis: The Psalms are manifested in space, time, and matter. Everywhere we look we can see Jesus in these dimensions and how through Him God is reconciling all things -- in all dimensions, all possibilities -- to Him.