This is quickly becoming a handy, accessible catchall for the quotations from books that I want to keep. The first non-assigned book I picked up after finals week was by my pastor and professor. Daniel had read Telling God's Story during one of our semester breaks, and he said it had deeply contributed to his understanding of Dr. Wright's sermons. I'm also sitting in on a philosophy class with Dr. Wright this summer, so reading something by him was doubly illuminating.
Much of the book is practical instruction for shaping sermons in a manner that follows a tragic arc, rather than the comedic arc that has become the hallmark of evangelical preaching. Wright is also concerned with the formation of the congregation as a group distinct in purpose and meaning from other social bodies: "When the church is no different from the neighborhood watch group in ethos or mission or consequences, it is much easier for a family to stay in bed to watch the neighborhood over the paper before the NFL games begin than to load the kids in the car to attend worship services at a small church, for which they provide the financial backing" (69).
Wright incisively explains the process by which we have arrived at the prevailing church format: "With no ecclesiology committed to the gospel teachings of Jesus or the Pauline or Jamesian ecclesial formation, the covenant of grace, which often begins embracing the poor, tends to become upwardly mobile. Because salvation is solely individual, the church moves toward the wealthy and the powerful within society as the preferred market for the individual narrative of salvation. By reaching the influential, it is hoped that covenant of grace will envelop more and more people through the resources and influence that power and wealth possess. Such a move requires that we leave a specific market niche to a broader, more general demographic market" (72).
Wright's critique of nationalism mirrors that of William Cavanaugh, who spoke at our school this semester. If the nation is the same as the church, we may as well just be active in the nation (73).
Viewing ourselves as Christians and not as, for example, Americans, is a simple and yet devastatingly revolutionary move that completely rewrites the narratives we have of ourselves and our place in our culture: "While the covenant of grace and the federal covenant eclipsed the biblical narrative, the Scriptures still remain to call forth a faithful people through the workings of the Spirit. . . . [This church] would understand that conversion is more than a personal experience of a personal relationship with God; conversion requires the incorporation of an individual into a new people, a new family and developing the necessary virtues to live as aliens and exiles in this new transnational community" (74).
I'm a big fan of subtle feminist readings, and so I appreciated Wright's characterization of North American society as divided into the managerial (gendered male) and therapeutic (gendered female) realms (129-31). On this view, the workplace and the areas of commerce as well as political action are hard, rough, managerial realms that necessitate the therapeutic realm, into which churches often fall.
"Balance becomes a key virtue for sustaining life within such a cultural arrangement. "[Robert] Bellah argues that contemporary culture isolates the managerial from the therapeutic in ways that did not exist earlier in history" (131). This results in emotivism, moral good residing in the judgment of the individual (132). "Whether the church embraces this context or develops into a peculiar people that discerns where and how to be different makes all the difference in the world" (133).
But the church simply cannot fit into this managerial/therapeutic binary. "The biblical narrative does not tell us how to negotiate between public and private realms, nor how an individual might live a meaningful, self-fulfilled life. These simply are not categories consistent with the biblical narrative. The biblical narrative reveals how individuals might become members of God's elect people in order to witness to God's love, a witness that can—and often does—involve suffering for righteousness's sake" (137).
"Within God's story the church does not aim to provide therapeutic services for disturbed individuals. The church does not exist so that individuals might seek intimacy with others, themselves or God. The church exists as a people, a distinct people, whose witness can bring opposition from the world through the fact of its nonconformity, but whose communal life provides concrete, embodied resources for support amid the resultant suffering" (138).
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