Book Review: How God Became King by N.T. Wright

Book Cover- How God Became King I will never read the gospels the same way again after reading How God Became King by N.T. Wright. I am not new to reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but this book helped me to see things in those four books which I have missed in all of my previous reading of them, even as they have been my constant companions for years. And the things it helped me to see are not just trivial matters, like trying to unlock some secret code hidden in these ancient documents, but rather, they are the essence of what all of the four gospels seek to communicate. I am not alone. As he says early in the book, "Despite centuries of intense and heavy industry expended on the study of all sorts of features of the gospels, we have often managed to miss the main thing that they, all four of them, are most eager to tell us."

A subject that runs throughout the book is how Christians manage to deal with the different emphases of the traditional Christian creeds and the content of the story of Jesus' life in the gospels. Other than Jesus' birth, death, resurrection, and ascension, the creeds have practically no mention of Jesus' life, and a straightforward reading of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John leaves no doubt that the things Jesus did in his life (particularly in between his baptism and Good Friday) really do matter. I know no one who denies that explicitly. Yet I know many (and have been one myself in the past) whose theology could skip straight from Christmas to Calvary and not miss anything. Wright's point is that such theology may be consistent with the creeds, isn't consistent with the gospels, and that the creeds and gospels do not have to be separated like that, but can and should compliment each other.

Wright's claim that Jesus becoming king is the point of the gospels may not sound all that shocking to readers upon first glance, though many might think that Matthew is "the kingdom gospel," while the others have their respective emphases. But Wright does a masterful job of showing how each of the gospels is thoroughly a gospel about God becoming king (of Jesus' ancient Israel, and of the world) through Jesus. In order to make sure his argument suffers no injustice, I won't try to summarize it here, but will simply urge anyone who has an inkling to do so to read this book.

I first read Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy in the summer of 2000. The way I live and what I believe has never been the same since. This book by Wright has been part of a Willard-esque revolution in my understanding of the gospel. Much of the point of Willard's message is that we have to evaluate whether the gospel we communicate naturally leads our hearers to become disciples of Jesus, or to become something else, and that if we are to be faithful to the scriptures, our gospel has to be filled with the message of God's kingdom. Even though that concept forever changed my approach to life and ministry, I have always struggled with how all the parts of the scriptures might form a kingdom-centered gospel which naturally leads people into discipleship. This book makes a huge stride in that direction.

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Prayer All-Stars, Why I'm Not One, and Why That's Okay

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from a section of the third chapter (Praying With Your Own Words), which discusses why it's okay if we don't have some of the same kinds of prayer experiences as famous Christians.] One of my favorite stories about a prayerful person is a story about George Mueller. Some of you may recognize his name. He became a fairly well known for his work with orphans in the 1800s in England. He decided from the outset of his ministry that he would never ask for financial support for his orphanage. He would simply ask God to provide for his needs through prayer, and trust that God would do so.

By the end of his life, Mueller’s orphanages had cared for more than 10,000 children, and he established 117 schools which provided education to more than 120,000 kids. He was so effective at providing an education to poor children that he was actually accused of “raising the poor above their natural station in life.” And all of this was through a man who was radically dependent on God and was extremely prayerful.

The story goes that Mueller was on a ship that was sailing for America, when they came into a dense fog.

“Because of it the captain had remained on the bridge continuously for twenty-four hours, when Mr. Mueller came to him and said, ‘Captain, I have come to tell you that I must be in Quebec on Saturday afternoon.’ When informed that it was impossible, he replied: ‘Very well. If the ship cannot take me, God will find some other way. I have never broken an engagement for fifty-seven years. Let us go down into the chartroom and pray.’

“The captain continues the story thus: ‘I looked at that man of God and thought to myself, What lunatic asylum could that man have come from? I never heard such a thing as this. ‘Mr. Mueller,’ I said, ‘do you know how dense the fog is?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘my eye is not on the fog, but on the living God, who controls every circumstance of my life.’ He knelt down and prayed one of those simple prayers, and when he had finished I was going to pray; but he put his hand on my shoulder and told me not to pray. ‘Firstly,’ he said, ‘because you do not believe God will, and secondly, I believe God has, and there is no need whatever for you to pray about it.’ I looked at him, and George Mueller said, ‘Captain, I have known my Lord for fifty-seven years, and there has never been a single day that I have failed to get an audience with the King. Get up and open the door, and you will find that the fog has gone.’ I got up and the fog was indeed gone. George Mueller was in Quebec Saturday afternoon for his engagement.” 

(Glenn Clark, as quoted in A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants by Rueben P. Job)

Isn’t that great? I love to read the stories of some of the “prayer giants” like that. For more than 50 years, John Wesley awoke between 4-5 a.m. for prayer. He said that he often had so much to do in a day that he could not afford not to spend at least three hours in prayer.

I have read stories about men and women like that for years, and for a long time I imagined that if I was ever going to be teaching others about prayer, my doing so would be full of stories like theirs, trying to inspire us to imitate their efforts.

The main obstacle that keeps me from trying to inspire others to imitate the efforts of the Muellers and Wesleys of history is simple: I can’t imitate their efforts. I tried to pray like Wesley once. I gave up on day two, because, man, I was tired. To be someone who prays for hours every day, and sees things happen like fog disappearing from Mueller’s ship... I have started to believe that those kinds of experiences may not be for me, nor for most of us. And it’s interesting that while Wesley and others like him certainly urged others to pray, they generally never encouraged others to pray in the ways that they did.

So, at this point in my life, I think I’m okay never making it into the prayer hall of fame. I don’t need to become a superhero and have extraordinary experiences. Instead, what I really, deeply desire is simply to keep becoming a more prayerful person. Remember again the story of Albert Haase from our Introduction, whose spiritual director told him, “The point of praying is to make us prayerful people,” meaning that the point of the times that we spend set aside for prayer is so that we will be more able and likely to pray and be aware of God’s presence through the rest of our day. We pray during some parts of each day so that the rest of every day can be lived prayerfully

Therefore, please understand that we don’t do the kinds of things we discuss in this book in order to try to become the prayer all-stars. Rather, my hope is simply that we can learn time-proven ways of praying that have been helpful to other followers of Jesus for a very long time, some of whom we may know their names, but the huge majority of whom were never known beyond the people right around them.

I still think it’s good to be inspired by stories of people like Mueller or Wesley, but I hope that none of us have prayer’s equivalent of football’s all-pro quarterback in mind when we think of what it would mean to live a prayerful life. If we’re going to associate a word with the lives of God’s prayerful ones, I think it is much more helpful to us, and much more consistent with the message of the scriptures, to get rid of images and words like superstar or hero, and replace them with another, much simpler word: friend.

...

Why Our Own Words Matter

Tonight, I thought of a story about my son that I wanted to work into the Live Prayerfully chapter on praying with our own words. When I sat down to start writing it, I thought I may have used the story in some way on the blog before, and sure enough... not only had I already used it, but I had also already connected it to praying with our own words. Man, a blog can be handy.

So this post is really just a link to an old post: If You Were Going Somewhere By Yourself, I'd Want to Catch Up.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Praying With Other People's Words

[I'm working on finishing up drafts for the chapters to Live Prayerfully: Three Time-Proven Ways Ordinary Lives Become Prayerful. The general of the aim of the book is to provide guidance on historic practices of prayer in simple ways. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter (Praying With Other People's Words), which discusses many of us already come to this kind of prayer with a bias for or against it.] If you were to walk through my church’s building about five minutes after the beginning of our worship services, on one end of the hallway you would hear a huge pipe organ booming as that part of our congregation sings a hymn that is likely to be three to five hundred years old or older. Other parts of their worship service will likely include things like the people up front being in robes, praying by saying aloud one of the responsive readings from one of the Psalms in the back of the hymnal, or banners hanging in the sanctuary that have to be certain colors at certain times of the year.

If you would normally prefer to worship at this end of the hallway, my hope is that this chapter will add depth of meaning to some things you likely do in worship already, and help you to see ways that we could become more prayerful people by carrying those practices into our the other parts of our days and weeks.

However, the worship service taking place at the other end of the hallway is very different. If you were to walk toward it, you would hear music equally booming, but this time coming from a drum set, guitars, and electric keyboards as that part of our congregation sings a song that is likely to be six months to a year old or newer. Other parts of their worship service will likely include thing like the people up front being in jeans, every prayer said being made up on the spot by the person saying it, and various multimedia images being projected on the majority of the wall space visible throughout the service.

If you would be more likely to find yourself in the drums and multimedia end of the hallway, thank you for at least reading to the fourth page of this chapter before skipping ahead in the book. Hang in there with me, because my experience is that you are likely to find at least as much depth of meaning in this way of praying as your friends down the hallway.

I mention this because I am well aware of the potential that some of you may already be turned off to this chapter just because of its title. If that is you, it’s okay that you feel that way, and there is likely some good reason that you do. I am more of a newcomer to intentionally using this kind of prayer than the others that we will explore in this book, so I think I understand your hesitations. Yet I include this way of praying, and I include it first, for some important reasons. First, I have found this way of praying to be very life-giving to me personally, and as I have taught this material to others in classes and retreats, this way of praying is the one where people most often describe a light bulb coming on inside of them. One woman stopped me after we opened a retreat by teaching on the topics in this chapter and said, “Even if we didn’t do anything else after that, I’m glad I came.”

(I wanted to stop the retreat right then, realizing the mistake I had made in setting people up for disappointment in the remainder of the things I had to say, but it all ended up okay.)

So, if you are one for whom the title, “Praying With Other People’s Words” fails to light a light bulb or anything else within you, remember the advice of Albert Haase’s spiritual director that we considered in the Introduction, “Find the way of praying that works for you,” the way of praying that helps you to be prayerful, and do so by trial and error. If praying with others’ words isn’t something that you think makes you tick, I am only asking you to hang in there with us through the end of the book and experiment with how each of these ways might help you become a more prayerful person.

Do Prayer and Exercise Have Anything in Common?

A really good comment from my friend Alayna (a.k.a. Paul) got me thinking about some connections between prayer and exercise. Like any metaphor, it eventually breaks down. I've never wanted to throw up after prayer, nor been hardly able to walk the next day from praying more than I should have when I wasn't used to praying very much. But I think there are some good parallels:

Whether we realize it or not, some good how-to guidance really matters. When we aren't praying, or aren't exercising, we can think of both of these activities as things we know we should be doing, and already know how to do, but we just aren't doing them. When we aren't praying or exercising, the how-to seems too elementary for us to bother to investigate: to exercise, we could just go out our front doors and start jogging. To start praying we might say something like, "Dear God, please help me..., please help them...., please help us... Amen." While neither of those approaches are the worst in the world, neither are they the best. That approach to exercise rarely makes an unfit person healthy, and that approach to prayer rarely makes an ordinary life prayerful.

On the other hand, once we begin to attempt exercise or prayer, we find that some good how-to guidance is highly valuable. For example, we find how helpful it is to have a plan, or to learn from those who have already taken the steps we're attempting to take. In exercise, the guidance helps us to avoid injuries and to stick with it when we don't feel like exercising. In prayer, the guidance helps us to shape our our prayers in ways we might not think of on our own and to stick with it when we don't feel like praying.

It's easy to avoid doing them by convincing ourselves we always do them. I have a good friend for whom I have enormous respect who used to wear a pedometer, and we'll call him Russell. (The point of wearing of a pedometer is to count how many steps you take during a day in order to quantify your level of activity, or lack thereof, in a normal day.) While it was a good thing that Russell wore that pedometer, I don't think it accomplished its intended result. Rather than attaching it to his hip, as the instructions say to do, Russell discovered that the pedometer also fit nicely onto the side of his shoe. In addition to looking a bit more stylish, this also allowed Russ to earn quite a bit of extra credit on the pedometer. All day long, as he sat at his desk (or drinking Dr. Pepper with me), he would habitually shake his foot... all the while getting credit from the pedometer for living an active lifestyle.

When we think of our main way of praying as "praying all day long," we're like Russell sitting at his desk, drinking a soda, shaking his foot and getting credit for exercising all day long. We absolutely need specific, dedicated times of exercise to be healthy, and we also need specific, dedicated times of prayer to be prayerful. When we have those specific times, we begin to find that their effects spill over into the rest of our days, and then the real experience of praying all day long comes into view for us. The times of exercise give us more strength or energy in another part of the day when we wouldn't have had them otherwise. The times of prayer help us to be aware of what God is up to in our world when we would normally have been completely oblivious.

This is the flip side of what I wrote about in A Life That Makes Prayer Come Naturally. The key in that post to prayer coming naturally for Mr. Means from the moment he awoke each day was all of the time he spent intentionally praying throughout his life. If we try to only develop a sense of constant prayer without building it on dedicated times of prayer, we may as well sit at a desk, shake our foot, and see how healthy it makes us.

It's tempting to stop short of letting them take their effect on us. Several years ago, I bought a weight set. (We disassembled it when we moved six years ago, and it's never been put back together since then.) I used it two times in one week, and suddenly I thought of myself as a serious athlete. The truth was that I was still practically as unfit as I had been before getting the weight set. The only real difference was that I was an unfit person who had lifted weights twice in a week. I may have been headed toward a more fit life, but I surely wasn't there yet, regardless of how I was thinking of myself.

It's the same with prayer. If we have two consecutive days with dedicated times for prayer, many of us think we'll soon be nominated for canonization as saints, even if we're not Catholic. However, the likely truth is that we're probably still living largely prayerless lives, though we're hopefully on the road toward living more prayerfully.

The point of exercise and the point of prayer is not what happens during the moments when we exercise or pray. Rather, the point is the (healthy or prayerful) life that those moments lead us to develop over the course of time.