Abstract
Christopher J. H. Wright’s latest book is a distillation: it miniaturizes Wright’s project at large, and it draws serially on Wright’s own prior writings. Wright signals the first kind of distillation from the book’s opening sentence: “condens[ing] something that one has been thinking. . .that was the task I gladly undertook” (ix). The book’s indebtedness to Wright’s past literary output can be seen from long inset excerpts from Wright’s earlier Mission of God and from running references to the Cape Town Commitment, of which Wright was an architect (56–59).
In addition, three of The Great Story’s nine chapters reflect lectures given at Acadia Divinity College in October 2020 (ix): chapters 5, 6, and 7, address, respectively, building the church through evangelism and teaching; serving society through compassion and justice; and caring for creation. These topics correspond to “three focal points of mission” that chapter 4 proposes—with a diagram—as a heuristic reduction of the “five marks of mission” (67–74). Wright seeks to anchor each dimension of mission in the text of Matthew’s Great Commission.
This is exegetically easiest in the case of evangelism and teaching, whereas the subsequent two chapters must pursue a more indirect strategy. The chapter on compassion and justice appeals to Jesus’s teaching in Matthew’s gospel, and it discerns a Deuteronomic background to Jesus’s injunction (“observe all I have commanded you,” 94), together with a comparable light-of-the-world, attractant effect. The chapter on creation care also connects Jesus’s claim of authority in heaven and on earth to Deuteronomy, though its presentation mostly orbits the goodness and the praise of creation; it adapts material composed for a creation care symposium (119n7).
If the three focal points of mission, organized around the Great Commission, structure the book’s lattermost chapters, its initial three chapters follow a quite different scheme; they fill out the narrative element promised in the book’s subtitle (“The Biblical Drama of Mission”). After a short first chapter introducing a missional hermeneutic—the Bible as record, product and tool of God’s mission—chapter 2 articulates a vision of the whole Bible as a single story divided into seven acts. As with the three focal points of mission, a diagram, borrowed from a Phoenix pastor (15–16), visually identifies each episode: creation, rebellion, promise, Christ, mission, judgement, and new creation. The third chapter of The Great Story meditates on the practical and doctrinal implications of plotting the Bible out into a seven-part arc.
There is a noticeable lack of integration between the two halves of the book: the one focuses on the biblical story and the other on the Great Commission, and neither refers much to its counterpart. Further signs of strain appear, moments when the conceptual scaffolding threatens to buckle under the theological weight placed on it. It comes as a surprise, for instance, when the (linear) narrative of scripture transmutes into a (lens-like) “worldview” (50–53); or when the sequentiality of seven “acts” blurs: church time is “an overlap period” (46) when both the past accomplishment of Christ and the future glory suffuse the present. Above all, Wright’s aim to make the Old Testament relevant to Christian mission cannot survive his allocation of it to “act 3,” construed as a pointing-ahead—literally a right-facing arrow on his diagram—toward Christ (act 4), in whom God overcomes the rebellion (act 2).
Wright is correct that “evangelical traditions ‘jump’ from Genesis 3 straight to Jesus . . . as if nothing in act 3 is of any relevance to understanding the gospel” (56n10). But, as Kendall Soulen wrote almost thirty years ago (God of Israel and Christian Theology), this irrelevance is inevitable as long as the Old Testament’s role is to prefigure a divine initiative that is remedial in character. To repair the irrelevance, the Old Testament must be understood not only as pointing-ahead but already-embodying; and God’s purpose, in Israel and in Christ alike, not only as remedying but consummating.
In sum, Wright’s book distills his oeuvre in an accessible, teachable fashion. It also suffers from lack of editorial integration and (arguably) from overextension of theological concept. One erratum: the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC) is housed at Princeton Seminary and not Princeton University (83n7).