Books and Culture Reviews “How God Became King”

Recently at Books and Culture, Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove reviewed N.T. Wright’s How God Became King.

The review is mostly quite appreciative, but does bring up some concerns which are worth hearing out, and which seem to reveal some of the distinctives of the neo-monastic and Anabaptist communities.

At the core of this book is an invitation to re-read the gospels—to hear them as the story of how God became King by paying attention to the ways they make claims about four themes that were central to the hopes and longings of 1st-century Israel. Those themes are the story of Israel, the story of Israel’s God, the hope of God’s renewed people, and the conflict between God’s rule and the kingdoms of this world. For all of its value as a clear and concise argument about the meaning of Christian faith itself, this book is at its best highlighting Wright as a Bible teacher. The gospels come alive in these central chapters, singing the song that all of creation longs for, flowing like living waters in a dry and weary land. I wanted to stand on the corner and read several passages aloud…

… after so many years of Christendom, the news that the gospels are really about “how God became King” may come to some—especially those who worry that the Western church is in decline—as an invitation to rebuild our institutions, renegotiate our relationship with the power structures, and reclaim a sort of theocracy. I live in the Christ-haunted South. We’re always susceptible to the promises of a Jerry Fallwell. But this is not the hope that the guys on our corner ache for, nor is it the good news Wright is proclaiming. “The implicit ecclesiology of all four gospels is a picture of the complex vocation of Jesus himself,” Wright says. It is “to be kingdom-bringers … first because of Jesus’ own suffering and second by means of their own.”

You can read the full review here.