N.T. Wright on Hope

My cousin (living on the East coast) linked me to a series of lectures Oxford professor and Bishop N. T. Wright gave at Harvard recently.  I'd not heard of him.  They are here, here and here.

(The picture is of him as the guest on The Colbert Report.  Having him on the show gave Colbert some trouble, as he clearly actually liked Wright's ideas and his book Surprised By Hope, but his "Stephen Colbert" character had to be stupid and wouldn't get them, and said funny stuff about "Well, I know what heaven will be: I'll get a harp and I'll sit on a cloud with a mint julep and ask Ronald Reagan questions.")

Something he sketched out that I thought was particularly good, was that there are three predictable, ages-old human approaches to doing good:

Rule-following: you simply decide not to break certain rules.  If this is successful, it normally results more in people merely "being good" (behaving, not doing bad things) rather than achieving good.  As everyone knows, our understandings of systems of rules are always faulty and imperfect, following "the letter of the law" and missing the spirit of it can twist systems of rules very badly, and there always seem to need to be exceptions to the rules.  The bible is full of stories of people (like David and Jesus the Christ) trying to explain to angry authority figures why they aren't quite following some rule or other, at least in the way that the culture had agreed such a rule would be followed.  In most cases, you can make rules to keep people from doing bad things, from being weak and evil, but you can't really legislate good.  There seems to be more to good than obedience.

Greatest Happiness Calculation (Utilitarianism): you decide that all decisions should be made based on making the greatest amount of happiness.  This gets messy because, should you be faced with a room full of drug addicts, argument could be made as to how to make people like them happy, and in fact, what "happiness" really is, anyway.  C.S. Lewis said something along the lines of "Treating others as you yourself would like to be treated is very bad practice for a masochist."  Wright, like many, feels that happiness is something which happens as a by-product of something good, that it is something you feel when you're up to something and then encounter or help to create something good, rather than being achievable as a result of pursuing happiness in and of itself, which is, to many people, an insufficient goal.

The Pursuit of Virtue (nowadays usually called "Self Improvement" or "Personal Enlightenment."): You decide to get as good as you can, and hope this will help the whole world.  The lack of workability in trying to live a life which is markedly lacking bad and corrupting elements, and of trying to get into the unthinking habit of good-doing is that it usually leads people to forswear the company of others, to cloister themselves away, and is, ultimately, a selfish act (self improvement, personal enlightenment) not based in love, but based in the idea that "I can't fix the world, but I can better it by fixing myself."  This way usually lies insufferable self-righteousness and spiritual self-interest.

Wright points to hope, as the only thing that can withstand negativity and nihilism.  When faced with "Yeah, but really, what's the point?" the other three fall down under that very modern question.  He sees Kurt Cobain style "Yeah but what's the point of any of it?" as a properly post-modern response to modernism (modernism says "We can put men on the moon and make glow-in-the-dark toilet paper now!" and post-modernism says "So?  I'm still not happy and you haven't cured the common cold, let alone AIDS or cancer yet.  What's the point of any of it?").  He says that, although post-modernism is a necessary poke-in-the-eye for modernism, you can't stop there, and have to find an answer to that question (what's the point of any of it?) and that we call that "hope."

He doesn't think the Usual Three explained above really provide that hope.  What's the point of following the rules if sometimes they need to be broken, if people who break them get rewarded and get into positions where they can do more harm, above and beyond the sphere of influence attainable by people who know how to bend and break rules to their advantage?  What's the point of trying to make everyone happy when nothing seems to make some people happy, when bad things make others happy, when people being unhappy makes yet other people happy, and when different people's dreams of exactly what would make them happy are contradictory or compete or conflict with their neighbors'?  What's the point of self-improvement if it makes you a target for evil people who will kill you or remove you from any place where you can do good in the world, or if it relies on you removing yourself from most connections to the world unfolding around you?

Wright thinks that people in the world not "getting" Jesus is sad, not because they're not following the right rules, not because they're not following his example to try to help people and make their lives better to make them happier, not because he was so virtuous, and people are not following his method.  Wright says Jesus isn't a method, a system of rules or merely a role model, but a bringer of a new vision of how the world could be: a new hope.  He points out that the whole "point" of Jesus being here (for those who want to "get" him) was for someone to walk the earth in a perfectly and fully human way.  Jesus was God in a mysterious way, but that wasn't the point.  He wasn't walking around "being God."  He was walking around being human.  He gave us hope that there was a way to do that, and that it worked and had good results.  So, Wright says, it shouldn't be about "What do the rules say I can do?", "what makes me happiest?" or "What is the most virtuous thing?" He says the life should be about "How can I become more fully, healthily, wholly human, in the way that God is moving everything toward?"  It's not all about self-denial, but about self-centering, self-knowledge, but with the Usual Three turned inside out, so that you know about freedom and how to be it in a good way, about knowing yourself in terms of where and how you best fit, and being good, not to cut one's self off and be good, but about healthy, beneficial connection and love and simpatico.

He points out that the bible is FAR less concerned with heaven and hell than the modern Christian seems to be, and that far more of it is taken up, not with "who gets to heaven and how?" but "What is God doing in the world anyway? Where is it all headed?  What's He up to?"  He points out that modern Christians often want to say, "God made the world and it was good.  But disposable.  We want to get off it as soon as possible because it's horrible here and heaven might be nice."  He points out that the bible presents a whole direction God has the world on, in which this present reality is one phase of the design, this phase coming to an end is in the cards, but that then there is a whole new heaven and earth in the plan, and that what good we partake of, participate in and help bring about now is likely to have a place in the new regime and is good "practice" for it.  

This hope that nihilism is silly, that everything is headed somewhere other than merely to hell in a handbasket, that doing good matters and has lasting effects, that there is a plan to bring all people and things and places together into a cohesive, sensible, delightful, peaceful, beautiful reality, all of this will be a better motivator than any of those usual three methods, and will answer "What's the point?" properly.  Interview a woman who is in the middle of giving birth and ask her about the rules, about the happiness, about the virtue, and what she's focused on is the hope. She may unthinkingly achieve mastery of all three due to that focus.

I found it rather inspiring.