By LeRoy Lawson
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jack Weather ford
New York: Broadway Books, 2005
Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues
N. T. Wright
New York: HarperOne, 2014
Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness
Richard B. Hays
Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014
When I told a friend I was reading a biography of Genghis Khan, he laughed at me. “You will read anything, won”t you?” No, not anything, but a lot of things!
“But why Genghis Khan?” Because I don”t know very much about him, that”s why, and because he was one of the most powerful men in all history. And because we in the West are still paying for our ignorance of the world he conquered and ruled with such success that it took his heirs 500 years to dismantle his work.
Genghis Khan (c1162″”c1227) was born in north-central Mongolia with a blood clot on his hand, a sure sign in Mongol folklore that he was destined to be a great leader. But his destiny didn”t seem apparent in the beginning. He was only 9 when his father was treacherously killed, forcing young Temujin”s (his given name) mother and her brood to rely on their own meager resources””and nurse their future sibling hostilities. Eventually Temujin prevailed. He killed his half-brother Bekhter to become the head of the family. At 16 he married Borte, the first of the many wives who produced his many progeny.
This passionate, gifted leader then began his lifelong pursuit of power””to get it, to hang on to it, to wield it over the multitude of tribes of Mongolia and unite them under his rule. He kept adding new conquests to old until he reigned over the largest empire the world had ever seen (greater even than Rome”s), until the British Empire eclipsed it in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I thought I would quickly tire of the “game of thrones,” as battle after battle pitted the forces of the man who became Genghis Khan against his worthy but lesser opponents. But I didn”t. I became fascinated with his uncanny leadership gifts, his various breaks with Mongol traditions to create a new world where merit meant more than nepotism and respect for the vanquished replaced routine slaughtering.
Not that there wasn”t slaughtering. There was. But he was more than the barbarian chieftain siccing on his “Mongolian hordes.” He was in fact an empire builder.
Genghis Khan means “universal ruler.” His rule was political and religious. He worshipped Mongke Koko Tengri, the “Eternal Blue Sky”; his people worshipped him. He fostered religious tolerance among the people (Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.), but, of course, demanded their primary allegiance to himself.
North-central Asia was (and is) a brutal place: long, harsh winters, short growing seasons, few natural resources, scarce food supply. Only the tough survived. It was inevitable, then, that Khan”s growing masses would require more and more territory, so they attacked and attacked again in northern China, western territories of what are now Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, and on into eastern Europe. So skilled were these horsemen, and so savvy their use of the latest techniques of warfare, that none could stop them.
And I couldn”t stop reading.
Prolific and Pointed
From the powerful Genghis Khan to the incredibly prolific N. T. Wright, the British professor, bishop, and author, moves us from the sweeping panorama of world conquest to the focused studies of biblical scholarship. Surprised by Scripture, a collection of essays, is sure to please Wright”s fans and upset his critics. Newsweek named him “the world”s leading New Testament scholar,” generous praise to say the least, although it would be fair to ask by what criteria such scholars are to be rated. Still, the man is always insightful, always provocative, and never to be taken lightly.
Surprised by Scripture, written with the popular American audience in mind, sheds the heavy paraphernalia of scholarship, but does not back away from the pesky issues fueling debates these days, issues like . . .
“¢ Must it be science versus religion, or is it possible to cherish the message of Genesis and respect the findings of biological evolution?
“¢ Is there no way to accept the authority of the Scriptures and still find women in church leadership acceptable?
“¢ Do Christians have anything to say in the public square, and can they say it without the name-calling and character assassination of Republicans versus Democrats today? Or between church liberals and conservatives? Is reasoned dialogue possible?
“¢ Have we become so fixated on salvation into Heaven that we have overlooked Jesus” message of the kingdom of God””which is a “kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven”?
“¢ And when our politicians point to an axis of evil “out there” without seeing any trace of it “in here,” aren”t we simply proving we don”t understand the nature of evil at all, at least from a scriptural point of view?
Throughout the book, Wright pictures contemporary culture (in both Britain and America, but especially in America) as blindly subscribing to the dictates of the Enlightenment and Epicureanism, which taught us to expect no guidance from God, if indeed there is a God, which there probably isn”t. What is discouraging, he says, is that this culture has seeped into, in fact has mostly taken over, the church.
There is more. Don”t expect to like everything in this book, especially if you think everything is right with American Christianity. If you do, Wright insists, you must be prepared to be surprised by Scripture.
A Professor”s Perspective
Richard Hays, New Testament professor at Duke Divinity School, believes to fully understand Scripture, we need to learn to “read backwards,” by which he means reading the Old Testament through the lens of the New. Actually, his real objective is to encourage reading the Bible in both directions, from Old to New, from New to Old. The four Gospel writers” imaginations, for example, were saturated with Old Testament Scriptures. We”ll read the Gospels accurately only if we know what they knew and thought about those Scriptures.
It”s equally true that one misses so much of the Old Testament”s meaning without keeping in mind the Gospels, and more specifically, the central role Christ plays in both testaments. This is Hays”s thesis: “The OT teaches us how to read the Gospels and that””at the same time””the Gospels teach us how to read the OT.”
Hays appreciates the diversity among the four Gospels, noting that each contributes something unique to the composite picture of Jesus as Lord. The evangelists tell the same basic story, but filter it through their own personalities, experiences, and specific purposes. Something is lost when we try to harmonize all their individualized pieces into arbitrary conformity with one another.
Here”s what is really important to Hays: “The more deeply we probe the Jewish and OT roots of the Gospel narratives, the more clearly we see that each of the four Evangelists, in their diverse portrayals, identifies Jesus as the embodiment of the God of Israel.”
And about reading backwards? “The Gospel narratives, precisely through their reading of the OT to identify Jesus, force us to rethink what we mean when we say the word “˜God.”” We cannot fully grasp the Old Testament meaning of “God” without the help of the Gospels. Neither can we grasp the essence of Jesus” lordship apart from the overtones and foreshadowing of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Hays isn”t exactly the lone voice in the wilderness of modern biblical scholarship, but his strong identification of Jesus with the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is a refreshing change of diet from those scholars who prefer to emphasize the distance between them.
LeRoy Lawson is international consultant with CMF International and professor of Christian ministries at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Johnson City, Tennessee. He also is a CHRISTIAN STANDARD contributing editor and on Standard Publishing”s Publishing Committee.
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