The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential by N.T. Wright

Abstract

287 Book Reviews more dissenting voices are making themselves heard, most recently Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture and much respected for his dialogue with the arts. With particular reference to Massimiliano Fuksas’s church in Foligno, the Cardinal has spoken about the inadequacy of such buildings for Catholic worship. The renewal of church architecture that is happening today needs to be supported by a more robust theological reflection on the sacred in Christianity, which will help architects to design buildings that are fitting and truly functional for the liturgy. With Duncan Stroik, we are fortunate in having a practitioner who is himself able to contribute to this conversation. Uwe Michael Lang Heythrop College University of London, UK N.T. Wright The Case for the Psalms: Why They are Essential New York: HarperOne, 2013 200 pages. Hardcover. $16.58. At the beginning of this light but substantive meditation on the Psalms, Wright asks his readers to take a broad view of the Psalter’s Christological character. In this poetry, which forms “the great epic account of the creator and covenant God” (33), we encounter not just particular verses that function typologically or allegorically with reference to Christ, but “the great complex narrative that, with hindsight, Christians have discerned as the story of Jesus himself” (32). As Irenaeus would say, Jesus is the recapitulation of Israel, and so what latter Rabbinic commentators claimed of David, the Christian community claims of Christ: “Everything which [the Son of] David said in his book was said of himself, of all Israel, and of the past and future of Israel” (MidTeh 17.1). In the Emmaus pericope we see, of course, that the same is true of the entire Old Testament: in Novo patet. Wright judges, however, that the Psalms occupy a unique role in this regard. They give voice to that “epic” which is sacred history, and in doing so, they adopt our voices as their own. That is to say, the poetry of the Psalter is meant to be prayed and to be sung. As such, it opens the possibility for an identification with that sacred history 288 Antiphon 17.3 (2013) about which it speaks. In taking to our lips the words of prayerful Israel—chief among whom is the prayerful Christ—we “inhabit” the world of the Psalter, allowing it to form our vocabulary, our imagination, and—since “you become like what you worship” (27)—our very selves. It is with an eye to this vision, to the Psalms understood as the (re)entry point to the Biblical “worldview” (16ff), that Wright encourages Christians to rediscover the Psalter as the essential hymnbook of the Church. They possess a particular efficacy in countering the prevalent Epicureanism of modernity which, in its garb of scientific fundamentalism, would have us think that “Our world and our own lives were simply part of an ongoing self-developing cosmos...cut off [from] any long-term or ultimate hope” (18). The heart of the book Wright structures around the themes of time, space, and matter. Summarizing the theological outlook of the Psalter, he writes: “Time: the past of creation, the future of judgment, and the present of celebration are drawn together. Space: what was promised for the Temple is now promised for the whole world. And now matter: we find ourselves standing at the fault line between the original material of creation and the new, restored, glory-filled material of the world that is to be” (144). The reader will not find in this book a treatment of any one given psalm in its entirety. Much less is there an effort to treat all 150 of the psalms. Rather, as suggested by thematic structure, Wright engages the Psalter as a unified book, which, notwithstanding moments of tension, speaks with a unified theological voice. In working to sound this voice to his audience, he draws judiciously from the Psalter and, with an eye to the canon as a whole, makes use of a wide range of texts from both Testaments. The effect is not so much a clear understanding of the structure and contents of the Psalter as it is an understanding of Israel...