What’s Wrong with Tom Wright’s Five-act Play Biblical Theology?

^{[Longer read – image: Kyle Head]}

So here it is, 35 years late and bang on time, my critique of Tom Wright’s five-act play model of the Bible. The model has become almost as ubiquitous in evangelical thought as the Shakespeare plays on which it is based. In case you haven’t come across it, you can find it in full here.

Is the Bible a five-act play?

In a nutshell, Tom Wright’s proposal (first shared in 1989) is that we can think of the Bible as moving forward in five acts: creation, fall, Israel, Jesus and the church (or, often a big emphasis for Wright, new creation). The Bible gives us the first four acts and the beginning of the fifth. Our job is to ‘faithfully improvise’ our part of the fifth act in the awareness that the final part is coming. There is no point simply repeating the previous acts, as that isn’t how a play works. But it also wouldn’t work to do something wildly unpredictable that departs from the author’s intentions, seen in the other acts.  

The five act thesis is a brilliant piece of popular theology, quintessential Tom Wright. In particular, it has the following virtues:

• It recognises that scripture is often narrative, rather than simply a catalogue of commands. 
• It is dynamic. It allows for new interpretations, such as opposition to slavery. 
• It is, potentially at least, contextual. Each act of Christian faithfulness is a fresh ‘performance’ in which the previous acts, the present actors, and the uniqueness of a given situation come together.
• It honours creation, by emphasising renewal rather than replacement. It improves on the idea of the Scriptures as ‘B – I – B – L – E’ (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth).

Wright’s model has quite a few pragmatic advantages too. It allows us to make some concessions to modern life, but still consider ourselves faithful to scripture – in that sense, it’s an attractive settlement position. It appeals to evangelicals because it’s all about the story of scripture; it appeals to charismatics as it allows for continuity between the miraculous ministry of Jesus and the church today; it appeals to progressives is because there is allowance for change through time. It is a novel proposal, but it wears its novelty lightly – there is not much critical reflection on the fact that the church hasn’t always thought of scripture and authority in this way. It’s a cultural form that many of us readily recognise, though this fact itself should begin to make us question its universality. It allows for local agency, but it has a revered place for the master-scholar – the one who sees ‘the whole story’ (for this, read Tom Wright himself or the would-be evangelical theologian or the well-informed individual Christian).

It’s only a model…but it has become a template for theology, ethics and imagination.

I should be clear, I have taught this model before and found elements of it very helpful. Of course, it’s only a model – all models have limitations. But its wide use and all-encompassing scope have made it a template for theology, ethics and imagination. This means its weaknesses have been amplified. I set out some of these below. 

Creational versus Christological

In a nutshell, the main weakness is that the five-act model is not sufficiently christological. Put another way, it begins and ends in the wrong place. Now, there are lots of reasons why ‘creation to new creation’ sounds right and good. It fits a straightforward canonical reading of scripture; it begins with Genesis 1 and ends with Revelation 22.  (In this respect, it relies not just on scripture being inspired but on the order of scripture in the Protestant canon somehow being God-given). So what’s the problem?

My issue with this is that when New Testament writers give us the ‘big picture’ of reality, they repeatedly start in a different place. The clearest and most deliberate example is John. John knows well how the Torah opens: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.’ But it could not be clearer that John wants to communicate how the coming of Christ places the world in a greater and richer perspective. ‘In the beginning… was the Word! And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God’ (John 1:1-2). John definitely wants us not to begin the story with creation. He wants us to begin the story before creation. He wants us to begin with the life of the Word with God, as God, ‘close to the bosom of the Father’ (John 1:18). John begins with the eternal life of God, an infinite, self-possessed life of grace, truth and light. Without this, John’s gospel doesn’t make sense. ‘The Father has life in himself’ (John 5:26); through Jesus we can receive that life. God is light, God is love (1 John 1:5, 4:8); through the gospel we come to share it. The reality of God comes first; creation and salvation follow. All things come from God, and to be saved is to return to the Source, just as Jesus comes from and returns to the Father (John 13:3). 

John is not the only one. Hebrews begins with the Son as the radiance of God’s glory, the one whose being precedes the creation of ‘the ages’ (Heb 1:2-3). Colossians also wants to point us to the Son who is ‘before all things’, raised ‘so that he might have first place in everything’ (Col 1:17-18). Quite simply, why would we begin our story with creation, when the New Testament glories in beginning its story with Christ? What else could it mean that Christ is Alpha and Omega? Surely the story should begin and end with him!

Why would we begin our story with creation, when the New Testament glories in beginning its story with Christ?

To press this further, Christ is not just an agent in creation – contributing to its genesis, coming to save, returning to judge. It isn’t sufficient to say, ‘Christ is central to the story because he is involved in making it all happen’. Christ is more than that. He is the relational basis of creation, its founding location, its organising rationality (that is, its logos) and its purposed end. The universe was made ‘through him and for him’ (Col 1:16). And the coming of Christ is more than a climax; it is an epiphany. Everything is restructured, every thought reframed by Jesus; nothing is left untouched. Without this we run the risk of trying to fit Jesus into a predetermined narrative or conceptual structure, what Douglas Campbell critiques as foundationalism: ‘Jesus arrives in our story somewhat unexpectedly…Before the arrival of God in person in Jesus, we did not possess this truth about the universe in all its fullness, so we could not tell our story properly’; consequently, ‘we should construct this story revelationally, or epiphanically, looking backward from the key revelation of God’s nature and purpose in Jesus’ (Pauline Dogmatics, 73 & 86). The five-act play emphasises Christ as an actor in the middle of the story, and implied throughout, but it doesn’t sufficiently reflect this fundamental truth. 

It is worth considering, as an example of this, just how christological the Nicene Creed actually is. It is as if Christ is the very centre of reality, and all Christian life and thought depends on that fact (this is a line of thought explored by Rowan Williams, drawing on Maximus, Aquinas, Barth and Bonhoeffer in Christ the Heart of Creation). The five-act play gives us, instead, a kind of chronological confessionalism. It turns a shorthand storyline for the Protestant canon into an absolute dogmatic framework (as my friend Sam Fletcher put it, it elides the biblical narrative and the economy of salvation). As a result, it raises the profile of reformed teachings about the fall and restoration of creation – matters broadly untouched by the historic ecumenical creeds – but it decreases the emphasis on the divine person of Christ, and the saving logic of his being. In some presentations of this model, it’s not clear why the role of Christ actually requires him to be consubstantial with the Father at all.

All this brings us to the question: whose story is this? God is clearly the author, but the bookended point of reference is the world: the play goes from Creation to New Creation. In this sense, the Bible becomes ‘the story of creation’. But in actuality creation is the story of the Son. It is, as we find out rather surprisingly somewhere in the middle, Christ’s story. And this should radically affect the way we read the whole thing. The danger with the five-act model is that it gives us a ‘creational theology’, concerned with the order and destiny of the world, but not a fully Christian theology, beginning and ending with Christ and the life of the Trinity. It is inadvertently cosmocentric, rather than thoroughly Christocentric. 

To structure the story round creation has important ramifications. It roots the theological task in the limited and ‘finished’ work of creation, rather than the abundant, ‘always more’ of the life of God. It instinctively prioritises what Ben Quash calls the given rather than that which is yet to be found. It leans heavily on readings of Genesis which are seen as setting the terms for theology. As interpreters, we can end up looking for story patterns, narrative arcs and timeless authorial principles rather than subjecting all our reasoning to the ultimate logic of Christ. We ‘ink in’ horizontal lines through time, rather than tracing a path to the centre. 

The heart of all things is not the structured chronology of a historical play but the living reality of a divine person.

However, if all reality is centred on Christ, our approach should be different. The heart of all things is not the structured chronology of a historical play but the living reality of a divine person. The goal of all things is not so much a narrative conclusion as participation in the life of the Trinity. And this most central of truths was revealed not as the progression of a plot but as a radical interruption that reframed, and retold, the whole story. Christ is not a feature of the authoritative word of God; he is the Word. The scriptures draw their meaning from him and truly speak only insofar as they point to him. It’s not that the Bible can’t be appreciated as a story, but that the story only makes sense in the light of the Son. 

This lack of sufficient Christological basis leads to all the issues below. In each case, the framework of the story risks obscuring the living presence of Christ that exceeds our capacity to organise history into stages. 

Sequential versus ongoing 

The five acts are sequenced in Wright’s model. One follows from another, and we are to act in a given way because we are in one place in the story and not in another. As Wright puts it in the original article, ‘[t]he earlier parts of the story are to be told precisely as the earlier parts of the story. We do not read Genesis 1 and 2 as though the world were still like that… Nor do we read the gospels as though we were ignorant of the fact that they are written precisely in order to make the transition from Act 4 to Act 5, the Act in which we are now living…’. This episodic, epochal structure is part of its evangelical appeal, allocating parts of the Bible to eras of a grand story in a way we can trace. But it raises a set of questions.  

By sequencing the acts it presents previous acts as being finished. Creation is ‘finished’ and we move on to the next stage. But what of creation as a continual donation of existence, the constant giving of life by the Spirit? What of creation as an unfolding and evolving reality? The Fall is also depicted as a moment or stage in history rather than as an element of all human experience (Wright would say it is both, but the model emphasises its temporal aspect). Similarly, what about Israel? Is this act finished? How does the model allow for God’s faithfulness to Israel to sit alongside God’s dealings with the church? In all these ways the five-act model sequences things that are actually ongoing. 

As above, a more robustly theocentric proposal would be structured around God throughout. That is, the great drama begins in and with God. God is the act that continues alongside the other acts. In other words, what if it isn’t about us being the play and God ‘coming to join’ through the incarnation? What if, at least from another perspective, God is the play and we get to join with God? God has been described by the great theologians as pure act. After all, creation lives because Gods ‘breath’ gives us breath (Psalm 104:30). And ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). Salvation, too, is to be ‘in Christ’ so that we are parts of his body, and to share the ‘fellowship of the Spirit’. Wright’s drama gives us a world created in a ‘new space’ outside God (Surprised by Hope, 113), whose plotted history takes place in ‘a different country altogether’(Interpreting Scripture, 127). But Scripture and tradition also speak of us dwelling in the ongoing and manifold presence of God. 

What if God is the play and we get to join with God?

Interestingly, Bonaventure describes the progression of reality as four rivers: Trinity, creation, Israel, church. The act of a play finishes, but a river keeps flowing. Nicholas of Cusa talked about an ‘unfolding’ of God in creation (while never fully being unfolded), yet the whole process is somehow ‘enfolded’ in God’s presence. As in the Nicene Creed, history is situated within the Triune relations. If this sounds too philosophical, we should bear in mind the approach the New Testament takes. There are indeed ‘ages’ whose culmination has come upon us (1 Cor 10:11), but the result is not to see previous eras as a preparatory backdrop. Rather, as the Old Testament is re-read in the light of Christ, his presence shines throughout (2 Cor 3:14-18). So Christ is seen to be the rock that accompanied Israel’s ancestors (1 Cor 10:4). All God’s promises are found to be ‘Yes’ in him (2 Cor 1:20). We see through Israel’s tabernacle to the heavenly reality (Heb 8:5). This is more than a thematic connection between parts of a play. Old Testament texts participate in the eternal reality of the Son; New Testament texts aren’t just a model for us to implement, they are a means of encounter. This is why they are Holy Scriptures not simply recommended reading. We read not just to look back at earlier episodes; we read to look through to the abiding reality of Christ. 

Programmatic versus interruptive

Although it’s an attractive idea to think of us faithfully improvising on a schema clearly outlined by God, developments in life and doctrine don’t necessarily happen this way. As Luke tells it, Gentiles were included in the church through a powerful intervention of the Spirit, not as a result of prior biblical reflection. The language of ‘Trinity’ and the Nicene Creed depended on a new register of ideas and made significant use of Greek philosophical categories. When the church accepted a heliocentric cosmology it changed the basis on which the biblical story was understood, and allowed the emerging discipline of modern science a voice it hadn’t had before. In abolishing the transatlantic slave trade Christians had to recognise the ‘minority report’ of people like Gregory of Nyssa, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Quakers. Each of these changes are arguably more than a faithful improvisation – they are disruptive innovations, interruptions from the margins, and unprecedented readjustments of the relationship with culture. Afterwards, we can look back and integrate them into the story; but at the time, did they feel like a faithful development? Perhaps sometimes, as David Bentley Hart provocatively puts it, ‘a certain degree of wilful historical forgetfulness must be cultivated, so that a new version of the past can be invented, one purged of the very complexities and confusions that had demanded a new dogmatic definition in the first place’ (Tradition and Apocalypse, 108). To tell the story as the collaborative work of a group of actors might not capture the radical, contested, violent and piecemeal nature of this process. 

To tell the story as the collaborative work of a group of actors might not capture the radical, contested, violent and piecemeal nature of the process. 

Andrew Perriman challenges the sense in the five-act model that all the major building blocks are in place and all that is required is implementation: ‘Wright’s outline leaves us with a lot more history–in fact, an indefinite amount of very unpredictable history–to get through in the last few rushed scenes of the final act…[In a] more complex model…we are not just reciting the same evangelical mantras…in order to fill the theological void between Jesus and the final judgement’ (End of Story, 123-124). What if, instead, ‘the story of the church…is undetermined, because history is undetermined, and remains open to significant development’; this is because ‘narratives move forwards, they change direction, they spring surprises’ (103, 131; see Sam Wells, Improvisation, 53). In fact, so far as it interprets Scripture through a fixed and governing abstraction (the five-act framework), Wright’s approach no longer handles Scripture as a narrative. The twists and turns of a story are subordinated to ideal principles.

Again, this has implications for the place of Christ within the whole scheme. Perhaps, rather than a fixed or linear sense of what a play involves at every stage, we should allow more for the expansiveness of Christ, who exceeds all our imagination. Christ interrupted Israel’s history, reconstructing her stories in a way unexpected at the time. Only later could the early church pick through the aftermath, reflecting on the way themes were adopted, left behind or transformed. Might Jesus still do this with our imaginations now? Could the Spirit give us new retellings of the story, of which Wright’s is only one example? The future, after all, belongs to the unseen Son (1 John 3:2), whom no one knows (Matt 11:27), and whose judgement is not yet revealed as we await his appearing. 

Realist versus analogical

Finally, Wright has argued persuasively throughout his academic work for ‘critical realism’. But the five acts do assume a relatively straight correspondence between biblical vocabulary and the structures of reality. Creation happened, the Fall happened, Israel and Christ happened and the new creation will happen. At the level of biblical metaphor, Wright is happy to acknowledge that ‘all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist’ (Surprised by Hope, 144), but at the level of the model itself the Bible is still functioning as a realist chronological framework. I’m not arguing against the framework, as such. But I do notice that this approach leans towards the chronologically realist, and underplays the analogical. 

There is an existential dimension to this. Despite Wright’s careful reflections on this theme, if we are not careful, we end up knowing the ‘how’ of history rather than what we really know, which is ‘who’. In other words, an over-emphasis on realism risks becoming technical and programmatic, rather than personal and provisional.

There is also a moral dimension. This came home to me powerfully in an evangelical bible study on climate change. As the study went on it seemed that the question ‘where does this fit in the story?’ had come to matter more than simply ‘what is the most loving thing to do?’ But can we always get our bearings simply from the plot lines of Scripture? Are there aspects of behaviour – OT genocide, inequality, even the violence of the Book of Revelation – that can’t be justified unless they are transformed by the cross? Is our final appeal to ‘the big story of Scripture’ or is it the character of Christ and the virtues of goodness and love that he reveals to be divine perfections?

Finally, there is a dogmatic dimension. If the Bible gives us the shape of history and the tools to understand it comprehensively, the rest of theology can end up as something of an afterthought (a point made by Hans Boersma in Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew). Yet the five-act model rests on a host of dogmatic assumptions. The Fall is an entire act of Wright’s play. This despite the fact that the phrase, or something equal to it, never appears in the Scriptures. There is clearly a sense of brokenness throughout the Scriptures, but that is not the same thing as a discernible chronological phase. Wright’s model follows Augustine inasmuch as it begins with something relatively ideal from which the Fall is a departure; redemption restores what has been lost, hence, we end with ‘new creation’. But in reality, creation seems to grow towards maturity rather than simply decline (something Irenaeus captured better than Augustine). All this explains why Sam Wells makes changes in his version of a five-act approach, writing instead of Creation, Covenant, Christ, Church and Consummation, all grounded in the God being the essence of all things (Humbler Faith, Bigger God, 20 & 71-73). 

Ultimately, we need to recognise the analogical function of religious language. We have the sign not the reality itself. We don’t have full purchase on the whole story. We can’t always read morality ‘off the page’ of the Bible. We can’t absolutely capture the chronology of the earth in dogmatic categories, however important those categories may be. 

Conclusion

At heart this comes down to models of biblical theology. In Wright’s ‘authoritative story’ model, the whole of scripture fits together as a coherent unit from which we construct a robust interpretive framework. This is a free-standing edifice: from within its structure, we can critique the worldviews of others, as if Christian subculture floated relatively independently within its wider cultural context. But I wonder if we should be looking at Scripture differently. At its heart is Christ, radiant and unsurpassable. But no one can look directly through to the centre – he is not a truth we can systematise or possess in that way. Radiating out from Christ are the rays of the biblical writings. No one writing can be fully harmonised with another, but each one distinctively reflects his glory (Balthasar expressed all this memorably in The Glory of the Lord, vol 1, and Truth is Symphonic). All this affects how we do our theology. The future still has a profound openness to it; our models are necessarily incomplete; our words may sometimes fail as much as they succeed. 

There are certainly virtues in ‘faithful improvisation’ – it is a good model, alongside other models. But Scripture is not just drama or narrative. It is also wisdom that requires ongoing communal discussion. It is a treatise on truth that leads us to the rationality at the heart of the universe. It is a book of signs, a dim analogy for a reality it claims not to be able to grasp (1 Cor 13:12, 15:35-44, 1 John 4:12, 1 Tim 6:16). And we can think of it as a sacrament in that it leads us to the very presence of Christ. Our approach needs to take account of all these aspects. 

It could be as simple as beginning and ending with God: Communion; Creation; Covenant; Christ; Church; Consummation.

As to what a different approach would look like, that is an interesting question. It could be as simple as beginning and ending with God: Communion; Creation; Covenant; Christ; Church; Consummation. We could recognise that what issues from the Trinity is not just a succession of stages but ongoing gifts that share in the life of God, flowing like rivers from their ultimate source and then returning to it. More than anything, as a point of method, we should always begin and end with Christ, centring our thought on him. More could be said about this. But that, as they say, is another story.