Same. I really liked that one quote from Pascal that said as much.
I’m looking over the preface of the book and the end of the first chapter right now for clues.
In the preface he enumerates a number of meanings of the term Natural Theology, and then says this on xiii:
‘Natural theology’, in other words, has become a loose label for a string of questions, all of which have to do with the relationship of the world and God…I am proposing that we relocate them within the larger setsof questions to which, historically, they ethemselves belong, and that we do so with a fres historical look at Jesus himself (indeed, with “history” itself clarified and resced from its own similar distortions).
History, in other words, matters; and thus Jesus and the New Testament ought by rights to be included as possible sources for the task of ‘natural theology’. In saying this I am certainly not attempting to revive the kind of rationalist apologetic that would seek to ‘prove’ the Christian faith by a supposed ‘appeal to history’. …Neither in method nor in results will I be following normal apologetic pathways. To make the case for including Jesus in the topic at all, I shall dismantle some of the now standard misunderstandings of his public career and teaching and go on to argue for a fresh placing of him within the Jewish symbolic as well as historical world of his day.
From:
N.T. Wright. History and Eschatology.
Later, on page xvii, Wright describes some of the later lectures with this:
On the contrary, the resurrection opens up instead a new public world in which the questions raised by humans within the present creation can be seen as provisional signposts to God.
They are, however, ‘broken signposts’, since the highest and best aspects of the human vocation, from ‘justice’ to ‘love’, all create paradoxes and sharp disjunctions…At this point [the cross] the particular kind of "natural theology’ which comes into view, unlike most kinds in the last three centuries, takes a specifically Trinitarian form. Reflection on the “broken signposts” and the paradoxical way they point to God challenges the older implicitly Deistic models which either leave Jesus out of consideration or try to fit him in at the late state into a picture of ‘God’ generated on other grounds.
Wright obviously failed his high school freshman comp class with the 5 paragraph essay and thesis statement clearly at the end of the first paragraph. Stay tuned for more.
@Jay313 Thanks for the piece from Middleton. I’m going to start that when I’m done here!
PSA – That would be: Public Service Announcement, folks.
@Jay313 mentioned starting a new thread for the second lecture. I’m not inclined to do that, but will, if that’s what folks would prefer. PM me with your thoughts. What I have in mind is similar to what I did with the End of Apologetics thread. I put a Table of Contents at the beginning of that thread, and added links to the first slide for each new chapter discussion. This time I would include the same Table of Contents with the same navigational links at the first slide for each discussion section, AND place a link that goes back to the OP as well.
I’m starting to think in the structure of a simply designed e-book!
I am right there with you, Mitchell.
I have to treat these book discussions like a course with a final at the end. They are an enormous amount of work for me. There’s no way I could redo the pace of the Penner discussion.