Yes, the ideas percolating on top tend to filter down. But the folks on bottom before the invention of mass media received their news via rumor and the local priest/pastor or trader passing through. The rural/urban divide existed long before the late 20th century, but until recently it tilted far more rural than urban.
I forgot to mention my biggest issue with this first lecture. Does God intervene in history – whether human history or our personal histories? The question draws a line in the sand between Deism and Christianity. The problem arrives when people try to interpret individual events. Skeptics interpreted the Lisbon earthquake during Sunday Mass as evidence of God’s absence; fundamentalists interpreted Hurricane Katrina as God’s judgment on godless New Orleans. Some people see God’s hand in every minute detail; others pray for deliverance and receive no answer. I’ll wait to see where Wright comes down, but my own experience is most often silence with an occasional course correction.
Addendum: Forgot to mention the liberalized academy. Seriously, for every Harvard there are dozens of Wichita States, Emporia States, Fort Hays States, Eastern New Mexico Universities, New Mexico Highlands Universities, and on and on. It’s a drummed up fear of nothing, like Christian persecution in the US.
Thanks for adding that balance to the often-conceded perspective I mentioned. It’s worth remembering and repeating. And probably … for every ‘secularized’ or ‘liberal’ curriculum developed and pushed out there there will be a hyper-partisan conscious Abeka or BJU or conservative homeschooling publication of some kind enjoying wide circulation of its own.
[Though I might add - as one who has some skin in the game and experience with some of these more conservative publishers mentioned - they aren’t immune to cultural movement of their own (and not always toward the right). I don’t know about Abeka so much in this, but BJU (while still solidly YEC) - I don’t think they give nearly so much full-throated voice to their anti-Catholicism as they used to. Not to mention trying to leave racism issues behind them. Some of these cultures may drag their feet - and shamefully so in too many cases - but they are not unresponsive entirely. They are no doubt caught in their own hard place, wanting to keep on board Christians who talk like I just did above, and yet having significant clientelle and money motivations to not anger the other perspective which would be instead pushing language like ‘no compromise with culture’ and ‘staying true to the Bible’ (i.e. - Our inerrant interpretation of it - as one never hears clarified or conceded)]
I think sometimes it’s a reduction in volume of ideas that the “growth department” (marketing) recognizes are unpopular and less sellable. They haven’t changed. They haven’t gone away. The fine print remains, but mainstream (whatever it is) sells better, so those items are put on heavy rotation.
Point well-taken. And again - like Jay’s counterproposal - that has a ring of truth too. Of course, some might say that movement (relegation?) from the ‘heavy rotation’ circuit into it’s less visible ‘fine print’ status is just the inevitable path that such things take as they are propelled toward the exit doors. Granted, that’s an optimistic light. And don’t get me wrong - I’m not defending everything these publishers do or stand for. If such views are indeed on their way out … the path to the exit door seems to stretch down a forever hallway for some. One can be forgiven for thinking that there are some views which never go away.
In my experience – with a number of topics in my “evangelical world” – eventually someone with clout and a mic will have noticed a while back. This will lead to the gathering of others with clout who will gather together and hammer out a carefully-worded statement named after a U.S. city (usually) that clarifies in large print what had been relegate to fine print.
Then a movement begins to see it not only in church doctrinal statements but incorporated into legislation, sometimes in the definitions section of bills. I could go on.
Early on in lecture 2, Wright makes the comment that one must ‘mind their manners’ if they want to preserve their spot with the cool kids at the ‘high table’ (which I guess is Wright’s way of referring to the liberal but still somewhat religous intelligentsia that cannot tolerate the thought of naive acceptance of pre-scientific dogmas.) That sparked the question for me (given all the rest of where Wright goes in this lecture and all the subsequent ones) - Has Wright been ostracised from the ‘cool kids’ table? He’s obviously been invited to give this prestigious lecture series, and he’s respected more in scholarly circles now (I’ll venture) than perhaps he would be in fundamentalist ones. And yet, where he’s taking us would make scholars squirm more than just a little, I’m thinking! As one who hovers near the edges of that end of things - he makes me shift a bit uncomfortably. Is Wright a quintessential scholar, who nonetheless here has entered the higher temples of intellectualism and begun a wholesale turning over of tables and driving out animals? That thought challenges me through these lectures.
Between 8 and 9 minutes in, Wright makes the interesting observation that … Even though the Reformers and the Rationalists wanted different things, they both disapproved of the medieval church - and as a result of that alliance, the Protestant Reformation got its energy from both, and thus the tradition became saddled with a lot of rationalist baggage.
NAVIGATIONAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
for this thread:
“Discerning the Dawn: History: History, Eschatology and New Creation” by N.T. Wright
Below are the links to sections of this discussion. Please see the OP for more information.
Fingerbowl:
This starts around 5:00. Wright is talking about the academic confusion created by English simplifications of sophisticated biblical analysis done in Germany, which was taken in England as “assured results.” According to Wright, this misreading was then defended by the English not by going through the Germans’ arguments themselves to understand and critique them, but by snobbishly condemning anyone who questioned the English misreading of the German writers as a matter of bad manners.
Wright is condemning intellectual laziness of his countrymen, not railing against social inequities or classism.
I had a couple of grad school professors who made the same argument. They often lamented that biblical scholarship in the U.S. was fifty years or more behind Germany, still stuck on things the Germans had dismantled and moved on from.
Wright seems to me to think it an obvious conclusion that if the world is destined for destruction, then it has nothing to teach us of God. I can imagine his detractors pushing back on that one, though. Jesus obviously didn’t think the lillies of the field were any less worthy of having starring roles in parables about Kingdom things just because they are here today and gone tomorrow. This isn’t to say I disagree with Wright’s conclusion in this. I’ve already accepted that the early Christian understanding was looking forward to a tranformed creation, not a destroyed one - so I’m already accepting Wright’s main thesis at the higher level. I just don’t think it necessarily holds water (in a way obvious to me) that only imperishable things can teach us anything of God.
On a separate note - I share in Wright’s apparent surprise that Schweitzer held up Nietzsche as a moral hero alongside Kant and Jesus. Would be interesting to delve into Schweitzer’s defense of that!
Actually my favorite part of the second lecture was actually his response to the first question, which was about how to avoid being trapped in our culture. His line about how we all know that fake news exists but that doesn’t mean nothing happened was great, pointing to that we all know bad scholarship exists but that doesn’t mean there is no scholarship; this linked to his pointing out that scholarship concerning history tends to be self-correcting, i.e. that if one scholar publishes something about the original culture in which the scriptures were written and gets it wrong, other scholars will promptly apply corrections.
This made me think I’d really like to hear him talk about how to go about understanding scripture.
I’m glad you asked this question about the emphasis that Wright is putting on the “end of the world.” I assumed I understood what he was doing, bringing it in. In part I think I do. At least in the part of the lecture I’ve spent the most time with, he’s showing how there was a cultural focus in the late 19th and early 20th century on both myth as well as end-of-world narratives. As a German lit major, I can attest to the myth and fairy tale focus in all levels of literature and the arts.
I’m not convince that Wright’s interest in the end-of-the-world view of Christianity, and specifically Jesus, is in pointing out that it is not valuable, but rather that it is wrong. And that this wrong notion of Christianity (think of Platonism from the first lecture) leads to many misunderstandings of Christianity - pie in the sky when you die, an absolute end to history with no comprehendible activity afterward, duelistic concept of humans as well as the world (spirit good/matter bad), and more.
How this is important to his argument about including history in natural theology, I still need to work out. So many interruptions and so little time to really knuckle down. I’m still trying to pull together a few notes.
I think Schweitzer’s list of moral heroes is surprising, until you think about what Schweitzer’s interests were. Kant, of course, seems to be the secular moral paragon. And Nietzsche (as little as I know about him) did promote a strong moral code. It just happened to focus on the largesse of the Übermensch, who had no trouble eating little people for lunch. If you ignore just the right stuff, Nietzsche was a really great guy! And Jesus, of course, could be revered as a wonderful moral teacher, especially if you focus on him as an aspect of myth - like any other god of mythology, rather than a real person in history, who also happened to be God. Schweitzer was interested in the grand, sweeping narrative (myth) it seems as anything else.
I have so much more to work on here! Sorry it’s just crumbs these days.
@St.Roymond, I see you’re posting. How’s the lecture going? What thoughts do you have on Wright’s second lecture so far?
[Correction: I see you did post about the lecture as I was typing. Let me read that now!]
I like that connection between the points about scholarship from lectures 1 AND 2. I thought his point about the public nature of scholarship was really important, too.
Interesting in the second lecture is the implied importance of UNDERSTANDING the scholarship that one is critiquing. His comments about the British misunderstanding and simplification/smoothing out of the German and other Continental scholarship of the 18th and 19th centuries is a good example.
I agree. When we’re done with this series, I would like to start enjoying more of Wright’s work.