[Note to those who are curious about quoting people who are themselves quoting … You can select text from another post that is using quotes itself, and your quote will leave their quote embedded as such in your own quote! - just as I did with Kendel’s quote of Wright below. (So long as your selection includes some text outside the embedded - and now nested - quote.) ]
It does indeed seem that a much-needed and ongoing task through all religious history is the constant need for eisegetical clean-up of cultural and traditional accretions, some of which turn out to be less than helpful, or even harmful to our pursuit of true and faithful discipleship.
Well stated! Where Wright claims that “it must grow out of historical exegesis of the text itself”, I would insist on the additional caveat that our own traditional and cultural responses to past exegetical (and even eisegetical?) work is not necessarily all bad or of no value. Nobody (I think Wright would and does agree) interprets and applies scriptural understandings in a vacuum. We each are obliged to “make the narrative our own” and weave it into our own life situations. We can do that in false and self-serving ways, and it can also be done in faithful and Spiritually attentive ways. Or more likely - always a messy mix of both of those things, we being what we are. So clean-up crews always have work to do; but I wouldn’t characterize that work as being always and only demolition work.
Thanks for those thoughts, Kendel. I’m also looking forward to revisiting the fourth lecture.
@klw we’ve talked about our views on the ideas and practice before. I think you are more thorough about the theory and praxis here than I am. However, I am curious where Wright stands on this. He keeps digging at the U.S.'s separation, indicating that it is problematic. While, I think it’s a side issue here, I would like to know more about how he sees it. I think it’s also come up in relation to education. It seems like he does see an important roll for a state church and maybe other things I haven’t figured out yet. It’s hard for me not to bristle at such ideas.
When I wrote that I was thinking about Epicureanism. And I’ve gotten some very good information on it from some of you (Terry in particular).
Still I wasn’t asking quite the question that was developing. This is closer: Wright keeps pointing to motivation of the Enlightenment – it wanted to be the center of history, and thus must cut Jesus and Christianity down to size in order to overcome it and take the position for itself. I am curious about the reality of “The Enlightenment” having such motivation. I have my doubts about it.
It seems to me, perhaps wrongly, that the Enlightenment rolled along pretty well without particular reference to theology, or Christendom or Christianity. Maybe I have that wrong?
Thoughts?
I like the way Wright talks about the process here. It’s much more “real” than what I think most people assume about written “history.”
In connection, @Andy7mentioned North Americans (I’m including both Canadians and Americans here, although I think Canadians show a stronger commitment to this project) coming to terms with colonialism and the narratives we tell about it. Right now in the U.S. there is a strong movement to update history textbooks to tell our history more accurately. The pushback and accusations of “Revisionism” have actually been shocking. Because this isn’t the way people learned history as kids, they think it’s wrong, twisted, politicized. Without recognizing that that has been the case for a very, very long time.
Wright, as a historian, describes the reality of the discipline, that the product – history – is always shifting, as historians (and those who rely on the historian’s work) attempt to work closer toward the truth of what happened and write the narrative faithfully to the truth, rather than to a supporting mythology for whatever one wants to believe.
We cannot recreate the past. But real historians should seek to show the past as accurately as possible.
I am a librarian and work professionally with some historians, and one of my closer friends is also a historian. They are relentless. I mean absolutely relentless. They will travel great distances, pay their own hotel and transportation for the opportunity to check a few facts in an archive of obscure documents. Everything must be checked, cross checked, demonstrable, documented, footnoted, and if the source is dubious, that’s noted, too.
Good historians want to be honest historians, and as Wright says, they are putting their work out to the public for scrutiny. They don’t make assumptions. They really trust no one. They check EVERYTHING.
This last section of Lecture 3, particularly in context of the second half of Wright’s article/lecture How Can the Bible be Authoritative?, remind me of the last chapter of Myron B. Penner’s book, The End of Apologetics. The abstracts of those chapters on pages 17 and 18 are enough to introduce Penner’s view.
I don’t “know” Wright’s work and thinking well, so I am often flabbergasted, when he does things like talk about revising belief and doctrine, when we identify a problem with it. And that we need to make it our own, as you said, @Mervin_Bitikofer. This really isn’t how the traditions I’ve been a part of work. It would be seen, I think, as “liberal.” Rather than honest and necessary.
I think this might be the intersection of Penner’s Lived Hermeneutic, and Wright’s (borrowed) Hermeneutic of Love.
Most serious believers (including Wright I think) would not say it exactly this way - they would probably rather couch it in terms of returning to a more faithful or reliable understanding that would have been closer to original authorial / cultural understanding native to the writing in question. And in that respect they would probably think of it as undoing a revision or change that happened later in church history or tradition that they think can now be seen to have been scripturally unwarranted. But of course to the adherents of any such precious doctrine meeting that kind of criticism, they will usually hear none of it and insist that the doctrine was itself a core part of scriptural understanding all the way back to Christ.
I guess to adopt any posture of humility about one’s own strong beliefs might be seen as an inherently ‘liberal’ thing to do … if conservatives really want to continue to concede all humility to the other side. One would think they might have some hesitation about letting that happen … but be that as it may be - I don’t answer for them. An insufficiency of humility will lead groups into some very bad places and they are paying a dear price for it on the cultural front, the piper perhaps having yet to be entirely satisfied.
What are the other kinds of options scholars have given for this scandalous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, dead and buried, and then on the third day rose again from the dead?
How do scholars understand the kinds of accounts that we have that seem to testify to this but give differing explanations?
Give us a little survey of what those options are, and at least the short versions of what’s wrong with those and why the better option is that Jesus really did rise.
Wright:
Until the rise of what we now call historical criticism in the 18th century, there had always been skeptics, of course, but skeptics outside Christianity.
But then from the 18th century onwards, there were skeptics who came up from within a broadly Christian tradition, particularly interestingly, because within the Lutheran world, there was so much emphasis on the redeeming power of the cross, that often the resurrection didn’t seem to have much work to do.
It’s almost as though the Easter story is just a kind of a nice addendum, and then oh, by the way, you know, he rose again, and he ascended to heaven, that’s the end of the story sort of thing.
Any sense that the resurrection was actually the launching of new creation on Earth, as in Heaven, just had disappeared from the theological tradition.
Then, when skeptics from within Western scholarship came up and said, well, actually, he never really did rise.
Then people started to say, well, look, Paul says it was a spiritual body and so that presumably means that Paul didn’t think it was a physical body.
Paul was the earliest writer we’ve got, so all these stories in the gospels were obviously written down later on, because the gospels were probably written in the 60s, or 70s, or 80s, or 90s, so clearly, people started to make up stories a long time after the event.
The original idea was simply that after Jesus’s death, his followers had this strong sense that God loved them anyway, or that Jesus’s project was still continuing, or that there really was some sort of a life after death.
That then got downgraded into what a great many people in churches were taught through the 18th 19th and 20th century, so that the people who had swapped the biblical gospel of new creation for the Platonic gospel that the real aim is for us to go and live with God in a non physical, non spatio-temporal place called heaven. Once you’ve got that, then what’s the point of resurrection? So many people grew up saying, I believe in the resurrection of the body, in the Creed, but actually meaning I believe in the immortality of the soul, which is, of course, a very different thing. But once you’ve got a lot of would be Christian people believing that actually what matters is the immortal soul going off to heaven, then what’s the point of having a bodily resurrection? Then the skeptical scholarship comes along and says, well, there you are. When they said he was raised on the third day, what they actually meant was that God’s Kingdom continues, and that we will one day go and be with him, which is, of course, not what the language of resurrection meant at all. So there’s been an odd confusion between skeptical scholarship and muddled believers, who will say, well, clearly Jesus is alive because when we say our prayers, we have a sense of his presence. But obviously, he’s alive in a spiritual way, because he went to heaven, so he’s no longer around. The amount of sheer muddle and misinformation, both among Christians and among non-Christians has been such that it took me a lot of unpicking in the big book, and in the smaller book, Surprised by Hope, to try even to lay out what the options were. Of course, then you get skeptics who come along and say, well, if he didn’t actually rise from the dead, then, in what sense was there anything achieved at all by his life? Was he not simply whistling in the dark? Or was he not simply suggesting that there might be new ways of ordering your life which will be less unpleasant than other ways? And so the whole thing gets downgraded. To try to come back from that, and to say, no, let’s actually read the texts which are about new creation being launched in the very physical body of Jesus. This has been and for many people continues to be quite a shock. This is not what they expect to hear on Easter morning.
I’m also curious to hear Wright unpack his “two kingdom” view a bit more. From what I’ve gathered so far, he is out to do battle with gnostic/ epicurean/ enlightenment dualisms about the “material” versus the “spiritual”. I think Wright is saying that during the Enlightenment, people came to place “reason and logic as demonstrated by science in the physical realm” as the most important for society, and tried to relegate God to an unimportant “spiritual” role either as a deist–not acting in any significant way, or relegating religious belief as only an “internal/ individual pietistic practice”. In this way, one’s (internalized) spiritual beliefs would be private and have no impact on a secular society-- on education, the economy etc etc. Perhaps Wright is saying that this is what the American founding fathers were trying to do. But I’m not a student of the American constitution. Jefferson was a deist though?
I think the Anabaptist “two-kingdom” view is a bit different than this. We think the material world is very important, and how one lives one’s life (with physical actions in relation to others in the public sphere) is a critical part of one’s faith. (Faith is not only an internalized intellectual assent to doctrines). I think of an example in Ephesians when the idol-sellers became angry with the Christians and started rioting because their idol-selling profits were apparently evaporating. Clearly those early christians were living out their convictions in allegiance to their “New Kingdom” in the public sphere. And those convictions were conflicting with, and impacting the economy of the “Worldly Kingdom”. It’s only that the methodology of affecting societal/ economic/ educational change is different once one is a citizen of the “New Kingdom”. i.e., those early Christians did not try to grab political power and pass laws for all people in society against the buying or worshipping of idols. They simply lived out their true allegiance and its ethics among themselves, but in a way that it had public and material ramifications, ripple effects in the larger society. That began to subvert the idol trade from the inside-out. One could make the same argument for slavery in the NT?
I think it’s true of the later Enlightenment but not the earlier. They were both humanistic, but early on humanism conformed to culture and sought to improve it, but later humanism was exalted to the position of being the ‘savior’ of the culture with the ability to decide what should be kept and what should be discarded.
I knew a Lutheran pastor who used an interesting comparison for the Cross and the Resurrection: it’s like ice on your windshield on a cold winter morning; the Cross is the stimulus that causes the moisture across the whole windshield to crystallize, creating beauty, while the Resurrection is when sunlight hits that freshly-formed ice and you know you weren’t seeing things, that the ice is real.
I really liked the point about how Europeans and Anglo-Saxons view myth, one as seeing connection with the past, the other saying the stories are just made up. That relates, I think, to his four definitions of history: events, narrative, task, meaning. Theology has to do with the second and fourth, which are connected in the case of Christianity to real events. Some then reject any hint that some stories are in any way myth because when they hear “myth” they think “fiction” – a view that sprang up in societies founded by Anglo-Saxons. But that’s a misunderstanding that strips much of the Old Testament of the intended messages. By failure to grasp the original worldview, we end up with a fiction we can’t recognize until we actually grasp the concept of different worldviews.
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I really appreciated his point that ideas about history can be formed to hypotheses that can be tested against facts we know about history. It struck me that many YECists accept that when it comes to showing the reliability of the scriptures but reject it when it comes to science.
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I really, really liked the point about predictive historicism, the idea that there is a direction to history and we know what it is and therefor we should work to make it happen.
It struck me as he continued that theme that just as one couldn’t tell that Jesus was God by looking, so we can’t tell that God is in charge of history by looking at events. God being one Who hides Himself is an expression of Incarnation.
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I also loved the reference to scholars who reject the deity of Christ on the grounds that it conflicts with Jewish monotheism – I think they need to learn fom Dr. Michael Heiser.
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When he said to theologians “Don’t reject history – you have nothing to lose but your Platonism” I had to pause it I was laughing so hard.
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Last, what he said about historicans and archaeology resonated since I was just thinking of that while watching a video about what figures from the Old Testament can be counted as historical. One point that was made was that we can now (to use Wright’s term) hypothesize that David was a real person because we have discovered mention of “the House of David”, a mention that doesn’t confirm but definitely suggests that David was real. It made me wonder about Solomon: archeologists have found several things (stables, mines) that the scriptures mention in connection with Solomon, but no mention of Solomon’s name, so the hypothesis from that would be that his name ought to be appearing – and as wright noted, we can’t do an experiment to find it, we have to wait for those who dig up old ruins and old texts.
If one looks for a ‘spokesperson’ for the enlightenment - and I suppose there are many candidates … from Hume to Huxley or from Bacon to Descartes … then to be sure, (depending on whom you see as its voice) you might struggle to see Wright’s case that it has set itself up against any earlier linchpins of history (Christ). And specific voices (like Hume or Huxley) might have been quite happy to put it in just those terms, but other enlightenment voices would have deemed themselves to be within the fold of Christian perspective and would not put it thus, but insist on growth of what we now call the modern scientific enterprise as being yet another outgrowth of discipleship - far from being in competition with theistic perspectives - maybe instead even rooted in them. Perhaps Biologos enthusiasts largely align this way? In any case, I can see (and share in) your doubts about this proposal of Wright’s then.
On the other hand, maybe the enlightenment could be viewed as yet another of the ‘principalities and powers’ that has yet to be brought into submission. A ‘spirit of the age’ if you will that does set itself up against all other contenders. As such, I think that spirit has been alive and well (or maybe up until recent years anyway?) … we call it ‘Scientism’, and Biologos exists in large part because of the [past] and possibly still present prevalence of that very spirit. It seems to me that contemporary, strident voices for that might be culturally muffled right now - but far from gone or defeated I should think. And I furthermore suggest that I’m naive if I think those very voices are entirely ‘over there’ in some tribe of people we can easily identify and consider set apart, rather than recognizing the presence of those very spirits within ourselves who’ve all been thoroughly steeped in enlightenment presuppositions by now.
I share in your curiousity about how well Wright’s thesis will hold up as these lectures proceed.
Just so you know, there are plenty of people in Canada that have politicized the issue of reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Please don’t put Canada on a pedestal .
I think N.T. Wright and others properly place Jesus in His historical context of political extremists of the day. Even his disciples somewhat expected Him to bring in the Kingdom of God by political or other force. Instead, Jesus showed that His Kingdom is about peace and love and forgiveness (and even persecution).
That actually referred to ‘heavenly’ beings who had been assigned by YHWH-Elohim to portions of the Earth to manage them, who rebelled and thus became enemies of God’s people.
In the above context, a “spirit of the age” would be an actual spirit, one of the fallen spiritual beings include in “principalities and powers” (there’s a whole hierarchy in Second Temple Judaism, and if I’m recalling it correctly these guys were the top of the heap). There is some indication that the spirit of one nation can gain ascendance if that nation rises to prominence and so becomes dominant for a time; I suppose that would qualify as the spirit of that age.
Just by the way, I like to think of the rebel spiritual realm as a ‘cosmic Mafia’; the behaviors as described in the literature are a pretty good match. We tend to think of Satan as being sort of the king of all the fallen spirits/angels, but that’s extremely over-simplified: the highest of those rebels are like Mafia bosses, perfectly content to war against each other while they extort obedience from the ‘peons’ (us humans). Satan has preeminence due to being “more crafty” and having been the first rebel, but he’s not in command of the whole shebang.
In the context of the time, Jesus had no choice but to be a “political extremist”; politics and religion in Judea were a messy mix and anyone who could gather crowds for whatever reason became part of it.
I was just listening to a video by an ex-Muslim who was saying that Hamas is just the logical result of the Qur’an, that violence is inherent in the system (humor intended). It strikes me now that violence is also inherent with Christianity, except in reverse: Christians should expect to be met with violence from the outside whereas Muslims are supposed to inflict violence.
I think there’s some theological debate, though, about what these “real” things could be. Some have suggested they are human governments and rulers for example.
That doesn’t fit the bits in the scriptures well. It’s a position that Dr. Michael Heiser calls “cowardly”, scholars not wanting to accept the biblical worldview. Another scholar who has studied what Heiser calls “the unseen realm” says the view that human rulers are meant can only be sustained by really mangling a number of passages but isn’t quite as blunt as Heiser.
This, by the way, is an aspect of something in another thread that one person definitely isn’t aware of, that when Peter wrote about the angels who rebelled it isn’t about Satan and his followers, it’s a reference to the start of Genesis 6, which itself is a very brief statement of what can be found in the Book of Enoch. Deuteronomy 32:8 where YHWH divides up the nations “according to the number of the elohim”, a reference that can’t be made to fit the “human rulers” idea; it’s a reference to God having divided the nations among His divine council (who then proceed to rebel, deciding they want their people to worship them instead of YHWH).
Its a bit off topic for this thread, but just for the record, I’m “agnostic” about what these principalities and powers refer to…whether supernatural or human or a mixture of both? I don’t think it affects the point that Paul is making so for me it’s no theological hill to die on.
That said, with all due respect to Heiser’s dedicated scholarship and his devoted fans (and I have nothing against him), many of his detailed claims about the organization of the heavenly realms come from the book of Enoch and other Jewish writings not considered canonical (or necessarily inspired) by many in the church. Such writings may be “of interest” but I’m more hesitant than Heiser to make confident factual statements about the details of the organization of the spiritual realm based on those data. Hence my agnosticism. But of course Heiser would call people that don’t agree with his interpretation of the text “cowardly”, eh? Seems a bit ad hominum ?
Heh. It isn’t important to salvation, but it’s part of a theme in the Old Testament scriptures that gets echoed in the New, that God divided the nations among His divine council (thus “principalities”); in Second Temple Jewish lore there were also lesser ‘angels’ who aren’t bound to particular nations but can move around (thus “powers”). Though given that both Enoch and Peter speak of the rebel divine council members as having been imprisoned in darkness under the Earth (Tartarus) presumably the original principalities have been replaced. But either way, understanding this clarifies a few things.
Oh – it also explains where demons come from; they’re not the fallen angels, they’re the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim, the ‘angel’/human hybrids of Genesis 6 (plus possibly disembodied spirits of the later Rephaim and even Anakim).
So when we talk about spiritual warfare, these guys are the enemy.
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