"Discerning the Dawn: History: History, Eschatology and New Creation" by N.T. Wright

Faith & Science Conversation
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A bit more that I’ve been working on all day. I want to come back to the inaugurated kingdom soon, but may not have time this evening.

It has been hard to sustain discussion in this thread. @St.Roymond has tried hard. I know I have failed. I’ve looked over past posts and am afraid I’m often repeating things that were said before, just throwing up my notes. I’d like to review the previous posts for Lecture 4, but I hope other folks will, too. And reply to them.

Friday we start on Lecture 5.

My post for today:

I spent more time today going over the lecture with an eye to better understanding what Wright is getting at with apocalyptic and to see if I could find any clarification for questions that @Terry_Sampson , @Andy7 and I (and maybe others) expressed about the “already” aspects of the Kingdom of God.

Wright’s explanations of “apocalyptic” are straight-forward:
• a literary form and use where writers intend to denote what we call “this-worldly” realities and to connote theological meaning.
• Uses the language of cosmic catastrophe to refer to actual political events.
• “[Jesus] was talking about something that was happening and would happen once and for all on earth as in heaven. He was using language that would invest that “something” with theological significance.” (History and Eschatology p. 134 – the book that came out of these lectures.)
• NT apocalyptic writing refers to the coming of God.

It was helpful to me that Wright gave extrabiblical examples of apocalyptic writing. It’s not something unique to the Bible and more mysterious, but was widespread in its use for the same purposes that Wright includes in his informal definition of apocalyptic. These give us contemporary readers demonstrations of how this type of literature was used and understood by the people who wrote it, and that without the feel of “high stakes hermeneutics” associated with the Bible.

Again, I actually enjoyed Wright’s discussion of new creation as part of his discussion of the evangelists’ use of and understanding of apocalyptic language. In speaking of Romans 8, Wright says: “Paul uses Exodus language. What God did for Israel, and what God did for Jesus at Easter, God will finally do for the whole creation.” Paul links this to the final resurrection envisaging an actual transformative event, not simply an existential experience. Romans 8 does not describe a cosmic disaster. The present creation will not be destroyed; it will be set free from thora decay. It will be more truly itself when, in the end, God will be all in all.” (23:32 to 24:07)

And again to the quip (but with what follows): “If the day of the Lord meant the collapse of the space-time universe, you don’t expect to be informed of this by a letter. Paul was describing transformative events within the ongoing space-time world, not the destruction of that world and its replacement with a purely spiritual existence nor supernatural.”

This is magnificent, isn’t it? This is not the “Left Behind” or “A Distant Thunder” boogieman I’m used to.

Around 33:31 Wright States that “The Gospels do not contain apocalyptic in the first century sense; they are apocalyptic. They are describing how the coming of God took place.”
A number of us have pointed out this correction, but I think it’s important to look at why Wright says they are apocalyptic. They aren’t just talking about what Jesus did (denoting events) but giving those actions theological significance.

Wright boldly states a few minutes later: “The way the evangelists told the story of Jesus was as the story of a potential messianic claimant in whose actions and ultimate fate they discerned in retrospect the presence of Israel’s God.” I imagine this view that gives credence to hind-sight might be rejected in some camps. But it deals reasonably with the delay of the writings after Jesus’ resurrection, as well as with their genre or form and even stated goals: “that you may believe,” for example. Which is different from Action News Reporting.
Finally, related to the coming of God, Wright mentions about 36:34 “That’s how the old mythological narratives work; you defeat the dark powers and then you build the place where God or the king or both is going to come and rest. And we see such images or references involving Jesus all over the new testament. Once the king is seated, there will then be a rest for God’s people with him.

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Looking back over the thread for Lecture 4:

“Do we ever reach a point where that has concluded its “forward-pointing work?”
The temple completed it’s forward-pointing work when it was superseded by Jesus himself. The people of God were never left without something pointing forward to God’s Kingdom.

I suppose we must entertain the question whether “holy writ” does, in fact, point forward to God’s Kingdom. Assuming it does, we might need to consider how it does that; in what way it serves this purpose; what use we should make of it.

I hear part of the the counter: “You are forgetting the Holy Spirit! God gives us the Holy Spirit to guide us, to point to his Kingdom!” No, I am not forgetting. I am remembering, in addition to the proper understanding of and submission to the Holy Spirit, the misguided as well as evil claims ascribed to the Holy Spirit. Much of this is addressed in “holy writ,” which I find to function as an essential set of guardrails, guides. Without “holy writ” we can make up whatever we want. And people still do. I think we need those guardrails, even if people misuse or ignore them, as some did the temple.

One person’s “paper pope” is another’s window to revelation – the best we’ve got for now. I am unaware of the Holy Spirit broadly providing the level of detail about God and the Christ, or the Holy Spirit himself. Until some new pointer is provided that supersedes “holy writ” we will need to continue to use it.

Those who choose to prostitute themselves for the sake of power (some of whom are American Evangelicals) are not using “holy writ” as a paper pope. They are misusing it and twisting it. They are also participants in the very cultural layers that form them (as we all are). All the more reason to continually point to “holy writ” as guardrails and a guide to forming our thinking, committing ourselves to keep trying, looking for errors in our own thinking.

This is an overly-broad brush. Speaking myself as one of those American Evangelicals. I’m crushed by what is so widely accepted in “my tribe.” But “widely accepted” is not the same as consensus or homogeneity.

There’s plenty to be horrified at. But of the American Evangelicals I’ve shared the pew with my entire life, few fit the stereotype your comments reflect.

Additionally, I bristle at “brand loyalty” and the specific way it targets other “brands” of Christianity. Any of us may prefer our own tradition and for good reasons. Fine. But understand that there is always valid criticism available against what each of us prefers.

Me, too, @Andy7 . All the time. As the Church, and over perhaps most of her lifetime, we fail to make use of our greatest opportunity to share the gospel – by following the specific commands of Jesus. Actually, Wright will address your concerns in some of his upcoming lectures. But not with easy answers.

Yep. I like the way you put this.

And so was Jesus, according to Wright:

“Jesus’ parables offer his own redefinition of Kingdom of God. Remarkably, they’re seldom seen this way. One gospel scholar has even suggested that Jesus offered no modification of what the kingdom meant in his world. That’s bizarre! In fact, the kingdom parables all start from a supposedly normal kingdom meaning and then explain that the kingdom is coming but in a different, subversive fashion. The hope of Israel is being fulfilled, but not the way people thought it would be.” (39:14)

“The messianic theme in all the Gospels reaches its height in Jesus’ crucifixion. All four Gospels, fully aware of the paradox, see the crucifixion as Jesus’ royal enthronement…This is how the Son of Man is humiliated in order then to be glorified…Jesus was not politicizing the kingdom; he was redefining power and politics themselves.” (40:03)

I think (what appears to be) the absence of the bottom-up kingdom that you and Wright mention is evidence of the disobedience and distractedness of the church (at least in the west) for a very, very long time.

Like you @Terry_Sampson I am still looking for those details!

PS:
Hey! you guys! I can’t add to this thread until someone else participates here. I can’t even make another post to remind the group that Friday starts the Lecture 5 discussion, or to post the next navigational table of contents. Without your participation, the thread will die in 7 days.

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Point well-taken. Thanks for reminding me that I shouldn’t always paint with such broad brush-strokes.

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I was just reading some of the kingdom comparisons the other day and was reminded of how backwards they are often interpreted. Consider:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

I don’t know how often I’ve heard sermons that connect the kingdom to the pearl and admonishing that we should give up everything in order to have it, but the text plainly says that the kingdom is like the merchant, that the kingdom gives up everything in order to acquire the pearl. Clearly the merchant is Jesus – and we are the pearl.

That stands the usual interpretation of the Kingdom on its head; the usual idea is shown in those wrong-headed sermons: it is not something we can buy or earn, it is something that spends everything to acquire us.

Precisely – the Cross is where the Kingdom trades everything it has in order to obtain us.

It’s so backwards to the constant theme in pietism that we have to obtain the Kingdom. I often think of the horrid Sunday School song “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder”; it’s horrid because it presumes that human effort can achieve heaven (which is quite contrary to where Jesus states “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven —the Son of Man.”

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I bump into that all too often! I’ve wondered if there’s a way to put a time limit on that, for example if three days go by and no one else has posted, the three-in-a-row limit resets.

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Chapter 5 Discussion begins today!

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.

Opening Post (OP)
Jan 5, 2024: Lecture 1 - The Fallen Shrine: Lisbon 1755 and the Triumph of Epicureanism
Jan 19, 2024: Lecture 2 - The Questioned Book: Critical Scholarship and the Gospels
Feb 2, 2024: Lecture 3 - The Shifting Sand: The Meanings of ‘History’
Feb 16, 2024: Lecture 4 - The End of the World? Eschatology and Apocalyptic in Historical Perspective
YOU ARE HERE: Mar 1, 2024: Lecture 5 - The Stone the Builders Rejected: Jesus, the Temple and the Kingdom
Mar 15, 2024: Lecture 6 - A New Creation: Resurrection and Epistemology
March 29, 2024: Lecture - 7 Broken Signposts? New Answers for the Right Questions
April 12, 2024: Lecture 8 - The Waiting Chalice: Natural Theology and the Missio Dei

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Though the following extended quote is not from the Gifford Lectures or even from Wright, I’ll post it here nonetheless since it overlaps with this subject area (of earth-situated Kingdoms).

In the wake of The Late Great Planet Earth, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, millions of Christians assumed that Revelation was a kind of biblical code that foretold the future. So as I tuned out Reverend Presley’s sermon and tuned into Revelation, I thought I was reading an encrypted foretelling of the geopolitical events of the late twentieth century. I thought Revelation was about communism, the Cold War, international intrigues involving Henry Kissinger, and a supercomputer in Brussels called the Beast. But I was mistaken. And so, it turns out, was Hal Lindsey.

The book of Revelation is easily the most misunderstood and misused book in the Bible. It’s the book that had the hardest time gaining admission into the New Testament canon of Scripture. Fifteen centuries after its composition, in the early days of the Reformation, Martin Luther wanted to remove it from the Protestant Bible. Luther derided Revelation as …

neither apostolic nor prophetic….I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it….Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it….Christ is neither taught nor known in it.

Luther had no use for the book of Revelation, until he used it to preach that the pope was the Antichrist. Pope Leo X returned the favor and used Revelation to preach that Luther was the Antichrist. Protestants and Catholics have been weaponizing the book of Revelation ever since. Unfortunately, this kind of mistreatment of the Apocalypse has been common throughout church history. Revelation has been regularly shanghaied as a polemic against enemies and as a warrant for violence. All of this abuse is sad, since Revelation gives us one of the most stunning, creative, and beautiful portrayals of Jesus Christ and his kingdom in all the Bible.

Though I often cringe at how Revelation is typically preached, the book is perhaps the most important biblical text for the American church right now. Its particular relevance has to do with Revelation’s intensely political nature. If there is one book in the Bible that is written specifically for Christians living as citizens in a superpower, Revelation is it. The Apocalypse brings the Bible’s most creative and powerful critique of the idolatry inherent within economic and military superpowers. Regarding Revelation as a political work, Eugene Peterson says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.” For Christians living in an economic and military superpower and called by Christ to resist the idolatrous greed and militarism of empire, Revelation is supremely important. But to serve this purpose it has to be rescued from its sensationalist and outrageous misinterpretations.

Zahnd, Brian. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (pp. 148-150). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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I think this is it. I was coming into young adulthood on the end of the Late Great Tsunami, or rather walking among the debris after it began to recede. I can’t express the relief I felt, when I first encountered J. Nelson Kraybill’s Apocalypse and Allegiance a few years ago. [I just pulled it out, and see that I never finished it. I can tell where my markings end.] It made sense. It was clean and simple. Straight forward. Useful. Not a horrible bloodbath of vengeance and justification for hate.

This is why I have enjoyed so much Wright’s hints at the Kingdom of God already inaugurated. And it’s why I want him to flesh that out more. Which may be some other lecture series. But we need that one, too! At least I need it.

Here’s a bit from Kraybill’s introduction (pg. 15):

But Revelation also serves as a primer on how good and evil interreact in every generation.
…
The pressing issue for John’s readers was how Christian , who give their highest loyalty to Jesus, should conduct themselves in a world where economic and political structures assume that everyone would worship the emperor. While no Western nation has outright ruler worship today, we do have political, military, and economic powers to which millions give unquestioned allegiance.
…
He received his vision in the first-century Mediterranean context, and symbols in his work relate primarily to realities of that era. But the world he inhabited – the Roman Empire – and the symbolic universe his vision created have uncanny parallels to our circumstances today…In the meantime, what is the Spirit saying through Revelation to us about faithfulness to Jesus Christ in our world?

I think a large part of the appeal of the Late Great Planet Earth interpretation of Revelation is that it takes all the real pressure off us Christian Bible readers once we get out of Chapter 3. “Whew! Glad I’m not like those pathetic screw up churches! Now Jesus is gonna kick some unbelieving/Communist/Anti-American/unpatriotic butt!” ( / sarcasm ) We Christians can ignore what the Spirit is saying to the churches, and avoid the pain that comes with real self-examination and change. But are we ever told to judge others in the NT? or those outside the church? Whom are we commanded to judge, to examine, to search?

Ourselves.

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All of this ‘convergence of themes’ that I’m seeing from Wright, Zahnd, and Kraybill is making me want to go back and re-read Revelation with fresh eyes! How many times have I read that book (not because of any special focus or study of it specifically, but only as the obligatory culmination of a ‘reading sweep’ through the whole Testament), and yet had never fully realized all these things about it!? Even as an Anabaptist, my own habits of thought have not been beyond the cynical airs of cultural addictions and war-enthused imaginations that have perverted this final beautiful appeal of the real Gospel message of Christ, and turned it into Caesar-worship instead!

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I first read it when a fellow summer camp counselor had it with him. He and others became Christians after reading it, which didn’t make sense to me. I now wonder how their spiritual lives have gone given just how far off the book turned out to be.

I do remember that a Methodist minister pointed out that there has hardly been a century in history when one Christian or another wrote something similar showing how the end was right around the corner according to Revelation!

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I find it difficult to see how people can read Revelation honestly and not see that it is talking about our lives in “Babylon”, instead using it to treat the U.S. as “God’s Country” with some sort of holy mission.

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well, of course … I wasn’t saying I’ve every been that far gone to imagining those sorts of perversions … but the softer sort of seductions are much more widespread than just the U.S., I think … and what I mean by that is just the perennial slippage every generation (and nationality) of humans has towards “here-and-now” materialistic results orientation (with all the of implied utilitarian-rationalized violence that slips in with that). No generation has ever just been ushered past the Petrine error without succumbing to that temptation themselves and needing to hear the “get behind me Satan” rebuke from Christ for themselves. There is nothing automatic about the way of the cross, and even when we learn it, we still have to keep dying to ourselves repeatedly because force, domination, and power are all just so shiny and sexy to the violent-minded (which … is all of us during our worst moments at least - and for some maybe all of their moments!). Many U.S. Christians may be near the worst of the lot in this right now, but we are in no way alone I’m certain.

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I’m curious, whether any other cracks at Revelation included naming specific countries and to-that-time-contemporary technologies and events the way so many “expositors” do now. And the time tables, etc. Or is this a new phenomenon.

I don’t think it’s slippage, Merv. The slipping was completed a long time ago. I doubt that even Capitalism is (alone) to blame. It’s the world we’ve been living in for many generations. Anabaptists may have been able to insulate themselves from it at bit, but to maintain that difference requires a strict form of separatism, that would prevent you from participating in this discussion even.

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Yeah - and we seem well-stocked in our own brands of spiritual pride that we begin toting around. Separatism may have some spiritual advantages of insulating one from wordly temptations (at least that’s the showy side of it - and the intent of it from the get-go). But then it comes with its own set of problems too, and ultimately fails to quench or address all the same sensual indulgences that we all still end up struggling with anyway. But … it is what it is, and I’m glad that God can use all of us in our various and assorted habits and traditions.

Back on Wright’s lectures … here are a few of my quotation/paraphrase choices from lecture 5.

11:15 Israel’s God has promised to do in and for all creation what he has done for tabernacle and temple. …this makes no sense within split level Epicurean cosmology. Nor does it appeal to the stoic for which divinity permeates everything anyway… Certainly not welcome to the Platonist for whom the earth is a mere shadow of higher reality.

14:15 Are the shrines (Solomon’s temple, etc.) … are they pointing back toward some original creation? Or are they pointing forward toward something new to come? Wright says he goes for the latter himself.

17: “The Sabbath is to time, what the holy of holies is to place.”

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Amen, brother!

I do not believe I am bound to hold a strict Sabbath, or Sunday as an alternate. Even though the denomination’s church I currently attend practices strict Sunday “Sabbath keeping” (or whatever term you’d prefer). However, this song (which I have probably shared various times before) exposits musically, what Wright is getting across at 17:. It’s one of my many favorites by Michael Card.

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Re: “keeping the sabbath”. I listened through to the questions from the audience at the end of the talk where someone asked "Do you think that the eastern orthodox tradition of sabbath-keeping is a way to achieve theosis (“sanctification”)? The wording of Wright’s response suggested that he viewed the “new sabbath” as a 24-7 thing, not a single day. According to his answer, the head-space of “peace and joy” was something now inaugurated and in which Christians should be living in continually–although he admitted he had not yet mastered this outlook in his own life, 24-7. Just as the confined sacred space of the old temple was transformed to a new temple comprised of the “living stones” of people, this concept of the sabbath in the new kingdom as a transformed and permanent mental state was new and intriguing for me.

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I’m intrigued as well! Thank you for pointing this out. I’ll listen extra careful.

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reposting from above…

In lecture 5 Wright was beginning to lose me. This idea that our sin damages or limits God is not an idea which I accept. We are the victims of our sin not God. And I certainly do not believe in a God which can be limited or damaged by the things we do.

But… this is one of the most the fundamental differences in the teaching of Jesus. So it is not that I am faulting the idea that the Jews believed in such a thing. And perhaps there is a different way of saying it… To be sure the locus of damage and limitations from sin are in us not God, but the relationship with God was indeed broken by the fall. And the one thing which will break a parent-child relationship is when the presence of the parent in the child’s life does more harm than good. So… “the return of Yahweh” as Wright calls it can be understood as getting past this by providing a way for the presence of God in our lives to be of benefit to us. And it is natural that this can be complicated by variations between people – that some will find this way for the presence of God to be a benefit to, while for others it remains unhelpful, where a belief in God can even be a part of the psychopathology of some people.

BTW… this makes me want to listen to lecture 5 again to remind me of what Wright said exactly to have me respond in this way.

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Oh… it is a pleasure to listen again!!!

I was taken with this introduction explaining how off our assumption was that the ancients were addressing our questions/challenges when they were answering different questions. This is similar to an observation I made in comparative religions… that different religions are answering the questions which they themselves pose and to think they are merely giving different answers to the same questions is a big distortion.

…oh but now a little criticism…

He poses the question others ask, must we adopt the worldview of the ancients? And instead of answering this he attacks their idea that we have a different worldview saying that we are stuck in an Epicurean worldview spread to consume all human thought and that modern discoveries of science don’t change anything!

NO.

I challenge his caricature !!!

Epicureanism has NOT consumed all human thought and it isn’t true that modern discoveries of science don’t change anything!

And… to answer the question… it is no, of course not.

But of course it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pay attention to their worldview when trying to understand what they are saying.

Ok… maybe Epicureanism holds inordinate sway in academia.
Ok… maybe modern science doesn’t change everything – it is not like they directily address our philosophical and theological issues.

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I’d say the difference is that they had a much more limited awareness of the world earlier on. I know at different points Huns and Mongols and Turks were seen as armies of antichrist or the Beast. Identifying specific military tech with items in the book may be new but I wouldn’t swear to it. Even into the seventeenth century many people took the beasts John described as real; I suspect it wasn’t until we had war machines, from Gatling guns to tanks and planes, that any identification with tech began.

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