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

Faith & Science Conversation
, , , ,
334
5 Likes
335
  • Here’s an edited transcript of Gifford Lectures 2018 - Professor N.T. Wright - Lecture 6, 28th February 2018
  • Don’t expect it to be up forever.
  • My first thought, as I listened to this lecture and edited the transcript was: I bet nobody, including Wright, has tried to pack this (and the 5th Lecture) into one or more Vacation Bible School comic books, or a Teenage-level Sunday School series. :rofl:
  • My second thought was: It would have taken some effort to grasp Wright’s “tongues-talk”, but I would like to imagine that I would have flourished in an 8th Day New Creation Church many years ago.
2 Likes
336

I don’t know that wright manages to really reconfigure natural theology, but i sure enjoy the content of this lecture.
Thanks for ANOTHER EDITED transcript, Terry! That seems like a labor of love.

As far as VBS goes these days, AIG is happy to provide all sorts of help.

1 Like
337
  • I wish I could say it was, but the fact is: it’s the best way for me to focus my attention (more than once) on Wright’s lectures … until the comic book versions get written and published.
4 Likes
338

Love thy neighbors as thyself?
Thanks for sharing. I have been putting together unedited transcripts and writing all over them. The book had been helpful but a pain to keep interloaning from the library and different enough to make it hard to follow.

339

Lecture 6 Discussion begins in the morning. Feel free to keep talking about previous lectures as well!

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
Mar 1, 2024: Lecture 5 - The Stone the Builders Rejected: Jesus, the Temple and the Kingdom
You are Here: 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

341

Thanks again, so much for that transcript, Terry!

I really like Wright’s listing of the “7 mutations” of Jewish thought that are at once new things, and yet still embedded in their very “Jewishness”.

I also like how he (somewhere in there) referred to Christians as “8th day sabbath” people. As in … we are now to be living in Sabbath constantly - not just on the 7th day - but now every day. Jubilee (the 70x7 sweep of forgiveness) has already been inaugurated for us by Christ.

Would it be fair to say that it’s in this lecture where Wright most definitely throws down the guantlet … that everything that God has been about is all revealed in Christ’s bodily resurrection? One is confronted with the distinct and uncomfortable challenge that for each and every one of us, this is where the rubber meets the road. It is precisely here that we feel the full force of: “…but it was a stumbling block to the Jews, and foolishness to the Greeks…” (though actually, Paul was referring specifically to Christ’s crucifixion when he said that in 1 Corinthians 1.) But as Wright points out several times in this lecture - there were many crucifixions of would-be messiahs in Roman times. The only reason we remember Jesus instead of the others was because of what happened afterwards.

One of my take-away points from a lot of other reading I’ve been doing, and from Wright in these lectures is that Jesus was already glorified when he was raised from the earth … on the cross. The kingdom has already been inaugurated - the king already crowned. And he is the lamb slain from the beginning of the world. The fact that John keeps looking for the lion (in Revelation) but instead sees that it is the lamb and the slaughtered lamb alone who was worthy to open up and read the scroll - that alone captures how surprising this all was to Jews then, and yet even today to Christians now. The cross remains as scandalous as ever to us even after all these centuries.

4 Likes
342

Again … (thank you, @Terry_Sampson ) … reading this (after having listened to it more than once) still seems to open up this lecture to me freshly as if I hadn’t encountered it before. Which probably reveals something about the relative strengths of my aural processing as opposed to visual processing. But more likely, it probably just highlights the necessity of doing both if you really want to absorb something more fully than just from what only one sensory input gives you.

I’ll suggest here that this sixth talk surmounts all the others given thus far - and further suggest that this one turns from intellectual to pastoral and prophetically challenging in all the best ways (and without leaving sound intellect behind). I especially like his summary of Romans 8 given in 1st (lengthiest) of five sections toward the end of the speech - though the remaining four bullets are all excellent in their own turns too.

And his concluding rendition of George Herbert’s poem at the very end made such an impression on me when I first encountered it, that this now hangs in poster form in my classroom. I nominate this particular lecture to be the opus magnum of these lectures - though I guess I must wait to re-encounter the last two to see if they too will rise to glorious new heights of their own if I encounter them in visual text form.

2 Likes
343

I understood this differently from Wight’s lecture. My take is not that anyone is carrying the temple. We live in it; it’s where/when God inhabits his people all the time. I think the point that Wright was making from ANE temple concepts is this:
the image/idol is in the temple as a visible representation of the God, but the God inhabits the image/idol. Wherever the image is, the holy of holies is. If the sabbath is the temple, it moves with us and we with it.

[EDIT: I forgot I wanted to put this in]
Your mention of SDA is interesting. I can’t find the spot again here, but Wright is clear (at least I thought he was) that the wrangling over Sabbath requirements for Christians are pointless. And his explanation makes great sense. It’s all the time.

It’s the one commandment that’s not repeated in the NT. And I have exercised my freedom in Christ not to practice it. At a Presby church now, for the first time, it’s being presented as a very strong “should” to which I object (silently to myself and then in the car on the way home).

Wright shoves the whole discussion off the table. There’s no point. You have the commands of Christ, your vocation. You know what to do. Do it. All the time.

I notice you spoke in the past and subjunctive. Why this tense and mood?

I’ve wanted to come back to Wright’s description of hermeneutics, particularly this:

(43:52) Once you grasp the idea of the image within the temple and of humans sharing God’s rest, you find the human vocation of interpretation the human and humanizing task of hermeneutics of a rich multi-layered truth-telling, discovering and displaying meaning by articulating in symbol and story and song the many levels of significance in God’s world past present and future and particularly in human life. Discovery and display of meaning is about discerning the larger story within which events and ideas, actions and artifacts and worship are what they are. And this is a never-ending task, a gift that keeps on giving, a vocation that keeps on calling the summons to discern the dawn.

This whole series and particularly the quote just above have reminded me of Myron Penner’s The End of Apologetics ever since we started listening. There are many places, where Penner expresses similar ideas that Wright is linking to human vocation in his lectures:

And the apologetic force of witnessing lies in the passionate integration of the message with the life of the witness. As a witness, I proclaim the truth not only with my lips but by my life. With my words I engage my listeners with a narrative so that they can imagine a world with this particular truth, and by my life I show them it is possible to live in that world.

A witness’s life expresses the message and embodies the truth the witness proclaims.

And I think that this last quote from Penner extends but does not conflict with what Wright has begun to say about human vocation. Christians have God-given, God-ordained work to do. It’s essential to know what it really is. And do it. And that is comprised in a lifetime of interpreting and living out the truths of the gospels

If I regard myself as an apprentice to the truth, I must be prepared to have my preconceptions and perceptions challenged, and I must be open to new avenues of understanding and interpreting my life through the texts and conceptual categories of faith as I learn how to be faithful in the ever-changing contexts of my life. As with any apprenticeship, there will be setbacks and failures as I learn how to be in truth’s possession, and at times it may even appear I do not have much faith at all.

We will not have the truths that edify us, nor will we be a witness to them, apart from our fully assuming them and living so that they shape our words and actions. This means that the gospel truth ultimately takes the form of a community that displays the gospel truth and makes it possible to imagine a world in which they exist.

(Penner, Myron B. The End of Apologetics. pg. 102, 106, 107, 130)

There’s a lot of temple-sabbath theology here! Have you made any
headway? I think he’s trying to show that the OT and NT are continuous in ways that aren’t terribly obvious except for the gum-shoe historian.

Ok. I better send this, before I mess it up and lose it.

1 Like
344

More stuff I forgot:
I think I remember that Wright comes back to Christian vocation again in one or more of these later lectures. I hope so. He starts to list things I think are important about 42:22:

  • Bringing order and wisdom into the world
  • Bring justice and mercy to the world
  • Political emphasis ( I wonder what he means by this; I doubt it’s what we’re seeing in the U.S. political scene today; sure hope not.)
  • Ecological and esthetic emphasis
  • Science
  • Technology and its appropriate use

It includes:

  • Organization and imagination, labor and love
  • And Hermeneutics, which he says is humanizing and includes:
    • Multi-layered truth-telling
    • Discovering and displaying meaning
    • In human life particularly articulating in symbol, story, song the many levels of significance in God’s world past, present and future

I’m sure I’m missing stuff. It’s an impressive list.

There’s a lot to talk about there, I think.

1 Like
345

One reason for that really ought to be obvious when we read the opening Creation account in Genesis in its original literary genres because of what “rest” means there, namely taking the prepared and filled temple realm and running it: we are the images in Gods temple, and the realm is now on Earth, with the church as the realm prepared by Christ, and we are to just step in and run it, i.e. do the tasks of the Kingdom. A Sabbath now would mean taking a day off from living as part of the Kingdom.

That’s so foundational to Orthodoxy that it can be found emphasized in every generation since the students of the students of the Apostles.

That may just be why I really love the work of Dr. Michael Heiser – he just dumps connections into everything he says.

1 Like
346
1 Like
347

lecture 6… I was interested in the focus on resurrection since this is a topic which arises frequently with me quoting 1 Corinthians 15.

Wright’s use of the words “bodily resurrection to some kind of body” got me thinking. …perhaps some of the difficulties I have had with other Christians on this topic can be overcome by comparing this with the views of Plato and the Gnostics. For Plato and the Gnostics there is the eternal mind seeking liberation from the body. And Paul clarifies that the promised resurrection is not that! It is a bodily resurrection. So this relationship between mind and body remains. It may be a different kind of body (and maybe a different kind of mind to go with it), but is not the Plato/Gnostic notion of a mind leaving the body behind. That is certainly not what Paul means by his teaching of a physical/bodily resurrection to a spiritual body rather than to a physical/natural body. We see from the story of Jesus’ resurrection that His resurrected body is capable of everything the old body was capable of and more. Something greater and more powerful and not something lesser and insubstantial.

Perhaps this also aids in explaining my frequent denial of a belief in the rational “soul” which is thought to reside in the body and make it live and be a person. Again it is not like the Gnostics where there is this thing called a soul which leaves/escapes from the body when the body dies. So I am not saying we don’t have a spiritual aspect to our existence or that we cannot expect a continued existence after the physical body dies. It is really about rejecting this picture of Plato/Gnostics and other religions in favor of the description by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.

2 Likes
348
  • That was particularly fun to read, inspiring me to contemplate promoting a new Christian denomination: 8th Day Sabbath Adventist. :laughing:
  • I sure thought so.
  • I suppose fascinating things would happen if a loved one died unquestionably, was buried without embalming or cremation, and a couple of days later showed up at my doorstep in time for lunch, stuck around for a couple of months, walked through a wall, and had a new habit of appearing and disappearing in unexpected places, to me and a whole lot of other people.
  • I realize that Wright beliieves, like Barth and many others, in bodily resurrection, I can say that I do too. But … and this is the part that I’m curious about; I suspect that Wright’s version of “bodily” and my version of “bodily” are not the same. I say that because I accept the authenticity of the Shroud, but I have yet to read where Wright says he does too.
  • It’s one thing to say “I believe in Jesus’ resurrection”, and another thing to say, "but I certainly do not believe that, when he was resurrected, that his body was “a sarx”, i.e. flesh and blood. But … that’s a difficult topic for some, so I won’t pursue it further, here.
  • Suffice it to say, I agree with you: This is where the rubber meets the road.
  • I agree.
  • As I told Kendel privately: my experience with Lecture 7’s “versions” had much the same impact on me, … too.
  • Kendel had told me that Wright’s actual book, History and Eschatology was difficult to follow. I wouldn’t have understood why, until I compared (a) the 7-page interview with Wright, (b) an edited transcript of his 7th Lecture, and (c) Wright’s book “Broken Signposts: How Christianity makes sense of the world.”
    The transcript of the interview filled almost 7 pages. I bought the book and discovered that Wright had written 192 pages, liberally quoting quite a few Bible verses. Then … I edited the transcript of Wright’s 7th lecture, on the topics which he covered in the book, And it too fills 7 pages (minus brief introduction and subsequent Questions & Answers) fill 7 pages, Boingitty Boing Boing. Not only does he “speak in tongues”, he writes in tongues.
  • What he says is “new”, and definitely presents material, some of which I’m sure I’ve read or heard before in many places, times, and ways, but I’m beginning to think that my hearing is improving,
  • The 6th Lecture definitely had an impact on me, and expect it continue to do so, I’m glad to have edited a transcript of it that I can read and re-read and refer back to as often as I want.
2 Likes
349

It might be near miraculous if they were …since (I am convinced) nobody understands this. I know … you, Mitchell, and others have been all around about this … yes - it’s a spiritual body … - but yes - it’s a physical body … yes, there is somehow some continuity with our existing bodies (temples), and yet, … yes, these present, frail bodies fail and die before resurrection can happen, and the mortal becomes clothed with the immortal. Y’all can throw bible verses at this all day long and it doesn’t contibute one iota towards your or our actually understanding what’s going on there. It just gives us a lot of catch-phrases we can parrot so as to help us hide our lack of understanding behind the safety of trotting out lots of bible phrases in the confidence that somewhere in all that must be the, as yet ungraspable truth, even if it can’t be explained or contained within a scientific scope.

But yet this mystery is at the center of Easter, which is why we are still talking about this particular cross and this particular crucifixion rather than any of the thousands of others.

2 Likes
350

Oh, I see I was unclear. Sorry.
I meant that it was hard to follow the lectures with the book, or the book with the lectures. While the overall organization of the book and the lectures is the same, there are enough differences between them that it’s hard to switch back and forth. Thus I ended up listening to the lectures (multiple times) AND reading the book.

I found that pasting the transcript into a word document and printing it off was more useful. I use the timestamps to help me keep track of places I want to review, and I write all over the print outs. Like I do my personal books. (Never in library books.)

2 Likes
351
  • And that’s why Peter says, in Acts 4:12, "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved.”
  • Not a problem for me. I can read (and will read and write on) an edited transcript of a Lecture quicker than buying a copy of the book, I just don’t have the added benefit of all of Wright’s footnotes and Bibliography. And, I suppose, an edited transcript would be easier to use in a Bible Study group if one engages in such activity,
  • I gyess this would be the place to ask: in Lecture 5, Wright wrote: “Now, in the previous lectures, I have sketched two major problems facing modern theology and the study of Jesus and the Gospels.” I haven’t yet transcibed Lectures 1 through 4. The question is: what would someone miss by starting with Lecture 5, not Lecture 1?
    • Seems to me, I would miss Wright’s lengthy statement of the two problems facing modern theology and the study of Jesus and the Gospels: i.e. (1) the Epicurean takeover and “the Big Divide” (a.k.a. Lessing’s “ditch” and (2) the modern split of past and present that has made history and eschatology both confusing and urgent. Important matters, if I were taking a college course using Wright’s book, History and Eschatology. But I’m not.
    • Personally, I’m inclined to skip editing transcripts of Lectures 1 through 4.
2 Likes
352

I suppose what they would miss his background historical sweep - the ‘setting the stage’ if you will that the first four lectures gave - and you alluded some to that.

I have already greedily downloaded your transcript pdfs for these last two lectures just to preserve them in a digital library for myself since you hinted that their presence here may not long endure. Thanks for at least doing these! Maybe they can be considered teasers for people to go back and listen to his first lectures.

2 Likes
353
  • Thoughts on Lecture 5:
    • Wright says, early: "So I want to argue now for a fresh retrieval of key elements in the Second Temple Jewish worldview within which the strikingly new things that the early Christians were saying about cosmology and eschatology had their intended resonance.
      • Understandably, “the Second Temple Jewish worldview” was and is Wright’s principal focus in Lecture 5.
      • I note that Wright subsequently said: “New studies have highlighted what we may call Temple Theology, generating fresh ideas about Jewish cosmology and eschatology.” I sez to myself: “Where have I been?”
        • At one point, Wright refers to: a “triple framework—the world, time, humans”. Shortly thereafter. he says: “So Temple and Sabbath and Image are elements of a cosmic narrative”. Here’s where Wright schools me. It’s obvious to me that, historically, I haven’t given a Temple, a Sabbath, or the concept of “Image” or “Image Bearing” the attention and respect that they merit.
        • A minor point: by focusing on The Temple, the pre-Solomonic Tabernacle doesn’t get, Lecture 5, equal attention, no? Perhaps “the new studies” Wright mentioned include Tabernacle Cosmology and Tabernacle Theology, highlighting the significance of the differences between the Tabernacle, i.e. a movable “place” and the Temple, i.e. a fixed “place”; the most obvious one being that the Tabernacle didn’t have–to my knowledge–Courts of Gentiles, Men, Women, and Priests, or did they?
        • More trivia questions:
          • How many Yomim were there in a Shana? I suppose that would depend on what planet you’re on.
          • How many seconds and hours were in a Yom? I probably should be asking a YEC.
354
1 Like