More and more I am convinced these issues are a very distant second to the issue of Israel’s election and the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ
1 Like
Yay!
Me, too. Terry’s transcripts are wonderful, but I am copying the junky auto-gen transcript from YouTube WITH THE TIMESTAMPS, pasting it into a Word document, dinking some with formatting so it’s big enough to read with margins I can write in, and printing that baby off.
I had been taking notes in a notebook. THat failed. I’ve got my copies of the transcripts all marked up. I went back over Lecture 6 today and reviewed my transcript/notes and will try in the next few days to pull some thoughts together – and questions.
Thanks for the book titles and links. I’ve been wanting more from Wright – or a likeminded theologian – regarding the church in the world, in this innaugurated eschatology.
Any churches doing whatever it is that I will eventually read about? There’s a lot on my mind as usual.
I’ve been involved in a discussion on “christian” nationalism in the States at another forum. It’s so disheartening to see all over the place in the U.S., but it’s been encouraging to see that it’s not everywhere or not as much as it is here.
When I was reviewing today, that same quote jumped out of my tablet at me. Woo hoo! Hey! Over here. THIS is what the church does, and it doesn’t help your 401 K or your new carpet, or getting your kids through college, or or or or.
I’m glad you’re sticking with Wright and us, @Andy7.
The dirty kitchen waits for me. : (
3 Likes
It’s been a while since I listened to the book review that Jay shared over in Pithy Quotes:
Now that I’ve listened to more than half the lectures, I got more out of the review and was able to critique it in a few spots. The author seems unaware of Wright’s working through various types of natural theology, at least at the beginning of the lecture series. I think that was in the intro to the book, if not the first chapter. I think Wright was quite clear that he had something different in mind than what is usually referred to as natural theology.
He also claims that Wright commits a syllogism by including Jesus in nature, and therefore natural theology. But I think the syllogism only remains, if Wright had not explained how he was approaching the idea of natural theology.
I think Jay’s point that Wright wipes away all of Christian throught for the previous 1000+ years, though, is worth considering. THat has bothered me throughout.
1 Like
- Is it my imagination? Do Bible Scholars tend to write big books, and a lot of them?
2 Likes
Wright is prolific by any standard.
I retract that now that I’ve listened to the intro for myself. The review gave me the impression that Wright focused entirely on natural theology since the Enlightenment. He did spend some time on earlier thinkers, and no one can cover all the bases and answer every possible objection even in a big book like this one. I’m still not a fan of the Enlightenment as boogeyman narrative, and Wright’s description of God gradually being removed from all spheres still strikes me as conspiracy theory thinking, but I’m mostly on board. Mostly.
3 Likes
True. He also has a blog with a lot of his book chapters and scholarly articles available for download.
The issue of when a particular passage was written down is only of interest in OT texts because it adds to the historical context when interpreting the meaning of the passage. Such considerations may or may not affect doctrinal questions.
As for myself, I tend toward canonical interpretation, but I’m not an inerrantist.
3 Likes
Like questions concerning the election of Israel and a new covenant?
Finally, at the end of the day, when my brain power is waning seriously, I’m getting to my scribbled up transcript of lecture 6. I can feel the energy draining, so I will list some topics I hope we can talk over in the next few days, before we move on to Lecture 7 Friday. Others may have other questions/topics they want to discuss, and maybe I’ve missed some already. Sorry. Please remind everybody.
One:
The question that is bubbling to the surface is squarely related to the quote from Wittgenstein (“It is love that believes the resurrection.”) and the question I’ve been thinking about since the beginning: Is this hermeneutic of love that he is talking about equivalent to “the benefit of the doubt”?
- Wright gives us good ways to interpret the biblical accounts of the resurrection.
- But does he show it to be true?
- To have happened, or likely to have happened, OUTSIDE the world of the texts?
- Is it a strong-enough defense to say:
Real, early Christianity demands a historical explanation. Easily the best as far as I’m concerned is that Jesus really was raised to a new kind of physical life…" ( 27:45)
One.one:
Wright says a few times that the resurrection brings its own ontology and epistimology with it. (See, for example, 4:12 and 30:13). Is this only true for believers?
Two:
I think Wright’s point about skeptics and conservatives both getting it wrong is worth considering and discussing. I think James K. A. Smith makes a similar point in Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism which I’ve recently plowed through:
And far too often, some version of Cartesian certainty has attached itself to particular religious expressions—the result is what we call fundamentalism—and engendered untold harm. The problem with such modern religion—whether in the form of post-Kantian liberal theology or the equally modernist versions of Protestant fundamentalism—is twofold: on the one hand, it rests on a mythical epistemology of immediate access and cognitive certainty; on the other hand, its fruit has included harm, violence, and suffering for communities, both to those within such communities and to those regarded as “other” by these religious communities.
Smith, James K. A… Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? (The Church and Postmodern Culture): Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (p. 118). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 1
Both authors are, I think, talking about the “Cartesian” belief in the need for absolute certainty – having worked through all doubt and rebuilt from the ground up. In this lecture Wright’s point is that both the skeptic and the conservative get it wrong because they both concede a split universe, rather than one in which “heaven and earth really are mutually porous.”
Three:
Is Wright performing an ID maneuver? Looking back and applying a structure that leads to the “telos” he desires now, and beyond? I know he says “no” and careful focusses on the forward-looking features of Jewish theological history. But I find myself constantly asking: “Is his view correct? Is his proposal true?”
Four: Moral Order
Again, I wonder, if this is only true for believers? Morals, morality, culture are all very human. Is he talking about something different from what I have in mind?
If the early church was the only time this was “self authenticating” (35:53) what is there to say about the state we are in now, or what does that state indicate.
Oh, I see I have many more questions, but my head is just buzzing from tiredness. The rest will have to wait until tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to insights from others on these questions and others.
1Oooh! Slick. My Kindle app automatically produced that nice citation without any effort on my part!
3 Likes
Early in lecture 6, Wright commented that when he wrote his book on the resurrection, he used the same historical evidence and reasoning as “conventional apologists” to come up with an abductive conclusion (inference to the best explanation) that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. He said an atheist friend read his book and responded that the logic was good, but that he still chose not to believe because there had to be another explanation. Wright told him “That’s fine, but realize that you are choosing not to believe based on your own worldview, not on the basis of any different facts”. (the atheist/epicurian worldview being that the divine never interacts with the physical here on earth).
Later in the lecture, Wright said there are 2 ditches to “knowing” the resurrection. The one is the purely rational in which apologists expect the historical facts to definitively prove it like a mathematical Q.E.D. --(intellectually). The other ditch was “Romanticism” which reduced the resurrection to an inner personal emotion/feeling–a subjective sentimentality, but which thought that the resurrection didn’t physically happen in history.
As I understood it, “the epistemology of love” was between those two ditches, incorporating both. Not excluding the mind and abductive reasoning based on history. But also requiring an emotional response of love towards God, a response to the love he first showed us. I take this love to be like relational “faith”, like a person saying “I do” when offered a marriage proposal, the “complete knowing” another involves not only learning facts about the person, but relationally committing to loving the other.
4 Likes
- Casual curiosity in “Criticism of N.T. Wright”, led me–as I suspected it might–to Calvinist critics. A little on-line “wandering” then led me to Middleton’s blog and this:
J. Todd Billings’s Critique of Tom Wright’s “New View of Heaven”- "Billings is, first of all, appreciative of the new emphasis among evangelicals on the renewal of earthly creation as the eschatological hope (a view Tom Wright and I both espouse). But he thinks that Wright’s emphasis on our righteous “works” or “deeds” (in the sense of our cultural activity) enduring into the new creation is wrong-headed.
- "Instead, Billings thinks that Wright (and, by implication, Middleton) should focus instead on our worship and glorification of God as the true telos of the new creation.
- Interestingly, I have just agreed to write a chapter in a new Zondervan book tentatively called Four Views on Heaven, in which one of the chapters would be precisely on the view that Billings advocates."
- Four Views on Heaven (Counterpoints: Bible and Theology)
2 Likes
For all I know, @Kendel, you were probably deliberate about all this - but your Gifford lecture schedule that you concocted for us is coinciding perfectly with our holy week season! What a great time for us to be discussing the meaning of resurrection!
To that end, and at the risk of repeating stuff that’s already been quoted above… I read this again this morning from lecture 6:
…Barth leaned over to him and said with considerable force which I shall never forget:
“Wohlverstanden, leibliche Auferstehung” – “Mark well, bodily resurrection”. That is a fine moment in the history of modern theology. But my point is that it should never have been necessary. The reason for agreeing with Barth, here, is not a theological a priori “We don’t like Docetism so let’s assume it must been bodily”, but rather a matter of history because, in the first century, a non-bodily resurrection would have been a contradiction in terms. Resurrection meant bodies; to think otherwise is to fail on your linguistic homework. Yes, the language of resurrection can be used metaphorically; yes, from the late second century Gnostic writers began to use the word to mean Platonic soul-survival. But Jews or Greeks who wanted to say that had perfectly good language to do so, and the word “resurrection” would, in Paul’s day, have made entirely the wrong point. The home base for the metaphor and for the Gnostic mutation was that resurrection always meant some new kind of bodily life. The other thing to get clear: the possibility of resurrection is that everybody in the first century world, except for the Pharisees and those Jews who followed them, understood what resurrection meant and knew it was impossible.
[my own emphasis added in above]
Whether the parallel is valid or not, the phrase, “…to think that resurrection could have meant anything other than bodily is to fail on your linguistic homework…” reminded me of the retort we often here in these settings from YECs - “…to think that a day could be anything other than 24 hours is to fail on your linguistic homework…”. And yes - I’ve learned from bible translators and scholars on this very site that they are right. That is what day means and always meant. And to try to insist that it was really their secret code for “ages” in an anachronistic attempt to pretend that they (back then) were really in on some secret about geological ages that we now know of - is a linguistic and translational failure indeed. But the point is - we can still misunderstand and misuse those early Genesis chapters to teach things that turn out to be not of Truth, and that push us in wrong directions, not aligned with the Spirit of Christ.
So my question in this is: Are we missing some main point of resurrection teaching in the same way? I feel, maybe in a similar vein to you, Kendel, if I understood you correctly, that Wright is insisting we moderns have largely missed the significance of the resurrection life over the last thousand years. But if so - how could his main point - where we should be getting it - how can that be summarized?
2 Likes
To begin to respond to my own question above …
I feel like Wright has thrown down a guantlet here that confronts everybody. All other issues (modernity, science, evolution, squabbles over biblicism…) all those noisy belligerents fall silent and retreat to the sidelines while this one issue suddenly compels us with a challenge that will not be set aside: Is your life re-arranged by this?
Or is it only just one more factoid to tuck away into your modernist chest of doctrinal treasures before you lock it away again in the attic for safekeeping?
3 Likes
I believe Wright goes on to say that a bodily/physical resurrection is something that restores/transforms the “Old Creation” (which was material) into a New Creation (which is also material), showing that God loves creation and doesn’t think the material world is evil (as did the Gnostics). Rather, the resurrection shows the first fruits of Heaven coming to overlap with, and interact directly with, Earth. The “big idea”, if any, I got from this was that the eschaton is not about being whisked away to an immaterial heavenly realm “out there” (which perhaps has been taught by many in the church over the last 1500 years), but needs rethinking as Heaven coming to Earth, and eternity being played out with us in a physical-material (although changed) universe.
In practical non-doctrinal terms, it could mean that Christians, as now indwelt by the Holy spirit (we are the new temple, God breaking-in-to-the-world), it is our acts of love to God and to others here in the material realm which are an important part of the transformative process towards the “New Kingdom”. Wright talks a lot about “inaugurate eschatology” , I wonder whether he will speak more about the practical work we Christians are to do in the next lectures?
4 Likes
Terry, I was about to congratulate you. I see, however, that the congratulations go to @JRM (although I am also late in giving them).
I see this view reflected in the PCA church we are in now as well. Unfortunately, It seems to be to the ignoring of very specific commands we have from Jesus that include much more than Question 1 of the Westminster Confession. In my Baptist background, I’ve rarely seen an interest in much more than making disciples and baptizing [I will leave further comment on the exertion of political power to the side for now]. As usual, I think we need to do both. And if we’re obeying in all things, I suspect the result would be bringing glory to God. I think this is part of what @klw was getting at before me:
Moving on…
Yesterday klw replied to my post:
Yes. You are pointing to my concern with this. I think it gets to a bigger question of how world views develop and change, how one acquires a world view. I don’t believe that they are (usually) simply a matter of choice. Few of us are philosophers enough to really do the work of doubting everything and reworking our world view entirely, assuming that such a process could possibly lead to a well-crafted world view at all.
I think the same can be said for both Wright and his tutor. Both of their world views, if those are the basis for their different interpretation of the facts, lead them to view the matter differently. Neither of them can claim an objective, universal, or neutral stance. I think if prodded, Wright would probably concede this, as he gives credence to “the subjective.” But in the lecture he seems only to understand his tutor as having a world view issue. How does one arbitrate between world views?
My concern, then, is what to make of Wright’s entire project in light of his comment on different world views. Maybe it’s helpful to consult his stated purpose. At the outset of lecture 1, Wright explains, as he had to his mother:
I explained that some people used to think you could start from the natural world and think your way up to God from there that other people thought that wasn’t such a good idea, but that fresh thoughts about history might lead to fresh ideas about Jesus and thence to God after all and that on the way we might learn something about the nature of knowledge itself.
Lecture 1, 6:53)
Rather than being guided by Wright’s stated purpose, maybe I keep reverting to the typical (modernist) concept of natural theology and expect Wright to try to pull out some killer apologetic. While Wright’s stated purpose does not include such a goal, his apparent disappointment at his tutor’s rejection of Wright’s explanation of the beginning of Christianity, could indicate that he was hoping that the tutor would be convinced by Wright’s insights – which would seem apologetic in that case.
Wright says a number of times in lecture 6 that the resurrection of Jesus brings its own ontology and epistemology with it. And I love these ideas. But are they only really “true” within the text of theology? Or only true for those who can exercise a hermeneutic of love, which would be those who already believe?
Yeah, I don’t like these questions at all, either. I’d be very glad not to be bugged by them. I’d be glad for a better perspective.
and @Merv wrote:
This is a good question at face value, but also helpful for what I think is underneath it. For believers, good theology should do more than confirm our opinions so we feel good about ourselves. Good theology should make us think and and change how we think and live. This is also a lifetime effort. Eugene Peterson borrowed from Nietzsche when he named his book, “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.” That’s what good theology should help us work on.
You mentioned “doctrinal treasures.” With that, I think it sounds like you see Wright’s work here as theological, rather than apologetic in nature. And we’re back to that.
Ach. Please, somebody bring up something wonderful from the lecture. I’ve brooded enough. There is a great deal of beauty that I’ve not focused on at all.
1 [my added footnote]
Warning: Kendel is a J. Todd Billings accidental fan girl. 
Billings’ views on Wright aside; his book Rememberance, Communion and Hope is a wonderful book (another Baker Book House clearance rack that changed my life) for those who, like me, have never felt comfortable with their church’s “memorial” view of the Lord’s Table. I started it 5 (?) years ago and got stuck on the middle section. I need to finish it. Even if you don’t agree with his view, thinking through the Lord’s Table with him is well worth it.
Billings also wrote two other books I have in the wings, “Rejoicing in Lament” and “The End of the Christian Life.” Both are a product of dealing with an incurable terminal cancer. He also developed an outstanding podcast of 6 interviews called The End of the Christian Life.
2
[No referent for this footnote]
That is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time, Merv. If there were such a thing as dyschronic, I am it. I schedule things because I must. I hate it. I’m terrible at it. Sometimes I could have a panic attack over it. That there is any coincidence with the lectures and Easter in a schedule I set up may be seen as evidence of the mutually porous nature of heaven and earth.
3 Likes
Oooh. I forgot this post. Thank you! I needed to read it.
I think Wright does mention more things, or emphasizes the need for the church to be actively obeying Christ NOW. It’s been quite a while since I listened to the last few lectures.
1 Like
I’m not so great at mind reading. You’ll have to give me more to go on than this.
Sorry to quote myself, but I’m catching up on Lecture 5 (thanks to Terry) and the full context brings up one objection to Wright’s project. I’m familiar with the temple/tabernacle imagery and, as I said earlier, these concepts blew my mind when I first ran across them. But this bit caught my eye given what I’d just said about historical context and canonical interpretation:
Now here we must be careful. We don’t know … I don’t know, and actually I don’t think anyone knows in what sequence the relevant texts were written or edited. So we can’t easily say: ”Well, this one came first obviously. That one’s influenced by it”. And it would be easy to miss the all-important sense of a narrative, because Genesis 1 and 2 up are given to us as the start of a project. Eschatology or at least a telos, a goal, is in view from the start: this is going somewhere. What matters as far as I’m concerned, and I think we should be concerned, is: how reflective Second Temple Jews might have thought about the relevant texts, and then how the radically new proposals of the early Christians resonated within that world.
The “all-important sense of a narrative” reflects the canonical interpretation of scripture, which is to say, “This is the text as we’ve received it, regardless of how it’s come down to us or the order of its composition. We should take it as a whole and interpret accordingly.” I agree, to a certain extent, but there’s a flaw in this argument that I’ll come back to tomorrow, Lord willing and the crick don’t rise.
3 Likes
A more recent update on Middleton’s blog:
3 Likes
As far as the practical work Christians are to do in the New Kingdom, I expect N.T. Wright will say that it depends on our gifts. Here is a quote from N.T. Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope”:
How do you answer someone who says, rightly, that the world will not be completely just and right until the new creation and who deduces, wrongly, that there is no point trying to bring justice to the world (or for that matter ecological health, another topic for which there is no space here) until that time? Answer, from everything I have said so far: insist on inaugurated eschatology, on a radical transformation of the way we behave as a worldwide community, anticipating the eventual time when God will be all in all, even though we agree things won’t be complete until then. There is the challenge. The resurrection of Jesus points us to it and gives us energy for it. Let us overcome our surprise that such a hope should be set before us and go to the task with prayer and wisdom.
Prayer and wisdom are always needed.
5 Likes
.
1 Like
- From the Mishnah, *Pirke Avoda": [Attributed to Rabbi Tarfon] “He used to say: It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
4 Likes