That is something people can see and even measure… those words have meanings which certainly is not just in somebody’s head.
The so called “truth” of the person declaring the thinking and religions of everyone else in the world to be nothing but navel gazing, looks far more like navel gazing to me because there is not even an attempt to communicate with other people.
One of my professors would say, “Stuff and nonsense”.
You do an awful lot of projecting onto people here.
Yes. It’s some of the surrounding context to Wittgetnstein’s quote repeated by Wright: “It is love that believes the resurrection.”
It doesn’t sit right with me, either, even though many people seem to think I’m supposed to believe it. Unless he meant that the very presense of faith - since it is a gift of God - would act as assurance, and indicate that one is saved. (Which is how I understand Calvinism’s point about the perserverance of the saints. God gives the faith and he “vouchsafeth” their salvation all through his own work. It is not important to me, though, that we agree on this.) But this doesn’t seem like certainty to me in the way gravity does.
I was surprised by the slightly fuller quote of Wittgenstein’s. I know very little about him. But the contrast between his tortured (or torturing!), incredibly rational thinking and the unique form of faith he experienced is also surprising to me.
This makes more sense to me all the time.
Thats like being certainly uncertain… I appreciate certainty in its proper context (ie. Acts 2:36)
Lecture 8 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
Mar 15, 2024: Lecture 6 - A New Creation: Resurrection and Epistemology
March 29, 2024: Lecture 7 - Broken Signposts? New Answers for the Right Questions
You are here: April 12, 2024: Lecture 8 - The Waiting Chalice: Natural Theology and the Missio Dei
For those of us, who have been working dutifully through these lectures, trying to pull together something worth saying in response to them and to each other, I dedicate this quote from Lecture 8:
33:38
There are five areas to explore. Time forbids more than a brief glance at each. As often happens at this stage of a course of lectures, you discover that actually this should have been 16 lectures or maybe 24. But you’ve been very patient; that’s quite enough for one term.
And here is the entire poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that he quotes from:
From roughly 8 minutes in to lecture 8 … Some great meditative thoughts in here. Wright does such a good job blending scriptural scholarship with pastoral exhortation and encouragement! What a blessing just to soak in these thoughts in comparison to all the squabbling that would reduce the messages of Genesis to little more than an encyclopedic compendium of sterile facts.
… Solomon builds the temple and the Divine fills it; but the coming King of Psalm 72 will do justice and mercy for the widow and the helpless so that the Divine Glory may fill the whole earth! And the present mystery of Divine hiddenness in creation and the obvious pain and disasters and death itself in the world as it presently is will finally be dealt with. That’s how the implicit promise of Genesis 1 is to be fulfilled – bringing in too the idea of Sabbath as an advance foretaste of the final promised state. The temple promise and the sabbath promise converge at the notion of rest. God’s glory will be at home in creation. And God’s people reflecting his image will be at home with him. This is the promise of new creation.
From about 17:05
When Jesus wanted to tell his disciples what his death would mean, he didn’t give them a theory. He gave them a meal.
…and … I’ll keep prattling on here since I seem to have the floor!
I also love how, in a single run-on sentence one can feel like they’ve almost taken a philosophy 101 course just from the singular (if run-on) sentence! Wright would do the Apostle Paul proud. Here is what I mean (a little after 9 minutes in).
If you eliminate the biblical eschatology of new creation, as so much theology and biblical studies has done in the last several generations, you’re left with an escapist eschatology, to be activated in the present by existentialisms (Bultmann), or with the lie that we live in the best of all possible worlds (Leibnitz), or with the shoulder-shrugging Epicureanism: “This is how it is. Get used to it.”, or with a Sartrean despair.
And the lecture continues the above as follows … just to give the rest of that paragraph.
If, in fact, a natural theology tries to find a full doctrine of God from within the present creation, then, in terms of the model I’m outlining, it looks as if it’s trying to get the full eschaton in advance. It’s trying to leap forwards to the final new creation, while bypassing the darker route that the New Testament goes to get there. And this goes with the problem of a natural theology trying to discern the being and activity of God by rational inquiry alone, screening out once more the epistemology of love. Rational knowledge won’t be able to grasp what is already true, or to see the significance of the broken signposts we explored in the last lecture. And it certainly won’t glimpse the eschatological promise of new creation. In
Prattle away, @Mervin_Bitikofer. I like the quotes you are highlighting. This is probably my favorite lecture, because it is so hopeful. I will try to pull together some thoughts soon.
That sentence from about 9:00 is, however, not a run-on. It is a long, beautiful, perfectly grammatical, complex sentence.
I will try to add something much more insightful soon. But, in the meantime, you get three more posts before you are stalled again!
I’m finally starting to go over the transcript of Lecture 8 after having listened a number of times. The visual helps, along with the ability to mark up – respond to – the text. I know I’m going to have other questions, but here’s one for now that’s been on my mind since the last lecture:
About 4:39, when Wright is summing up the major points from his previous lectures, and he says:
Their [the seven broken signposts he had mentioned in the last lecture] very failure points to the wounded God of the Gospels, inviting us to start with the natural world of failed human aspirations and to see on the cross the revelation of the true God.
Theologically, in faith, I can attest to this. And maybe that’s what Wright intends, particularly with his emphasis on love a few sentences later:
I have argued throughout that part of our problem in our contemporary epicurean atmosphere is to have banashed from our agenda the one thing which makes us truly human and grounds all true knowing, namely love itself.
But outside of faith, can this carry any weight?
Aren’t the broken signposts he mentions all explainable through sociology, social psychology, evolution, or evolutionary psychology? If that is the case, then does he have any argument that actually reaches outside the context of theology?
This question, or ball of questions, has bothered me since I first listened to all the lectures months ago. I want Wright to be right, I am still wrangling with his ultimate point and the lectures’ application, particularly in light of what continues to feel apologetic to me.
If he is not attempting an apologetic argument, or series of them, I’m not entirely sure what his application of the lectures is in the end. There are some outstanding calls to the church in understanding and carrying out its role in light of its nature. And maybe that is ultimately what Wright is hoping to accomplish.
The majority of the German theologians and philosophers he discusses were self-idenified Christians. So, maybe he intends to correct error in the church’s thinking.
Well, sorry to be thinking out loud here, and sorry if I’ve forgotten a great point that was made earlier. I’m sure I have.
I’m looking forward to better insights from the rest of the group who has been putting in the work.
Agreed!
And compared to some of the Apostle Paul’s sentences, that was brief.
Like @Mervin_Bitikofer , I was amazed at the overview of the previous lectures, and allusions to the various philosophers and philosophies that Wright could pack in to a single sentence!
@kendel, like you I’m still a bit hazy here, but this is what I took from the broken signposts: Wright is not attempting a full-on apologetic for the existence of God here, but is arguing against the old approach to “natural theology” as the main theme of these lectures. Specifically arguing against that one can derive God´s character by looking at nature. So, he makes the point that the “signposts” in the material world are a mixed bag…broken (I do think some of the brokenness can be explained by evolution, or sociology, etc. but I don’t think that’s Wrights intended focus here–explaning such things would drift into details of theodicy which is another entire series of lectures, I assume). Rather, I gathered that Wright´s main point is that you can’t look up from nature to see a clear “perfect watchmaker God” as in classical Natural Theology. Rather, one needs to see how God intervened from the top down into the world (Jesus and the Resurrection) to get the true picture of his character which is love (delivered in suffering and brokenness). So his point is that the broken signposts are not necessarily an argument against a perfect God, but can be seen (retrospectively), in the light of the cross, as an expression of his perfect character of Love. If Wright is attempting any apologetic here, it seems to be a negative apologetic in the sense that the broken world may not clearly display a perfect, controlling, designing watchmaker God, but neither is it an argument against the type of God that He really is… a suffering God who is relationally involved in the material world and works through brokenness to renew it.
I like how you summarized that.
A little later in Wright’s lecture, perhaps we can find something of (a summary?) of his own about it all; especially in the 2nd paragraph here (about 33 min into lecture) where he says “…a renewal characterized by love, both as ethics and as epistemology.” But here is that thought set up and more fully quoted.
Paul’s proposal here doesn’t have a name, but it deserves one. The word panentheism—the idea that everything is in God—expresses the opposite of what Paul says. I don’t normally like neologisms, but we might propose theenpanism—the view of God being all-in-all. Panentheism, like its tired old cousin, pantheism itself, has glimpsed a truth, something about the world in God getting together as over against Epicureanism, but has seen it the wrong way round and tried to arrive at it by a shortcut. We are not there yet. Paul’s vision is of an eschatological theenpanism, the ultimate filling of the chalice with the rich, outpoured wine of his love: the powerful messianic love which has already resulted in his inaugurated rule and which will go on loving and ruling until all the dark powers that still tyrannize us, including ultimately death itself, are put under his feet. Pantheism and panentheism offer an over-realized eschatology which does indeed reflect dimly the Creator’s eventual intention. That’s why they’re often popular with people who are escaping from forms of Christian dualism, but they ignore the ongoing reality of evil; perhaps because, whether consciously or not, they want to avoid the only solution, namely the cross. But the cross is the only route to the promised goal.
Now it’s hard to hold all these things in your minds together, to put into the same sentence or paragraph the visions of creation renewed in Romans 8, the new city in Revelation 21, the spring garden, and the outpoured Spirit of John 20, and the final victory, and ultimate filling in 1st Corinthians 15. But we cannot doubt that the early Christians were consciously retrieving, in the light of Jesus and the Spirit, the biblical theology of cosmos and Temple which I sketched earlier. And they were doing so with a conscious and biblically-rooted vision of Jesus as the truly human one, the true image, and of his followers indwelt by the Spirit, as themselves, Colossians 3, renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator, a renewal characterized by love, both as ethics and as epistemology. At the heart of early Christian theology, we find precisely: the Temple, the cosmological overlap of heaven and earth, and the Great Sabbath, the eschatological overlap of past, present, and future, both of them focused on Jesus and the Spirit, both of them offering a vision of the world and God and of the relation between them which enables us to open up the modern questions of natural theology in a whole new way.
I do think Wright would find it interesting to consider what a new philosophical synthesis, one that brings together classical and presuppositional apologetics, would mean for natural theology.
That was a great lecture series – I’m thankful I stuck with it. Thanks for pointing it out, and for the discussion thread.
Dr. Wright’s exposition of “the scientific quest and the ‘two books’” was relevant to people here, I think. I like this depth to the Parable of the Sower:
Think about it: Jesus suggests that the kingdom of God comes like a sower sowing seed, some going to waste, snatched by birds, trampled underfoot; some finding good soil and bringing forth a great crop. What does that make you think of? Ought we then to be surprised to discover that the cosmos seems to have originated with an enormous broadcast sowing of life potential, much of which appears to go to waste? But some of it takes root and produces life as we know it. That parable holds all sorts of things together.
I was just going back over the lecture again with my beat up transcript and puzzled a bit over that section, wondering if he had something in mind, that I’m sure he doesn’t. So I decided this is probably Wright’s way of including the reality of evolution, including abiogenesis as part of that “life potential,” which could take place elsewhere in the universe as well as it did here.
Andy, I’m glad you stuck with the lectures and participated in the discussion. I’m going to try hard in the next few days to pull some other thoughts together. I really appreciate the great contributions in the last few days (and weeks and weeks ) from @klw and @Mervin_Bitikofer.
I have found this series of lectures a good introduction to many areas of Wright’s work as well as an interesting way to reconceive the idea of Natural Theology.
From Wright’s recent book … which I’m finding to be a seamless continuation (or repetition) of themes from this lecture series.
Do we regard the Church’s association with empire as a marriage of providential convenience or an act of spiritual adultery? Did Christ defeat Caesar or did we merely turn Christ into Caesar?
Wright, N. T.; Bird, Michael F… Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (p. 34). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Yes, I think Dr. Wright was saying that the seeming wastefulness/inefficiency of biological evolution is NOT contrary to the way God does things. We cannot fully comprehend God’s ways, and the Parable of the Sower shows that He works in ways that seem inefficient to us.
@Mervin_Bitikofer “Jesus and the Powers…” another book to add to my reading list 
.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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