It’s been a very, very long time since I read anything by Lessing, and they were his literary works. But what WLC says in hundreds of words is rather different from the summary of Lessing’s ditch in Wikipedia.
Additionally, WLC says at one point that it depends on how we interpret Lessing’s metaphor. No, it doesn’t. The letter writer was clear about what he meant, in addition to invoking Lessing’s ditch. The letter writer expressed concern about the inability to prove that the miracles of the past actually happened and thus could be relied on as proofs. WLC uses many words to create a smoke screen to hide that point.
He employs double speak, first pointing to NT Wright’s views on the historicity of the resurrection as helpful, then claiming that it’s problematic to base religious beliefs on historic proofs.
Finally, he invokes Kiekegaard and rests on the entirely subjective existential experience of the Holy Spirit as providing the certainty the writer needs. He could just have stated that alone and been more clear.
And for the letter writer, who had either not had that kind of experience or doesn’t feel he can trust himself to interpret some sort of experience accurately as the Holy Sprit, there seems to be nothing available. We “head christians” are wrong to seek something more than ourselves to trust.
No, I found WLC’s description of and attempt at refuting Lessing’s ditch lacking.
Interesting question. I know that a couple of interpretations of Revelation were made by people who regarded their little sect as ‘God’s True People’, but I’m not aware of any considering their nations that way.
And a true confession from me in my own turn here then: I’ve not looked into the WLC link - but then again - I’m willing to take your word for it that he only just muddied the waters; and my own waters are already plenty muddy enough.
All I was trying to get at was, how is Wright’s temple cosmology (the intersection of heaven with earth) - how does that fit within all the philosophical/spiritual geography (or ‘cosmology’, I guess) where Lessing postulates an uncrossable ditch between heaven and earth?
And that’s nothing more than an honest (and still open) question for me. How would the 1st century scribes (as curated to us by Wright) - how would they react if Lessing and his ‘ugly’ ditch could be ‘time-traveled’ back and anachronistically presented to them?
If I understand Wright correctly, they simply would not recognize said ditch, and would stare blankly at Lessing, having nothing (none of Lessing’s or our baggage) in their own philosophical landscape of the time to even frame or relate to his so-called dilemma. Now - on the one hand, Wright reminds us that we didn’t need modernity to tell us that dead people don’t come back to life and that miracles aren’t just ordinary events that one routinely expects. No … they knew all that then quite as well as we do now. So that isn’t it. And they also had a tiered cosmology that sees God (or the gods) as primarily residing up in or above the starry celestial sphere, while we mere mortals were all down below here, underneath the intermediate airs where angelic beings might exercise commerce between the two realms. (Hence … temples often being high up on mountains?) So; what is it about Lessing’s Ditch that challenges us now, but not them then?
I suppose, perhaps, it might be its alleged uncrossability? The ancients had no trouble imagining that gods / angels / demons … whatever might be making all sorts of mischief or needing to be appeased so as to improve day-to-day affairs down here. Whereas our enlightenment legacy has disenchanted all of nature of these mischief makers. We now know better. In our virtual atheism (99% of gods now evicted from our mental landscapes - let’s set angels aside for the moment), the ‘ditch’ is now exposed in its stark relief for us as never before. There is now all this god-eviction inertia for us to deal with, where we believers come to a crashing stop just before this last God - the true God as we claim, while the skeptics among us plunge on to completion and stare back at us in puzzlement - why did you all stop? For atheists, there is no ditch - only the cosmos. But for us, now reacting to all this newfound enlightenment skepticism, we find ourselves defensively marshalling evidence to put a hold on this one last eviction. And I guess Lessing’s Ditch has become something of a safety barrier to insulate or protect this last God from the scrutinizing skeptics’ microscopes and telescopes. But I’m rambling now.
So … back to Wright’s assessment: Jesus changes all this. And an ethic of Love lived here and now in the incarnate God - residing now in the hearts and minds of God’s community is that intersection of Divine with earthly. What was the domain of temple and tabernacle … or even (in time) of Sabbath … all that is now blown open to say that we - in our every-day lives (not just the seventh day) are to be the presence of God here. We are the temples - or are called to be anyway, in a restoration of our original calling.
So I’m still not sure how Lessing’s Ditch fits into all that, except as a defensive reaction against modern skepticisms. And maybe all I did here was more of what you groused about WLC doing … why use five words when fifty will suffice? I’m still trying to process a lot of this myself - thinking outloud here as I do so. Sorry for any more mud that got stirred up.
I’ve been reading explanations of what Lessing meant by his “ditch”, and it seems to me that he was engaging in circular reasoning or just an arbitrary declaration against anything theological, so I’m not sure how it fits here, either.
Listening to the homily of the priest at the Orthodox church that I ‘attend’ via streaming on YouTube I was reminded of this bit in Wright’s lecture:
“After all for the ancient Israelites as for the early Christians what matters is not how we leave the Earth and go to heaven but how is the divine glory going to come and dwell here with us – the glory of heaven coming to earth and filling the earth.”
(@ about 48:05)
It seems to me that the emphasis on going to heaven is the result of secular humanism infecting the church, resulting in loss of the sacramental so we don’t really allow any place where God comes to us in any tangible way. The priest suggested that a major difference between the sheep and goats of Jesus’ discourse in Matthew is that the sheep are those who experience Christ here through everything the church has to offer, especially in the sacraments, particularly the Sacrament of the Altar, while the goats include those who are only thinking of “the hereafter” and thus fail to be really connected to the church here – that they respond, “When did we see You…?” because their eyes were so focused on getting to heaven that they failed to grasp that heaven comes to us, not the other way around.
Nope. I don’t think so. Thinking out loud and asking indirect questions is not the same thing as putting something confusing out as an argument or explanation.
As I understand it, Lessing’s concern was that that the miracles that are relied on as proof of Christianity’s historicity are themselves historically unprovable. Here is the letter (translated in English) from
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, H. B. Nisbet.; Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings (pp. 83-88)
where Lessing described the problem and the ditch.
What may challenge us now, as Lessing believed it did then, is the lack of immediate experience, immediate witness of the miracles themselves, particularly living in a time where provable miracles seem not to occur.
I don’t think this is exactly what Wright is getting at. To this point Wright ties love directly to the way we carry out hermeneutics. Wright rather rapturously puts it in lecture 5 thus:
43:30
The theme of image-bearing is not just an eschatological goal to be anticipated in such activities. The human, image-bearing task – seen in this Sabbath and temple framework – turns out to include not only organization but also imagination, not only labor but also love. 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.
By attempting to use a Hermeneutic of Love, Wright is working to understand as closely as possible how first century Christians would have understood temple and sabbath theology in order to demonstrate that the Epicurean God-world split, and the Enlightenment Past-Present-Future splits are incorrect. This is a daring reconceptualization of natural theology. It’s not “ground up” as natural theology is generally understood, but “God down.”
Dealing with the Epicurean split involving place, Wright is attempting to show through scripture the theological signposts that indicate God’s communication of his presence and preparation to reign on earth through the use of temple references and places, and then through his people as image bearers throughout the earth. God is not distant from his creation; not only has he entered it, but as a result of his enthronement on the cross he has entered into the very humans he has made and resides within them.
Dealing with the Enlightenment split of time, Wright again attempts to show that past, present and future are joined together in the rhythm of sabbath, which provides yet another sanctuary concept, where God meets with his people.
Oops. I’d forgotten about the rest of your paragraph, when I pulled together quotes to respond to. I see now we said very similar things.
I see there have been other posts since I started this draft, which took hours and may now be out of date. Ah well…
I like that description!
And that passage deserves a bit of rapture.
That’s a good corrective; a lot of study takes Second Temple Judaism and proceeds as though that’s how the early church understood things. While to a large degree that’s true, it forgets that Jesus turned the way of viewing scripture (i.e. OT) on its head; as Wright said elsewhere, He changed it from us reaching up to God to God reaching down to us. Yes, Temple theology itself rested on God coming down to us, but only in one place to which people had to come. But love offered the Temple to everyone everywhere (cf. John 4), which changes everything.
I still get chills from that concept no matter how often I’ve encountered it.
Discussing this with an SDA once I got the mental image of the difference between the legalistic view of Sabbath and what Jesus has done as picking up the Temple and carrying it from one day to the next. Listening to Wright and thinking of that, I recognize a mistake: I don’t carry the Temple, Jesus carries it, or from a different perspective, Jesus-in-me is the Temple and we carry it together (cf. Matthew 11:29).
I wanted to come back to this specific question (I read it as a question at least).
I think I framed a similar question but around Wright’s insistance on the presence of Epicureanism. I am strongly inclined to like Wright. I don’t want to think he is employing some staw man strategy couched in philosophical terms, or just being defensive. But I know it’s possible.
If Wright is going to address Lessing’s ditch on Lessing’s terms, he is taking on something enormous. He knows it, and I think that’s why he lays such careful ground work in the first 4 lectures.
However, his lectures are only attempting to address Westernphilosophical and theological questions in philosophical and theological terms. Even if Wright is able to deal with Lessing’s ditch on Lessing’s terms and Epicureanism, will his conclusions address important (and frustrating) questions that would emerge from science, for example?
I’m rooting for Wright.
@mitchellmckain Thank you for reposting your thoughts on Lecture 5 from earlier in this thread. I still need to review them and think how I might respond. I thought your posts were very interesting. Always a lot to chew on.
This keeps reminding me of some of the things Myron Penner said about a lived faith or lived hermeneutic in The End of Apologetics. I think I am far too inclined to focus on assent and content. “Peace and joy” are not easy for me. It’s beautiful to hear about these things from a brainiac like Wright, who clearly has a strong focus on content and assent as well. Peace and joy are a legitimate focus, which don’t require checking our brains at the door.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
