@Terry_Sampson, thanks for posting this, I have wanted to read up on Wright and the NPoP, but keep forgetting about it.
What are your thoughts on the it?
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N.T. Wright was interviewed on the Holy Post about his and Bird’s book - “Jesus and the Powers”. Was a very fascinating interview and he rang a lot of the same bells we’ve been discussing in his Gifford’s lectures.
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The blurb on Amazon sounds terrific.
And wandering down the rabbit trail, I see Bird wrote a book called: How God Became Jesus, which looks super.
I need eternity. There is so much I want to read and don’t even know about yet.
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I read Bird´s “how God became Jesus” and found it a good counterbalance after reading Bart Erhmans “How Jesus became God”. I think Bird wrote his book in response to Ehrman…
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That’s what the blurb said.
I haven’t read anything by Ehrman. I only know “of” him.
I REALLY don’t believe in this. I was happy to find that assurance was not a part of my new church’s articles of faith because I detest that idea more than any others found in Christianity. I see no difference between assurance and entitlement which is the opposite of faith. Faith is simply putting your salvation in God’s hands, and NOT about brainwashing yourself into believing you have it made. The latter is what makes people think salvation is one of their accomplishments in life and leads them to asking that last question in TULIP Calvinism whether they can lose their salvation. I think that question is highly improper and contrary to faith. Salvation is never yours to lose. It is a work of God alone and not something He is obligated to do by some contract, let alone guaranteed by some divine magic. I think this trivializes the problem of sin and the attitude of entitlement is behind much of the evil perpetrated by religious people in history.
So my answer to that quote in German (Wittgenstein?) is… what you need most certainly is NOT some illusion of certainty but wisdom – the Bible speaks against certainty in favor of wisdom, and the greatest wisdom is to turn to and rely upon God for the many things we have no assurance or ability to control. Faith is not certainty or incompatible with doubt – quite the contrary. Faith is acceptance of doubt and surrender to God – it is to make a choice when there are no guarantees.
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So? What a majority believes does not determine truth.
That fits with the fact that the Koine Greek word usually translated “faith” can also be rendered “faithfulness”. It also fits with a view of the Decalog that says the “Ten Words” were not telling the people how to become God’s people but were more about what God would make out of His people (I first heard that from a Lutheran pastor/priest who had studied to be a rabbi but converted to Christianity).
A surge that YECists vehemently oppose. Reading a lot of what is used as YEC arguments shows a great effort to remain ignorant.
No kidding!
I would also like to explore all the beaches on our planet.
I have, and I consider him dishonest and a sensationalist.
This “vast” you claim is not something which people can see or has any meaning to them. How does it, in fact, mean any more than the fact that you attach so much importance to your own religion? This looks far more like an obsessive gazing at your own navel to me.
I suppose you think that astrophysicists describing how awesome supernovas are are just “obsessive gazing at [their] own navels”, too. Does Neil DeGrasse Tyson writing a book “mean anything more that the fact that [he] attach[es] so much importance to [his] own” field of study? It seems you view sharing truth as just an exercise in egotism.
Truth is truth. Pointing out how awesome some truth is is the opposite of navel-gazing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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