I think God does create good - as in God’s creation is full of good creatures and things.
But, yes … I do have a need for God to be good as well. It is a human concept too … but a divinely sourced one I’m inclined to think.
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I think it was in a lecture by Michael Heiser that I heard a reconciliation of these two via the idea that Eden was essentially an intersection where heaven and Earth overlapped. After the Fall there isn’t anywhere on Earth where that was the case until God chose Abram to start a people who would have a land that mimicked the entire Earth: there would be a portion where this was true again while the rest would be associated with that place. In this sense the land of Israel becomes equivalent to the Temple, Jerusalem corresponds to the Holy Place, and the Temple itself corresponds to the Holy of Holies.
Then Jesus comes along and lays claim to the entire world and changes the cosmic geography: God’s people become the Temple so there’s no longer any specific geography – which turns the entire world into the courtyards of the Temple. Instead of Eden and a world to tame/subdue to make like it, there is the church and humanity to “subdue” through the Gospel. And the end result of this shift in cosmic geography is that eventually the entire world will be transformed as was intended and the intersection of heaven and Earth will be everywhere.
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Finally listening to the first lecture and catching up on the thread:
Me too. The language is problematic. It reminds me a bit too much of the “7 Mountains” rhetoric and conservative politicians who play upon White Evangelical fantasies of persecution and the end times. I’m not sure how anyone conversant with recent developments can say God is “removed” from politics, and the argument that God is removed from science sounds like Phillip Johnson’s “Darwin on Trial” and the birth of the Intelligent Design movement.
God is removed from economics and history? Not sure what Wright means here. Maybe he has a Kuyperian vision in mind that @JRM understands. I guess we’ll find out.
Laughable? This implies no progress can be made in morals or culture. Is it a “fad” to think women shouldn’t be silent in church and in submission to their husbands? Is it a fad to think same-sex marriage is morally acceptable, or LGBT+ people are morally acceptable to God as they are? I’m not sure BioLogos is ready for this discussion.
I think it’s obvious on its face that progress can be made in morals and culture. This isn’t a knock against Jesus, Paul, or the New Testament. It’s a recognition that they pointed the way forward in their treatment of women, for example, but none of them tried to overturn the existing social/cultural order. Plenty of work was left for the rest of us to do in our time(s). Don’t get me wrong. Human progress will never usher in the kingdom of God. That requires a supernatural act, but saying the pinnacle of human moral/cultural achievement was reached 2000 years ago is no different than Muslims wanting to adopt Sharia law.
The last bit, “No wonder we are in such a mess with multiculturalism and postmodern identity politics and such,” strikes me as a non sequitur. I stopped listening here, so maybe I’ll learn what he means tomorrow. Meanwhile, Pinker has already been invoked, which reminded me of some interesting connections to what Wright says here.
Pinker and Jerry Coyne (Evolution Is True) are among the elder generation of white male scientists reacting against major journals like Science and Nature trying to include more women and people of color. I don’t respect their stances.
Besides his campaign against kids and cell phones (which I support), Jonathan Haidt has been writing against identity politics in the academy for a while now. I think he’s both right and wrong. (That doesn’t make me a fake centrist, by the way.) The problem with PoMo analysis, IMO, is that it’s too binary. Everyone is sorted into colonizer/colonized, oppressor/oppressed baskets and labeled. I agree with the PoMo critique that we all have blind spots and should learn from traditions other than our own, but Haidt is right that this binary analysis is just cringe.
Absolutely agree that the Bible isn’t a set of propositional statements waiting to be systematized by Wayne Grudem. haha
Stopped here (snuck forward a few more minutes). I’m not sure what Wright means by that last bit. Give me till tomorrow.
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I didn’t think there was much millennialism at all until the nineteenth century.
That made perfect sense to me. I’d actually heard the same idea before but without naming Epicurianism.
Such a throwback to Liebnitz!
In college philosophy class we countered Liebnitz by declaring “This is one of all possible worlds” – even argued that this being the best of all possible worlds would mean God was not free to not create it.
LOL
I heard guest lecturer once maintain that since all the peoples in the Table of Nations have been reached then that aspect has been fulfilled. It made for a lively Q&A after!
Frak, what about people in the U.S. working their butts off to just barely survive on federal minimum wage? I’ve read several articles in the last couple of years pointing out that medieval peasants had it better than U.S. minimum wage earners (I recall one in The New Yorker as quite well done).
I had a history prof who maintained that human progress is like pushing a marble up a circular ramp – but the ramp has hoes in it so every now and then if we fail to dodge one we plunk back down a level or more.
If “care” means health care, parts of the U.S. are going backwards.
And that number is counting the cartel violence – that would add some armed conflict in North America.
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Sounds like the U.S. today where something like 80% of the wealth increase in the last twenty years has gone to less than 0.25% of the populace.
This reminded me of why my dad only subscribed to the weekend edition of the newspaper: he said the news was the same six days out of the week and on Sunday they just summarized it, and reading every day just told him how much they weren’t telling.
I listened to a lecture recently where the speaker argued that the Roman Republic was better in one big aspect of human rights than today’s U.S.: skin color made no difference. I think that applies more to the imperial period, but he’s quite correct; the Mediterranean region had many ethnicities with differing religions and skin colors and they were just regarded as different varieties of being people.
Well, I should hope so! The Bible itself lacks any such notion; truth in both Old and New is tied in with history. History can be used to show truth, and truth in turn can be applied to evaluate history.
One of my philosophy professors seemed to always have some scathing remark about “dispassionate reason” to drop into any conversation. I recall him once contending that reason without passion is just lazy diletantism.
They’re now regarded as belonging to the Greco-Roman biography type known as “bios” (BE-ohss), which is primarily historical but employs summaries of speeches rather than actual quotations and is almost expected to include some supernatural item about a famous person (the episode of Jesus in the Temple and the Transfiguration may fit this aspect). What makes them stand out is that they include far more supernatural aspects.
I read a summary recently of a paper that argued that Russia has never actually end serfdom, just changed some details. That was before the invasion of Ukraine, which has only served to emphasize some of the points.
More like the top 0.1%. Then there was the 0.9% that served as a middle class of sorts, including lower nobility and merchants.
A book I read I think last year argued that half of the growth of the church in the second century and into the third was due to how Christians cared for widows and orphans (including infants left out to die). This didn’t just include lower classes but also upper class widows who had property but no social standing.
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You exactly anticipate Wright here I think. In later lectures he will be hammering home on the theme of “God coming down” into a “holy temple” intersection where heaven comes down to some special place on earth - in order to eventually spread out from there of course. Spot on!
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He isn’t saying that God is really removed from all these things, of course - as if we could ever even do that! Only that this has been attempted by … some? … or many I guess, if Wright’s appraisal of the alleged Epicurean stranglehold over so much of history holds water. In a later lecture he will speak of the systematic (I’ll call it: ‘refusal’) to acknowledge God’s hand in all these different areas - even finally in the life of Jesus himself - as some would charge a nearly atheistic-minded Jesus seminar project of doing (or Jesus sans anything supernatural anyway).
But your point remains well-taken! It does sound an awful lot like an echo of ID or perhaps the recent white evangelical persecution complex, doesn’t it! Keep that criticism handy, and let’s see where it might end up as more lectures unfold.
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Sometimes I think the Christian view of God as being all-everything to the point that everything could have been any way He pleased, sells God short. I don’t think God whips the world together from nothing in genie-fashion. God brings about the world as we find it over great expanses of time through processes we can not imagine but would call natural in hindsight if we could understand them at all.
Everything must find its place in relationship to everything else and the process would likely look inefficient, haphazard or thoughtless if we thought here is a being who could have had things any way at all but dragged it through such a messy process … why? Existence is miraculous. The story of creation should be “God finds a way”, He didn’t impose an end result but midwifed it through every necessary intermediary step with great care and attention. But we greatly underestimate the difficulties if we imagine that any end result could have been chosen and brought about effortlessly.
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One of my grad school profs once observed, why did we think we’d all studied Plato if not to be able to watch out for that influence?
I heard it argued that it was Plato’s influence that led to the approval of icons and their veneration. That was a connection I;d never encountered before.
That’s not just due to Plato; enough people in human history have been sufficiently oppressed that the only thing they can imagine a heaven to be is the total cessation of labor.
That depends on your definition of evil. If you mean natural evil, fine, but if you mean moral evil, I disagree. Natural evil can be used to extrapolate the results of moral evil, so moral evil isn’t that useful.
As above, that depends. I think the existence of natural evil is part of God’s goodness because of the lessons we can learn, but the only lesson from moral evil is to reject it.
I have to disagree. A specific example is the fad of condemning Israel for defending itself, connected to the fad of excusing Islamists regardless of the atrocities they support or engage in: that illustrates Wright’s point.
It doesn’t imply that no progress can be made, only that the idea that everything we come up with is inherently superior is bogus.
At least not on a huge scale. Paul was an advocate for women, as was Jesus; it’s only that they didn’t go as far as some people nowadays would like that gets them negative press (well, that and some total misunderstandings of what they did and said).
I would say that thinking that our achievements are the pinnacle is just the same: both assert the absolute superiority of one small piece of human cultural history over all others. The moment we think that our way is the ultimate best it’s moral tyranny as well.
It looks to me like a logical conclusion: any culture that thinks it is better than all other cultures is going to end up a mess.
For “PoMo analysis” you could insert “Puritan analysis” or any other version of absolutism.
C. S. Lewis talks about this somewhere. As I recall he makes the point that by this view of God it becomes impossible to call God “good” in any meaningful sense. If God is good then there are plainly things He is not capable of doing!
Of course my objection is also that the Greek word behind “omnipotent” does not mean what the above suggests.
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Good point. It isn’t necessarily the Christian understanding I object to so much as the subset who are much more shrill and adamant in their opinions. Shouldn’t really paint an entire religion based on the worst examples.
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Just like people. The key is thinking you are better than others because you are such a wonderfully considerate person.
Some sort of supernatural item? Is that how you view Jesus? As an undefined supernatural insert?
I am sorry, but this is catagorising for catagorising sake.
I am pretty sure that none of the gospel writers were Greco-Roman let alone following a known writing form.
Matthew had a purpose. To show the Jews what they had missed. And Luke appears to be trying to fathom out Christ from a non Jewish person. There is no attempt to place the story in history other than the Luke birth narrative. And as for John, He is so loose with the history it is almost incidental.
I, personally, do not think there is any other literature that compares to the Gospels, neither religious nor otherwise
Richard
At around 51 minutes in …
The chronological snobbery of ‘modernism’ is ridiculous. The only new thing about it is its sudden dominance.
Note that Wright is not here passing judgment on how right or wrong it may be, but only on the notion that it is new or actually modern. In fact, elsewhere (it might have been in another lecture even) - he heaps praise on the blessings of modernism - somewhere pontificating that “Make no mistake - I would not want to be operated on by either a pre-modern or a postmodern dentist!” One could be forgiven, I should think, for concluding that Mr. Wright at least acknowledges there have been significant and new developments in dentistry! …which is safe to conclude he wouldn’t deny (obviously!). But probably his answer to this might be that he’s suggesting that the underlying philosophies, worldviews etc., that lead to those wonderful new developments was not itself some new thing with no precedent.
A little later in this first lecture …
‘Religion’ (the word means something different for us now) has been recast as a merely private affair, rendering the integration of it throughout all life (as it would have been in Roman times) nearly impossible now. Hence we have actual departments of study: “Philosophy of religion”, “History of religion” …
The above was certainly echoed in Tom Holland’s book, “Dominion”.
…and then a bit later in the lecture (54:30), and maybe related…
“A standard 18th century answer [to skeptics of the day] was to appeal to the miracles of Jesus. But this word too has shifted decisively since Hume. The Humean denial of the miraculous and the apologists re-affirmation of it both made the same mistake. They both saw ‘miracle’ as an invasion of the natural order by an outside power such as might provide evidence for the truth of Christian claims. Hume insisted that this was a-priori impossible, the apologists that God could do the impossible. As with the word ‘religion’, the word ‘miracle’ now reduced diverse phenomena to a single category, and moreover an unsuitable one.
Also among these expressed thoughts, and still along the same theme…
He discusses what has happened to the labels ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism’ (and then also ‘methodological naturalism’). “These have now become politically charged making them even less useful than before.”
We’ve given Lessing’s Ditch a free pass … merely wondering whether or not God at times leaps over it.
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Richard, I’m not sure if you see this as a problem, or if you are only making an observation.
Since the Gospels were written within the lifetimes of eye-witnesses (assuming the Gospels aren’t fraudulent), I wouldn’t expect them to include a broad historic background. “I saw it happen myself” or “I interviewed people who saw it” or “I pulled together eye-witness accounts” seems to be the historic placement. I’m not sure the writers had any idea that readers would still be relying on these writings 100, much less 2000 years later.
It does me, too. I forgot to include his dig against multi-culturalism, when I griped about his dig against PoMo. The “mess of multiculturalism” I guess depends on where one finds oneself in the multi of the culti. A white male in the west may worry a lot about the implications of Multi-culti. A brown-skinned woman will likely have a very different view of the value of multiculturalism. The Church should be the best example of the best possible version of multi-culturalism, which does not imply melting-pot type assimilation to any particular culture, but an integration of every tongue, tribe, people and language into Christ on his terms.
Galatians 3:26–28
26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
John 17:20–23
20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
This is a good point. Also a hard one to swallow. We all want to be really, really right, intellectually as well as morally. Which makes us see the other guy a degenerate idiot.
Oh, goodness. I hope not.
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No I don’t. The Gospels are what they are.They are not attempting to be fraudulent or even misleading, but they are intending to imbue faith. IOW they are biased, even Luke, to a greater or lesser extent is not as objective as his introduction might suggest.
The bible is a doctrinal book. There is no point in calling it anything else.
Richard.
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More like no point to arguing over what we call it
I disagree. Some call it the words of God which is misleading.
Richard
Are you enjoying the lectures? I finished the second one a little while ago and was godsmacked Schweitzer was an end of the world type. Pretty remarkable. This lecture reminded me of Keener’s The Historical Jesus of the Gospels.
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