Just watched the (listened to) 1st lecture. Brilliant! I feel like a secret (well… hidden) history has been revealed to me. I am hooked now…
It is certainly coming at things from a different angle. …though it overlapped my own thinking and had my resounding approval with its disapproval of the incorporation of Plato into the Christian worldview and the specter of Gnosticism which are key points of my own analysis.
Looking forward to see where this is going as I watch more of these lectures…
The first time I listened to these lectures I thought it would be interesting to hear your take, particularly because of Wright’s mention of Plato. I’m glad you’ve joined. I hope you find the lectures and the discussion rewarding.
There’s tons of it – that’s how scholars know the Gospels qualify as Bios; they conform to the form. The biggest difference is that the Gospels have more than one supernatural item; John makes a point of noting the ones he includes.
John gets an awful lot of historical details correct, including a number that historians used to scoff at as inventions but that archaeologists have now found to be right.
Finishing lecture 3, I cannot resist poking a bit at one of Wright’s comparisons. It doesn’t detract from is larger message because He is more careful later in the lecture.
He says we know the Romans destroyed the second temple as surely as we know water is hydrogen plus oxygen. And from this you may take the message that history is as certain as the physical sciences. The problem is that the our knowledge in the physical science is a great more detailed in precise quantities. And in fact his comparison is case in point. We know a great deal more than Wright’s vague description of water as hydrogen plus oxygen. We know water is composed of units combining two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. With history we only know what people bothered to describe in writing. So considerable detail is lacking and will never be known.
But… later on, Wright takes pains to describe history as seeking stable footing on shifting sands. Nobody describes the physical sciences in that way. LOL
It’s not so much what as when. John is less concerned about the precise chronological time as the appropriate action to fit the appropriate teaching.
This is not a criticism. itis just his way of reporting.
Richard
Is N.T. Wright in his ‘right’ mind? In McGilchrist‘s hemispheric sense, yes. No doubt. I don’t want to untracked this discussion but as I listened to the first lecture and another unrelated talk of his tge thought that he is balanced in his thinking kept coming to mind. A google search brought up an interesting article which I’ll put front and center in its own thread.
I thought of you reading the end of the chapter that comes from this lecture today. I’ll try to put some scans up later, when there is more time.
Sorry I’m slow. I started over with the first lecture and had a few thoughts I didn’t see mentioned yet.
9:54 Epistemology of love as the appropriate means both to grasp new creation and to think from that back to the original creation itself.
I look forward to seeing Wright unpack this thought.
14:12 Reaction to the Lisbon earthquake – Christians and Jews have always known about earthquakes and natural disasters. Only became a problem because of the deist form of Christianity.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think deism ever became a dominant belief among any but the most educated Western Christians. And since the subject is natural theology and the Enlightenment, I’m more than a little surprised that Pascal doesn’t deserve at least a mention. As a contemporary of Descartes, Pascal wrote in his Pensées:
Pascal’s last sentence has been echoed by Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Voltaire and all his contemporaries in the French Enlightenment continued to argue against Pascal a century after his death.
More tomorrow, Lord willing and the crick don’t rise.
I forgot this first time around, but here’s Pascal on natural theology:
Addendum from Pascal, to spare y’all another post:
I shall not undertake here to prove by natural reasons either the existence of God, or the Trinity, or the immortality of the soul, or anything of that nature; not only because I should not feel myself sufficiently able to find in nature arguments to convince hardened atheists, but also because such knowledge without Jesus Christ is useless and barren. Though a man should be convinced that numerical proportions are immaterial truths, eternal and dependent on a first truth, in which they subsist, and which is called God, I should not think him far advanced towards his own salvation.
The God of Christians is not a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths, or of the order of the elements; that is the view of heathens and Epicureans…
If the world existed to instruct man of God, His divinity would shine through every part in it in an indisputable manner; but as it exists only by Jesus Christ, and for Jesus Christ, and to teach men both their corruption and their redemption, all displays the proofs of these two truths. All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides Himself. Everything bears this character.
(Finally getting to the first lecture… ; - )
I thought this was apropos:
36:19 Banish the old Deus divinity up to his epicurean heaven and perhaps however paradoxically you might discover a different kind of divinity within the process itself: theology, like nature, abhors a vacuum – atheism can sometimes beget new forms of pantheism.
Like panentheism.
@Jay313, welcome!
I don’t really understand these quotes from Pascal regarding Descartes, particularly that last line that you said is echoed by LW and SK. Maybe more context could help.
Thanks!
And I, too, am waiting to hear him unpack “epistemology of love.”
Thanks for this post. It’s a great one.
Yes - thanks for that addendum, Jay; it was much more accessible to me than the fine print in the link.
I join you in thinking that surely Wright must have been influenced by such words - he is certainly echoing what Pascal wrote there. Though I’ll say the final paragraph of Pascal’s that you quoted there is still a bit unclear to me. But the first two - yes! Has Wright written all over it.
And since I’m not nearly so thoughtful or kind as Jay is - I’ll happily inflict on the thread yet another post of notes from this first lecture (but this does reach the end of my lecture one notes - so mercy is in sight.)
From about 56 minutes into the lecture Wright says this: Ontology and Epistemology are partners. The latter is not neutral territory. But we can sometimes spot when something has been screened out from our recognized ways of knowing. And what modern Epicureanism has screened out is love.
Wright goes on to suggest that the Faustian bargain of giving up love for the sake of knowledge and power – the appeal to a singularly enthroned rationalism is the epistemological equivalent of the Epicurean materialists unguided atoms and separated natural world.
Romantics (including Christian ones) reacted to all the above in the opposite direction …. whatever warms the heart.
I think I agree with Wright that … We need both.
It seems like a number of us have grabbed on to this idea and are anxious to hear him work through these ideas – the “epistemology of love” as he calls it. To some degree I am concerned that he is couching in academic terms the concept of “benefit of the doubt.” But Wright isn’t the kind of academic, at least as I know him, to seek a way to get out of proving his point by invoking “the benefit of the doubt.”
I have this question near the front burner.
Ditto.
Well - but on the other hand … One probably doesn’t take pokes at Epicureanism and the whole enlightenment project quest for ‘natural theologies’ and left-brained ‘proofs’ of everything … all only as a prelude to then … offering up said proofs of their thesis, right?
I mean - yeah - we are all looking forward to Wright showing where this ought to go under an epistemology of love; but we have to realize, isn’t it mostly our left-brains carrying on this discussion with each other in these here parts?
That isn’t to say Wright won’t deliver up satisfaction - maybe he will. But there is some irony in it all then, right? I do think Wright is in the end probably still a left-brained fellow like most of us. So, will have to see if he delivers. Complete with irony still intact then!
@Merv, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that Wright would be wrong to use rational arguments to identify and evaluate the validity of an Epicurean world view as well as to explore and evaluate the various concepts of Natural Theology and their ability to demonstrate anything about God, and then finally, rationally, to develop a better alternative to them.
Assuming I understand you correctly:
This is the same error that theologians who wrote book reviews of The End of Apologetics made in condeming Penner, a Postmodern, for using rational tools to evaluate a particular type of apologetics.
This type of evaluation and argumentation is inherently rational, logical. No one should be “getting away with” intuiting the right world view by how it feels to them. We shouldn’t intuit theology, either. (Although the way any person does theology is influenced by their basic enculturation).
Wright will need to show with careful logic how love fits into the framework he will develop for natural theology and why – as well as what he means by “love” in this context. But that is after he fleshes out the (rationally developed) framework for it that he has already begun to describe – one that includes the history of Christian origins.
Wright’s intuition, by giving him a wide, sweeping understanding based on years of study and integration of that knowledge, may have helped him to grasp how our culture has developed in ways (world view) that make it harder for us to recognize God in the world, and the inadequacies of the traditional concept of Natural Theology, but he must use logic and carefully structured arguments to show us those things and build his case for them as well as his proposed better alternatives.
I suspect Wright might say to those who feel as you do that you’ve been sold a WV which insists anything true must be demonstrable rationally. But if you can hold anything as true because you’ve found you can trust it, why should we assume there must be a rational basis which will allow you to forgo trust in favor of pure deduction? Some but not all knowing can be established rationally. I doubt Wright has any rabbit in his hat. His epistemology of love will come down to our ability to empathize with narrative to arrive at a gestalt which fits best with all aspects of the story. But even when you’ve become convinced it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to easily convince anyone else.
Perhaps the hiding is only to require that those who find Him to become more worthy first. Just because He doesn’t hand out the truth like candy so that anyone with a sweet tooth will become wise by satisfying that craving doesn’t mean there is no God to be found.
To write against those who made too profound a study of science: Descartes.
I believe Pascal has in mind his own idea that truth is known in more ways than reason alone, which is reflected in this note:
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?
On the next note about Descartes,
I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.
Pascal knew Descartes personally. The rest is a description of Deism. Finally,
[Descartes. —We must say summarily: “This is made by figure and motion,” for it is true. But to say what these are, and to compose the machine, is ridiculous. For it is useless, uncertain, and painful. And were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain.]
I believe the first sentence refers to an unbroken chain of natural causes-effects back to a first cause. “The machine” refers to the universe operating like a machine. I’m not certain whether Determinism was a “thing” yet, but that’s what it brings to mind for me. Once the first domino is tipped, everything else happens by necessity. Free will is an illusion, etc. Such a conclusion is useless, uncertain, and painful to us, according to Pascal. Regarding the last line, Kierkegaard was famously critical of philosophy, but no particular quote jumps into mind. (Memory failure?) I love this quote from Wittgenstein’s journals, though:
Is what I’m doing really worth the labour? Surely only if it receives a light from above. … If the light from above is not there, then I cannot be any more than clever.
Addendum: Dang! Forgot his famous quote on philosophy: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
And his thoughts on proofs of God’s existence:
It enlarges if you click on it. Then again, I’m on a giant computer monitor. Sorry.
I’m pulling from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pascal’s Pensées, if that helps. The introduction by T.S. Eliot is worth reading on its own.
Just to make things easier:
If God desired to make his existence known through the natural world (natural theology), then such evidence would so obvious that there would be no dispute over the existence of God. But that’s obviously not the case. Pascal sees the evidence as finely balanced. We see glimpses of God, but not enough to be sure.
On the Jesus angle, Pascal views humanity as poised between the greatness of God (being made in his image) and the “lowliness” of the beasts. But Pascal subscribes to the notion that humanity fell from its former greatness into corruption, which I don’t agree with. He’s a bit old-fashioned sometimes, being dead 350 years and all.
“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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