"Discerning the Dawn: History: History, Eschatology and New Creation" by N.T. Wright

Faith & Science Conversation
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Excellent question. Really goes to the heart of the matter. Why insist on cool detachment and justification toward all else but exempt oneself? If you don’t feel the nearness of God why construct long arguments to justify belief in something that has only abstract existence for you? Perhaps it is only the instrumental purpose of signaling virtue for the sake of social inclusion or the abstract promise of afterlife benefits?

Geez this guy this has been plagerized by Wittgenstein though probably unknowingly.

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Well … yeah - and I think you do capture my vague thoughts, to the extent that anything is there to be captured. I just wanted the irony of the whole project to be noted - that we are at least in part taking hacks at the same large branch we are all sitting on - not meaning to hack it completely off, of course. I’m sitting on the same branch too, and have no intention of lopping it all off so that I fall to the ground.

But I just think it’s amusing that we don’t want Love shunted completely aside in favor of total left-brain analysis - so … let’s admit love and see what we can do with it by analyzing and reasoning about what it can accomplishe for us! We’ll go ahead and admit love to the table - but the intellect is still the committee chair sitting at the head of the table, and it is enthroned intellect that will evaluate with logic and reason whether Love earns its place at the table and how.

Is there a place where truth (reason) and love meet and kiss, both on their own indispensible terms? Don’t know what that would look like, and really I think I’m just talking nonsense right now. Because reason has no wherewithal to evaluate itself. There is no philosophical mirror to look into.

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Thanks, @Jay313 , I will spend some more time with the Pascal quotes on Descartes. Sometimes I feel incapable of penetrating my own language.
I like the LW quotes. Thanks for including them.
(I’ve been listening to Monk’s bio of him. What a fascinating person!)

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@Mervin_Bitikofer and @MarkD the context for Wright’s lectures and book is academic. In such a setting he is not free to depend primarily on his intuition, althought that may have guided his insights at first. To be invited to present a series of Giffords, he had to be recognized as the serious academic that he is, which generally requires heavy use of rational thinking.

I have no doubt that Wright, just as the outwardly crusty Puritans and the stereotyped-as-wooden Jonathan Edwards, is fully engaged in his love for God as well as others. But in this series he must rely on his other thinking.

Althought I have watched all the videos, I don’t remember what he said in them. I won’t speculate farther than to say that the setting of the lectures is academic first to last. However love fits in his thinking ,and what he means to say with the word, will be presented in a way appropriate to academia.

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105

Quite so, and not doubted for a moment! I feel like I’m on solid ground while listening to him. He has a precision in his language that I admire. A top class scholar! It’s one of the reasons I so enjoy listening and learn so much from him.

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106

In lecture 5 Wright was beginning to lose me. This idea that our sin damages or limits God is not an idea which I accept. We are the victims of our sin not God. And I certainly do not believe in a God which can be limited or damaged by the things we do.

But… this is one of the most the fundamental differences in the teaching of Jesus. So it is not that I am faulting the idea that the Jews believed in such a thing. And perhaps there is a different way of saying it… To be sure the locus of damage and limitations from sin are in us not God, but the relationship with God was indeed broken by the fall. And the one thing which will break a parent-child relationship is when the presence of the parent in the child’s life does more harm than good. So… “the return of Yahweh” as Wright calls it can be understood as getting past this by providing a way for the presence of God in our lives to be of benefit to us. And it is natural that this can be complicated by variations between people – that some will find this way for the presence of God to be a benefit to, while for others it remains unhelpful, where a belief in God can even be a part of the psychopathology of some people.

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Started lecture 6… I was interested in the focus on resurrection since this is a topic which arises frequently with me quoting 1 Corinthians 15.

Wright’s use of the words “bodily resurrection to some kind of body” got me thinking. …perhaps some of the difficulties can be overcome by comparing this with the views of Plato and the Gnostics. For Plato and the Gnostics there is the eternal mind seeking liberation from the body. And Paul clarifies that the promised resurrection is not that! It is a bodily resurrection. So this relationship between mind and body remains. It may be a different kind of body (and maybe a different kind of mind to go with it), but is not the Plato/Gnostic notion of a mind leaving the body behind. That is certainly not what Paul means by his teaching of a physical/bodily resurrection to a spiritual body rather than to a physical/natural body. We see from the story of Jesus’ resurrection that His resurrected body is capable of everything the old body was capable of and more. Something greater and more powerful and not something lesser and insubstantial.

Perhaps this also aids in explaining my frequent denial of a belief in the rational “soul” which is thought to reside in the body and make it live and be a person. Again it is not like the Gnostics where there is this thing called a soul which leaves/escapes from the body when the body dies. I am not saying we don’t have a spiritual aspect to our existence or that we cannot expect a continued existence after the physical body dies. It is really about rejecting this picture of Plato/Gnostics and other religions in favor of the description by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.

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Mitchell, please keep these thoughts handy for when the rest of the group catches up with you in some weeks. They will be great for the discussion!

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Hmmm… difficult for me. I don’t think I can remember the context of each lecture waiting so long in between, and if I don’t write these things down immediately they will be quickly forgotten. I am not sure I could of even done so much better (on a topic like this) when I was young. So… the best I can do is keep going and link back to these comments when the time comes.

I don’t have this problem with math because everything get used over and over again as you go on.

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For context, my note was

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.

Like you and @Mervin_Bitikofer, I’m curious how Wright defines “love,” but I’m more interested in how he relates that to epistemology, and I’m dubious about any conclusions that can be drawn about the natural world by working backward from new creation to the original creation. I hope that’s not where he’s going. We’ll see.

A couple of loose ends before diving back into the first lecture …

Related to the earlier PoMo discussion, I’m just now getting around to @JRM’s blog post updating his thoughts on a book he wrote on the subject 30 years ago. Three articles and a whole bunch to chew on:

Finally, I suggest making a separate thread on Jan. 19 for the 2nd lecture. Include a link to the lectures and a synopsis of the lecture. Much easier for newcomers and more welcoming for folks who may be interested in the subject but not committed to the full series. Just my 2c. Others can weigh in with their opinions.

Now, back to listening …

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Heh. I just tried to access my notes from the lectures, only to discover that notes from lectures 1 through 3 aren’t showing up whether I search for “Wright”, “Giffords”, or “lectures”. There goes my ‘auxiliary memory’.

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I think you’re ahead of the rest of us!

Though there was one thing I recall from lecture five: he said there were “seven heavenly bodies” in Genesis 1. I’ve hunted and can’t find any reference to that, so I have no idea what he was talking about!

I’ve never heard of such a notion before, and I agree – that’s a silly notion. We are broken, not God, and the only “damage” to God would be grief.

I listen to the lectures with WordPad running so I can take notes.

This is one of the common errors that drives me crazy: it’s “could’ve”, short for “could have”. [Though I think it should be “could’v” since the e is pointless – of course for that matter it should be “hav”.]

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I’m having to go back and listen since my notes vanished into quantum limbo. It’s annoying because I have at least twelve hours of Michael Heiser videos, at least nine hours of Orthodox basic theology videos, and another eight or nine hours of various other speakers.

If only I could do a Druid ‘spell’ from my old fantasy RPG and hire someone to sleep for me!

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114

Same. I really liked that one quote from Pascal that said as much.

I’m looking over the preface of the book and the end of the first chapter right now for clues.
In the preface he enumerates a number of meanings of the term Natural Theology, and then says this on xiii:

‘Natural theology’, in other words, has become a loose label for a string of questions, all of which have to do with the relationship of the world and God…I am proposing that we relocate them within the larger setsof questions to which, historically, they ethemselves belong, and that we do so with a fres historical look at Jesus himself (indeed, with “history” itself clarified and resced from its own similar distortions).

History, in other words, matters; and thus Jesus and the New Testament ought by rights to be included as possible sources for the task of ‘natural theology’. In saying this I am certainly not attempting to revive the kind of rationalist apologetic that would seek to ‘prove’ the Christian faith by a supposed ‘appeal to history’. …Neither in method nor in results will I be following normal apologetic pathways. To make the case for including Jesus in the topic at all, I shall dismantle some of the now standard misunderstandings of his public career and teaching and go on to argue for a fresh placing of him within the Jewish symbolic as well as historical world of his day.
From:
N.T. Wright. History and Eschatology.

Later, on page xvii, Wright describes some of the later lectures with this:

On the contrary, the resurrection opens up instead a new public world in which the questions raised by humans within the present creation can be seen as provisional signposts to God.

They are, however, ‘broken signposts’, since the highest and best aspects of the human vocation, from ‘justice’ to ‘love’, all create paradoxes and sharp disjunctions…At this point [the cross] the particular kind of "natural theology’ which comes into view, unlike most kinds in the last three centuries, takes a specifically Trinitarian form. Reflection on the “broken signposts” and the paradoxical way they point to God challenges the older implicitly Deistic models which either leave Jesus out of consideration or try to fit him in at the late state into a picture of ‘God’ generated on other grounds.

Wright obviously failed his high school freshman comp class with the 5 paragraph essay and thesis statement clearly at the end of the first paragraph. Stay tuned for more.

@Jay313 Thanks for the piece from Middleton. I’m going to start that when I’m done here!

PSA – That would be: Public Service Announcement, folks.

@Jay313 mentioned starting a new thread for the second lecture. I’m not inclined to do that, but will, if that’s what folks would prefer. PM me with your thoughts. What I have in mind is similar to what I did with the End of Apologetics thread. I put a Table of Contents at the beginning of that thread, and added links to the first slide for each new chapter discussion. This time I would include the same Table of Contents with the same navigational links at the first slide for each discussion section, AND place a link that goes back to the OP as well.
I’m starting to think in the structure of a simply designed e-book!

I am right there with you, Mitchell.
I have to treat these book discussions like a course with a final at the end. They are an enormous amount of work for me. There’s no way I could redo the pace of the Penner discussion.

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115

Check your notebook!

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And sentences with from 16 to 22 words.

I signed up for a university course where the first day the instructor gave us a handout that included this silliness as a requirement for all our papers. I walked out, leaving the handout in the trash, and went to switch to a different section of the course with a different professor. I don’t recall if she asked why I was leaving – if she had I would have listed several famous writers who didn’t follow those rules, starting with Sir Walter Scott.

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I absolutely love that term and wish I’d encountered it before university! It’s got so much theology wrapped up in it I would venture that an M.Th. thesis could be written on it.

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I vote for this.

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While we are processing Lecture 1, I think it could be interesting and useful to talk about what experience ye have with Natural Theology.

Some of us are familiar with it as a form of apologetics. But I don’t know much about it. How about ye?

What other concepts of Natural Theology are you familiar with?

WHat are your thoughts on it?

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Sorry… as I continue with lecture 6.

Wright talks about the epistemology of love… and to even understand what he is saying I need to compare this with my own epistemological framework.

He gives a list of claims as a part of this epistemology of love:

  1. knowing involves all aspects of being human
  2. knowing takes place in community
  3. knowing is engaged and situated not detached.
  4. knowing takes place in a field of claims to power.
  5. knowing needs to be redeemed by love.

Compare these with these things I say which connect somewhat…

  1. Knowledge is the portion of our spectrum of belief which governs the way we live (this rejects the standard idea of knowledge as justified true belief as hot air empty of meaning since nobody believes things they think are untrue or unjustified). Something is knowledge because we live by it. For example, in science, scientific knowledge consists of the things science uses as part of its toolbox to investigate phenomenon. Theory becomes knowledge when it becomes part of how science does its work.
  2. Language is the substance of the human mind and there is no language without community – indeed language only works when the meaning of words are by consensus. And connecting this to number 1: how we live… is in community. The human community has become the environment which we now adapt to.
  3. Here I would distinguish between objective and subjective knowledge. In the former (in science) we exclude ourselves from what we study in order to observe, and with a procedure which gives the same result no matter who performs it we obtain some reliable objectivity. But life requires subjective participation where it is the very nature of living things to impose an order on the world, Therefore a pretense to restricting ourselves to objective observation alone is delusional. Detached knowledge therefore is inadequate for living our life.
  4. Knowledge in science provides a means to power. Making the scientific means to knowing the measure of all knowledge thus makes everything a search for power. And thus it is no surprise that religion fails such a measure, for that is something good religion should fail at.
  5. When religion becomes a means to power it has left God and become blasphemy. Science has built in limitations where religion has no inherent limitations and this is what makes religion dangerous. Thus it behooves us to impose limitations on religion and this indeed has become one of the most important tasks of established religion. We need to insure that God and love and only God and love reign in the works of religion.

The point of this comparison is to invite the criticism… “no that is not what Wright is talking about” so you can explain to me what he is talking about instead and thus help me to understand what he is saying.

I am not so familiar with the idea and Wright’s mention of this has continued to intrigue me. I am hoping for some explanation in the last lecture. But it seems so far that his argument is that natural theology is one which accepts history as the “nature” which needs to be examined for human events and motivations.

P.S. As I start lecture 7, I find Wright turning to the question of natural theology and what is it? So we do not have to wait to the end of lecture 8.

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