Gifford Lectures 2018 - Professor N.T. Wright - Lecture 1, 12th February 2018

well good evening ladies and gentlemen can you hear me okay the back thank you very much I might greaves I'm senior vice principal here at the University of Aberdeen and I'm very honored to make this introduction to the Gifford lectures this evening I want to welcome you all here this is a first in the series of 2018 Gifford lectures here at the University of Aberdeen these lectures were established in 1888 by virtue of generous bequest by Adam Lord Guildford an outstanding Scots lawyer and jurist they take place regularly in each of the four ancient Scottish universities and the specific object of Lord givers endowment was to found as he stipulated a lectureship or popular chair for promoting advancing teaching and diffusing the study of natural theology in the widest sense of that term over the years Aberdeen has regularly hosted outstanding lecturers who have taken up their tasks in a wide variety of ways thereby making signal contributions to the fields of philosophy ethics history theology psychology as well as the social and other humane sciences some examples most recently we've enjoyed lecture series from Robert Novak Mona Siddiqui David Livingstone Sarah Coakley and Alister McGrath and in the longer history of these lectures our Dean has hosted the likes of Etienne Gilson Alvin Plantinga Eleanor Stumpf Yaroslav Pelican Paul Tillich Hannah Arendt Michael Polanyi Carl Bart and Josiah Royce as well undoubtedly proved to be true once again this year the Gifford lectures make a notable contribution to the intellectual life of this University and more widely to the cultural life of Aberdeen City and Shire and so once more a war were a warm welcome from me to you all I'd now like to invite to Professor Philip Ziegler chair of the Gifford committee to introduce this year's lecturer it is great pleasure for me to introduce to you our Gifford lecturer for 2018 professor NT Wright professor Wright is currently a chair of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of st. Andrews schooled in Yorkshire and educated at Oxford and learning important life lessons it seems in both places from his serious enjoyment of rugby cricket and rowing Tom's academic career began and flourished with appointments at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as well as at McGill University in Montreal in Canada Tom assumed his current professorial post at st. Andrews in 2010 following an extended period of ecclesiastical leadership and service in the Church of England first as Dean of Lichfield Cathedral then as canon of Westminster and latterly as the Bishop of Durham this university honored his life's achievement early it seems in the year 2000 with an honorary doctorate of Divinity professor Wright's research is concentrated on the study of early Christianity and the interpretation of its formative texts especially those which constitute the biblical New Testament it must be said that the long list of Gifford lecturers contains but a few biblical scholars by my reckoning the most recent of those to deliver the lectures was James Barr in 1990-91 with Rudolf Bultmann in 1955 before that and reaching back a bit Albert Schweitzer in 1934 3035 before that a few few perhaps but undoubtedly August company central to Professor Wright's life work has been extensive historical research and writing that explores the way in which the earliest Christian faith and thought emerges from within the complex matrix of second temple Judaism i say extensive but perhaps prodigious would be more in keeping with the facts the case for many of you here will know and be well familiar with the sheer scale a professor writes published scholarship as well as the very many valuable books that he's written over the decades that have served to bring that scholarship to wider readerships around the globe constrained for time as we are one might be forgiven for only pointing to the several substantive volumes that make up his landmark series the Christian or Christian Christian origins and the question of God as exemplary of his wide-ranging work and ambition and indeed achievement rare - undoubtedly is the energy and scope of an author who is able to compose a complete New Testament commentary series and then to cap it off with a translation of the New Testament itself from the very same ancient texts as tom has indeed done in recent years and to cap it off before these lectures are concluded in four weeks time Tom will have written another book not this one but a biography of Paul a book entitled Paul a biography in fact the product of last year's labor a work of some 500 pages that the rabbi Lord of Jonathan Sacks has praised as in his words a work full of insight depth and generosity of understanding we can be sure that the coming weeks will afford us all the privilege of experiencing and benefitting from that same insight depth and generosity of understanding of which the chief rabbi speaks as Tom delivers the series of eight talks the overarching title of which is discerning the dawn history eschatology and the new creation so with that and that alone please join me in welcoming professor Wright to the podium to deliver the first of his lectures the Fallen shrine Lisbon 1755 and the triumph of epicureanism [Applause] thank you very much for your generous welcome and indeed for the surprising and honoring invitation I am delighted and privileged to be with you and to be able to undertake this remarkable task my mother now in her 95th year asked me what these lectures were going to be about I explained that some people used to think you could start from the natural world and think your way up to God from there that other people thought that wasn't such a good idea but that fresh thoughts about history might lead to fresh ideas about Jesus and thence to God after all and that on the way we might learn something about the nature of knowledge itself I thought that was quite enough to explain to him my mother thought for a few moments and then said firmly I'm glad I don't have to listen to those lectures anyone who agrees with my mother should feel under no obligation to stay but let me sketch a slightly a fuller version of what I want to do I shall begin by putting the earlier quest for natural theology including Lord Giffords bequest into its 18th and 19th century cultural context particularly the rise of new forms of Epicureanism then in the second lecture Wednesday I'll show how the same distorted perspectives tripled modern biblical studies from the start this includes I fear biltmans interpretation in his 1955 Giffords of history and eschatology to which my own subtitle eludes that was the last time a full on New Testament scholar gave the Giffords as was said and since then there's only been an Old Testament scholar James Barr 1991 so if we exegetes our rations to one shot every generation perhaps my successor in 2050 can pick up the conversation from here so the first two lectures form the first movement of a for movement proposal sketching the historical context the second pair of lectures then address the question of what history and eschatology themselves might mean historical knowledge is real knowledge about the real world and forms a key part of the relationship between that real world and God and that will enable us to clarify apocalyptic and eschatology in the fourth lecture then the fifth and sixth lectures the third pair will place Jesus and His resurrection within the world of first century Jewish cosmology eschatology and anthropology and that's where new creation comes into its own leading us back to the question of natural theology with fresh possibilities and lines of thought and that leads to the final pair and the seventh lecture I'll explore these possibilities in detail and in the eighth will offer some combined cosmological and missiological proposals which address the underlying problems as too many illogical zin there we should invent a new way of saying these things but that's where we are at the moment and I will be explaining throughout what I am calling rather loosely the epistemology of love as the appropriate means both to grasp new creation and to think back from that to the original creation itself all the lectures apart from this first one will take place you'll have noticed during Lent perhaps they will function as a call to penitence but my overall theme is the Easter message of new creation discerning the dawn and the relation of that to natural theology will I hope become clearer you remember that CS Lewis said he believed in Christianity as he believed that the Sun had risen not only because he saw it but because by it he could see everything else making a metaphor out of that simile we might say that the relationship between the sunlight and the newly glimpsed world is precisely the theme of natural theology so the puzzles we inherit when I was Bishop of Durham my study contained many books that had belonged to my predecessors and one day a postcard fell out of one of them dated three hundred years ago last year 1717 it was an invitation to Tenace addressed to a young man then seeking Anglican ordination that young man was Joseph Butler who became Bishop of Durham from 1750 until his early death two years later Butler's classic work written in 1736 was the analogy of religion Butler argued against the then powerful deists that the perceived problems in the Bible the mysteries and cruelties of sacred history were matched by the mysteries and cruelties inherent in the natural world so he argued thank you for what he called analogies between the world of nature and the truths of the Christian faith lending support to the latter now that summary as those of you who know Butler's work will know does scant justice to his subtle and powerful learning but Butler is important not just for what he said but for what he represented a mood of Christian optimism the missionary movements of his day were mostly post-millennial in inspiration the kingdom of God was growing and soon Jesus would be hailed as Lord of lords right around the world Handel set this to music in 1741 in the Messiah an earlier example is Joseph Addison's hymn of 1712 the spacious firmament on high at one level this is simply an English enough Psalm 19 but at another level it bears the stamp of the same Christian faith which Butler put into his anti deist arguments what though in solemn silence all move round the dark terrestrial ball what though nor real voice nor sound amidst their radiant orbs be found in reasons ear they all rejoice and utter forth a glorious voice forever singing as they shine the hand that made us is divine now this you might think is natural theology at its best a scripturally sourced acknowledgment that the natural world speaks and indeed sings of its creator and that human reason can hear that song such idea were widespread a noble vision and then came the crash the earthquake that struck Lisbon on All Saints days 1755 destroyed 85% of the buildings in the city killing around 1/5 of the city's population not least those who are in church for the festival but the shattering geophysical events were as nothing compared with the philosophical and ideological devastation the Fallen shrine of Lisbon symbolizes the collapse of optimistic natural theology there were of course other reasons for the reaction Lisbon did not generate Voltaire's skepticism out of nothing and Jews and Christians had always known about earthquakes and famines and the like perhaps they only became problems when Christianity has taken either a deist form or the Buttler like response to it nor was skepticism itself new over a century earlier descartes had unleashed despite I think his intentions a wave of potential skepticism and memories of intra religious conflict whipped that wave higher people in other words already had socio-political reasons for wanting traditional Christianity to be untrue and now they had epistemological tools to help the Lisbon earthquake then was seized upon by those who for whatever reason wanted to reject europe's catholicism and protestantism alike Voltaire's sarcastic comments about God and Lisbon will you now say he asked in a famous poem asks the devout will you now say that this terrible event will merely illustrate the iron laws that chained the will of God these comments expressed what many others were thinking and when the dust had settled the deism which Butler had opposed had been replaced with a similar but sharper worldview a revival of the ancient philosophy at Kurian ism things were now explicit people had often confused deism and christianity as they still do no chance of that with Epicurus now Epicureanism had been increasingly popular in europe as an alternative to the official religion since the rediscovery of the great epicurean poet Lucretia's in 1417 it had been influential though inevitably controversial in the complex debates of the 17th century including the rise of new scientific endeavors Edmund Halley used Lucretia's as a model for the ode he wrote in celebration of Newton's mathematically coherent system Canon Robert south of Oxford eager to say the worst thing he could about members of the Royal Society described them in 1678 as quote sons of Epicurus both for voluptuousness and irreligion unquote all this had been in the air but after 1755 epicureanism had come to stay forget those stars and planets singing the praises of God if there is a God he or she is a long way away takes no notice either of us or of the whirling stars religion is a human invention designed to keep the masses docile the world does what it does under its own steam it develops and changes in random ways without outside interference as atoms move randomly and sometimes through swerving bump into one another and produce new effects that's all there is to life and when we die we die so there is in both senses nothing to be afraid of that is epicureanism in a nutshell from the great man himself in the 3rd century BC through Lucretia's his poem in the first century BC all the way to Machiavelli Thomas Jefferson and many more since Karl kirpan a close friend of the young Karl Marx claimed that epic Eurus was the great enlightener of antiquity of you echoed by marx himself this robust materialism has become so much today's stock-in-trade that we don't even realize its ancient roots as Catherine Wilson formerly of this University argued when we read summaries of Lucretia's the ideas seem deeply familiar because quote many of the works core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed end of quote this renders the process the project of natural theology a lot harder or rather it makes it harder to argue from the world up to anything like the Christian God Epicureanism does offer a kind of natural theology we look at the whirling atoms just doing their own thing and we conclude that the gods were never involved in this world and they still aren't Christian natural theology however now not only has to make bricks without straw it has to build on land already liable to subsidence before proceeding further let me briefly clarify three things first on the history of ideas what am I doing with this stuff I do not suppose that great thinkers were always consistent or that as soon as they'd said something everybody in Europe believed it some were outrageous pioneers whose ideas took a century to be accepted some caught a public mood and expressed it strikingly said that as with great poetry people glimpsed something that oft was thought but now so well expressed most great thinkers come somewhere in between now I'm using words like modernity and enlightenment here heuristic aliy the key figures often didn't think of themselves like that we think after all of Schubert as standing on the bridge between classical and romantic music but Schubert himself was thinking about love and and the next tune only in retrospect do we see where people fit into a larger sketch and my aim is not to attempt a chronology of developing ideas but to draw attention to currents of thought which with hindsight we see to have shaped the world within which our questions have been asked and to propose that after the shrine of an older natural theology had fallen it was replaced in the popular mind with something quite different so then deism and Epicureanism deism was widespread in the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain and elsewhere and it offered an easy transition into full-on epicureanism so what's the difference deston Epicureans share the view of a gulf between God or the gods and the world we live in for the dest there is a Supreme Being who created the world he's the watchmaker who made the machine and keeps it well-oiled for some days like Newton inconsistently perhaps the watchmaker comes back from time to time to wind it up or adjust it but for the epicurean God or the gods had nothing to do with making the world and they have nothing to do with its maintenance nor is the world itself a well-oiled rational machine since it makes itself by non-rational trial and error with atoms swerving and bumping into one another at random there is therefore no problem of evil in epicureanism the world is what it is for at least some Deus --tz-- God cares how we behave and might eventually call us to account for Epicureans and this was always its great attraction of course the gods don't care and they won't judges so how he behaved is up to us and at death we dissolve into nothingness lacks Epicureans have always seen this as an invitation to licentiousness serious ones as a counsel of moderation many today however hearing the word epicurean think of morality or more likely immorality I'm primarily indicating by this word the cosmology which says that the gods domain is totally different from ours and it's incompatible with it oh you can acknowledge the gods if you like you can give a distant cool appraisal of their superiority but don't imagine the prayer or devotion or holiness will have the slightest effect on them when modern surveys suggest that more people say they believe in God than go to church here's the answer why would you get out of bed for the distant deist God let alone for the absent epicurean one so third a clarification about this blessed word enlightenment Immanuel Kant used the word of clear room in 1784 he was picking up on a theme from the french encyclopaedists who referred to Lumiere the lights of new knowledge the English word enlightenment wasn't used until the 19th century and then often contemptuously mocking those shallow and pretentious continental intellectuals and their politics cants own definition was a campaign slogan which we could summarize thus enlightenment means the freedom to make public use of one's reason with the goal of liberating humankind from its self-imposed immaturity but actually the Enlightenment really started in 17th century England because Kant looked back to John Locke's sense based epistemology to Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes and David Hume they were leading lights even though they didn't use the e word by the early 19th century William Blake was shaking his fist not only at the movements French leaders makan makan Voltaire Rousseau but also their underlying epicureanism the atoms of Democritus ceases now historians of the Enlightenment differ in emphasis and analysis but they all look back to something like cants definition and to his sense of a project a new kind of knowledge had opened up a new era freedom a human coming-of-age there is a book being published in America tomorrow by Steven Pinker called the enlightenment is succeeding or words that effect this mythology lives on now such a movement enlightenment rooted in complex philosophical social cultural and political debates does not appear in a flash with Albert Schweitzer or AJ as springing from the head of Kant like Athena from the head of Zeus and of course throughout the 18th and 19th centuries there were leading thinkers and Christian movements who show no sign of enlightenment tendencies the Wesley's Samuel Johnson John Henry Newman countless others come to mind but there was a tide running with the Enlightenment the book entitled God's funeral is not about the 1960s death of God movement or the Dawkins and Hitchens New Atheists it's about the Victorian era atheism is the end of the epicurean road there isn't much difference between having distant unknowable divinities and there being no God at all by the end of the 19th century many had embraced that new vision and they supposed it to be based on science the word enlightenment says it all till then darkness and superstition has reigned and now came the light this ironically it's exactly the same appeal launched by Lucretia's a new world free from ignorance free from fear of divine interference or final condemnation now we've found how the world works we will do things our own way we're grown up we can stand on our own feet take control of our own destiny and we must then accept the dark faithfulness of this random world there's a great 19th century example in the poet William Ernest Henley his Invictus of 1875 is best known for its last lines I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul but the whole poem accepts the new philosophy and announces a human self confidence from within it under the bludgeonings of chance my head is ludie but unbowed and death itself approaching as the Menace of the year's finds and shall find me unafraid now this shout of defiance should be put in context having suffered from tuberculosis as a boy Henley had his lower left leg amputated when he was 20 the poem expresses a robust Epicureanism whatever the gods may be up to I will live my independent life and death will be nothing to be afraid of twenty years later the University of st. Andrews awarded Henley a doctorate of Divinity let me sketch five telltale features of late 18th century culture which show where all this is going first there were the revolutions America France in France the earlier jansenism combined with a new intellectual analysis of and reaction to the corrupt collusion of the church with the unpopular monarchy it isn't clear that ordinary French people wanted to destroy the church but the Revolution gave political force to the attractive idea that society could now be comprehensively reordered and this led to the D Christianization campaign of 1793 which unleashed a particular vein of Epicureanism setting up the goddess of Reason in not Redang Cathedral getting rid of princes getting rid of God and his earthly representatives words are the most radical two ways of saying the same thing Robespierre attempted to mediate with a form of deism suggesting in his final speech to the convention that death was not an eternal sleep as the Epicureans would have said but the beginning of immortality and in June 1917 94 he supported a proposed cult of the Supreme Being but his far left opponents weren't having it they Gillen teamed him seven weeks later epicureanism not deism was now the new orthodoxy America meanwhile had being eager to get rid of George the third in all his wicked ways and the theological and ecclesiastical later declared I too am an epicurean though to be fair he was a great many other things as well most of the founding fathers were actually deists though consistent theology was not their strongest suit and some were quite devout calling people to pray for God's help and guidance the tension between that cautiously integrative approach and the more powerful deism persists to this day in America with debates about prayer in schools and so on I suspect that at least some American attempts at natural theology may have been aimed at finding not the Christian God but the Supreme Being who still provide presides over a certain amount of American religion anyway the revolutionary leaders didn't want to reject bishops they just didn't want the royalist placement that George the third kept sending them and the day istic separation of God in the world was to be mirrored in the strict separation of church and state so both France and America in their very different ways wanted to get God off the public stage alongside the political revolutions there was second the rise of pre-darwinian evolutionism note the ISM this isn't just a theory about biology this is a worldview in which evolution necessarily took place without divine guidance some people have called this naturalism but that's inadequate it's epicureanism it was developed by people like Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus who with his colleagues were inspecting the creation for signs of internally driven development like democritus's atoms the scientific heart of epicureanism the organisms that darwin and his colleagues were studying and the machines they were inventing would do their own thing without outside interference put the question of god on one side and science will flourish third there was the radical economic theory of Adam Smith who in 1776 published The Wealth of Nations arguing for the existence of an invisible hand motivated by self-interest that would guide the flow of money without intervention to bring about social improvement it's basically Newton's mechanistic universe translated into money the clock would work by itself and in the same year forth there appeared the opening volume of Edward Gibbons decline and fall of the Roman Empire arguing into alia that an otherworldly and squabbling Christianity had helped to sow the seeds of imperial decline given was one of the main back markers for what's now called historical criticism and he used comprehensive documentary research and a caustic style to dethrone an easygoing view of Christianity as a force for good in the world as in the expansion expansionism of the early 1700s if there was to be optimism it would have to find other grounds the shrines were falling to left and right and fifth and right in the middle of all this there was the start of what came to be called the quest of the historical Jesus Hermann Samuel Ramirez believed as a deist in a good and wise deity who would have to be discovered by unaided reason since for him the old testament was misleading nonsense and the new was a self-serving fabrication saying little about Jesus himself jesus said Rui Morris was in fact a deluded would be revolutionary who died a failure and whose followers hid his body and invented the new movement GE Lessing who brought Rui Morris's work to posthumous public attention is known for his ugly broad ditch between the eternal truths of reason and the contingent truths of history rhyme Aris is account of the contingent truths of Jesus history made the point how could you base any eternal conclusions on that stuff and even if you tried Jesus wasn't like what the church had imagined heaven and earth remain opaque to one another all these things go to get together politics without God science without God economics without God history without God and finally Jesus without God their God Father if that isn't exactly the wrong term was David Hume the five features I've mentioned are different in some ways but they're united in a human philosophical thrust they're not just straws in the wind they are flags flying strongly to announce a new world a new day by 1800 the shrine had fallen and a brave new independent world had been born this sense of a new world embodied the idea the new idea of progress but how could that notion appear within Epicureanism there's no guarantee that randomly swerving atoms will produce outcomes anyone might like but the Enlightenment's philosophers and social activists announced that the new dawning day would get brighter still and brighter the French philosopher Congo say said what many were thinking the human race said free at last from its shackles was now quote advancing with a firm and true step along the path of truth virtue and Happiness Thomas Jefferson for his part quoted Virgil on American banknotes to this day Novus Ordo seclorum a new order of the ages this resulted in a parody of Jewish and Christian eschatology a new form of inaugurated eschatology the French revolutionaries were most explicit about this because like Bar Kochba in 132 ad they restarted the calendar year one this modernist belief in a new dawn was a new phenomenon for the times and in part it was a secularization of earlier Christian optimism what we saw in the early 1700s and behind that an older doctrine of Providence it drew also on ancient mythology which you can see already for instance in Keats his poem I period but its central claim wasn't just that new and better days seem to be happening but that they were in some sense happening automatically all you had to do was get on board and push aside anyone who didn't see the point Hegel didn't invent that idea but he came in on the tide believing that rational progress was demonstrably not only in science but also in philosophy and the arts and even history and even religion he thought now invoking Hegel helps us to see how the cuckoo of progress appeared in the unlikely nest of Epicureanism banish the old Deus divinity up to his inaccessible 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 democritus's world of swirling atoms becomes the vehicle of Hegel's imminent Geist the spirit moving inexorably though dialectically forwards Marx suggested in his doctorate that Epicurus had anticipated Hegel's principle of inner self-consciousness now for the right wing Hegelians progress was a smooth evolution this remarkably led to the idea that the kingdom of God itself was advancing under the guise of the new Western culture it may seem a big step from Jefferson and Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon and the rest to Albirex ritual ritual in the second half of the 19th century but with Hegel as the bridge and with only a little oversimplification the job was done by the end of the 19th century it was widely assumed in Britain and Germany at least that the spectacular achievements and advances of Western civilization were part of what it meant to say that the kingdom of God was at hand this was natural theology made easy just look at our wonderful civilization and see the handiwork of God Steven Pinker's new book says just look at our wonderful civilization and see the result of the enlightened hmm the 19th century had many virtues but modesty was not one of them the rhetoric of evolution sustained this but this isn't how biological evolution works if the fittest survive that means that most developments don't most of nature's experiments end in blind alleys what else could you expect from swerving atoms likewise the idea that science and technology are making the world better is ambiguous industrial pollution atom bombs gas chambers tell a different story but at the popular level the ideology of progress ignores these counter examples like the eager British and American socialists who visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s and returned to say we have seen the future and it works the ideology ideology of progressive thought and forward-thinking movements quote unquote sweep all before them on every chat show everywhere every time someone says in this day and age or now that we live in the 21st century so by the end of the 19th century we find the following combination of philosophical and cultural beliefs first there is the ongoing epicurean framework God is out of the picture the world does its own thing second the scientific theories about evolution give credence however unjustifiably to a belief in progress whether through steady advance or revolution Hegel or Marx this coincided third with actual political movements and this toxic combination is with us still there have of course been loud protests jean-jacques rousseau thought advances in arts and science have actually damaged the human race not made it better Kiku Gore saw through the whole sham Charles Dickens displayed the seamy side of the Industrial Revolution Nietzsche foresaw nothing but disaster Karl Barth's Romans commentary offered a word from above a divine rebuke to the 19th century Tower of Babel look where your progress has landed us now so too with Walter Benjamin in the 1930s Theodor Adorno in the 1940s post modernism itself directly challenges the narrative of progress wisdom does not advance chronologically but even with the horrors of the 20th century the postmodern protest hasn't actually made much headway the idea of progress has embodied its own principle it's gone ahead under its own steam sustained by the fruits of science not least in medicine the people sometimes say to me Oh Tommy are so critical of the Enlightenment and I say listen I don't want to be operated on by either a pre-modern or a postmodern dentist thank you very much I want the benefits of high modernity but sustained by the fruits of science and the achievements of technology it applies to the future as a whole the principle that had already been applied to politics science economics history and even Jesus rethink them all without an external divine figure directing the traffic Providence but without God this has produced a strong sense of innate superiority there using classical Epicureans wanted to withdraw from everyday ordinary life because they wanted to imitate the happy gods who had detached and distant from the messy world our few ancients could afford this kind of social withdrawal you needed money in a nice vineyard and compliant slaves but with Europe's new skills it seemed possible the modern Western world has acted out the ancient dream to be the enlightened ones the developed or advanced countries the ones who know how things work operating on different principles living by different rules we live in an epicurean paradise it comes at a cost usually borne by others of course modern Western Western housing and health care and communications and so on are innately desirable that's why so many want to come to the west and enjoy them but to infer from this that the latest Western cultural or moral fads are likewise superior is laughable no wonder we're in such a tangle with multiculturalism and postmodern identity politics our philosophical basis gives us neither a clear analysis of what's happened nor the tools to cope so the social and political implication of Epicureanism remains powerful today political debates sometimes mirror theological ones thus the question of geopolitical intervention reflects the theologians question about divine action in the world the newtonian deus in america want to intervene to wind up the watch the Epicureans in france don't the British as usual get puzzled and pretend not to understand the question but these are the puzzles we face after the fall of the shrines where do they leave us how do we now face the task the task reimagined the question of natural theology can we arrive at truths about God by inference from the world around us it's flanked awkwardly by two others first does God intervene in the world by doing miracles and what about so-called natural evil these are in apparent tension because if God could intervene to raised Jesus from the dead why didn't he stop the Lisbon earthquake and so on I take it that Lord Giffords intention for these lectures was to see if one could address the main question without appealing miracles and things like that and hoping that maybe the problem of evil would shrink somewhat as well but something's missing history in general and the history of Jesus in particular history has to do with things that happen in the natural world now here there is a paradox our historical evidence for Jesus is mostly found in the New Testament so you might think oh that wouldn't count that's part of the special revelation were not supposed to be using but that's muddled that imagines that the Bible consists of abstract supernatural truths revealed from above in fact much of the Bible especially the Gospels purports to be about stuff that happened in the world history about things that actually went on and the more we follow Hume and Gibbon and Rui Morris the more we find Jesus as a man of his time as part of the flow of history part of the natural world order you can't have it both ways you either have to rule him out oh you have to rule him in the skeptical historians accidentally offered a challenge they said well history itself is part of the natural world okay why can't we use it in natural theology the problem is that the cultural presuppositions that have shaped Enlightenment thought as a whole have also shaped the study of Jesus and as a result would be orthodox theology systematics philosophical theology has mostly ignored or even sneered at the historians portraits of Jesus and has projected back into the first century a construct called Jesus composed of later theological formulations it has in fact often agreed de-facto with Lessing we want the eternal truths so let's not worry about the contingent truths of history but Lessing's challenge can just as easily work the other way supposing we did the history for ourselves to see if romero's was right you cannot then logically keep the question of Jesus and history out of the question of natural theology the problem is how to stop both students let alone any answers being distorted by the surrounding culture and one further feature of that culture often invoked to help Christians face the rising tide of secularism has hindered rather than helping I refer to the Christian retrieval of Plato what happens if you want to be a thoughtful Christian within an epicurean world the answer ought to be read the Bible and see that that rigid God world split is a category mistake but sadly that hasn't been the usual reaction the more normal answer has been to invoke Plato and since many of the Fathers did that you can go some distance down that road without noticing that the Bible itself is dragging its feet and pointing in a different direction this has many implications I just very briefly mentioned two first modern Western Christianity has largely abandoned the biblical hope of new creation and bodily resurrection interestingly this protest of mine which I've been banging on about for some years is mirrored exactly by the equivalent protest of Professor John Levin syndrome Harvard speaking from within a Jewish Orthodox world most people in the West now think that Christians believe in a single-stage post-mortem reality going to heaven with no thought of new heavens and a new earth or indeed of new creation at all some theologians speak without embarrassment of our souls being presently in exile here longing to return home to heaven that's Plutarch not Paul but if this world is not my home then looking at the present world to figure out who God is becomes not only harder than it was for the Psalms or Isaiah or even Jesus it becomes suspect what could you learn about the holy God from looking at the wicked world the second implication of holding a platonic spirituality with an within an epicurean metaphysic is an open invitation to Gnosticism which is one of the default modes for Western religion epicurean elitism interiorized and individualized combines with the Platonic secret in a reality to highlight not a sinful soul that needs redeeming and transforming but a true self that needs liberating from the distortions that the outside world and even one's own body might try to impose and like progress itself this view has recently become orthodoxy the political Eliot ism which allows enlightened Westerners to look down at the rest of the planet and either bless it or bomb it goes well with an inward elitism of those who know themselves to be the spiritual high fliers the real moral heroes thus an old minority of philosophy has become the new majority even those who have modified it by finding either a pantheistic progress within it or a platonic escape route out of it have lived within the epicurean world never before has a whole culture organized its life on the basis of a radical separation between our world in the world of the gods if any that was Charles Taylor's point in his Giffords a secular age and never before then has there been a time when it would be harder to obey Lord Giffords instructions and talk about natural theology or indeed to attempt what I see as the necessary step towards that which is to talk about Christian origins Taylor's point however alerts us to four crucial conclusions first the idea of the modern world most of us were brought up believing that science had now discovered a new view of the cosmos rendering all earlier worldviews obsolete this chronological snobbery is ridiculous and unwarranted the current Western worldview is in fact of an observable variation a well-known ancient one advocated in the early modern period on social and cultural and political grounds long before anyone looked for scientific evidence whether the worldview is true or not is another matter the only new thing about it is its sudden dominance second brief comment conclusion on the word religion the Epicureans separation of religion from ordinary life would have been unthinkable to the ancients the world word religion has actually changed its meaning ancient religion was woven into the fabric of everyday lives all over the place the ancient epicurean sneered it was a sham to induce fear that ancient religion matches neither the modern meanings private spirituality and immortal hope nor the early Christian reality Jesus first followers established a new thing a network of worship based ethically rigorous egalitarian philanthropic fictive kinship groups church for short but the Enlightenment decreed that religion should now mean private human devotion many Christians have gone along for the ride contemporary usage flattening out early Christianity into a religion in the modern sense has then aligned the Christian movement with other so-called religions or faiths with all sorts of consequent confusions and the word religion has generated new sub-disciplines philosophy of religion where you might discuss natural theology and history of religion where you might discuss early Christianity but the word religion as now understood makes both more difficult and their integration almost impossible this brings us third to naturalism and supernaturalism in the medieval period the Creator was always at work in the natural world sometimes the Creator would do extraordinary things which you could call supernatural indicating neither the abolition of nature by grace nor the invasion of nay by grace but the super abundance of grace over nature but now the word nature and the cognate term naturalism describe one half of the Enlightenment's false antithesis the implication being that methodological naturalism would rule out supernaturalism from the start or that methodological supernaturalism would be irresponsibly credulous the labels naturalism and supernaturalism have thus become rhetorically charged and even less useful than before using these terms merely hands Lessing a free pass leaving his ugly ditch in place and merely wondering whether God sometimes leaps over it I suspect Lord Giffords question owes something to this antithesis because Christian apologists of the 18th and 19th centuries often resorted to claims of special revelation whether of miracles which I'll talk about in a second or of inspired Scripture which was itself being challenged the apparent trump card oh we have a sacred source cut no ice with Lessing and it wasn't gonna help the people whose questions Lord gif had wanted to address where could you turn for help well a standard eighteenth-century answer was to appeal to the miracles of Jesus but this word too has shifted decisively since Hume the human denial of the miraculous and the apologists reaffirmation 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 human sisters that this was a priori impossible the apologists that God could do the impossible this standoff too persists as with the word religion the word miracle now reduces diverse phenomena to a single category and more over an unsuitable one it is now heard within the split world of Epicureanism inalienable carrying that notion of invasion whereas the New Testament speaks of the original creator affecting redemption and healing and renewal within his own world final conclusion epistemology how do we know the proposal I shall be advancing throughout is that the ontology of mainstream enlightenment Epicureanism had a symbiotic relationship with its implicit epistemology a theory of knowledge that had screened out a crucial element the epistemology is not neutral territory but we can sometimes spot when things are missing the missing element is love this word too is rendered almost meaningless by overuse I use it here heuristic lis theories of knowledge tend to polarize for instance around objective and subjective when I say I know this is a desk am I making a claim about a reality external to myself or simply about the state of my perceptions and imagination behind this there is the standoff between idealist and empiricists do we start with ideas and work out two concrete examples or do we begin with raw data and work up to generalizations or what classic Epicureanism was always wary of love Lucretia's like Oscar Wilde advised that falling in love got in the way of properly appraised erotic pleasure it would disturb the soul this force wearing of love has now become an epistemological principle supposedly detached rational inquiry is the epistemological correlate of atomistic materialism consider the legend of Faust mephistopheles promises Faust everything on one condition he must not love what he is enjoying he must never want the blissful moment to remain in Goethe's phrase he must never say for phylla docs to bestow shown Faust makes his pact of during love he will have power and wealth and pleasure varnas all the same point Alber ik the me Berlin gives up love in order to get the Rhine gold and with it the dark power that drives the story thus the rationalist enlightenment screening out the god dimension of reality screened out love at the same time and for the same reason it claimed instead the objective knowledge of the physical world obtained and exploited through science and technology and it wrote off the subjective elements as mere opinion or worse mere projection and the result one way or another was Frankenstein's monster there have again been sharp reactions the Romantic movement including fervent Christian discipleship from Wesley and others onwards went the other way what mattered for them was what warms the heart what we know deep within ourselves but sadly one can be strangely moved by things which turn out to be false romanticism is not enough we need to put it simplistically both the objective and the subjective poll the romantic and the rational just as we need the ongoing dialogue between ideal and empirical how is that possible it is love which affirms the other nosov the beloved be it a person or a tree or a star and which wants it to be itself not a mere projection of our own hopes and wants and which also takes appropriate delight in this knowing leaping beyond mere cool appraisal to a sense of delighted if unexpected homecoming of belonging with even in a new place thus since one of the problems of natural theology discussions as also with the historical criticism of the bible is how do we know my proposal developed throughout these lectures is that the highest form of knowing including historical and Theological knowing is love itself the greatest of these as Paul says now of course this proposal is hardly original goes back in the history of philosophy and theology but it doesn't usually impinge on contemporary discussions either of natural theology or of the historiography of early Christianity in Christian theology of course love became human in Jesus of Nazareth but this bald clay can sound like an uncritical fantasy designed to close down further thought I believe on the contrary that it avoids fantasy and opens up further thought and that so we'll be going next time seeing how the philosophical and cultural situation that forms the backstory of natural theology has contextualized and seriously distorted the reading of the New Testament itself and its portrayal of its central figure making it much harder than it should be to bring Jesus into the discussion of theology and of natural theology in particular thus in case anyone might suppose that the theme of love is pointing straightforwardly towards Valentine's Day when the next lecture takes place the review of modern gospel study will remind us that it is also Ash Wednesday thank you very much [Applause] you

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Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2018