I'm not sure that you're going to get a
performance out of me; no tap-dancing. Good evening. It's my
pleasure to welcome you to Samford University and to the very first Provost
Distinguished Lecture Series. My name is Mike Hardin, the Provost of Samford
University, and it's my joy and honor to introduce this series and our esteemed
guest this evening. Part of our role as Provost at Samford
is to work to achieve an integration of academic and spiritual concerns to
maximize the impact of Christian faith on the educational program and relayed as
campus groups at Samford. Thus the idea for this lecture series was born in
attempt to fulfill this directive given to me by the university. I wanted the
first guest of this lecture series to be someone who is a world-renowned and
respected Christian scholar who has thought and written deeply about the intersection of faith and the academy. I could think of no one better fitting
this description than the Wright Reverend Professor, N.T. Wright. Dr. Wright is the
research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of
St. Andrews Scotland. Beginning in January, Dr. Wright will
retire and move to Oxford, England where he will become Senior Research Fellow at
Wickliffe Hall. Dr. Wright previously taught New Testament at Cambridge, McGill, and Oxford universities before serving the church in various posts finally as
Bishop of Durham. Dr. Wright has published more than 80 books at both
academic and popular levels, and has broadcast frequently on radio and TV. He
is married with four children and five grandchildren. I first heard Dr. Wright
lecture in person in Washington, D.C. at the National Cathedral. My son, for his
graduation from high school, got the present of me taking him to that, he was very happy about that, and hearing Dr. Wright speak. I was simply amazed and overwhelmed as I listened to him. He was engaging and
thoughtful and tonight, you are in for a real treat.
Tonight's lecture is titled "Space, Time and History:
Jesus and the Challenge of God." After the lecture, Dr. Wright will be available for
a book signing in the lobby. I ask that you wait until the end of the program
and some final announcements to make your way to the lobby so that Dr. Wright
will have time to get to the book table. But now, without further ado, please help
me welcome to the podium the Wright Reverend Professor, N.T. Wright. Thank you, Provost Hardin, for this
splendid welcome and thank you all for being here; it's a joy to be back in this
university after a long time-I think it's nearly 30 years since I was last
here and I'm delighted to be with you again and especially to be giving this
lecture tonight. A theologian given a free hand for a topic ought, in principle,
to talk about God and the world. And a Christian theologian ought to talk about
Jesus and God and the world and that may sound easy, but like many things, it gets
more complicated as you get closer. People often say to me, sometimes email
me and say, "I've just got a straightforward question; I just want an
easy answer here," and then they say "Why did God allow evil?" Or "What did Jesus
mean by the kingdom of God?" And I have to explain that easy questions often have
difficult answers and that's just the way life is. Indeed I wrote three books
with the word "simply" in the title. "Simply Christians," "Simply Jesus," and "Simply Good
News," after which my publisher asked me tactfully if I knew the meaning of the word "simply." My answer was that if somebody comes up to me in st. Andrews
and says "How do I get from here to Glasgow and please keep it simple," I
could just say "Keep going south and a bit west,
sorry, west and a bit south for about 50 miles and you can't miss it," but it would
be kind to tell them that there's a river which is a mile wide at its
narrowest point in the way, and also a range of mountains and if they say "No I
don't want to know that, I just want the simple truth," well okay enjoy your
journey. Now my recent work has been exploring Jesus and God and the world in
relation to what is called "natural theology." I did, had, the privilege of
doing the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen University last year and I've been-I
have just recently finished revising them and expanding them for publication
under the title "History and Eschatology." And I see natural
theology as the challenge of public truth; the idea of observing the natural
world and trying to draw conclusions about God. That is as old as the ancient
philosophers; people have always made those sorts of questions and answers, but
what has now been called natural theology has been the challenge to say
something about God in a way which is open to public scrutiny
rather than being merely the private truth of those who already believe. And
my particular proposal is that this public truth needs to have Jesus at the
middle of it and most people who've written about natural theology have not
included serious study of Jesus at the middle for reasons that will become
apparent. And what I want to try to do tonight is to summarize some of my
argument. Obviously, I'm not going to try and squash an entire course of lectures
into one, but I want to take the argument of the original lectures forward in ways
which I have tried to incorporate in the version which is going to be published
quite soon. My late mother, shortly before she died, which was 15 months ago, asked
me what the Giffords were about. And when I said natural theology, that didn't mean
very much to her. So she said "Well what is this natural theology thing?" And I
said, and she was by this stage bedridden in a care home, but her mind was as sharp
and her tongue as sharp as it had ever been. So I said "Okay, keeping it simple.
Some people used to think you could look at the world of nature and argue up to
God. Other people have thought that's not a very good idea, but since Jesus himself
was part of the world of nature, the natural world,
why shouldn't we include Him too? And if we did, we might learn something about
the nature of knowledge itself." And I remember, as I said those sentences
thinking, "This is quite enough for a 94 year-old lady,"
my mother thought for a moment and then she said, firmly, "I'm glad I don't have to
listen to those lectures." The very characteristic put down. Our putting
Jesus in the mix of natural theology has been strangely unfashionable. What tends
to happen is that Jesus gets left out until the very last moment when the
theologian or philosopher, having constructed an outline picture of God on
other grounds, finally asks, if they're a Christian theologian, what it would mean
to think of Jesus as in some sense the embodiment or revelation of this God. I
decided to try it the other way around. To the consternation of some who think
it's cheating to put Jesus in the picture from the start, but actually it's cheating not to. Jesus was, as I said, a human being who lived at
a particular place and time. The world of history of space, time, and matter is part
of the natural world and if that's where Jesus was, then should we not study Him?
But the world of history has seemed, over the last two or three hundred years of
Western thought, to be much harder to get at, much harder to use than the world of
the natural sciences. How can we be sure that this happened or that happened? When it comes to Jesus can we be sure of what He really said and did? Do we really know
that He even existed? Can we be sure that He rose from the dead? And if not, what
happens to Christian theology? Now here we run into a serious problem about the
word history itself. What do we mean by history? I want to say a few things quite
simply, as it were, about that and then move to consider, from a genuinely
historical point of view, three of the most vital things about Jesus' public life, space, time, and the future before we put the picture
together and see how to approach the whole question of Jesus and God. And I
will, inevitably, cut a few corners and those corners will be adequately, I hope, filled out in the book when it comes out in a few weeks time. So the meanings of
history. Some of the most important words in the English language are annoyingly
ambiguous. The word "love" is an obvious example; C.S. Lewis wrote a book called "The
Four Loves," suggesting that our English word "love" is too vague because it covers
things for which the Greeks had four, or if anything more than four, meanings. Well
the word "history" has at least three quite different meanings. First, there is
history as the past; events that have happened; things that historians study.
"That's history" means it's the past and we can in principle study it. Second, there
is history as things written about the past; what historians produce. Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" is itself, of course, something that was
written in the past so it is part of history in that sense, but we use the
word history to mean the stuff that was written about things that happened in
the past. But then third, there is history as tasks. The research, the debating, the
discussion of sources, and the writing up of the whole thing; this is what
historians do. So you have what historians study the past, what
historians produce, the written thing that completes it, and what historians do
in terms of their daily tasks before the thing is complete. We move easily between
these in casual conversation, perhaps too easily. If you're watching a motor race
on the television and one of the cars crashes, the commentator shouts "He's
history," meaning he's in the past, that's finished. Churchill said at one point
"History will be kind to me because I intend to write it." And that's the second,
that's things written about the past which often, if not always, includes a measure of evaluation. And with that evaluation, by the way, comes more
complication. You may remember that, back in 2011, when something was going on
called the Arab Spring, Hillary Clinton declared that it was important, quote, "To
be on the right side of history," unquote. That seems to assume, it's a common phrase, that world events are moving inexorably in a particular direction,
that we know what that direction is, and all you have to do is get on board.
That's the view that some people call "historicism," though that word has its own
complexities too. Meanwhile, on the other side, a recent political writer declared
that, quote, "History is full of surprises," unquote.
After all, it has the ring of truth; we know very little of the past and
precisely none of the future. So it's not surprising if there are surprises. Anyway,
all this shows how complicated the word has quickly become and there is much
more, I'm just summarizing here. Then the task, of course, emerges when you approach
a student and say "What are you studying? What are you reading," and they say "I'm
doing history." Doesn't mean they're yet actually writing a book about some bit
of history; they're studying history, learning its methods and so on. So, it's a
slippery word. And it behooves us to recognize its slipperiness, otherwise, we
do get into quite serious trouble. All this might just be applied common sense,
but in theology, we are confronted specifically with the historical study
of Jesus. Many people have become very suspicious of such study, since most historical Jesus portraits have seemed to be trying to cut Him down
to size. To say that He wasn't really the Son of God until the later church
decided to call Him that and so on. And so that Christianity is actually based
on a mistake. Many, many people have written books like that over the last
two or three hundred years. And, actually, that was the conclusion which many in
the 18th century, when all this got going, wanted to reach since, in the 18th
century, many preferred either deism, that is God as an absentee landlord, or rank
Epicureanism, that is the gods are out of the picture altogether and they don't
get involved nor we with them. And both of those theologies, which were very
popular in the 18th century, not least among the founding fathers of your
beloved country, by the way. They sit well with a merely human Jesus, a historical
Jesus in the first sense of history that what actually happened since,
trimmed-down to suit the modern preconceptions as articulated by
philosophers like David Hume and historians like Edward Gibbon, great
central eighteenth-century figures. That has continued and has continued to this
day. And many seeing this, have suggested that
the best we can do then is the historical Jesus in the second sense of
history, the what historians write sense. In other words, we can't actually get
back to Jesus as He really was, all we can do is study what Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John and various other people said about Him or we can just do well what
this historian says about Jesus or that historian says so that the phrase "the
historical Jesus" shifts from meaning one of history to meaning two of history. Now, of course, it is true that we always, with any historical writing, have to
be aware who is writing and from what point of view; there is no such thing as a point of view which is nobody's point of view.
I say to the students in my classes: there is no such thing as an
epistemological Switzerland, a neutral territory where you can sit at the top
of a mountain and gaze equally on everything else. We are all involved in
the real world and all points of view are somebody's points of view. That's why
history has to be a public discipline because we have to have other people
involved seeing the evidence from other angles to make sure that our point of
view is corrected. So, that's fair enough, but that doesn't mean that we can't get
real information about the past. When you see a report of a sports event, a
basketball game, a football match, whatever it is, especially between rival
teams from neighboring cities, you expect in the newspapers that there will be
plenty of local bias in the way that the match has been written up, but you don't
expect them to get the score wrong; that would miss the point. So it is possible
to get actual information even while allowing for bias. Now the low point of
historical Jesus research was the so-called
"Jesus Seminar" organized by some American scholars in the 1990s. Unfortunately, some, including some theologians, have used the work of the Jesus Seminar, their very
negative work, as an excuse for abandoning history altogether; in sense
three, abandoning the task of history and even saying that one ought not to do
history because that's naturalistic and inherently anti-supernatural or
something odd like that. So this is where the verbal slippage really kicks in. Some
theologians have said "Don't give us history in terms of research and
reconstruction you will be bound to cut Jesus down to size if you do that."
Instead, they say "We must believe that Jesus is the Lord of history." But history,
now in that sense, is not what historians do or what historians produce, nor even
what historians study, but a massive, all-embracing sense of everything that
ever happened or ever will. Such theologians will claim that God is
sovereign over history in this sense, or Jesus is Lord of history in this sense.
But claims like this tell us precisely nothing about what actually happened,
about who Jesus actually was, and what He meant by what He did and said. It's a bit
like asking your bank manager what you've got in your bank account and
receiving the reply "money." Saying history in this huge generalized sense may be
true at one level, but it isn't helpful. If we want, as theologians and preachers
rightly want, to talk about God incarnate, we ought not to do so until we've looked
very carefully, and that means historically, at the incarnate God; otherwise, we merely put the cart before the horse. John in his gospel declares
that nobody has ever seen God, but that the only begotten Son of God has
revealed Him. So, we have on the one hand, some skeptics saying that Jesus was just
a Jewish teacher whose followers decided to launch a religion in His memory, and
on the other hand, we have some theologians reacting, not just against
that, but against any attempt to investigate Jesus declaring grandly that
since He's the Lord of history that's all we need to know. But actually, neither group are doing real history at all. And this has left many ordinary Christians,
including many hard-working clergy, bothered and unsure about whether they
can really trust the Gospels. Nor could we simply appeal to the authority of
scripture since, though we may believe in it,
the people we may be trying to convince do not; we ought to be looking for public truth that can be recognized as such. So I want to suggest some ways forward.
There is no secret to how good history is done; there are generally accepted
principles among real historians. Obviously they're a debate because that's
what we academics do we debate things otherwise we'd be out of a job, but, in principle, there are principles. First, history is real knowledge; it's not
merely opinion or vague guesswork. It follows, actually, the accepted methods of
the natural sciences; you collect all the relevant data, you form hypotheses, and
you test and modify, and ultimately try to verify those hypotheses. Most hard
science does exactly this with things that you can repeat from one laboratory
to another. History, like the sciences of astronomy and geology, study the
unrepeatable; you can't go through those great prehistoric things again, you can't
run the sequence again, but the method is the same. So, first, history is real
knowledge, second, history involves enquiring after human motivation, which
means thinking into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.
History asks why certain things happened, looking for clues to the human
motivations that drove events. Sometimes, of course, the most important law is the
law of unintended consequences, all sorts of things happen that nobody actually
intended, but we can still study what people did intend and why those things
went the way they did. And, by the way, studying human motivation isn't
psychoanalyzing people. It's hard enough to psychoanalyze somebody when you're
sitting in the same room as them and sharing the same culture.
History studies the motivations, the things which we can see in public discourse, and poetry, and stories, and goodness knows what, actually are the
reasons why people do what they do. Then thirdly, history, unlike mere Chronicle
which just collects unrelated data, history always aims at a connected narrative, in which cause and effect are appropriately displayed. Now all this is
part of what I and others, and some philosophers have loosely called
critical realism. Critical realism is a fancy way of saying that we know that
fake news occurs but that doesn't mean that nothing happened. And critical
realism needs to employ what, again I and others have called an epistemology of
love. When historians think into the minds of other people, that takes an act
of sympathetic imagination and that exists like love itself in the fragile
space between lustful projection, on the one hand, imagining that the other is
just like me or just like I want them to be, and a detached indifference in which
we don't try and understand the other point of view at all. Love jumps over
that gap, transcending the objective- subjective divide that so much modern
Western culture has often taken for granted. It's remarkable just how much
scholarship about Jesus that has called itself historical-critical, with a hyphen in between, has not in fact employed these historians' principles, but
has remained content with anachronistic frameworks of thought, often 18th or 19th
century frameworks, and inappropriate and pseudo-scientific methods. Such scholarship has often been mostly critical and hardly
at all historical; and I'm afraid that's the kind of unfootnoted sideswipe that
happens when you do a quick lecture on a complicated subject, but you'll find the
footnotes in the book. So, centrally to this lecture, space and time and the forgotten hope. As historians, we know quite a bit about the first-century
world in the Middle East. The Romans took control of Judea and Galilee in 63 BC.
After a century or so, they lost patience, they defeated the constantly rebellious
Jews and they destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. And Jesus' public
career took place right in the middle of that period. Resistance to Rome in Jesus' day was smoldering; it wasn't an open flame, but rebellion was never far from
the surface and Jesus himself was executed as a rebel king in the early 30s after a short public career. Everything
that I've just said we know without a shadow of doubt; it's not open to question in any serious historiography. We also know, uncontroversially, certain
vital things about Jesus' public career. Its theme was the announcement of God's
kingdom on earth as in heaven. I don't think any historian is going to challenge the
fact that Jesus went about saying "God's kingdom is happening." And Jesus made that announcement, indeed, as well as in word. And the theme of God's kingdom, which is
clear in Israel's scriptures, was current in revolutionary movements. The
revolutionaries wanted God alone to be king because they were fed up with their
present wicked rulers, whether the Herod family or Caesar in Rome. And Jesus
explicitly hooked his own announcement of God's kingdom into the ancient
scriptural prophecies when he said "The time is fulfilled. What time is this? Well the time spoken of by the prophets." And he radically
reinterpreted the meaning of the kingdom through dramatic actions, particularly
healings, and celebrations, and sharp-edged little stories, the parables.
This vivid, slightly expanded, picture of Jesus is, again, not open to doubt; you can
chip away at different bits of it, but the overall outline is clear. The
evidence converges and it makes sense precisely in the complex world of the first third of the first century. By the time the Gospels were being written,
issues had moved on. But this historical basis for understanding Jesus has not
been explored, let alone exploited, either by the skeptics, who have concentrated their fire elsewhere, or by the systematic theologians, who have usually only wanted
to find in the Gospels advance hints of much later dogmatic puzzles. And if we
are to understand Jesus Himself and if, with the New Testament, we are going to
think in terms of looking hard at Jesus in order to get accurate glimpses of God,
then we have to do the historical work of understanding what Jesus meant by His
kingdom announcement. Now, to aid us there are three features of Jesus' public career which stand out as being badly understood in later tradition. They are
the temple, the Sabbath, and the future space, time and history, and hope and
these are vital. So the temple. Before the 1980s, the question of Jesus' attitude to
the temple, and particularly His action in the temple, wasn't central to
historical Jesus research; kind of fell off the back of a great many studies. But
more recently, several who have studied the first century Jewish world in its
own right have highlighted Jesus' temple action as the climax of a
program of Jewish restoration eschatology. This, by the way, was not
about the end of the world. It was about the fulfillment of God's promise to turn
the present world inside out. To rescue Israel from pagan domination; perhaps
even to establish in some way or other worldwide justice and peace. And what
Jesus said and did in relation to the temple fits within that program. So what
did the temple mean to a first century Jew, this is vital. The temple was
directly related to creation itself and to the promise of new creation. The opening chapters of Genesis portray the
creation of heaven and earth as the construction of a temple. Creation is
built like a temple in seven stages and the final thing that you put into the temple is, of course, the image of the God reflecting the divine presence into the
world, and channeling worship back from the creation to the Creator. A temple, any
temple in the ancient world then, was designed as a place where heaven and
earth would come together would overlap and interlock. Our modern culture has
embraced, as I hinted before, a version of ancient Epicureanism. Thomas Jefferson
said "I'm an epicurean," though to be fair he was a lot of other things as well. Ancient Epicureanism says that though
the gods may exist, they are a long way away and have nothing to do with us;
heaven and earth do not overlap. Our culture has just bought that; it's part
of the deal for most people in our modern world. Hardly anyone, though, in the ancient world thought like that; Epicureanism was a tiny minority
interest. But Genesis was written to say, among
many other things, that God's good creation is meant to be a combined
heaven and earth unity with humans called to stand at the dangerous point
of intersection between the two. And that God created this world for his own use;
wanting to come and dwell with his human creatures. To take his rest among them in
his own true home. And this plays out in the overall shape of the books of
Genesis and Exodus, the first two books in the Old Testament. When the children
of Israel were enslaved in Egypt, Moses said to Pharaoh that they should be set
free to worship God in the desert. The climax of Exodus is not the crossing of
the Red Sea nor the giving of the law on Sinai, those are preparatory, the climax
comes with the tabernacle; after the Israelites nearly blow it by making the
golden calf. The tabernacle is then a small model of the heaven and earth
creation; from the stars to the plants. And the glorious divine presence, what
later rabbis would call the Shekinah, the tabernacle in presence comes to dwell
there. There is a narrative arc all the way from Genesis 1 to Exodus 40. Picked up exactly by the prologue to Saint John's Gospel, which says the word became flesh
and tabernacled pitched his tent in our midst.
Now there's a vital twist here which many ignore but is really important for
understanding Jesus in the New Testament. The wilderness Tabernacle and then later
the Jerusalem temple were built as signposts pointing forwards to an even greater reality. They spoke of what the Creator God longed to do with the whole
of creation. The glorious filling of the wilderness tent pointed to the ultimate
filling of all creation. For us, the residual platonism of much
modern Christianity means that we can easily think that, if God is present in
some sense in a church or Christian assembly, that is giving us a safe space
away from the world; a sign to a disembodied reality called heaven rather
than a sign of what God intends ultimately for the world. Take Psalm 72,
which celebrates the coming true King, and remember that Jesus was seen by His
followers as the king who was supposed to come. In Psalm 72, the coming true king
will do justice for the poor, and the outcast, and the helpless, and the widow,
and the orphan. This is one of the Kings three-that's one of the Kings
three jobs. The other two are to repel Israel's
enemies and to build, or restore, the temple. And all these are aimed at one
purpose, namely the coming of the divine glory to dwell with the people. The king
repels the pagan enemies to cleanse the land for God to live there. He builds the
temple so that the divine glory may come there. And in Psalm 72, he does justice
for the poor so that the divine glory may dwell in all the earth; the whole world is claimed as God's holy land. And the temples' heaven and earth reality
points to the heaven and earth reality of the whole renewed creation. And, as in
Genesis 1, the heaven and earth reality is focused on the human being through
whom it will all happen; the king becomes the true image bearer, the true human
being. Some Jews in Jesus' day were already reading Genesis 1, Psalm 8, and
other passages in this way and Jesus seems to have made these traditions His
own. And once you see this, you will never read the Gospels the
same way again. So what happens when, as historians, we put Jesus in His public
career into this world. A world of promised glory for temple and creation.
Jesus appears as a prophet announcing God's kingdom, but it soon appears that
He believes Himself to be more than just a prophet; He is the true king even
though He is redefining kingship around Himself in a creative new synthesis of
Israel scriptures. He isn't planning armed revolt, as a would-be Messiah might
be expected to do, but He is doing things which the prophets foretold; healing the
sick and so forth. And when He publicly forgives sins, He is claiming to do and
be what the temple was and did. Slicing through protocol and offering people on
the street what you'd normally have to get through the official channels in
Jerusalem. And His regular, notorious feasting with sinners and, quote, "outcasts,"
unquote, looks like a dramatic enactment of Psalm 72 reinforced by parables like
The Prodigal Son. So Jesus' public career offered
throughout an implicit challenge to the temple. And this becomes explicit in His final visit to Jerusalem; His action in the temple was not a demand for reform,
it was an acted parable of the temple's upcoming destruction of the divine judgment, which would be executed by Rome. And when He stopped the flow of
sacrificial animals, He was performing a symbolic demonstration of that coming
destruction. And at the same time, He was offering something radically different
something symbolized by His own quasi Passover meal with his friends. And then
when Jesus died, the temple veil was torn in two, again symbolizing, in retrospect, its imminent destruction. Something had happened,
something was happening as a result of which the temple was becoming both
redundant in the face of the promised reality and under judgment as it was in
the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And when we put all this in the context of
what I stress was a normal way of understanding the temple, the implication
is massive. Jesus believed that He was the true king and that in His words and
deeds the glorious and devastating presence of Israel's God was manifest at
last. He was the place where, and the means by which, heaven and earth would
come together at last. He was the true image and He believed
that, with His forthcoming death and its aftermath, the kingdom would indeed be
established in a whole new way on earth as in heaven. But how would this work? How could the age to come, many Jews of Jesus' day and on into the
Rabbinic Period talked about the age to come over against the present age, how
could the age to come break into the present age rather than merely
abolishing and replacing, it as so many have supposed? For that, we turn from
space to time; from temple to Sabbath. What I've just said about the temple
applies even more to the Sabbath. The Sabbath was to time what the temple was
to place. The temple was where heaven and earth met, held together in a dangerous
symbiosis with image-bearing humans standing up that faultline. The Sabbath
was where the age to come broke into the present age so that God's
future and God's present were held together again with human beings
standing at the threshold in the single day of rest and celebration. With the
past coming forwards as well creation, Exodus, and all the
other moments of divine triumph said the Sabbath is time out of time; a time when
past and present and future come together. Now, just as modern Christianity
hasn't known what to do about the temple and Jesus' sayings and actions in
relation to it, so we haven't known what to do about the Sabbath. The Sabbath
stories in the Gospels have been treated as a clash between, quote, "Jewish legalism," unquote, and, quote, "Christian freedom," unquote, but that's not the point.
Jesus' opening announcement about the kingdom was that the time is fulfilled.
His Nazareth sermon in Luke 4 announced the Jubilee, the seventh seven, the great year of release; this was the ultimate Sabbath. And the Sabbath, remember, was when every week, the age to come would arrive in advance in the midst of present time.
Thus, even in the ongoing world of sin and death, you could live for a day in
the promised new age of blessing, and healing, and forgiveness. Thus, if the temple was a signpost to God's ultimate intention to fill the whole creation with His presence, the Sabbath's were advanced glimpses of the age to come; the
future somehow nesting dangerously in the present. Sabbath candles were
assigned that, one day, God's new day would dawn and Jesus was declaring that
that day had come at last; you don't need candles once the sun has
risen. The Sabbath controversies, therefore, reflect the already of the kingdom. This is about the presence of God's new day, not that the Sabbath was a silly thing or a bad thing or a stupid old law now abolished, the Sabbath's were
a set of forward-looking signposts and to say that we've now got where those
signposts were going, is to say that the signposts were true, were right, were
a good thing now happily fulfilled. And Jesus' parables fit exactly here. They were designed to affirm the Jewish expectation of God's
coming Kingdom on earth as in heaven, and to announce that this expectation was
now being fulfilled; and also to redefine the meaning of the kingdom away from the
revolutionary aspirations of so many of His contemporaries and towards Jesus' own understanding of the Scriptures and His vocation. So where did Jesus suppose it
was all going to end? What then, as historians trying to
understand, a larger vision of God in the world, what do we do with what we've
normally called eschatology? That's another of those multi-layered words in
the book. When you get hold of it and read it, you'll see that I analyzed, I
think it's five or possibly six, meanings of the word eschatology in the literature of the last 200 years; it becomes very confusing, you have to keep
a clear head. The failure of Western Christianity to understand how the first
century Jewish world thought about time has resulted in a caricature. For a
hundred years and more, students have been taught, almost as an article of
faith, that Jesus and His first followers expected the end of the world anytime.
How did this mistake arise? In the 19th century, many European scholars had been
convinced that the progressive advances of Western culture constituted the
steady arrival of the kingdom of God. But the mask had begun to slip. People had
seen through that hyper optimistic idea. Kierkegaard had denounced the Hegelian idea of progressive development. Nietzsche was saying that the whole thing was a fraud. Karl Marx had transformed Hegel's secularized progress
into revolution, which is a secularized version of Jewish apocalyptic. And two
young scholars, Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, at the end of the 19th century, caught the mood of the times. They declared that first
century Jews in general, and Jesus in particular, believed in the imminent end
of the world, the denial of all progressive options and that that's what
they meant by the kingdom of God. And this has become received scholarly and
often popular orthodoxy in many circles to this day, but Weiss and Schweitzer got it wrong. They had not studied Jewish apocalyptic in its historical and
political context. Schweitzer, one of my heroes I've got a big picture of him in
my study at home, but like all my heroes he has feet of clay just as I do.
Schweitzer was a brilliant philosopher, a musician, he was an expert on J.S. Bach, but also a massive fan of Richard Wagner, particularly of The Ring Cycle. Schweitzer attended performances of The Ring in Bayreuth four times during the very
years when he was writing about Jesus and the kingdom of God. The Ring, as you
may know, offers precisely a Nietzschean vision of the end of the world.
It's a massive denial of Hegelian progress. Schweitzer transposed this into
a first-century fantasy. Many saw his work as a word for the times, a warning
to 19th century optimism that everything was about to crash and burn. And that warning was then picked up by Karl Barth after the first world war in his Romans
commentary. And to this day, massive confusion abounds on end of the world
stuff in relation to all of that. But the answer to confusion is careful
historical exegesis and in particular, we need to ask the question "What did apocalyptic language," there's another slippery word, "mean in the first century?"
When first-century Jews echoed books like Daniel or 1 Enoch, what were
they talking about? You see the post-enlightenment philosophical climate dominated by Epicureanism, as it was, was bound to give
the wrong answer. If you start by supposing that heaven is
utterly different to earth then, if Heaven comes to reign, that must mean that earth will have to be abolished to make room for it, but that is neither biblical
nor Jewish. And likewise, the idea, which many Christians have embraced, of leaving
earth to go to heaven is actually a platonic notion not an early Christian
one. The best first-century exponent of leaving earth and going to heaven, that I
know, is Plutarch, a middle Platonist, a pagan priest at Delphi and a great
biographer and philosopher. Jesus Himself spoke of and taught people to pray for
God's kingdom to come on earth as in heaven; an idea which Epicureanism finds
impossible and platonism undesirable. Instead of both of those options, the
first-century retrieval of Daniel and 1 Enoch was what we would call
political, but the political here thoroughly mixed with the theological. My friend and former colleague and about-to-be colleague again in Oxford,
John Barton, the Old Testament scholar used to say in his undergraduate
lectures that we ought to know, as a matter of genre, that when in Isaiah 13
it says that the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and
the stars will fall from heaven; we ought to know, as a matter of genre, that the
next line will not be that the rest of the country will have scattered showers
and sunny intervals. This is not a primitive weather forecast.
It is theological and political metaphor; it's the only way you can talk about
what we call "earth-shattering events." You see, God is creator of all and Lord of all
for the ancient Jews that's how they saw it. When Isaiah described Sun and Moon
being darkened, etcetera, he was talking about the fall of Babylon.
What other language would be appropriate for an event which, in that world, would
be like a combination of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and 9/11. When Jeremiah warned that the created order was going to unmake itself and go back to being
without form and void, he worried a long time that he might be a false prophet
not because the world was still going on, but because the temple had not fallen.
The temple was where heaven and earth were joined together and if the temple
fell, heaven and earth themselves would have come apart at the seams. We know
from the historian Josephus and from the book we call forth Ezra how Daniel was
being read in Jesus' day. Daniel 2 has a statue with the head of gold and the
feet of clay smashed by a stone, which becomes a mountain, obvious political
allegory, different kingdoms and then a new one coming up which is going to take
over. Daniel 7 has four monsters followed by the exaltation of the Son of Man, or
one like a son of man. 4 Ezra refers back to Daniel and turns that
vision into a very obviously Roman eagle being attacked and conquered by a very
obviously messianic lion. They didn't expect that the fulfillment of that vision would involve an actual eagle and an actual lion, these were political
cartoons. The language of apocalyptic, of dreams and visions in which God's coming
Kingdom overthrows and replaces the kingdoms of the world is not about the
end of the world in our modern sense. That theory has given the impression of
the first Christians as simple, pre-scientific folk cherishing strange
ideas now long falsified. Which then neatly absolves us from having to follow
their theology or ethics either; that line is merely self-serving. Part of the
gangrene of liberal reductionism. So when we put all this together, what do we find
about Jesus' announcement of the kingdom? He was, indeed, talking about an end and a beginning, but it was the end, not of the
space-time universe, but of the long years in which Israel's temple and
Israel's Sabbath's had functioned as forward-looking signposts. They were true
signposts, they were good, they were God-given. Let's not get any of the silly sub-Christian idea that Jesus was saying they were bad things which shouldn't
have existed in the first place. Jesus was declaring that the age to come
had arrived in the present. Not now as a weekly advance celebration, but as a new
permanent reality running concurrently and confusingly with the present age
until a yet future date. So that Jesus' followers from then on would find
themselves living simultaneously in two different theological time zones.
Paul frequently refers to that kind of theological jet lag saying that it's
time to wake up even though the rest of the world seems still to be in darkness.
But with Jesus, there are other further wrinkles which Paul already takes as
read and develops because for Jesus, the ultimate victory over the powers of
darkness, the victory which would establish God's kingdom, was yet to
happen. The victory over evil spirits during the course of His public career
was a sign of an early victory, but there was a darker battle yet to be fought and
that is at the heart of Jesus' understanding of His own approaching
death. I've written about this in my book the day the revolution began. For Jesus
and Paul and the gospel writers, the crucifixion of Jesus is the victory over
the dark enslaving powers; takes a lot of figuring out of first-century Jewish
thought to understand how that could make sense. The victory was achieved
though through what we later theologians might call representative substitution.
There are different modern theories of Atonement, which regularly missed this
point and divide those up and force you to choose between them, but actually, they
go together. For the early Christians, the victory had indeed been won. Yes, Caesar
was still ruling the world, the temple was still standing, but both were
tottering. A new reality had been launched upon the world, a perpetual
Sabbath, a new kind of temple and they believed all this because they believed
that Jesus had been raised from the dead, thus demonstrating his victory over evil by his victory over evil's consequence, namely death. Now, all that, of course, is a vast topic for another time as is the question of what this kingdom then looks
like or should look like in the time between Jesus' resurrection and his final
return. But the other wrinkle, more than a wrinkle really, is that at the heart of
the Jewish vision of the future was the hope which was closely bound up with the
temple that Israel's God would return in person to rescue his people and set up
his kingdom. Isaiah says explicitly this is gonna happen.
So do Ezekiel, and Zechariah, and Malachi; interestingly, those are the very texts
that all four Gospels in their different ways draw on in order to talk about
Jesus. Historical critics and theologians alike
have tended to ignore this entire strand of the return of Israel's God, but I
believe it's at the very heart of historic New Testament Christology that
when we view Jesus' public career, climaxing in His death and resurrection
and ascension, we should think, and if we don't believe it we should still think,
that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Paul and the others thought this is what it
looked like, that's the claim, when Israel's God returned in glory. Can history prove the truth of such a claim? No, but history can radically clarify
what that claim involves so that one can then study it from all
angles and so that the fuller knowledge that we seek comes together in all its
coherence. So for today, I want to bring this lecture back where it began by
asking what we might learn from all this about the question of Jesus and God. If
this, that I've been saying, is a properly historical account of Jesus, a Jesus fully
at home in the first-century world, where might it leave the question of natural
theology? I've suggested that historical study of the first century poses a direct challenge to the modern epicurean framework. In particular, it challenges
what has essentially been a Faustian pact in which the real heart of
knowledge, namely love itself, has been pushed aside so that a ruthlessly driven
progress could proceed unchecked. You know the Faust myth, which goes back
to Marlowe in Shakespeare's day, and then Goethe in classic expression, and then
Thomas Mann, great twentieth century novelist. Faust makes a pact with the
devil, the devil will give him power on one condition: you must not love. That's a
parable of the modern world. And that project has produced, as well as wars, a
massive Western arrogance. We will know how to run the world as long as we don't
have to love it. So that we've created an attempted
epicurean paradise removed from the rest of the world, a secular temple, a secular
age to come, a parody of the Christian message. And that's why, in the modern
world, Christianity is reduced to the status of a religion and then were told
that religion and real-life don't go together; that's epicureanism again. Now, even if we don't want to engage the question for
philosophical reasons, the urgent political crises of our day ought to
tell us that this is not just about spirituality
or religion, it's about which god or gods we are going to serve and which
god or gods are ruling the world. There are different interlocking ways of
approaching this question which focus on the central theme of Jesus' crucifixion,
of His resurrection, and the mission of God. First, the paradox of the Cross meets
the paradox of human longing. There are many vital strands in human
life, and in the book I've explored seven of them, justice, freedom, beauty,
spirituality, truth, power, love. And in each case, we know these things are
crucially important, but we find them elusive; they are harder to attain and
hold on to than we want. We feel them to be clues to the meaning of life, but they
appear to let us down. Justice is denied or distorted, freedom is twisted into
license or new forms of slavery, the sunset disappears. Spirituality becomes
self-serving fantasy, truth becomes fake news, power corrupts, and love changes
either into lust or into grief. This is why many today see natural theology as
pointless. All the things that might appear to be signals of transcendence,
signposts to ultimate meaning turn to dust and ashes as we reach out and grasp
them. But my point is that the gospel story of Jesus going to His death meets
this dark human narrative at its lowest point. The story of Jesus does not enable
us to stretch up grandly to God, it declares that God has come down to
meet us in our dust and ashes; and that, I believe, is part of the secret of the
power of the message of the Cross. The reason why the cross in statues, or
pictures, or art, or music, perhaps especially music, has the power
to leap over human skepticism and incomprehension and open up recesses of
the human imagination and understanding. It is precisely at the point where Jesus
appeared to His followers to have failed, in what they thought was a bid to
establish an ordinary kingdom, that we have a strong sense of ultimate
connection. The cross, as we say, finds us where we are. And in particular, therefore,
it has the capacity to awaken a genuine love. And, to repeat, love here is not
fantasy, it's not sentiment. Love is the delighted recognition of a truth beyond
ourselves, reaching out in response to a reality, not from ourselves, but somehow
for ourselves. Paul says "The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me," yes, but
that can only be said in the light of the Resurrection. Which is why the great
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said "Startlingly, it is love that believes the
resurrection." The actual events of the gospel focusing on Jesus' death and
resurrection evoke that love as a new dimension of the ordinary epistemology
of love, which is required in any case for all good history. And this new
dimension opens up because, in the resurrection, it has become clear that
the creator of the world has declared His love for his creation, including for
ourselves. Not just in theory, but in practice because the news that Jesus has
been raised and is now alive in a whole new way;
bodily, but with a transformed immortal physicality, something which is totally
unprecedented and unimagined. That tells us that our deepest longings, framed and
frustrated in equal measure by our present created but corruptible
existence, are now redemptively reaffirmed. They are not, they cannot be
affirmed as they stand because of their inherent
corruption, but the act of redemption is also the real reaffirmation and with it
the revelation of the creator's love; the love which believes the resurrection is, therefore, an answering love, which is the ultimate form of knowledge. As Paul says
"Based not on our knowledge of God, but on his knowledge of us." And this kind of
knowledge, which refuses the Faustian pact of modernity and allows love to set
the terms, includes, but also transcends, the good historical arguments which make
it clear that Jesus' resurrection is the only answer to the question of Christian
origins. History is important, but by itself, the best historical arguments may
still not convinced the skeptic. But it also includes, but also transcends, the emotional appeal, which is all that many can hear in the word love, but which
would, by itself, result simply in a private experience rather than public
truth. Because saying "You ask me how I know He lives, He lives within my heart"
may be true, but lacks the power to convince others. They'll say "That may be
true for you, but it's not true for me," no. The message of Jesus' resurrection is the message that new creation is launched because the powers of corruption and death have been defeated on the cross and, therefore, the message of new
creation is the message of a deeper love; a deeper sense of welcome-home than
humans could otherwise imagine. With this, as we see in the response of the
disciples after Jesus' resurrection, the ultimate mystery opens before us. Thomas says "My Lord and my God." Now all this only really appears when the hard
historical work has been done so that we see what the four Gospels are really
telling us above and beyond our truncated modern understandings. Of course, none of this proves anything in the shrunken sense of a mathematical proof, but the shrill demand for that sort of proof is
itself a trick of the Faustian reductionism to which our culture has
been subjected. And once we recognize that the claim of Jesus and His first followers has nothing to do with the end of the world imaginings and everything
to do with the great Sabbath, the transformative arrival of the age to
come within the present age and the dangerous joining together of heaven and earth that that implies, then the believing love which answers
the creator's love can be seen for what it is. This is not about the adoption of
a cold Dogma, but the embrace of and the commitment to the project of God's
kingdom on earth as in heaven, which leads to my final point. Following from
this interpretation, we have the spirit driven mission of the church as part of
the argument for natural theology. That once we recognize that justice,
spirituality, relationships, beauty, freedom, truth, and power are genuine
signals in human life as to ultimate meaning, then it becomes clear that in
the power of the Spirit, the mission of the church is to work at all of those
simultaneously. Not resting content with the Platonic promise of a disembodied
heaven or the agnostic delusion of self-discovery; the mission of God thus
belongs quite properly as part of natural theology since it addresses the
puzzled awareness of all humans living within the world of nature itself. So, to conclude, I do not believe that one can straightforwardly start with a test tube or a telescope and argue your way up to God, but if the
test tube and the telescope remind you to look to the larger world, including
the world of history, including the fact of Jesus; then, if you look with answering
love, you will glimpse, as Paul says "In His face, the light of the knowledge of
the glory of God." Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Wright, for a very intriguing and very interesting lecture this evening. As Dr. Wright makes his
way to the lobby, please allow me to make just a couple of announcements. First,
Alabama Bookstore is here out in the lobby, I believe, with 12 of Dr. Wright's
books available for purchase, including his recent book "Paul," a biography, "The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion," which I
believe he alluded to in his talk tonight, "Surprised by Scripture: Engaging
Contemporary Issues." So please stay around a few minutes to meet Dr. Wright
and to have a book signed. Second, if you enjoyed tonight's lecture, then I'll hope
you will return Wednesday, September the 11th at 7 p.m. as Dr. Wright will engage
in a dialogue with Dr. Mark Kinzer, senior scholar and president emeritus of
Messianic Jewish Theological Institute, on the meaning of Israel. You can still
purchase your tickets online or at the door. Last, we will upload a recording of
tonight's lecture on our YouTube page youtube.com/samfordcommunications, you can go to our website and find that, and that will be
available later this week. I hope you will share this lecture with others.
Thank you so much for coming tonight, I hope to see you again Wednesday. Good
evening.
