"The Meanings of History: Event and Interpretation in the Bible and Theology" (N.T. Wright)

hello excuse me hello and welcome to the seventh annual analytic theology lecture at aar this lecture series is sponsored by the Center for philosophy of religion at the University of Notre Dame I'm Michael Rea one of the directors of the center Sam nuances the other he's up here in front today's lecture will as usual be followed by a reception from 4:30 to 6:00 which will be held right downstairs in the Westminster room all of you are welcome and encouraged to attend our speaker today is nt right research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of st. Andrews professor Wright has held teaching and research positions at Oxford Cambridge and McGill University and he has served as Dean of Lichfield canon of Westminster and Bishop of Durham according to one biography I found he has received nine honorary doctorate of Divinity degrees from various universities including Durham and st. Andrews and he will be giving the 2018 Gifford lectures at I believe the University of Aberdeen right this is now the part of the introduction where I talk about what the speaker has published in the interest of keeping this to less than an hour I will just say this his prodigious corpus of work includes the enormous and enormous ly influential volumes in the Christian origin and the question of God series a translation of the New Testament entitled in the United States the kingdom New Testament the for everyone commentary series numerous other books and articles both academic and popular plus a variety of many ministry resources for example educational videos many of which have been used to good effect in my own church over the years it is an honor to have him speaking to us here today the title of his talk is the meanings of history event and interpretation in the Bible and theology please welcome NT right thanks Mike and thank you to the committee for inviting me this was a surprising and gratifying invitation I'm not sure that you necessarily will think at the end of it that I'm talking about analytic theology we shall see but you may know that I've been involved in the Lagos Institute in st. Andrews in which we're trying to hold together analytic and exegetical theology disciplines which sometimes seem barely to have heard of one another let alone to be linked and this is demanding and we're only just beginning but some urgent issues are already coming clear and one such is the question of history this has been C really confusing my aim today is at least to clarify some things and I hope that doing so will count in some small way as analytic theology or if not that and you better tell me that afterwards at least a contribution to the project theologians routinely invoke scriptural authority scripture requires exegesis exegesis is a branch of ancient history inquiring what this or that biblical text first meant to writer and readers theology will which wish to say more but cannot say less without lapsing into fantasy or eisegesis and the more should exegesis into dialog at least with systematic analytic philosophical theology we exegetes often wish as you may have heard us say from time to time we often wish those disciplines took historical exegesis a bit more seriously you can't do without it and you shouldn't try after all some kinds of theology may that may neither need nor want history but Christian theology has no choice we face questions about Incarnation about salvation history and so on but that's just the start and history is not simply a lump of clay preventing docetic hot-air balloons taking off into the clouds the Zen crashed nak Obon to meet the Barton Sen correct von oben and never being seen again and those who pray that God's kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as in heaven our Apes o facto committed to focusing on real life real space time and matter existence not as an illustration of abstract truth but as the ultimate reality to which the abstract truths bear humble witness according to the New Testament Jesus himself them human being the man from Galilee who died on a cross is the full definitive revelation of who the one true God really is and what he's doing he's not an example or illustration not even the ultimate illustration of an abstract principle or a true doctrine principles and doctrines refer to him and must defer to him and this means history history requires this is still the introduction on your handout history requires humility patience penitence and love being analytic cannot mean that we escape the methodological demands of Christian virtue humility to understand the thoughts of people who thought differently from how we do patience to go on working with the data and resist premature conclusions penitence to acknowledge that our traditions may have distorted original meanings and that we have preferred the distortions to the originals and love in that history depends on the delighted affirmation of events outside ourselves and of thoughts other than our own or to put it another way history is the risky public discourse which matches and celebrates the divine risk the divine humility of incarnation itself without it we copy Peter at Caesarea Philippi assuming against Jesus own protest that we know what his Messiahship ought to mean or we copy Peter in Gethsemane trying to defend Jesus against risk but denying him shortly afterwards these are the standard Petrin temptations demanding the penitence and recommissioning of john 21 Jesus resists our attempts to define him or to defend him knowing they may end in denial he demands that we pay attention to what he's actually doing saying and being and that means taking history seriously so what is history what we mean by history itself the word is slippery producing confusing ambiguities a sports commentator on the radio the other day says that a racing driver who has crashed his car he's history the next minute a politician says it's important to be on the right side of history the first of these means past events that are gone for good now irrelevant the second is the inexorable movement of events towards a utopian goal an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs says that history is full of surprises and then in the same paragraph that history is driven by the interaction of geopolitics institutions and ideas the first of those is the sum total of all events the second is the way that important events happen very different and in the same issue I just was reading it on the plane coming up from Dallas where I was last week a reviewer describes a book has an exhaustive history and then immediately afterwards reports that somebody said to a prime minister david cameron i hope history will be kind to you the first of those is history as an assemblage of all that is known about the relevant past the second is history as evaluation of a particular set of actions now at this popular level there is in fact little confusion we shift easily enough between these and other shades of meaning but in theology these and others cause real problems and as analytic thinkers we dare not rest content with serial ambiguity the dictionaries offer many different meanings I'm going to skip that survey that could be a paper in itself and cut straight to my own proposals which even though there are eight meanings here its considerable oversimplification as you may realize first one a history is the whole of the past sometimes even the future as well the vast accumulation of events almost all unknown and unknowable when we say at some point in history this is the sense we have in mind and when we say history is the theater of sovereign divine action we mean the entire sweep and flow not only of past events but a future one's to one be history is the knowable past the far smaller accumulation of events for which frequently by accident we have evidence this includes the perceptions and reflections and reactions of humans at the times all part of that without evidence events cannot be written up as history in sense two below which is why we sometimes speak of prehistory or prehistoric events things that happened before anything we can write about and or before anyone back then wrote about them ancient historians speak of the moment whether with is Herodotus or with the Solomonic succession narrative when we move from prehistory to history and with meaning 1 a and B we associate the adjective historical meaning that something actually happened as opposed to its being fictitious the death of mist mist group the death of mr. Rochester's first wife is not historical the death of the last pterodactyl is we know it happened even though we don't know where or when to a quite different here the word history is the written account of past events to a claiming to be definitive or complete the history of the Civil War the important distinction here is between history itself and mere annals or chronicles just lists of stuff that happened the next day in the next day history tells the whole story making some sort of continuous sense of events the aspiration to completeness to a comes from the positivism latent in Western modernity with the analogue of a criminal trial the question who did it needs a definite answer we want certainty most history however is not like that so we move to the more modest to be to be is the written account of past events acknowledged as partial and incomplete a history of the Civil War this is realistic because all history involves selection and arrangement the only time you can say everything is when there's almost nothing to be said selection and arrangement of course move us into the areas we're going to look at under 3 & 4 but we are talking about the way the word is used history one is events history - as the written account the Peloponnesian War is history one few Citadis book of that name is history - now here there's an important problem in German sense one past events is character sense to the written accounts of past events is history Rudolf Bultmann however used those terms differently for him history combined one and two event and narrative while he used GU shifter in a sense something like four below events and/or narratives which carry theological freight and this has produced considerable confusion in discussions of the historical Jesus as we shall see so two three three a history is the task of researching and writing about things that actually happened as opposed to history or fantasy category three is what actual historians think they're doing they talk about doing history and we distinguished that incidentally from making history ie doing things which bring about certain meaning Laden events or effects the word is their tilting towards sense for below Julius Caesar both made history and wrote history so for that matter did Winston Churchill but that's actually quite rare most historians are shy shrinking creatures who live in libraries and would never dream of making any history but they're real if you believe that you believe anything now the distinction between 3a and 3b is subtle but important when a distraught relative arrives at the scene of the tragedy they may say I just want to know what happened there will be a time for evaluation for blame or excuse but the first thing to establish is what actually occurred when Leopold von ranker two hundred and so years ago declared that his aim was to tell the reader V as I can't leak evasion he was not declaring as some have supposed an ambitious positivism he was contrasting his restrained attempt at mere description with the then-current grand interpretive schemes he was setting himself a three a task which is that of researching and producing a narrative - telling about things that actually happened 1b rather than drawing any big picture theories like those of Hegel and others for of course he too needed to select and arrange he was not a mere analyst and that moves him towards three B and ultimately in the direction of four but the distinction holds the idealist capital I treats sense one as the incidental raw material for the big overarching theory von ranker saw sense one what actually happened as the goal so 3 B history is a task of discerning and displaying some kind of connection pattern or principle and hence some meaning within things that actually happens since 3 a thus easily and rightly slips over into 3b because selection and arrangement involve a principle the question is whether the historian allows the evidence to suggest refine the principal or insists on imposing an alien principle on the evidence and if the meaning of a word is it's used in the sentence and the meaning of a sentence is its use in a paragraph or larger unit you can all supply the footnotes then the meaning of an event or sequence of events will be its perceived role within some larger narrative or symbol set and the quest for this meaning often involves the study of human intentionality as part of the answer to the question why something happened comparatively few events except things like earthquakes are a matter of total random inanimate causation most events happen because of what humans do and most human action is intentional even though the consequences frequently are not since 3 B thus opens up to reveal sense for where the distinction of one and two events and narrative comes back into its own for a history is a meaningful sequence of events either in the sense that the sequence or the events have meaning in themselves or in the sense that they are as we say going somewhere that they have a goal in view this is the sense of history invoked when people speak of being on the right side of history which is often a popularized version of Hegel or Marx or somebody the idea that world events are proceeding in a determined way in a closed continuum to a four ordained goal such theories are often known as historicism though that term and even more it's to German equivalents are almost as multivalent as history itself so I'm not going to use them much you don't have to be a historic to see history as a meaningful sequence of events but it's historicism that has got sometimes got meaning for a bad name this recalls the clash of narratives in the 18th century European culture had lift or lived off various narratives including versions of the Christian story in which a God is ultimately in control and be we know that the story reached its climax with Jesus but as deism gave way to full-on epicureanism both those elements had to go a the story was controlling itself from within making itself as it were and be the story had just reached its climax in the enlightenment itself how convenient and these especially the first brought about the so called rise of historical consciousness which was emphatically not a delight in the past for its own sake as in other spheres if God is out of the picture epicureanism events must take their own course thus the telling of the past both positive and negative think of Gibbons debunking of the early church was seen as part of a larger epicurean project which was worked out in politics French Revolution and I think there was something happened in this town around the same time as well but also science economics as much as in history and the historical movement was a way of claiming control over the past in order to seize control over the present in the future as explicitly in Voltaire and elsewhere and for Hegel the events themselves carried the meaning of progress they were the history that beckoned people to join the right side thus with for a people say that history teaches us this or that not meaning that those who write history and sense to have inserted a moral into their narrative though they may have done that as well but that the events themselves convey a message often about the internally driven progress through which culture is moving inexorably towards the fulfillment of the Enlightenment dream sometimes to be sure the same phrase is used skeptically I've heard it often enough history teaches us that history never teaches us anything meaning in other words is found in the significance of the events themselves as they somehow carry an inbuilt purpose and a definite final goal whether that's a Hegelian teleology or any chiyan nihilism a great deal of philosophical and theological writing about history has something like meaning for a in mind but to display this of course writers resort to 4 B again be aware of the confusion between history event in history narrative history for a events carrying meaning history for B is a meaningful narration of events we think again at once of Hegel and Marx and those who have written history to display their theories in practice but we also think of ancient Hebrew writing and indeed early and later Christian writing which is hardly surprising because Hegel and Marx were producing parodies of Jewish and Christian views pantheist in one case materialist in the other the early Christians writing the story of Jesus were arguably saying these events are the goal of Israel's long story and through their world-changing significance they are the launching of a new story upon the world others at the same time we're doing something similar mutatis mutandis Virgil and Livy were telling the story of Rome's long history as a preparation for the glories of Augustus and his Golden Age a complex narrative with a teleological meaning now of course when people are actually doing history since 3 most of these senses may be in play at the same time I'm not suggesting that these eight meanings denote different or mutually exclusive activities my point is that the way the word is used slides to and fro between these meanings and no doubt others as well and this is where confusion easily arises so to some initial results for initial comments about epistemology or ontology cosmology and authority you'll be glad they weren't all ologies it's like all the omni's the theologians talked about let's not go there first since one sets up the post Cartesian dichotomy in which the lure of positivism generates its opposite namely radicals out hardly any questions of what happened even in modern history admit of absolute precision especially when we add as with three be above that historical investigation includes the study of human motivation can we really know lawyers meet this problem all the time but juries convict on the balance of probabilities scientists sometimes pretend to absolute knowledge until new data shows up requiring hypotheses to be revisited guess what there's a new planet or whatever it may be much of the initial running in historical study of the Bible and early Christianity took place in Germany just when the German enlightenment with Cantor's patriarch hagglers Moses and a line of prophets from Goethe to Trojan Beyond was eager to cut traditional Christianity down to size precisely not to find out what actually happened in a neutral fashion but to discover what ought to have happened if the ideal of the Enlightenment and with that the great new European culture project as a whole were to be valid they used the language of scientific investigation as though to stake some kind of positivistic claim hence the Cartesian pressure to epistemological caution was powerfully reinforced by the social cultural and Theological pressure towards forms of radical Protestantism hence the ambiguity of the phrase the historical critical method for many in Germany and elsewhere the historical critical method meant using historical tools source criticism and the like coupled with a human skepticism to produce a slimmed-down post-enlightenment Protestantism however many in the anglo-saxon world not being tuned into Hegel fire bark on the rest have continued to use the phrase historical-critical in a much more apparently neutral sense thus in a recently republished essay CK Barrett the great New Testament scholar from the last generation declared that Joseph barber Lightfoot from 120 years ago used only one method in his commentaries namely the historical critical method and Barrett meant by that quote the prime and inescapable task of exegesis is to determine the precise meaning of the words in question in the context in which they were first spoken or written fine but JB Lightfoot was not doing what the Germans are doing under the same title because hearing that definition if you said you are not following the historical critical method you would be confessing to arbitrary and homemade pseudo exegesis and with it historical dishonesty so when English speakers were told that the Germans using the historical critical method had produced assured results this was heard in England perhaps America within an assumed positivism and this has been a recipe for confusion and suspicion so how epistemologically speaking does history work I've proposed elsewhere following Ben Meyer and Bernhard Lonnegan a form of critical realism that phrase has been contested and controversial I'm accepting it in a common sense heuristic mode fake news exists but that doesn't mean that nothing happened historical inquiry must go round the spiral of questioning everything and then telling fresh stories which approach real knowledge by hypothesis and verification history is not after all that different to science as soon as the experiments done it becomes a past event open to misrepresentation and manipulation yes science studies the repeatable while history studies the unrepeatable though interestingly you can't repeat an experiment in geology or astronomy and the evidence that the historian adduce --is is in the public domain and others may assess it as well thus the critically realist task of history 3 producing history 2 can really put us in touch with history 1 be not indeed in a positivistic or certain tist way I don't like that phrase but I know it's used in this context but through appropriate engagement via the epistemology of love topic for another time though I'm gesturing at it here in the today so from the epistemology to ontology much theology induced discussion both of science and of history has referred to the assumed split between naturalism and supernaturalism without apparently noticing that this basically hands Lessing a free pass real able naturalism as Epicureanism and you'll see what's going on the supposed natural supernatural split has migrated into history discourse from science and religion discussions it was the wrong tool there and it's worse here in the Middle Ages the word supernatural meant the super abundance of grace over nature without denying that God was active in nature as well but that has been squashed into the dualist epicurean paradigm producing an either/or either you're a naturalist in some sense or you're a super naturalist both come with strong implicit evaluation in different communities but if one is a supernaturalists then within days of more epicureanism one can avoid the task of history altogether since is two and three you can look down from the supposed great height of meanings one one a even and four on those benighted souls who insist on studying historical evidence as though for some reason it mattered the supernaturalists knows in advance what we ought to find and so finds it astonishingly calling this process historiography all that counts for such a person is to produce some version of for B we know what God's plan was and is and we allow that to state the terms but supposing that the either or of the epicurean worldview was radically mistaken supposing we went with some kind of ancient Hebrew or first century Jewish world view in which heaven and earth was supposed to overlap and interlock supposing Jesus really was launching God's kingdom on earth as in heaven so that we needed to study earth in order to find out what heaven was up to rather than assuming we knew heavens mind in advance what then leaping from 1 to 4 while rejecting 3 and hence 2 as implicit naturalism is not history and I think it guarantees bad theology so from epistemology and ontology to cosmology or actually rather eschatology will history get where it's going by progress or by eruption Hegel believed in progress and God was part of that process so technically he wasn't a naturalist but there had been many naturalistic or as I would insist epicurean versions of this theory this is basically Jewish Providence theology with God left out just as Marx's dialectical materialism was Jewish apocalyptic theology with God left out reacting to Hegel we have Kaku go in the 19th and barter partly channeling Marx and others in the 20th century's challenging progress and the comfortable culture Protestantism as' that saw in modern European culture the gradual arrival of the kingdom of God the idea of history has been caught in the crossfire of these battles so that some here any appeal to history as a guilty plea however unwarranted to a belief in imminent process the assumed guilt comes from the 20th century of in events which prove that Hegel at least was wrong and that history leads only to disaster a conclusion that however warranted by actual events was already assumed by anti Hegelians Bart's insistence on Revelation vertically from above was more about his rejection of ritual and Harnick than it was a fresh reading of Scripture and those who hoped for a new world to emerge in the 1930s I think of poor Walter Benjamin particularly would then when disappointed appealed to Powell Clay's painting the angel of history looking back on history 1a as a pile of rubble that theme has recently been invoked by some who for quite other reasons use the misleading label apocalyptic to retrieve an agenda which rejects not only the salvation historical version of 4b but the task of three the project of two and the possibility that one would ever be helpful for theology these models need sorting out and the debate about progress and eruption as theories of how history works are you with incense for has been played out in the Miss shapen debate between apocalyptic and salvation history I've got a lot of inverted commas in this paper so I'm trying to do them with my left hand here I've written about that elsewhere genuinely historical study 3a and 3b of the relevant material produces a narrative to be about beliefs that were actually held in the generated actual events one be in the light of which we can and should construct a mature genuinely grounded picture of Jesus and his first followers and that picture includes the second temple Jewish sense that history in sense one was indeed guided by God it was not a smooth progress but it was through covenantal and creational renewal seen as the sudden fulfillment of ancient promises and this conclusion points forward to some of my later remarks both in its form real historical exegesis challenging spurious top-down schemes and in its content christian retrieval of second temple Jewish ideas challenging later Western ideologies it's vital then not to confuse historical investigation of the Second Temple material history 3 producing history 2 on the subject of history 1b with the various schemes that we find in 4b here there are two equal and opposite mistakes could be a subject of a whole paper this on the one hand appealing to history does not mean capitulating to Hegel in 4a but on the other hand just because as Christian theologians we confess Christ to be the meaning of history since 1a we can never leap from facts to a top-down version of for B while writing off 3 & 2 as though they embodied methodological naturalism life is more complicated and more interesting than that brief reflection on Authority at the end of this subsection the widespread appeal to the authority of Scripture as I've argued elsewhere only attains coherence when we see it as shorthand for the authority of God exercised in Jesus and through the spirit through Scripture but scripture does not offer a closed private world however attractive that looks within a quasi Bachchan post liberalism the gospel narratives do what Paul did on his travels they display the Jesus story as public truth the truth of events in history 1b which were told in coherent historical narratives to be by people who had researched edited and arranged them three B so as to display their view of the meaning for B within the events back to 1b they gesture at an overall meaning for the whole of history for a with one a but they insist that this meaning is to be found in the actual events as researched and displayed not in an a priori discovered elsewhere God's deciding decisive saving self revelation the Gospels insist has taken place not primarily in their writing to be but in the events to which they bear witness one B which is why history real history in census three and two matters and cannot be trumped by a grand appeal to a combination of 1 and 4 so history and Jesus the implicit old a moratorium on historical Jesus work is long gone controversy still rages at every level but options are narrowing down course nobody comes to Jesus neutral such claims for instance from gaze over mesh or ed Sanders are falsified both by their published autobiographical remarks very revealing and by their very different constructs so does everything then reduce after all to variations on for with historians just bringing their own meaning and adjusting the evidence to fit certainly not history 3 is a public discipline the debates continue and like all genuine knowledge in any sphere history 3 involves both the all personal engagement of the interpreter and the full allowance that the evidence may suggest things which don't at all fit the original assumptions that's why the phrase historical Jesus remains ambiguous as we saw before the word historical here is sometimes associated with sense 1 Jesus as he actually was in the past and sometimes with sense to Jesus as historians reconstruct him not least because that's what the German phrase de historias means theologians have often used that ambiguity to suggest that attempts at one collapse into two leaving us with Jesus as the historian reconstructs him I ran into this when I was lecturing in Oxford and I put down on the lecture list for one term Jesus in his historical context when it was printed somebody had edited into historical Jesus I knew who it was the implication being well that's just a historians fiction a projection of ideology or theology it's an agenda driven version of for masquerading as a quasi positivist objectivity in two and one and that's generated a reaction from Martin Caylor a hundred years ago to CS Lewis 60 years ago did you know that reads Screwtape Letters again there's an entire letter addressed to wormwood telling him to get his patient involved in historical Jesus studies because that'll get him off the track sorry more recently Luke Timothy Johnson in America several post liberals today they say please don't give us a historical Jesus because that will simply be your own construct a would-be fifth gospel finding of Jesus behind the text rather than relying on the Gospels we've got now of course many historians from rhyme eras onwards have indeed said don't believe the Gospels believe my account instead that approach has challenged church tradition in the name of that epicurean agenda which as we saw banished the rumor of God to an inaccessible heaven and tried to make sense of the godless world in its own terms very interesting to contextualise Rui Morris more or less exactly the same time as Adam Smith is writing The Wealth of Nations economics without God as the French Revolution history with politics without Divine Right of Kings as Erasmus Darwin in Litchfield is doing epicurean science science with it and so on and so forth RIE Maris is doing the same thing let's try Jesus without God but there's a big difference between adopting a human a priori and saying don't believe the Gospels believe my reconstruction instead and saying perhaps the church hasn't fully understood what the four Gospels were trying to tell us and we need to do some more history to dig deeper into them and see and this last is eminently reasonable Jesus and his first followers lived in the second temple Jewish world which became increasingly opaque to Christians and actually also to Jews from 135 onwards the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt precipitated major worldview transformations the recent massive advances in our knowledge of Jesus period shared copious light on what the Gospels in their different ways were actually saying this does not require the back projection of a theological construct culled from subsequent Christians thought it requires history through the task 3 producing narratives to which like scientific knowledge mutatis mutandis will more and more approximate to the events and motivations themselves one resulting at last in the possibility of fresh proposals at the levels of sense for proposals which have not been brought a priori which people often asterick sneeringly suggests but which have emerged through the actual practice the task of research and narration and we should ignore that smear about going behind the text that phrase suggests that we are going behind the writers backs doing something sneaky or underhand and the accusation gains traction from the post modern literary mood of questioning any real world outside the text and this cultural mood has coincided with the neo-kantian existentialism of Bultmann and his successors imagining the Gospels as self referential myth making rather than historical memory but this is ridiculous when prima facia a texts describe actual events compare luke's prologue for a start doing one's best to understand what those events were and meant in their context is not going behind them the text it's accepting the text invitation to explore the world of the past which they intend to open up when the newspaper reports that my team won the match it is not illegitimate to ask so who scored the goals this task of course requires sensitivity to genre all sorts we could say here Richard barrage on the Gospels as biography Richard ball c'mon the eyewitness tradition and many others create a new context the Gospels purport to be history and sense to be referring to history and since one be the results of historical research and selection 3 be pointing strongly to meanings in the area of four there are also sub genres like parables to ask where the prodigal son lived or who bought his half of the property were bid to miss the point but to ask what first century factors would have generated the hostility towards which Jesus parable was responding is to get the point and that illustrates my point because the tradition is often assumed that hostility against Jesus arose from a Jewish legalism which was offended by his offer of love and forgiveness and we now know and I mean know that this doesn't work historically we have historical proposals which do the job much better history 3 needs to challenge received interpretations not to substitute a new construct for the Gospels the Gospels we have but to understand what those Gospels were saying in the first place this is not to go behind the text except in the sense that the texts themselves urges to do so what can history do for us to begin with it is particularly good at defeating the defeatist a phrase I have learned from my analytic friends every year or so someone writes another blockbuster claiming that Jesus was an Egyptian freemason or a Qumran visionary or that he married Mary Magdalene or whatever always with the implied corollary so therefore traditional Christianity is based on a mistake these wacky proposals and the equally wacky though apparently scholarly proposals of groups like the Jesus Seminar come and go and can be seen off comparatively easily one should not judge a discipline by its distortions but what we'll see off the skeptics is not a dogmatic reassertion of the tradition or a ruling out of history 3 with the slur of naturalism but history itself another example many have suggested that Jesus and his first followers couldn't have thought of him as divine a because they were Jewish monotheists and be because that would have made him insane but contemporary studies of monotheism and of the Jewish perception of the temple as God's dwelling and humans as image bearers in God's temple have shown that that was mere ignorant problems remain but the old dismissal of Christian claims on the assumption of original and original low Jewish Christology and their mirror image in the suggestion that for a proper Christology we have to forget history and look to the father's or to Aquinas have been shown to be out of line not by an a priori I culled from later orthodoxy but by historical research since three into actual historical evidence since one challenging unwarranted narratives since - suggesting the possibility of different meaningful narrative sense for and I venture to suggest that this kind of complex history is part of obedience to the kingdom itself coming on earth as in heaven all this moves into a different register with the resurrection another whole course of lectures of course historical study of the sources suggests that from the first this precipitated a radical mutation within Jewish understanding of history and eschatology which then formed the interpretive grid Jesus rising was interpreted simultaneously as a very strange event within the present world and the foundational and paradigmatic event within God's new creation and this makes sense albeit new sense within that Jewish world in which God's space time and matter and human space time and matter were designed to overlap and interlock just as the skeptic cannot appeal to a human a priori so the Christian cannot simply say I believe in the supernatural as though that bypassed the historical questions the point about new creation it is is it that it is the renewal of this world not the substitution of another one good history will explain this and outflank the normal objections history proper history not an a priori not an a priori appeal is good at defeating the defeatist as I've tried to show in various places but that doesn't mean well now we've got rid of all that nonsense we can go back to believing what we've always believed because if history can defeat the defeat as it can also dismantle the distortions excuse my alliteration is trying to keep you awake on a hot Sunday afternoon history can challenge ordinary Christian misconceptions when we do the history better like science we're always advancing towards the hypothetical completeness which we sell them completely reach we glimpse forgotten dimensions of what the Gospels were trying to tell us the obvious example is kingdom of God Jesus was perceived we know this historically as a prophet announcing God's reign we know plenty about what that would mean to his contemporaries and which scriptural texts they would have associated with it and we know too that Jesus seems to have been redefining what kingdom of God meant and doing so around himself and his strange vocation he was not simply describing God's kingdom as though from the outside he was claiming that in his words and deeds and then vitally in his forthcoming death he was bringing it about we know this I suggest as a matter of history 3a and 3b though you'd never get it from the a priori which sweeps past on Way from 1a to 4b but from at least the 3rd century onwards much church tradition has not taken seriously either the Jewish context of Jesus kingdom Proclamation or the contents of his redefinition most Western Christians at least have assumed that kingdom of God means going to heaven when you die that's demonstrably flat wrong but if we get it right sharing Jesus vision of on earth as in heaven this revolutionizes how we read the gospels how we understand jesus how we imagine the church relating to Jesus in his story today the historical core 1b is not just a matter of clarifying what Jesus was talking about it is the mandate for the necessary vocation of history itself once we allow our history on stage to defeat the defeatist we must be prepared for it to dismantle the distortions as well perhaps indeed that's why some theologians are frightened of it and use the caricature of history offered by the Jesus Seminar and it's like as an excuse just naturalism but true history will show not that Christianity is based on a mistake but that the ways we have perceived and re expressed it have introduced mistakes precisely by not attending to the historical setting and meaning dogma tradition and piety all need to submit as the Reformers would insist and as even Aquinas I think would agree to the original meaning of Scripture itself and the original meaning 1 B is discerned through historical work 2 and 3 allowing for to emerge at its own pace and if history can defeat the defeatist and dismantle the distortions it must then also direct the discussion we dare not start somewhere else even with Copperbottom northa DOX statements like Cal seeding and try to move forwards while ignoring what the early texts were saying Cal Seaton was an attempt to recapture in 5th century idiom and for particular purposes something central in the early texts but the mode manner and content of its retrieval left much to be desired it screened out several dimensions of the original historical context and meaning which had they been retreat could have provided a more robust account of Christology and of themes other themes too if theology is to be true to itself it must not simply snatch a few biblical texts to decorate an argument mounted on other grounds it must grow out of historical exegesis of the text itself this of course will seem counterintuitive to those whose experience of academic biblical study has been a dry lifeless rehearsing of Greek roots and reconstructed sources I apologize on behalf of my entire guild for those of you who have suffered under that that too was always a way of avoiding genuine history of pretending that digging the soil was the same thing as growing the vegetables when done properly historical exegesis 3 and 2 ought to be producing the plants themselves 1 letting them bear their own fruit 4 but it will only do this if it's allowed to be itself if history 3a and 3b is able to do its work without people looking over its shoulder and telling it what it should and shouldn't say back to the patron temptations once more my plea therefore to the larger world of theology whether analytic or otherwise is not to fear or reject history you have nothing to lose but your platonism of course for the last 250 years people have said history history when there was no history when all they were doing was using human troj to undermine Christianity the slippery phrase historical-critical has often given good exegesis a bad name theologians who are used to rejecting the would be historical critique of Rui Morris and the reductionist critique of Harnack have borrowed Lessing's ugly ditch as a moat to defend their Citadel against any historically based critique which might say not the Christianity itself was based on a mistake but that some of Christianity's great traditions have slipped their moorings and floated off into the blue sky of speculation so when historical study shows as it does that many ancient Jews believed in Daniels extended Exile and that Jesus and his followers believed that he was inaugurating the real return from exile the result is at this worldly salvation a new heaven + earth reality radically different from what much Western theology has wanted rhyme eros was right then to say that the Western church needed to be confronted with history he was wrong to suppose that this would falsify Christianity itself rather it would remind the Western Church of the core Kingdom message which came true in Jesus life death and resurrection and the sending of the Spirit thus to embrace a high Christology and to forget the kingdom is almost as bad perhaps as bad as insisting on the kingdom and assuming a low Christology the divinity of Jesus is the key in which the music is set it is not the tune that is being played this results in the irony of people invoking scriptural authority to support various styles of modern Western Christianity perpetrating platonic theories which historical exegesis of Scripture actually undermines Jesus Kingdom announcement itself therefore commits us to the task of history history incense 3 that is the research and careful reconstruction of what Jesus did and what he meant by it since 1 and what his followers understood at the time and came to understand sure afterwards as they wrote the initial history since - so that the task of history 3 will then be to produce further coherent narratives about the past to be the ambition for - a must be reigned in through which the reader will gain better insight into what actually happened 1b and what it meant to the key players at the time and as we grapple with this through history 3b we reach out towards four not to collapse the project into subjectivism or to relativize three and two but to display the full historical picture and to allow the theology to emerge from it so the task of Christian historians what is Christian historiography all about my last bit the task of history is itself for the Christian historian a kind of kenosis in the true biblical sense not in the spurious Const rule that sometimes goes by that name the Christian historian is not called upon to abandon belief in divine sovereignty or Providence as is sometimes imagined by those who speak about methodological naturalism belief in divine sovereignty does not tell me in advance of historical research what it is that has happened in the real world over which God is sovereign as soon as someone says because God is sovereign because Jesus is Lord such-and-such must have happened or alternatively cannot have happened I know I'm listening to nonsense one cannot do history from above the historian has to plunge into the real world to follow the Jesus of Philippians two into the messy and risky sphere of history itself since one in order to find out what it is that God has sovereignly done we don't know this in advance John 1:18 no one has ever seen God but the only begotten God has unveiled him not to do this is to reject the god of John's gospel and the Philippines - it's not enough to say yes we believe in history meaning simply the bare acknowledgment that Jesus really existed that God incarnate walked on the earth we don't know who God incarnate is until we look at the incarnate God and that means history two three as well as one without that our reconstruction of meaning sense four will be circular self-serving Monsieur logically futile it's always open to the Christian historian to stand back and attempt a larger faith perspective whether on global history as a whole and good luck with that one or on a particular person or period that in a small way is what I've tried to do with sketching some of the roots of our shared disciplines but we must be aware of imagining that we can produce a new kind of salvation history reading divine intention and action off the all too ambiguous pages of even the best history just because we believe in divine providence we cannot copy the inspired writers of scripture and leap straight to a God's eye view of events Hegel saw history is inexorable correct progress we beg to differ Martin Luther saw the medieval period as the Babylonian captivity of the church well perhaps but perhaps not as with the depths and ambiguities in our own lives divine order is seldom perceived all at once and perhaps that's just as well even sand Paul musing on the meaning of Onesimus his conversion use that word perhaps to introduce his suggested interpretation perhaps this is why he was parted from you for a while back to humility and patience and penitence and love and so back to Jesus Jesus remains central to theology which means that theology needs history in all four senses we dare not embrace methodological docetism Jesus who looks historical but isn't really and we must not for fear of modernist prejudice invoke something called the supernatural to explain everything that would merely perpetuate Lessing's false either-or and would fail at the hermeneutic of love which allows the past to be itself as I've stressed the Ehrlich Jewish and Chris in worlds did not suppose their world to be divided into nature and super nature their understandings of reality were temple shaped heaven and earth overlapped and interlocked and the fact that one cannot as is often said prove the divinity of Jesus by history alone is part at the point we don't even know what divinity is until we discover who Jesus himself was as all four Gospels insist yes most of Jesus contemporaries looked and looked and never saw but those who did see in this fuller sense saw because they were looking both at and then through the things that Jesus himself really did and said not because they were looking through spectacles manufactured in later centuries and they also saw as those later spectacles might have screened out the kingdom vocation which was the point of it all the task to to which and for which the Incarnate son gave His life I proposed therefore that to study first century history said again three leading to two aiming at one open opening up the possibilities of four you'll be dreaming these numbers tonight to study first century history with Jesus and his first followers in the middle of it is a necessary part of healthy Christian life theology and witness and mission but to repeat history alone cannot form the foundation for an old-fashioned rationalist apologetic it's not meant to a true apologetic would include the larger history which is the spirit filled life of the church the storytelling and symbol making through which new creation brings healing power to the present world and points on to God's ultimate heaven and earth future and on the way history in all senses is vital to defeat the defeatist to disturb and dismantle the distortions and to direct the discussion into wise and healthier paths the task of history then is not unlike the task of the prophet Elijah rebuilding the altar of Yahweh which had fallen into disrepair the priests of bail the self-appointed leaders of secular Western culture have danced around cutting themselves with their own theories dream dreams of progress and/or revolution and still the kingdom has not come many of the faithful Yahweh scribes have retreated into caves safe in their private worlds maybe time for the historians to take up the stones that speak of the ancient past the task history 3 and with them to build an altar history 2 pointing to history 1 laying upon it as the offering of our labors such invocation of meaning sense for as emerges from that work the altar will of course be surrounded by a broad and ugly ditch full of water it may look impossible for the sacrifice ever to catch fire that is not our business our job is to build the altar the public truth which emerges from responsible and careful historical work displaying as best we can the meanings which make deep rich first-century sense then and only then we pray for the fire to fall thank you [Applause] [Music] just as people put their hands up as opposed to trying to keep a queue I'm gonna do my best to call on people from various quarters of the room so please forgive me if I see you and then just look elsewhere that's what's going on and the rules are keep your questions brief make them questions you know what I mean and no follow-ups I ask your question you get the answer and then we're going to move on so you can go ahead and start thank you for your great paper my question would go beyond your paper and idea about history what is the value of literary approaches like narrative criticism and ending up with reader-response criticism would you see any any any value and addition to historical research absolutely looking at the literary forms of any period is itself a specialized branch of history it's not something that occurs in midair somewhere when we look at Shakespeare's plays or Euripides plays we're studying history how people wrote and we can ask why they wrote in that form and what particular impact they thought the form might have or what it did in fact have hence reader-response as well one can look at all of those things within the larger task of history this is could have been a whole other section on that but yeah it all were all fits there your comments on Charles he'd and Billy Abraham Southern Methodist University I find sort of wobbly so here's my question Charles Eden in one of the four senses that you've outlined for history and which of those senses does it belong for [Applause] when scholars who study ancient history writing look at say greco-roman history versus Jewish and Christian history usually they make the distinction between greco-roman history writing focusing on human causation for the way that history works whereas Christians and Jews focus more on divine causation does that split affect the way that Christians historians today work are we looking for a divine causation in history or do we do history just like secular historians and we're looking primarily for human causes I think the I the role that you describe is is demonstrably misleading both for ancient greco-roman historians who often would invoke causes other than purely human within whichever religious or philosophical sphere they were thinking of you know some are more rationalist some are more moving towards an epicurean position but others you know a stoic who believes that the whole thing is part of some great divine pan-pan theism or different pagan writers would say well maybe Zeus had a hand in that or maybe Apollo did this or whatever going all the way though that there's a continuum between ideas which invoke that and ideas which would try to make it all human causation likewise in the Bible there's all sorts of ways in which human causation is really really important you know why did absalom's rebellion happen it wasn't just that God wanted to do something it was traceable back to David's own sin with long consequences through the amnon and Tamar incidents and so on so that I think the authors are they're saying that was David's fault and here's the chain of human causation which brought this about and the writer is inviting you to say and God somehow was at work in that God was doing what had to be done it's a kind of a covenant without working so it's not an either-or and I think if we've thought of it as an either/or we are as I say misrepresenting both halves of that equation thank you for the stimulating lecture in Reno writing or representing or reconstructing the history of Jesus it seems that the Gospels will play a particular part in any Christian historiography can you explore for us the the normative role of the Gospels visibly other sources in a Christian historical task there's there's two different senses of normative that you'll be appealing to there one is that the Gospels contain the vast majority of all ancient information about Jesus you know there is a reference in Tacitus there is a possible hint in Suetonius there is the disputed passage in Josephus etc etc when you get out beyond into the second century there are other documents including the Apostolic fathers some apostolic literature both generally regarded as reputable and often regarded as disreputable and and all in between so but Matthew Mark Luke and John presents such a wealth of detail and such a convergence of a first century first third of first century Galilean Jew doing kingdom staff talking about God becoming King and going to his death however you construe it I'm not saying everything that might want to be said there but that's a summary so it's normative in the same sense that Tacitus Suetonius and various particulars are normative for the life and work of Tiberius they are the main sources there there are coins and inscriptions which help but we don't have those for first century Jesus however for the Christian they are normative in a different sense which is hard to tease out because of our long history of saying Sola scriptura Sola scriptura without really figuring out how that works in practice that's why through in that line about if you save your authority of Scripture what you're really doing is telling a complicated story about God's authority exercised through Jesus Matthews / Trinity Age through the work of the Holy Spirit somehow through through these documents and that's much more complicated than most Christians have said now for me I have a very high theology of Scripture but that's not the same thing as saying it's normative because that's the only information we've got it will be a very interesting different question if we happen to have Pontius Pilate skort records or if we had Caiaphas's diary written up the day after or whatever then we would have more information which of course in many other periods of history you would have but so I think we have to be very careful about how those two census of normative work with each other recognizing that for the Christian the ultimate norm is Jesus himself you know Jesus did not say all authority in heaven and earth is given to the books you chaps are going to go and write he said he's been given to me and the old Phil Authority which the Bible has is derivative from the central factor of Jesus himself thank you so much a question that I've had is I have listened to this and also read your work is how do we lovingly how do we love our enemies by executing them well so I appreciated and agreed with the history of ideas you've presented situating historians in their own times my question is is understanding the place of the defeat or in history a sufficient evaluation of their ideas I wouldn't say it's a sufficient evaluation it's a necessary preliminary - a sufficient evaluation I would hope and I found that enormous ly helpful I mean I'm trained as a first century historian not an 18th or 19th century historian but in order to understand how my own discipline New Testament studies has got where it's got I've been forced again and again to go back and when I do it's absolutely fascinating you know the larger social cultural political ideological context of Rui Morris of David Friedrich Strauss of fly marker of vice and schreiter at the end of the 90 and so on and so on Bart and Bultman and and okay Simon cosmic this is this is absolutely fascinating but of course we're all such rated and I'm not a determinist essaouira cyst we're all situated we have to be understood within our own worlds but when all is then said and done let's look at the evidence let's see whose constructs actually make best sense who can do a history sense to in such a way that there is as in science a sense that the hypothesis is being verified is making sense is doing so simply and is shedding light on other things that's why I'm absolutely with Myer here that hypothesis and verification means that history is a branch of real knowledge not just guesswork or a mere belief great so um I have the immense fortune and/or misfortune of spending a lot of my free time and consents with postcolonial and global historians and one of the things that they've made me very sensitive to is the fact that a lot of social structures common practices ways we use language and so on themselves kind of things that we take for granted arise out of historical structures that are themselves oppressive and and morally very problematic and my question would be whether if we really take the results of the Christian historian or the biblical historian the potential results seriously might the results of that historical research actually serve to undermine revolutionize or otherwise transform certain structures and practices within the church itself that's always possible but your question is carefully phrased in such a broad and vague sense that I don't want to give you a blank check for anything that might come out of that but yes absolutely and it seems to me every generation of historians ought to be learning about ought to be self-reflective while while allowing the subject matter that's being studied to aid in that process of self-reflection and I don't really just believe in a simplistic horizon sort of back then and now but there is a spiral of knowledge there is a constant dialogue going on one of my favorite mantras about history which I alluded to one a few points was something that ASA Briggs used to say grace historian of the last generation that history is a matter of thinking into the minds of people who think very differently from ourselves and that's a constant effort and that's why I talk about humility patience penitence and love it's it's all about no I haven't listening got this right and I would mean that on every level not just I haven't got it rationally right or intellectually right I haven't got it morally right why would I expect that I had however that doesn't mean it's it's irreparable it doesn't mean there isn't such a thing as historical penitence and and so on and so I would want to go around that and that's one of the reasons I put penitence in that list that it is part of saying you know we have allowed whatever it is funeral structures or or eighteenth-century assumptions or something to condition the way we look at the past the selection and arrangement we make etc etc however much we may have thought we were doing it Christianly it may need to be dismantled and redone and that task no doubt will continue so yes thank you thank you for the analysis of the meanings of the word history which i think is very helpful my question her is a very simple one can history in any of those four senses bring us all the way to faith it depends what I mean by all the way and depends us so it's good good typical philosophers answers there are there are a thousand routes to faith and you know as a pastor I know people who've come to faith by many many many different routes it's sometimes quite surprising what brings people to faith but for many in our own day there are real historical questions because many people kind of sense their way towards something like Christian faith but then there seems to be this insuperable historical barrier that people say well either Jesus never exists you know we never said this or he never rose from his dead or something and that's where the defeating the defeat is and dismantling the distortions and so on really really really does help and for some people and but I don't to say this is part of a sort of rationalist per se because I see it actually as spilling out forwards because when the church is being what it's supposed to be and doing what it's supposed to do it is actually making history in a from the ground up way a kind of stuff that Rodney stark writes about in in the rise of Christianity which also is part of the apologia and things sometimes make sense and click when people have actually seen Christianity working on the street helping the poor healing the sick whatever it may be and it's surprising maybe shouldn't it shouldn't isn't surprising how sometimes what seemed in supra-aural historical objections to something in the early story melts away when stuff actually happens and it's much more ambiguous and complex than that but I hope you hear what I'm saying so it depends where people are starting but without that I would say it is of course it's possible for many many people to come to faith many many thousands of people have come to faith without ever doing very much history with a simple believing that something about God something about Jesus something about me but there are cold winds blowing out there and it's good to know how to stay warm and the church has always thrived when not just for protection but for fresh sense of direction it's gone back and done that fresh digging okay thank you Tom for this as a system a Titian who's greatly appreciated your work over time I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you would what you would say to a system at issue or how we can use our systemic theological methods to better account for history and by what I mean is that is that in the way you've described it sometimes with perhaps a bit of rhetorical flourish it almost feels as you're saying the system Titian that we should sit down and be quiet until the historians are done and that our methods are mostly not helpful which I know that you don't actually think that from with other things you've said so I'm wondering can you tell us a bit more positively over what you would say to system Atisha n--'s about how we can use our methods and account for history well in that process it's always exactly the same question that Kevin loser asked me in New Orleans last weekend of course it's it's a funny thing that many exegetes feel listening to sister musicians and analytic theologians that exactly that is being said to them we know that we can start with calcium and work upwards so actually you know all those commentaries you're writing you can forget that so there's this kind of nervousness that are you writing my discipline off the map is is mutual and and so and that's let's be honest about it that's that's part of what we have to engage with and it is very bizarre that it should be so but the way to address that is by fessing up to it and say no let's have this conversation okay so what we're doing but when you say about our methods I'm not sure which methods you're talking about but it seems to me as an outsider in that that the study of what the church has done while reading scripture which is Aquinas is definition of tradition if I remember rightly is absolutely vital in contextualizing all the people that we might want to read from Ignatius of Antioch through our earliest Italian the great father's right the way on through to the great theologians of our own day the more we understand them in context and and put them into that dialogue with Scripture which at their best is is what they were doing the more we should be able to see where they can help us and where they can maybe lead us off off the path you know some of my great heroes people like Athanasius I went back I reread the day in Karnak Theo Nia when I was researching for the day the Revolution began and I loved it but there was several points I thought oh you're just missing a trick or two here and so I'm very happy to use him and be refreshed and nourished by him but I would want if I was teaching patristic saw systematics using him as a text I would want to try to say now let's let's think about what's positive here what's fresh what's creative and what's what's missing what would have helped him round a corner here and I suspect one can do that all the way through and I would confidently expect that in another generation people would look at my work and say the same thing [Music] Fred Simmons I assume the original sense and intention are so exclusively authoritative well it's basically the medieval principle you know that the literal sense has to be prior to the analogical Anago vehicle and drop illogical senses and if you take the literal sense away then the rest can just do what they like and I think the best medieval four senses stuff always insisted on that in theory even if they didn't necessarily do it in practice but ultimately the answer is because of Jesus you know that Jesus is the central point the node of meaning and everything that the texts say relates to Jesus and the fact that there is a Bible for the Christian is about Jesus and God's self-revelation in Jesus so that the original sense is the primary witness to that I'm not totally happy with witness to as an account it's gesturing towards something more more complicated but that's how I see the Gospels Acts Paul etc and so I want to know those original meanings partly for its own sake because they are the ones which are right up close to Jesus but also because I have seen enough including in my own work you know I've changed my mind about all sorts of things I've seen in my own work ways in which my own context my culture the expectations of the people I'm preaching to whatever have made me miss read texts in ways which I now see as distortions so yeah as many different senses as you like the Bible itself is is multi sensual but the basic so when one says the original meaning or the literal meaning there's not necessarily the same thing you know said prodigal son the the literal meaning so do we ask what his name was or what he had for breakfast and whatever no we don't that's not how to read a parable so - no with wisdom and sensitivity how the different genres are meant to be read that's that's what we're trying to do thank you for your paper a few times during it you said you emphasized verification which I like and I think I might know how that's done for the events of history but can you tell me a little bit more about the narrative of history how that verification looks like and I and what I'm getting at to be clear you know do you think the narrative the history exists like something like a pot shard you know where you go when you you pick it up out of the ground you dust it off and then you compare your narrative with the narrative of history or is it something is it something different that's a great question thank you um I have argued in various places that by the relentless and day and week and month and decade study of the sources in and around the first century at least from you know from the the return from Babylon through to Bangkok for on the mission and beyond we can see that a great many Jews were living with an implicit narrative which is about what we think of as the scriptural story of God's rescue of Israel and through that of course the rescue of the world of the fulfillment of the great story from Genesis to Deuteronomy as Josephus says Moses song in Deuteronomy 32 was not just about stuff that was going to happen but stuff that is happening and are in our own day in other words there is a convergence of many texts from many different provinces in which we see tremblingly a story variously told about what the one God is doing now we then see the early Christians plugging into that story and saying this is what's happened in Jesus we see Paul's retrieval of Deuteronomy 30 in Romans 10 6 following for instance as an absolutely decisive moment he's saying this is how taurah is complete here we are at the end of deuteronomy Telos going on with chris koster at the end of the torah the goal of the Torah so there is that sense and that can be historically retrieved as that is the story they seem to have been telling now that's the point at which how musically I want to say as we tell that story we are building this altar and praying for the far to fall because we then need to be able to figure out where we are in some kind of ongoing story which as I said is very difficult to requires humility I grew up with books saying you know the Luthor story that it was all darkness and then quite suddenly in 1517 there was a great light and and it all happened and so on and since then I've read a man Duffy and a bunch of other people and you know it's more complicated than that just like the story of my life is much more complicated than any simple narrative would make it and so um I want to say the primary thing is to retrieve the narrative sense which was there which the early Christians reread as Richard Hays says reading backwards in the light of Jesus but it was that story that they were reading back was not some other story and then the question is how do we retrieve that was it mean to be the people who tell that story about Jesus and hence through the spirit by about ourselves that's that's the challenge [Music] thanks very much for your paper I appreciated your cautions about methodological naturalism methodological docetism but I wonder if I hear a bit of methodological Protestantism in your presentation and so I wonder why for example we should be confident that things like the Caledonian definition or the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas or mystical experiences are not avenues that the Holy Spirit uses to communicate information about the historical Jesus Wow there's a sting in the tail in that question I was about to say yes yes yes and then mm well not sure at the end yeah actually I mean I'm my Protestant friends would not normally accuse me of being a methodological Protestant I I do I do go figure I do think that that there was something which was being said in the 16th century by Luther and Calvin and so on which really does need to be said namely that when we tell the story of history there is an ephah Pax at the moment of Jesus and his crucifixion it's once and once only it's and this was told obviously in Eucharistic theology against the idea that Christ is being sacrificed in every Mass but it's part of the whole thing of Reformation theology which and here I do firmly agree that world history came to its climax when Jesus of Nazareth on the cross and rose again launching God's kingdom on earth is in heaven and that that has happened and that we are the beneficiaries of it rather than it being a cycle or something we have to go on with now insofar as some bits of some Catholic teaching implied the other then then I'm a Protestant but it's much more complicated than that of course as to whether one can know the historical Jesus sense to sense one what are you thinking historically as soon since - or the historical Jesus as in English I mean what happened okay since one thank you then I want to say I say at the beginning of my book the challenge of Jesus we know about Jesus in two ways by history and faith and I then say this will provoke howls of Roth from those who live in the Attic and resent me being in the basement and those who live in the basement to resent me being in the Attic and I actually want the whole house thank you very much because and again Protestant thing will anthem you know it's not enough just to know about Christ you got to know him in a more personal sense and that's surely something surely I hate the word surely that there's something which that the great theologians I think of many many many traditions have always seen that that you can tell the story you might even tell it with great historical accuracy but you could be hardening your heart and and so on and I would say that yes the story is told and the fire falls but not always but if the fire has fallen through a mystical experience through reading some medieval commentary or whatever but if then there isn't the church doing the historical work and reminding people that what matters is God's kingdom coming on earth is in heaven the distortions are obvious and easy where the platonic or Aristotelian or wherever and we'll take you into all sorts of other places so that I you know God can do whatever God can do that's one of the meanings of the word God as far as I'm concerned so so and God is gracious and God leaps over any walls we might put in the way so yes stuff happens but without this distortions will happen Canada you've spoken a lot about Western Christianity on several instances in the last comment a pertinent I'd like to ask what do you make of the liturgical context as the matrix within which the Scriptures come to be recognized as canonical and I say that as a question but also as a conviction as an Eastern Christian you would know of better than I that the manuscripts of the native books of the Bible are much more often found in liturgical forms than in whole codices and so what does that say about the way the story is remembered and to how does that shape the piety of a historian who wants to as it were engage the imagination through the witness of the hymns the chant of hymns the iconography the architecture what not mystics the lives of the saints and all of that is swirling around in the head when doing this research and one wants to give an a priori as it were trust to the richness of the tradition since it's from that womb in which we were from which we were born Wow yes thank you that's terrific I'm absolutely with you on that I mean in my tradition the sort of mainstream Anglican tradition if one is allowed to use that phrase then when the gospel is brought in we stand up we in my church released return to face it some people sign themselves and that's a way of saying this book is multi-dimensional it is God's book which is designed for us and when we read it we believe we're actually in the presence of God and some people cross themselves for the gospel canticle as well the benedict is a morning prayer of the Magnificat for evening prayer or the nunc dimittis a night prayer and as a way of saying when we take these stories upon our lips we are being new temple people we are being and praying that we will be people who stand at the dangerous intersection of heaven and earth and that these stories are telling us about the way that that was launched in a whole new way and that if we really want to plug into them then the mind is not enough there are that the entire person has to be involved and at that stage at that event it's like a marriage or something it's a total personal commitment and not just one part again I would say as to in the back the danger is I've seen this again and again in my own tradition that people who just say oh we know Christ in the liturgy then actually when you listen to the preach when you see what they write when you the other things about their life you actually a good dose of history would really really help to anchor this so it's it's so I want all of that but it's never an either/or it just depends where you're starting again sorry we are out of time for questions apologies to the several hands who who I wasn't able to get to before we thank our speaker let me remind you that there's a reception downstairs in the Westminster room let me also ask I know that a lot of you will want to talk to Tom after this please let him get down to the reception and then catch him there instead of keeping him up here in front and now let's thank our speaker [Applause]

Channel: Center for Philosophy of Religion

Views: 21,543

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Keywords: N.T. Wright, Bible, Theology, Analytic Theology

Id: KII2rltbG58

Length: 88min 37sec (5317 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2017