History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology

Abstract

HISTORY AND ESCHATOLOGY: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology by N. T. Wright. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019. xxi + 343 pages, including notes, bibliography, and indices. Hardcover; $34.95. ISBN: 9781481309622. *History and Eschatology is the published version of the Gifford Lectures delivered in 2018 at the University of Aberdeen by the prominent New Testament scholar and former Anglican bishop N. T. Wright. Lord Adam Gifford's will stipulated that the lectures bearing his name should treat theology "as a strictly natural science ... without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation." This is one classic and influential way to describe the project of "natural theology." Wright, however, devotes eight chapters (corresponding to his public lectures), over almost 300 pages, first, to questioning the assumptions on which that project--so construed--rests, and, second, to laying the foundations of an alternative. *In chapters 1-2, Wright finds hidden in the background of Enlightenment-inspired natural theology--conceived as independent of the particulars of Jesus as attested in the Bible--as well as in the modern scholarly suspicion of the integrity and historicity of the biblical Gospels, a revivified, arbitrarily deist, anti-historical Epicureanism: "European thought, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, was increasingly shaped by the Epicurean mood ... So the split between heaven and earth, between God and the world, continued to dominate the discussion" (pp. 68-69). *In chapters 3-4, Wright puts forward his own field of expertise, history, as a kind of "missing link" in the study of the "natural" world. In particular, a rigorous, contextually attentive, historical investigation of Jesus--its methods and conclusions resisting the distortions of chronological snobbery and materialistic metaphysics--deserves a place in the discussion: "Jesus himself was a figure of the real world. The Gospels are real documents from the real world. To refuse to treat them as 'natural' evidence ... looks like the sceptic bribing the judges before the trial" (p. 74). *In chapters 5-6, Wright summarizes some of the results of such an investigation, which naturally build on the conclusions reached in his sprawling published oeuvre on the historical Jesus: "Eschatology has come to life, say the first Christians, in the person of Jesus, and we know it because when we look at him we discern the dawning of the new day in a way which makes sense of the old, and of the questions it raised" (p. 184). In particular, Jesus's being raised from death to new life gives not only new knowledge but a new way of knowing, what Wright calls an epistemology of love: "The resurrection ... assures us that all that we have known in the present creation ... will indeed be rescued from corruption and decay and transformed ... [L]ove revealed gives birth to an answering love" (p. 212). *In chapters 7-8, Wright seeks to synthesize the threads of his argument into a reconceived "natural" theology: one that takes Jesus' resurrection, in its full historical context and depth of meaning, as determinative (1) of how "nature"--the created world, teleological history, humanity fallen and redeemed--points, brokenly but truly, toward God's kingdom; and (2) of the mission of the Christian church in a world perhaps not bereft but still largely unaware of God's glory: "a celebration of the coming eschaton ... in faith, sacramental life, wise readings of scripture, and mission, will constitute the outworking of ... divine love, the highest mode of knowing ... in and for the world" (p. 277). *As always, Wright's vocabulary and style are refreshingly accessible, almost chatty (although he is not beyond the occasional arcane scholarly or cultural allusion), at times repetitious. His argument--that the modern divisions (not just distinctions) between "natural" and "supernatural," between "rational" empirical knowledge and "non-rational" special revelation, between "accidental truths of history" and "necessary truths of reason," are nothing more than a warmed-over, still-moldy Epicureanism from the third century BC, and that these are brought radically into question by Jesus's resurrection, thought through precisely in light of its ancient Jewish background--is less new than trenchantly and winsomely laid out. And he does not so much interact with the modern traditions of natural theology as suggest that there are more important and interesting fish for theology, running on an epistemology of love, to fry. Indeed, Wright's implication is that natural theology in Lord Gifford's sense suffers from a case of misguided methods and unambitious goals. But it is really an implication, for History and Eschatology is more like a manifesto, proposing a monumental agenda, than a parsimonious demonstration of the inadequacy of "old-style" natural theology's ways and means. (Wright's disposal of three classic strategies of apologetics in a "natural theology" mode--the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments--takes barely three pages in chapter 7.) *As someone who is theologically sympathetic to Wright's overall project, both in its design and in many of its details (others are decidedly not so sympathetic), I consider there to be room for debate over the role of such strategies in the contemporary exposition and defense of Christian faith. That debate is not to be found in History and Eschatology. The possibility of dialogue with more "traditional" natural theology seems far away by the time we get to the end of a book subtitled Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology. And Wright, who, in most respects, is the paradigm of a careful, objective reader and historian, is still prone to annoyingly and unhelpfully broad generalizations on matters unconnected to his expertise (e.g., Adam Smith's economic thought "has become highly influential ... ending up with the greed-is-good philosophy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher" [p. 19]; Karl Barth could "launch a much fiercer protest" than Rudolf Bultmann against Nazism "partly because he was a Calvinist not a Lutheran" [p. 62]). These are real criticisms, but, I must admit, relatively minor ones in comparison with the impressive intellectual and spiritual vision on offer in History and Eschatology. More than many of its kind, this is a readable, preachable, shareable book. *Reviewed by Maurice Lee, North American Lutheran Seminary, Ambridge, PA 15003.