N.T. Wright, History and eschatology: Jesus and the promise of natural theology. 2019. London: SPCK.

Unless otherwise indicated, and other than in block quotes, inverted commas surround quotations from Wright.

Go back to notes on chapter seven.

Part 3: Jesus and Easter in the Jewish world

Ch 8: The waiting chalice: Natural Thology and the Missio Dei

Introduction

`The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

Wright says, “Gerard Manley Hopkins’s extraordinary sonnet manages to pack into fourteen lines almost the whole of what I now want to say as I draw the strands of my argument together. The poem not only articulates the theology of creation and new creation, the latter winning the victory over the desolation of the former; it embodies that victory by its art, creating a fresh beauty that symbolizes the beauty it describes. That too will be part of the point.” (251)

Wright writes:

I have proposed historical arguments for a fresh understanding of Jesus and the Gospels in the Jewish world where the Temple stood for the coming together of heaven and earth, the Sabbath stood for the longpromised future arriving already in the present, and humans were seen as Image-bearers, as God-reflectors, standing at the threshold of heaven and earth, of past and future. (251-252)

The main lines of ‘natural theology’ distort this understanding. They are dead ends. Wright’s proposals do not follow the old ‘natural theology’ in either its method or their results. But they do look at the natural world, particularly the real world of history to see the plausibility of faith the one the NT reveals as the father of Jesus. (252–253)

Wright says his task in the present chapter is to integrate the historical and eschatological vision of chs 4–6 with the ‘broken signposts’ of ch 7. (253)

Full of God’s glory: The promise of the cosmic temple

A Second Temple Jewish worldview saw heaven and earth as a vast Temple in which God would dwell and where humans would reflect his image. The Tabernacle of Exodus and the Temple of 1Kings and 2Chronicles pointed to this cosmic reality and to its future realisation (Isaiah 6:3; Habkkuk 2:14).¹ Back in Numbers (14:20-23)² God told his recalcitrant people that he would not only dwell in the promised land but would fill the whole earth (see also Psalm 72:18-19).³ (256) The new creation promise that we see retrospectively in the resurrection converges with the presence of God in his universal Temple and the promise of rest in the system of Sabbaths. (257)

The God of new creation is the God who sends his spirit into the world, filling the humans created in his image and who is known through their obedience. (259) Jesus himself is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15). The spirit is the down-payment of the ‘inheritance’, not simply of our future resurrection but of the renewed cosmic order of Romans 8. (260) “The church is thus the pilot project for new creation”: anyone who is in the Messiah is a new creation (2Corinthians 5:17). (260)

The waiting chalice

The image of the chalice that Wright adopts here is to me almost a distraction from what he wants to say. But when believers share the chalice filled with wine, they say with Paul, “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me”. (262)

Wright wrotes, “… the present creation has a power and beauty, a strangely evocative quality” which invites awe even from people with no acquaintance with God. However, the horror, suffering and apparent futility of the world—the brokenness of the signposts—leads some to see its beauty as a mere distraction. This leads to Platonism: the beauty of the present world is a mere shadow, and we, including much of Western Christianity, reach out for a reality that casts the shadow. But this is not the biblical eschatology of new creation. Jesus’ blood is the sign that the evils of the present world are defeated, “that the suffering of the present time is not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed, and that creation itself is to be set free from its slavery to decay to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified. ” This is why the world’s beauty is so evocative: it points forward to the day when it will be filled with the divine glory. (262)

At the heart of this vision is Romans 8:18-22. “In that passage Paul envisages God doing for the whole cosmos at the last what he did for Jesus at Easter.” Wright sees Temple overtones in Romans 8, first in the in-dwelling Spirit, echoing God’s dwelling in the Temple, and then in the notion of inheritance (14-17).

At the heart of the passage Paul speaks of prayer, the prayer of unknowing, inspired by the spirit and understood by the Father, constituting those who pray as the younger siblings of the Firstborn Son through their sharing of his suffering and glory. They are thereby ‘conformed to his image’, enabled to be the genuine human beings at the heart of the cosmic Temple, reflecting the creator’s ‘glory’, as in Psalm 8, in their stewardship of creation, and summing up the priestly intercession of all creation through the High Priest himself, Jesus (Romans 8.18–30, 34). (263)

The new creation as the new Temple is also seen in Revelation 21-22. The vision of the New Jerusalem is pictures an enormous Holy Place, the city as a huge cube (21:16) mirroring the construction of the inner sanctum of the tabernacle and then the Temple. “The ‘new heavens and new earth’ are thus the new temple itself, and the city is its innermost shrine, its Holy of Holies”. This is why there is no Temple in the city (21:22). (263)

What went wrong with the original creation has been put right; what was preliminary and pointing forward in the original creation has now reached its goal. … The redeemed human beings are now at last enabled to be what they were made to be: the true image-bearers, the ‘royal priesthood’ (Revelation 20.6). (263–264)⁴

John uses Temple imagery too, when he writes, The world became flesh and tabernacled in our midst, and we gazed upon his glory (1:14), reflecting Exodus 40:34⁵ where heaven and earth came together. Jesus himself (John 2:21) designates his body as the new Temple, that will be destroyed and raised up again. (264)

The problem with a ‘natural theology’ that attempts to argue from this world upward to God is that the world still reflects the fact that it is under ‘the ruler of this world’ (1John 5:19). But the vision of Psalm 72 is of a King who rules a renewed earth, and Paul looks forward to this renewal in 1Corinthians 15:23-28:⁶ (264–265)

The Messiah rises as the first fruits; then those who belong to the Messiah will rise at the time of his royal arrival. Then comes the end, the goal, when he hands over the kingly rule to God the father, when he has destroyed all rule and all authority and power. He has to go on ruling, you see, until ‘he has put all his enemies under his feet’. Death is the last enemy to be destroyed, because ‘he has put all things in order under his feet’. But when it says that everything is put in order under him, it’s obvious that this doesn’t include the one who put everything in order under him. No: when everything is put in order under him, then the son himself will be placed in proper order under the one who placed everything in order under him, so that God may be all in all. (265)

The final phrase expresses the fact that God will indwell the whole of the renewed earth. (265–266)

In the passages discussed in this section, Wright sees early Christians consciously retrieving the biblical theology of cosmos and Temple that he sketches in chapter 5.

And they were doing so with a conscious and biblically rooted vision of Jesus as the truly human one, the true Image, and of his followers, indwelt by the spirit, as themselves ‘renewed in knowledge according to the image of the creator’, a renewal characterized by love both as ethics and as epistemology (Colossians 3.10).

The new world will not be a new creation from nothing, but a redeemed, transformed, incorruptible version of the present one. Jesus is the prototype, for the world and for us: a renewed immortal body derived from the old. (267)

Natural theology and the missio Dei

Wright’s argument takes him to five practical outcomes.

The first is the whole notion of God’s mission, as we live in the overlap period between the present age and the age to come. “The spirit calls and equips the church to a mission which is aimed at the creator’s purpose: to fill his world with his glory, to rest and reign within his proper home.” This purpose, diverted by human idolatry and sin, was taken up in the Abrahamic mission to rescue God’s human creations so that through them his creational purpose could be accomplished.

Instead of a [Platonic] mission aimed at enabling saved souls to leave the earth and go to be at home in heaven with God, what the Bible offers is a mission aimed at transforming rebel idolaters into restored image-bearers through whom God will find his permanent abode among humans, in the ‘new heavens and new earth’.

This is part of a Jesus-focussed natural theology.

The new-creational task of bringing healing and justice to the world, including not least the holding to account of the powers of the world, is one of the church’s powerful ways of saying that the present creation matters and so it’s worth putting it right, … (268)

Part of the meaning of Jesus’ healings is to show what the Great Sabbath, the ultimate Jubilee, the release of captives and the forgiveness of debt will look like.

Every healing is a reaffirmation of the goodness of the currently sick body, just as the resurrection itself is the reaffirmation of the goodness of the original creation. (268)

The second outcome is the artist’s vocation, which was split off by the Enlightenment from theological culture. In churches, art and music have often been turned into mere decoration instead of speaking to the present state of the world, producing something that reminds us that “the world is indeed charged with the grandeur of God”, as Hopkins unmistakeably does in his sonnet. Art does offer the temptation of idolatry, but also celebrates the created world. (269-270)

A similar duality affects the sciences, but we can recover the pre-Enlightenment vocation of thinking God’s thoughts after him and sense the grandeur of which Hopkins wrote. Jesus saw saw the natural world as full of pointers to God’s kingdom, as the parables demonstrate. But Wright takes issue with the common idea of scripture and nature as two books. This implies that both can be read in parallel. But this is not so. Nature provides many signposts to new Creation, but is, in this present age, incomplete. A proper natural theology starts in the historical events surrounding the historical Jesus. And the Bible itself is decidedly not a book in which you look things up. We need to see the larger picture, the world opened up by Easter: (270-271)

The Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of hope, of creation and covenant and Sabbath and Temple and promise and exile and hope renewed. The Christian scriptures, picking up that story, are the open-ended narrative of covenant renewed, creation restored, the Great Sabbath and the New Temple and the surprising but joyful reversal of exile, and, yes, the continuing hope for eventual completion. The idea of books you can look things up in is, after all, a stepping back from the epistemology of love. Love invites us not to look at all this from a distance, but to make the story our own, to live within it, to find our place between the ‘but now’ of 1 Corinthians 15.20 and the ‘not yet’ of 15.28.⁷(271-272)

At this point, the two ‘books’ may converge, because creation itself poses the question: where do you belong in this story? “What response will you make to the strange combination of glory and tragedy that we find in our world?” In this respect nature and scripture are like two books that you “read to force you to think differently about the world and your role in it.” (272)

Wright’s fourth point has to do with politics. Events from the French and American revolutions right through to the second world war and beyond have forced us to think afresh about the big questions. But political thinking needs to be a two-way street. We need to recover a biblical political theology based, for example, on Psalm 72, with its vision of the true king who provides justice and mercy. This is part of the church’s spirit-led vocation, set out in John 16: to ‘convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgement.’ (272-273)

The church needs to pray for wisdom and discernment to state clearly where the broken signposts are supposed to lead and to speak fresh truth to power even ifespecially if!—power doesn’t want to hear it, when dark forces in the world are once again doing their worst. (273)

Wright’s fifth and final point points to a renewed Christian sacramental theology, one that recognises a Temple cosmology and Sabbath eschatology, that recognises the overlap of heaven and earth, of the age to come and the present age, in which the people of God are called to be a royal priesthood. The sacraments of baptism and the eucharist can recall and indeed take place in this overlap. (273-274)

Conclusion: The fresh mandate

When we look back at the created world, as the disciples on the Emmaus road looked back on the story of Israel, “we find that the resurrection of Jesus compels a re-evaluation not only of past history but also of all past observations of the world.” It shows us why the broken signposts seemed so important and explains their brokenness and the reality to which they were pointing—the reality of “the self-giving God we see revealed on the cross.” (274)

This also explains why a rationalist apologetic based on ‘natural theology’ could never alone reach divine truth. There is no way to the eschataological Promised Land except through the cross. (274)

The epistemology of love not only gives us a rounded and retrospective natural theology, it avoids subjectivism and grasps the ontology of love, realising that the outpoured divine love will in the end suffuse all of creation—and this generates the missiology of love, by the spirit giving compelling signs of new creation in the world, (274–275)

opening hearts and minds to glimpse the truth previously invisible to the gaze that had been blinded by idols. Neither rationalism (‘Here’s an argument you can’t refute’) nor romanticism (‘Here’s how to have your heart strangely warmed’) will do, though clarity of argument and the warming of the heart are both important. What matters is new creation coming to birth, in whatever form, like the Sabbath coming forward to meet us in the middle of time. (275)

Healing, at whatever level, is a vital sign of new creation. We need to free ourselves of the eighteenth-century dichotomy of natural vs supernatural. Even if ‘supernatural’ wins and miracles are recognised, this doesn’t take us to Jesus’ resurrection. The resurrection was a brand-new event, and its context is the heaven-and-earth of the Temple and the now-and-not-yet of the ultimate Sabbath. (275)

The cross was the means by which God became king, the answer to the ‘problem of evil’—to idolatry and the dark powers it unleashes. It gives the lie to any idea that we can work our way up to God and it reveals his true nature. (275–276)

The task of the church is to tell the historically rooted story of Jesus as the story of God, as the Gospels do. This is the focus of the church’s work in justice and beauty, in which it invites others to join, thereby producing new events in real history expressing the self-giving God revealed in Jesus, through which the dawn of new creation can be glimpsed. “This is how history and eschatology come together at last.” (276–277)

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Go back to notes on chapter seven.

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 6:1-3. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord,c high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robef filled the temple. Above him were seraphim,… And they were calling to one another:
     “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
   the whole earth is full of his glory.”
   Habkkuk 2:14: … the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
   as the waters cover the sea. ↩
2. Numbers 14:20-23: … as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the LORD fills the whole earth, not one of those who saw my glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness but who disobeyed me and tested me ten times— not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their ancestors. ↩
3. Psalm 72:18-19:
   Praise be to the LORD God, the God of Israel,
   who alone does marvelous deeds.
   Praise be to his glorious name forever;
   may the whole earth be filled with his glory. ↩
4. See also Rev 1:6 (has made us to be a kingdom ans priests), 5:10. 1Peter 2:5, 9, fulfilling Exodus 19:6 and Isaiah 61:6. ↩
5. Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. ↩
6. The translation is the one presented in the book. ↩
7. 15:20: But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruitsbof those who have fallen asleep.
   15:28: When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. ↩