Unless otherwise indicated, and other than in block quotes, inverted commas surround quotations from Wright. Notes on chapter 2 of History and Eschatology are here.

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

Part 1: Natural theology in its historical context

Ch 1: The fallen shrine

Wright says his purpose in this book is to bring natural theology and the incarnation into relationship with one another, when they have so often been kept apart.

Epicureanism revived

Bishop Joseph Butler represents the ‘old order’ when he writes optimistically of nature being analogous with the truths of the Christian faith in Analogy of religion (1736). There was a prevailing belief in Britain, reflected in Handel’s Messiah (1741), that the kingdom of God was indeed coming on earth. But the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755, which killed 30-40,000 of the city’s 200,000 citizens, accelerated a turning away from this optimism, picked up in Voltaire’s sarcastic ‘Poem on the Lisbon disaster’ (1756). The turning was towards Epicureanism. Epicurus’ thought had been undergoing a gradual revival ever since the rediscovery in 1417 of De rerum natura [‘On the nature of things’] by the Roman poet Lucretius (99–ca. 55 BC), a revival to which there are both positive (Sir Edmund Halley, Karl Marx) and negative (Diderot, Leibniz, Schlegel) witnesses. Deism, belief in a distant God, was already popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the distant God might sometimes take an interest in his creation, so it made sense to pray to him. Epicureanism goes a step further. There is no divine intervention , no judgment, no afterlife. Epicureanism’s proponents have included Machiavelli, Bentham and Jefferson. Epicureans believe that God, if he exists, is far off and uninterested in his creations, that religion is a human invention, and the universe goes on randomly under its own steam. This life is all there is.  The difference between ancient and modern Epicureanism is that the ancients did not think they could change the course of the world, whereas their modern counterparts do. Epicureanism has become so much a part of the modern western world that we no longer recognise its ancient roots.^[1] This is not fertile ground for arguing from the natural world to its creator. Indeed a cynic could suggest that Christians assume a divinity first, then see the world as his creation—and that Epicureans assume no God and thus see the world as a collection of independently whirling atoms.

A history of the Enlightenment

Wright reminds us that innovative thinkers are often voices in the wilderness. It takes time for their ideas to be popularised, and the result is often many competing versions of these ideas that mix with the thoughts of other thinkers. The English term ’Enlightenment’ is a 19th century coinage, translating Kant’s term Aufklärung, a retrospective label for the 18th-century move toward “freedom to make public use of one’s reason with the goal of liberating mankind from its self-imposed immaturity.” The Enlightenment was subjected to 19th-century English scorn as something European, yet its genesis was partly in 17th century England, in the thinking of John Locke, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume. It was a complex movement that culminated in 19th-century atheism, and there were simultaneously others who rejected it altogether: William Blake, John and Charles Wesley, Samuel Johnson, John Henry Newman. What started with the poet Lucretius has now become the implicit understanding of a majority in the Western world. It is summed up in the words of the poet William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) in his poem “Invictus”: I am the master of my fate;/I am the captain of my soul. It was in this context that “natural theology” emerged, theology that was ahistorical, especially with regard to the first-century Jesus. Wright points out that each discipline is liable to tell its story as if it were independent of its wider cultural framework. He draws attention to 5 features of late 18th-century culture that bear on theology, undermining the Church and traditional Christianity. All five make, in Wright’s words (p21), “the assumption that the world makes itself as it goes along without divine interference.”

• The French and American revolutions entailed attempts to bundle God out of the political picture. The French revolutionaries were largely Epicureans, the Americans deists.
• Pre-Darwinian evolutionism, led by men like Charles’ father Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), aimed to explain biological change without recourse to a deity.
• Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations laid the groundwork for laisser-faire economics, the economic equivalent of Newton’s mechanistic universe: the belief that self-interest would bring social harmony and economic improvement.^[1]
• Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789) charged Christianity with contributing to the collapse of the empire that he idealised and bringing a negative force in history.
• Between 1774 and 1778 Gottfried Ephraim Lessing posthumously published the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a Deist who believed in a good and wise God who could be discovered without revelation and by reason alone. For Reimarus The Old Testament was full of nonsense, the New Testament an invention by early Christians. This removed Jesus from theology and began what became ’the quest for the historical Jesus’.

The grandfather of these five movements was David Hume’s (1748) Enquiry concerning human understanding, which formulated the classic argument against believing in miracles. By 1800 the shrine of Joseph Butler’s theology had fallen.

Enlightenment ideology

One thing survived, however. Butler’s optimistic eschatology continued on as a parody of Jewish and Christian eschatology, an eschatology without God, but just as optimistic, under the banner of “progress”. Enlightenment thinkers believed that a new day had adorned for humanity and that it would keep getting brighter and brighter. The French Revolutionaries even started a new calendar from the year 1. It was to this idea that Hegel gave philosophical shape. In a purely Epicurean understanding, the universe keeps going by itself, but nothing guarantees its direction. Hegel made Democritus’ world of swirling atoms the vehicle of the immanent Geist, moving inexorably (but dialectically) forward. For the nineteenth-century middle classes, though, there was no dialectic. The world just moved comfortably forward under its own steam, and for some the achievements of western civilisation were equated with the kingdom of God. For others, evolutionary ideas provided a sort of “providence-from-within”, and for the entrepreneur mechanical inventions made production more cost-effective. Contrary evidence—the negative effects of social darwinism or industrial pollution—were ignored. The combination of Epicureanism and “progressivism”, says Wright, was and is toxic. Not that the toxicity went unnoticed. Protesters have included Rousseau, Dickens, Nietzsche, Barth (in his Romans commentary), Theodor Adorno, and in the late years of the 20th century, post-modernism. But despite two terrible world wars the protesters have not made much headway. We have “Providence without God” (27). The ancient Epicureans needed “money , a nice vineyard, and compliant slaves” to withdraw from “the mess and muddle of ordinary life”. Their modern counterparts in Western nations assume a social prestige that allows them to live their lives at the cost of much of the rest of the world. Their philosophical basis sustains no clear analysis of what has happened, nor tools to deal with the consequences.

Natural Theology in light of the Enlightenment

The essence of ‘natural theology’ is to “arrive at truths about God by observation of, and inference from, features of the world about us” (29). It is flanked by two modern questions. First, does God intervene in the world by doing miracles? Second, what about ’natural evil’? The two questions are in tension: if he intervened to raise Jesus from the dead, why didn’t he prevent the Lisbon earthquake (and many other disasters)? The missing element in the discussion, Wright says, is history. History is about the natural world, And Jesus’ human life, thoughts and intentions are part of that natural world, yet are excluded from natural theology. Reimarus and Co. let history into the conversation, but assumed it would disprove Christianity’s claims. On the other hand, for many 18th- and 19th-century Christians the New Testament was the key document of special revelation, and therefore excluded from natural theology. But great swathes of the Bible, including the Gospels, are about history— about events in the natural world. Logically, we need to go back and see whether Reimarus and Co. got it right. The first-century human being Jesus is then a proper object of natural theology. The challenge is to do this history without the distortions of modern western culture. A significant source of distortion is the Christian retrieval of Plato in the face of Epicurean thinking. Instead of discovering from the Bible how Jews and early Christians saw the relationship between God and the world, Christian thinkers acceded to the Epicurean distinction between a distant God and a present world, between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supernatural’, between God’s promised future and the present. How come? Because of a Christian tradition of interpreting scripture and doctrine philosophically dating back at least to Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215), supplying the Bible with a metaphysical framework alien to its contents (and which it does not need as it has its own overarching narrative). If the 18th-century Christian could not invoke first-century Jewish thought, what was the alternative? It was the Platonism of the Church Fathers of the third, fourth and fifth centuries. This was the Middle Platonism of Plutarch (ca 46-after 119) and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus (ca 204-270) and his followers. (33). One result of this was that sometime between 1700 and 1900 Western Christians abandoned the biblical hope of new creation and bodily resurrection in favour of a single ‘going to heaven’. This formulation, reinforced by Charles Wesley’s hymns, was drawn from Plutarch, but also got added impetus from the continuing Reformation pushback against the mediaeval belief in Purgatory. This contrast between a corruptible earth and a home in heaven reflected the Epicurean divide between man and a distant to God. It has also allowed Christians to see this world as vale of tears in which a deist God occasionally intervenes, a position that is an inconsistent mix of Epicureanism (God isn’t interested in this world, and ‘religion’ is sidelined by the majority) and Neoplatonism (a miserable earth and a wonderful heaven). Never before in world history has there been a culture that organised itself on the basis that the gods, if any, were too far away to be relevant to their lives.

Conclusions

In modern thought there is a supposed dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’, where ‘nature’ is seemingly independent of the creator. An older Christianity envisaged God as always at work in ‘nature’, sometimes doing ‘supernatural’ things, not abolishing or invading nature by his grace, but exercising a superabundance of grace over nature. The Epicureanism of the Enlightenment, however, set the natural and the supernatural in opposition, and the pursuit of methodological naturalism rules out the supernatural. The word ’miracle’ comes to denote an invasion of the natural by the supernatural, which ’naturalists’ deny and ’supernaturalists’ affirm. Enlightenment epistemology screens out love. But love overcomes the false polarisation between ’objective’ and ‘subjective’. Love affirms and celebrates the otherness of the beloved, whether a person or an object, not wanting it to be a projection of one’s hopes and desires. Delighting in this knowing, love moves beyond detachment to a sense of homecoming. Love became human in Jesus. Sadly this claim can be used to close down thought or can be the object of scorn. But we can resist both tendencies. Having understood the intellectual contexts in which the question of natural theology has been addressed, we can move on to see how readings of the New Testament and historical understandings of Jesus have been distorted. Notes on chapter 2 of History and Eschatology are here.

Footnotes

• [^1]  Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the origins of modernity. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.
• [^2]   Recent research shows that this was not the belief of Smith himself.