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 six. Go forrward to notes on chapter eight.

Part 4: The peril and promise of natural theology

Ch 7: Broken signposts? New answers to the right questions

Introduction

Some scholars have suggested that in writing the Emmaus Road story Luke (24:25) was out of line with the rest of the NT, and that Paul rejected this kind of ‘back story’ as irrelevant . But Wright has argued in NTPG (Part 4) that Luke’s position was indeed that of the early church. He saw the cross and resurrection, as the long-awaited fulfilment of Israel’s whole Scriptural narrative. The present book draws upon this passage, and applies it to the larger theological issues raised in recent centuries, including what we might call ‘natural theology’. (217)

What is the task that the phrase ‘natural theology’ refers to?

1. Is it an attempt to provide a neutral argument for the existence of God, and perhaps for Christian claims, in such a way as to convince a sceptic?
2. Or is it, reading backwards like Jesus’ account of Israel’s story on the Emmaus Road, a Christian account of how the natural world might have been pointing to the truth, however broken the signposts?

Wright’s answer is that (2) is more coherent.

The ‘special revelation’ claimed by the church, at least, until the Enlightenment was, in Wright’s words, “firmly detached from the ‘natural world’.” With the revival of Epicureanism, there was no desire to cross that ditch. (218)

The three ways

I have argued so far that modern theology and exegesis have been shaped by the Epicurean heaven/earth split; by the post-Renaissance chronological split between past, present and future; and by understandings of human nature shaped by those two. I have proposed an alternative perspective, rooted in Israel’s traditions, seeing the Temple as the microcosmos disclosing God’s ultimate purposes for the heaven/earth world; the Sabbath as the advance foretaste of the Age to Come; and humans as constituted by the Image-bearing vocation. These are then reshaped, quite drastically and in unexpected ways, around Jesus and the spirit. But the new shape still presupposes an integrated cosmos, a purposed new creation already tasted in advance, and a vocational anthropology. (219)

The parallels between this reconstruction and the ‘natural theology’ of the past 300 years are at best shadowy. The latter rests instead on cosmology, teleology and the human moral sense. But this doesn’t cohere with Second Temple Jewsish thought or early Christian thought.

The cosmological argument is that the world’s very existence implies a creator. Certainly the Temple looks back to creation as it claims to house the Creator, but it was never used as an argument for God.

The teleological argument concerns the goal of creation. The corresponding Second Temple inference looked forward to this as the ‘age to come’. But, again, it wasn’t used to argue for God’s existence.

The argument from human moral sense looks the most promising: Kant inferred that if human beings distinguish between good and evil, then the highest good in the world requires us to assume “a supreme cause of nature”. But John Stuart Mill rejected this argument on the grounds of evil and suffering in the world. And Wright argues that it puts knowledge of good and evil before knowledge of God. (219-221) (mdr: It argues from morality to God, whereas the appropriate question is to ask where ‘good’ comes from: my answer is, from God’s nature, but this answer presupposes God and his nature; it doesn’t ‘prove’ it.) The idea that we are God’s image-bearers has primarily to do with vocation, not our ‘moral sense’. A calling presupposes a caller. (221)

The despondent disciples on the Emmaus road had followed their own history, Scriptures, and culture, as far as they understood them, only to be bitterly disappointed when the crucifixion brought them up against a stone wall. The Messiah was supposed to release Israel from the pagans, but instead the pagans had crucified that Messiah. But then the resurrection led to a fresh retelling of that history, a fresh understanding of the cross. The disciples’ old understanding was raised to a new level and vindicated. (223–224)

Similarly, the world at large and human life in particular is full of signposts that seem to point to some kind of deeper meaning. Yet, taken alone, they will not lead us to God. It is the resurrection that leads us to re-evaluate them. The event which appeared to destroy hope, and falsify the Old Testament story was actually the place where God is revealed. Here lies the paradox of natural theology. It sees all the signposts, but without the crucifixion, it cannot take us to God. (224)

The vocational signposts

Wright introduces seven ‘vocational signposts’, features of human life that are seen in various cultures. The seven signposts are justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships. We know they are important, “but we can never quite grasp them, the way we feel we should”. Wright believes the echoes can you be retrospectively interpreted in the light of the resurrection. We knew the signposts were pointing to something. Now we see that that something is the resurrection. (224–225)

Wright emphasises two things. First, that these signposts should not necessarily be seen as points of contact with the divine. This has too strong an implication of the split-level world of Epicureanism. The Temple-based cosmology, and the sabbath-based eschatology discussed in chapter 5 offer a much richer integration. (225)

Secondly, the broken signposts are features of human life. Wright thinks that the wonders of the biological world and the physical universe are not the right starting points for a natural theology. Human life is. (225-226)

In the middle of the world described in chapter 5 is the image-bearing human being within the cosmos-as-Temple. Human beings are called to be royal priests, “summing up the praises of creation before the Creator and exercising a delegated authority within the created order”. “Royal” here has to do with the first five of Wright’s seven broken signposts. Human beings are called to do justice, to celebrate and foster the beauty of creation, to live freely and foster freedom, to speak truth, bringing the creators true order into the world (and this is where science begins), and to exercise power wisely. “Priesthood” relates to the last two posts. Humans are called to live in the overlap between heaven and earth. We loosely call this ”spirituality”. Above all, priesthood means we are called to love – to love God and one another. (226)

Justice

“We all know that some things are fair, and some are not.” Even children know this. Yet all of us are willing to bend the rules. We complain when we think something is unfair, unless like Machiavelli, we think this is all an Epicurean game that we have to play. The paradox is, how can something that we know matters be so difficult to attain? This is true all the way from personal relationships through to the organisation of society and the state. (226–227)

Beauty

“We all know that beauty is a central and vital part of life, whether in nature, art or music.” When beauty is missing from our environment, life seems less bright. Living in ugly surroundings is dehumanising. Is this just a by-product of our evolutionary history? The Bible doesn’t say much explicitly about beauty, apparently, because it is assumed that’s a part of what is being described or a feature of the writing itself. The Temple was beautiful, in its architecture, its design, its liturgy and its music—and yet all this was destroyed. Psalm 65:8 says,

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;

where morning dawns, where evening fades,

you call forth songs of joy.

In the Psalms and the prophets, and in Job and Song of Songs there is hauntingly beautiful writing which transcends cultural boundaries. And yet beauty always fades. (227–228)

Freedom

We all want freedom, yet it is diffcult to define, to defend and to keep. And sometimes freedom comes at the cost of another’s slavery. Rousseau’s version of Genesis 1-3—“man is born free but is everywhere in chains”—encapsulates the paradox.

“Freedom was … written into Israel’s long narrative.” The exodus epitomises slaves being freed. But the prophets write of Israel wanting freedom not only from Egypt but from YHWH’s rule, a stubbornness that enslaved them under the rule of one foreign empire after another (cf Ezra 9:8; Nehemiah 9:36). In the first century various would-be prophets and messiahs promised Israel freedom at last. “So was the dream an illusion?”

Truth

The Enlightenment and modernist version of truth has been replaced by the postmodern belief that a claim that something is true, is a claim to power in disguise. “What seems to be true for me may not be true for you.” But we still thirst for truth. We would like our paperwork to be complete because we want to avoid fraud. But we live in a world of fake news, where it is difficult to distinguish truth from untruth. (229)

Power

Throughout history, people intending to use power to accomplish something good have attained it, only to discover how difficult it is to exercise it well. “No society can survive without someone exercising power, but the world has known for a long time that power needs to be exercised wisely, and held in check.” And force doesn’t work either. (230–231)

Spirituality

In Wright’s and my youth, if you were gripped by Jesus’ message, you were easily pushed into a split-level world. Christians celebrated their private secret. But today things have changed. Many people are aware of spirituality, but they distinguish this from being “religious” (i.e. going to church, reading the Bible). Forms of gnosticism flourish. Many people are aware of ”dimensions of life that go beyond the obvious material world,” but few have a frame of reference within which to make sense of these dimensions. Even people who have embraced some form of Christianity conceive it with a mixture of Deism and Platonism. Modern Christians face a problem: they have conceived Christian spirituality as human beings “making their way towards God, or heaven, whereas the Jewish and early Christian worldview focused on the promise that God would come, has come, will come again, to dwell with us”. And even for those who know this, there are times when it all goes blank. “Yet another paradox”. (231–232)

The Temple expressed God’s presence in material terms, and the sense that God is at times absent is expressed in the Psalms with a robust realism. The sabbaths were a reminder that ‘rest’ would come. “… how you feel today is not as important as what God is doing.” (232) But this all seemed illusory in AD 70, and AD 70 has its parallels today. (233)

Relationships

All of us know that we are made for and formed by relationships. Yet we mess them up and are messed up by them. Love—like justice, freedom, power, truth, beauty and spirituality—raises questions that point beyond themselves, and require a story with a larger meaning for which they all long. The Epicurean response is that there is no larger story, and that this is the most dignified position to hold. But love won’t go away. For most of us, loving relationships, and what makes life worth living, and we would go crazy without human contact. (233)

Nonetheless, relationships are often hard. Many of us have to work at them some of the time, and even then they sometimes fall apart. This also happens on the global level because political leaders assume that others are just like themselves. The hidden story lines of different cultures collide.

“The Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of creation and covenant, and the point of of the covenant is love; love, with a purpose, a plan and a promise.” From the garden through to Jacob’s dysfunctional family, there is brokenness, but Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers points to God’s larger covenant purpose for Israel and through Israel for the world. However, relationships continue to be strained, the Babylonian exile is just the low point in “a long and sad story. The rumour of love will not go away. The prophets speak of covenant restored.” (234)

Where might the broken signposts lead?

The seven signposts—justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships—seem to point somewhere but actually lead nowhere. In themselves they are not compelling. Wright writes,

We might, of course, try to argue from them all up to some sort of ‘natural theology’. One might suggest that the passion for justice and the love of beauty make sense within a world which God has promised to put right, a world he will fill with his glory. Our longing for freedom could be said to resonate with scripture’s Exodus-theme. We could rightly say that the creator God is the God of truth, of reality, who calls his human creatures as Image-bearers to be truth-tellers, so that his wise order may come, through wise human words, into his world. (235)

And so on.

We may think these things, but a Dawkins could dismiss it all as projection. They can be memes transmitted from one generation to the next. Worse, though, we have failed and we fail, individually and collectively.

We have turned justice into oppression, beauty into kitsch, freedom into licence, truth into fake news, power into bullying. We have turned spirituality into self-exploration or self-gratification. We have made the calling to relationships the excuse for exploitation. All these, from a Christian point of view, have the word ‘idolatry’ hanging over them. (235)

But worse still, even when we don’t fail, we are haunted by real-world events “from Lisbon to Auschwitz”, by events in our own lives, and by the fact of our death. The seven signposts are at best very broken.

Should we simply have capitulated to the cool Epicurean cynicism: yes, we feel these things, but they don’t really mean anything, and we should silence such irrelevant voices and pursue the placid pleasures available to us here and now?

No, Wright says, there is an unexpected way forward. (236)

Broken signposts, broken stories

Wright again reminds us of Jesus’ words to the disciples on the Emmaus Road. He points them backward to Israel’s story as told in the Scriptures. This appears to be a story of human failures, i.e., its signposts are broken. (236-237) But

behind that broken and bleeding story we glimpse the narrative of Israel’s vocation: Abraham’s call and covenant, Moses’ Exodus and Tabernacle, David’s and Solomon’s victories and Temple, the catastrophe of exile and the long, dark time of waiting. When you read backwards from cross and resurrection, you see muddle, failure and mistake, but you also see the divine promises and vocations to which Israel kept returning, however partially and fitfully. And you now see, in a way you couldn’t before, that this was the right story to be telling, that these were the right signals if only you could have steered by them, that what Israel’s God has now done has as it were retrospectively validated the genuine forward-pointing signposts that went before. . . .

Israel’s story is the story of God’s faithfulness; and, as Paul rightly saw, the very brokenness of the story magnifies that faithfulness.¹ (237, author’s italics)

With a retrospective view, the disciples were persuaded that, despite the horror of the crucifixion, the risen Jesus was the culmination of Israel’s story.

At the very moment of their failure, they [the broken signposts] point to the ultimate broken signpost, which turns out to be the place in real life, in concrete history, where the living God is truly revealed, known and loved. Each of the signposts leads to the same place. (237, author’s italics)

Each of the “broken signposts” seems to point only to the (literal) dead end of the ultimate broken signpost, the crucifixion. [mdr:] Only in retrospect so we see that the crucifixion is the greatest turning point in human history.

The first of the signposts, justice, was central to Israel’s prayers and was the boast of Imperial Rome. Yet Pilate washes his hands despite his wife’s nightmares. The signpost of justice remains broken. Yet ironically this “flagrant and shameful miscarriage of justice” turns out to be “God’s justice-bringing action”. (237–238)

The Scriptures describe beautiful things rather than talking about beauty. The story of the crucifixion is initially one of horror, yet it became one of most frequent subjects of music and art in the medieval and Baroque periods. From a Roman perspective crucifixion was simply banal, but within a few decades Jesus’ crucifixion was celebrated in poetry as an event of great beauty, because it marked

the beauty of creation, ransomed, healed, restored and forgiven. The slaughtered lamb joins the One on the Throne, surrounded by a jewel-like rainbow, with seven burning lampstands and a sea of glass like crystal, and angels playing trumpets. (238)

As for freedom, Jesus chose the freedom-festival of Passover to do what he had to do. The Romans squashed the Jewish freedom cry. But Jesus insisted that real freedom was release from “the destructive power that takes people captive and warps their genuine humanness out of shape all the way to death.” (239)

As for truth, Pilate asks Jesus, “So you are a king?” Jesus’ answer is indirect: “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” (John 18:37–38) “What is truth?” scoffs Pilate. For Pilate, truth is naked power. John presents Jesus’ death as the clash between two definitions of truth. It looks for the moment as if Pilate’s definition turns out to be right. (239)

Jesus announces the good news of the kingdom of God, God becoming king, his will being done on earth as in heaven. Jesus quickly contradicts the notions of his followers about the sort of power this is (Mark 10:37). “The rulers of the nations do it one way, he said; we’re going to do it the other way round.” (239) Paul puts this redefinition of power at the heart of his theology. The “word of the cross” is God’s power to rescue. Pagans think it’s crazy. Jews think it’s blasphemy. Paul allows that the ruling authority has a God-ordained role, but will be held accountable for its performance. Pilate refers to his power as Governor, and Jesus retorts that his power is from another place (John 18:36). Thus the crucifixion is depicted as, simultaneously, a monstrous abuse of imperial power and as “the secret launching of a different kind of power altogether. But on Good Friday this secret is unimaginable.” (240)

Jesus represents the ultimate in spirituality.

But what shines out from the texts is that when people were with Jesus they were aware of a power, a joy, a forgiveness and healing that seemed to flow out of him; and they were aware that he was aware of it and that he was in constant personal touch with its ultimate source. He was acting, and was eventually perceived to be acting, as if he was a Temple-in-person, a place where heaven and earth interlocked; as if the time of his public career was a perpetual Sabbath, a time of fulfilment, a time when God’s promised future had arrived in the present. (240)

But it all ends up at the cross, the literal dead end. (240–241)

In the end, relationships fail. As John tells the story, Jesus loved his disciples right to the end, but his own family misunderstand him (Mark 3:21), Judas betrays Jesus; Peter denies him; the rest run away (Matthew 27:42, Mark 15:31). “The puzzle of love—we can’t live without it, but it seems to be much harder than we thought—is exposed in all its bewildering terror at the cross.” (241)

When we stand at the foot of the cross, all seven signposts appear to be not only useless but utterly deceitful. We have been tricked. The crucifixion story confirms the cynic’s view. There is no way ‘up to God’ from there

But when we ‘read backwards’ we discover that this was after all the means by which the true God was revealed. (242)

In themselves, the seven signposts fail in their promise to lead nobly to God. Instead, we find a God “who suffered the ultimate injustice”. And early Christians insist that the divine revelation took place, not in Jesus’ ministry, nor at the resurrection, but in the crucifixion itself. (240) The resurrection forced them to look back and see that in their brokenness the broken signposts point to the ultimate broken signpost—the cross. The first World War poet Edward Shillitoe wrote:²

The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak;

They rode, but thou didst stumble, to a throne.

But to our wounds, only God’s wounds can speak;

And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. (242)

Reading the signposts backwards

Here it is best to let Wright speak for himself.

As we have seen, when we look at each of the seven signposts in turn, the story the Gospels tell us, the story which ends with Jesus on the cross, simply highlights the problem. Justice is denied as Jesus is condemned; the hope of freedom is quashed; the only effective power is violence; truth is swallowed up in Realpolitik; beauty is trampled underfoot; spirituality ends up in dereliction. Love itself is betrayed, mocked and killed. The Gospels show us an event within the public world, the ‘natural’ world of history, of human beings, of politics and power-games and kangaroo courts. They make no attempt to suggest that the crucifixion itself consisted of a divine ‘intervention’ that might be visible only to the eye of an already-attained faith. Jesus refused to summon twelve legions of angels. Elijah did not come to save him from death. The cross of Jesus, precisely as a ‘natural’ event in the real public world of human affairs and history, is already on Holy Saturday the quintessential moment of meaningless horror. Seen retrospectively from after Easter, it becomes the ultimate true signpost to God, to God’s work in the world, to God’s purposes for the world. And, indeed, to God’s ultimate dealing with evil in the world. The trail of broken signposts leads to the broken God on the cross. (243-244)

This retrospection was immediate in the life of the early church.

… the early Christians made these signposts thematic for their own ongoing life. They looked back, in the light of the new day whose dawn they had discerned, and they declared that God had established his justice in the world and would complete this task at Jesus’ return. Their visions and poems, their common life and shared love, radiated a beauty which turned into world-transforming art and music, poetry and drama. They embraced the freedom of the new Exodus and lived in it. They spoke a lot about truth, and through their words the truth of new creation spread into the world. They spoke and acted with a healing, restorative power. They practiced a spirituality that could cope with the darkest night of the soul while being open to rich, multi-layered experiences of the God in whose image they found themselves remade. Above all, in their rich relationships they turned the ancient rumour of love into practical policy, caring for one another and for anyone their outstretched hands could reach. (242-243)

The Enlightenment has sought to rubbish church history, and the church, to be sure, has done much that was and is bad. But through it all, the ordinary life of Jesus-followers described in the paragraph quoted above has continued as a bright thread through Christian history. (243)

The cross is planted firmly in the ‘natural’ world of human history, and the Gospels are telling us, in concepts more familiar to second-temple Jews than to even third-century theologians, that heaven and earth are overlapping here. In Wright’s translation of John 1:18, Nobody has ever seen God. The only begotten God, who is intimately close to the father—he has brought him to light”.³ When we look at the cross, we see Orwell’s image of a boot stamping on a human face for ever. Yet in retrospect that “here the living God is truly revealed”. (244)

“The cross is where the downward spiral of human despair meets the love which was all along at the heart of creation.” (244–245) Wright gives a number of examples of its efficacy on people. Among them he repeats⁴ the story told by the former Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger. Three young lads decided to play a trick on the priest. In the confessional they ‘confessed’ all kinds of sins they’d made up. The first two ran away laughing. But the priest, having heard the ‘confession’ of the third, gave him a penance to perform: to look at the figure on the great crucifix and to say three times, ‘You did all that for me, and I don’t give a damn’. So the lad, as part of the game looked at the crucifix, said, ‘You did all that for me, and I don’t give a damn’. He did it twice, then found he couldn’t do it a third time. He left the church changed, humbled, transformed. And the Archbishop added, ‘And the reason I know that story is—that I was that boy.’ (245)

Wright comments that his broken signposts—and the ultimate broken signpost—do not align, either in their method or their results, with what is known as ‘natural theology’, but in response they provide a genuine form of Christian ‘natural theology’. Kant tried to argue from human ‘moral sense’ to God, but Wright proposes that

within the ‘natural world of human aspirations and unfulfilled longings —‘broken signposts’ as I have called them—we find the crucifixion of Jesus as the strongest and strangest ‘signpost’ of them all, making sense of the others, drawing them to a point which poses the question: can you not see that all these ‘vocations’, precisely in their brokenness and paradoxes, converge? . . . The ‘vocational’ variation on the ‘moral sense’ argument leads to the cross; but the crucifixion of the risen one then invites consideration of the kingdom of God. (246)

Paley spoke of a watch and an implied watchmaker. But in speaking of new creation, we might talk of a broken watch being repaired and telling a new time. The point is then that ‘new’ = ‘restored’. It is not the deletion or forgetting of what has gone before. It makes sense of the earlier broken signposts. But the power of this argument depends on how it makes sense to puzzled onlookers, and this points us to the church’s mission in the world. Reasoned argument is vital within the whole, but cannot by itself get us home. We cannot argue up to God. (246–247)

This brings us back to epistemology, and specifically to the love that believes the resurrection, as discussed in Ch 6. Believing the resurrection allows us to see “the signs of the creator’s presence in the old creation.” (247)

Those who have loved justice, beauty, freedom and the rest, and have grieved over their denial, have had unawares, all along, true knowledge of the true God who gave us these vocations. (248)

Conclusion

As we look back to the actual events of Jesus’ life, the signposts come alive afresh in our lives, standing for justice, delighting in beauty and creating more of it, cherishing freedom and speaking truth (“especially when we speak new creation into being”), exercising power with humility, entering into self-giving and fruitful relationships. As we do these things, we are knowing God and making him known, living out the power of the cross and exercising the innate human vocation of people created to be God’s image-bearers and a true signpost to the reality of God and the world. “There will be grief in all this. There will be love in all this.” (248)

Such an image-bearing ‘mission’, shaped by Temple-cosmology and Sabbath-eschatology now refocused on Jesus, will be oriented towards the ultimate goal, when the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. (249)

Go back to notes on chapter six. Go forrward to notes on chapter eight.

 

Footnotes

1. Especially in Romans 9-11. See Wright, Paul and the faithfulness of God, chapter 11. ↩
2. E. Shillito, Jesus of the Scars and Other Poems (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919). ↩
3. NIV: No one has ever seen God,a but the one and only Son, who is himself God anda b is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
   Greek: Θεὸν οὐδεὶς ἑώρακεν πώποτε· ὁ μονογενὴς υἱὸς ὁ ὢν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρός, ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο. ↩
4. From The day the revolution began, p11. ↩