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 five. Go forward to notes on chapter seven.

Part 3: Jesus and Easter in the Jewish world

Ch 6: The New Creation: resurrection and epistemology

Introduction

Epicureanism’s severely rationalistic approach to the world leaves no room for what Wright calls an epistemology of love. Idealism assigns ‘love’ to the upper world of Ideas rather than the lower world of space-time events. The model of knowledge privileged in Western Culture focusses on the left brain, as brilliantly argued by brain scientist and cultural critic McGilchrist (2019).¹ But Paul in Romans 8 (‘the mind of the flesh’ vs ‘the mind of the spirit’) proposes a different division and a different mode of knowing, one which still contains ordinary knowledge but goes beyond it. In 2 Corinthians 2:14–6.13 Paul has an extended argument for a larger vision of divine purposes focussed on Jesus’ resurrection and the resurrection of his people. The resurrection interprets present reality. (187-189)

One cannot start with Temple, Sabbath and Image and deduce Easter. If one could, then the two on the Emmaus road would have had no reason to worry. If we try to start with the natural world and deduce God, as natural theology does, we can’t. (You might reason your way to an aloof Epicurean divinity.) And in any case the attempt presupposes the intellectual framework of modernity. But if you start with Easter and look back, you find a Jewish philosophical framework within which Easter makes new and compelling sense. (191)

Knowledge in the Epicurean sense is uncritical realism, i.e. positivism.

A genuine ‘critical realism’, operating with the ordinary ‘epistemology of love’ as outlined in chapter 3 above (the eagerness that the evidence should be itself, should not be distorted to fit one’s own previous guesses or fantasies) will always be open to the radically new, to something which, as in Thomas Kuhn’s famous work,² demands a complete ‘paradigm shift’. . . .

What if the new paradigm, driven by the new evidence, was all about a revelation of love itself? Then the ‘epistemology of love’, which is normally (at least in my work) a shorthand for saying ‘a mode of knowing that takes with utter and delighted seriousness the distinct otherness of the thing known’, would acquire a double meaning. The normal critical realist imperative would find itself transcended, translated, transposed into a different mode. That, I shall argue, is what happens with Jesus’ resurrection. … The world opened by Jesus’ resurrection is the real world in its new mode: the new creation which recontextualises and reinterprets the old. (190)

Wright admits that this talk of an alternative epistemology will seem opaque or worse within the philosophical paradigms of Western culture—foolishness to the Greeks and scandalous to the Jews. (190)

Resurrection and history

In this section Wright summarises the numerous arguments for Jesus’ bodily resurrection, as the latter is essential to understanding why early Christians thought and acted as they did. (196). He has discussed these, convincingly and at length, elsewhere,³ and I won’t repeat them here. (192–197) What is important is how their certainty that the resurrection had happened resonated with Jewish thinking:

The young Christian movement was recognisably Jewish. It pressed all the buttons, though in a totally unexpected way: the royal leader had won the decisive battle; the Temple was destroyed and rebuilt; Daniel’s long exile was over; freedom and forgiveness had arrived in the present; the covenant had been renewed, creation itself was restored, and the One God had returned in a shockingly new kind of glory. (195)

Wright emphasises that we cannot understand the earliest Christians unless we see that they responded to essentially Jewish issues, yet did so in an utterly new and shocking way.

They lived, spoke and wrote with the presupposition that an event had occurred through which Israel’s God, the creator, had returned at last and had, through his chosen Messiah, won the decisive battle against the real enemy—even though this ‘return’, and this ‘battle’ and ‘victory’, were now seen quite differently to what we find in earlier Jewish expectations. They believed that, through this messianic achievement, the long exile was over, the great Sabbath had dawned, the ‘new Temple’ had been built (consisting of Jesus and his followers) and the creator God, through Messiah Jesus, had established his sovereign rule over the world, however paradoxical this might seem in terms of continuing persecution and struggle. (195)

In the perception of early Christians, the resurrection ushered in new creation, and new creation was and is “about the redemption and renewal of the creation, not its abolition and replacement”.

The resurrection of Jesus declares that ‘God so loved the world’; and this declaration constitutes a summons to an answering love. The renewal of creation therefore demands a renewed version of knowledge, including a renewed version of ‘the epistemology of love’. (198)

Resurrection and the vindication of creation

Jesus’ resurrection is an act of new creation. It does not signal the end of the old but the old’s redemption and renewal. It thereby reveals the the creator’s love, expressed in the covenant language of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, the love with which he created in the first place, “summed up in the horrible execution of a young prophet whose eager followers believed he was bringing about Israel’s redemption”. This supreme act of love, affirmed in the resurrection, is God bringing new creation in the midst of the old. (199)

The New Testament is emphatic that with Jesus and his death and resurrection the covenant with Abraham has been fulfilled, the ‘old covenant’ with Moses on Mount Sinai has been transformed into the ‘new covenant’ promised by Jeremiah, and the long, dark and winding narrative of Israel’s story with God—anything but a smooth, steady progress or ‘development’!—has reached its surprising and indeed shocking goal. (200)⁴

Each of the four Gospels presents Jesus’ story as the fulfilment of OT scriptures.⁵ “The death and resurrection of Jesus have retrospectively and transformatively validated what was there before. ‘Abraham rejoiced to see my day’, says John’s Jesus; ‘he saw it and was glad’ (John 8.56). (mdr: In Matthew 3:17, the voice from the sky says of Jesus, ‘This is my Son, whom I love”, echoing Psalm 2:7-8⁶). In Romans 10:1-4 Paul warns his fellow-Jews that their zeal for God is “not based on knowledge”, as “they did not know God’s righteousness but sought to establish their own”, but “Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes,” fulfilling the promises of Deuteronomy 30. (200)

Wright also sees the moral order as evidence that there is a continuity between the old creation and the new. We cannot directly infer moral order from the present state of creation. Natural disasters, the cruelty of animals, human moral chaos and more prevent us from inferring a moral order: traditional natural theology won’t work here. Instead, the Gospel events reveal the new way of being human and, retrospectively, affirm the in-built moral order, as when Jesus talks about marriage in Mark 10:2-12 (even though the Torah allows a lesser standard). In Romans 6 Paul speaks of the new life of believers and their avoidance of sin. Again, this retrospectively presupposes a previous moral order. “Resurrection redeems and so retrieves and now firmly establishes the goodness of the original creation.” (201)

Both the story of Israel and the re-establishment of the (old) moral order make it clear that the redemption of the old can only be seen in retrospect. It could not have been predicted. Welcoming non-Jews into the new creation community on equal terms and without the Torah to fence them in would have previously been unthinkable. Jesus on the Emmaus Road, and then Paul and other early teachers, showed that the resurrection did make sense in light of Israel’s scriptures. “It was, they argued, what Moses, the prophets and the psalms had always envisaged, though it would require a radical transformation in the ways they were to be read. . . The absolute demand for forgiveness, humility, chastity, patience, for the care of the poor, appeared quite out of reach”. These values had no place in the non-Jewish world, but when Jesus’ followers lived in accordance with them, they became self-authenticating—“the genuinely human way to live”. They confirmed earlier longings. (202)

At the centre of this, of course, was Jesus’ seemingly impossible resurrection. The earliest Christians interpreted this in the Jewish framework described in chapter 5. The framework itself underwent change—but change from within, not a total replacement. The earliest Christians continued to insist on bodily resurrection, on the renewal of the present created order, and on the one creator God of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac actively pursuing his promised rescue of the world. But they claimed that “what Israel had hoped for in the future had happened in the present”—one person, already seen as Israel’s Messiah, had been raised from the dead ahead of everyone else, explains Paul in 1 Corrinthians 15:20-28. “The future had come forward into the present”. (204) The “new age” had arrived, fulfilling Daniel’s “seventy weeks of years”, bringing liberation, forgiveness and endless Sabbath.

But all this meant that the earlier sense of a story, the long Jewish narrative of promise and hope, was retrospectively validated even while being radically modified. (204)

The Temple was the place where God’s presence dwelt, but for the earliest Christians the resurrection confirmed what Jesus had implicitly claimed throughout his public career, that he was the human equivalent of the Temple, where “all the fullness of the Deity in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). What God did for Jesus in his resurrection was a foretaste of “the ultimate fulfilment of Israel’s hope for the whole cosmos” (Romans 8:18ff). (204) The resurrection reveals the Creator’s love for his creation and the lengths to which he would go to rescue and restore it. (205)

Resurrection and the epistemology of love

In this section (205–212) Wright develops his concept of the epistemology of love introduced in the quotation from page 190 above. I found the section difficult. Is this because it messes with my mental framework, being “foolishness to the Greeks and scandalous to the Jews”? Perhaps in part, but not entirely, I hope, otherwise I will have wasted my time reading the book. The difficulty lies partly, I think, in the fact that Wright has some difficulty finding ways to express his thoughts.

Wright has earlier (190) explained the phrase ‘epistemology of love’ as his shorthand for ‘a mode of knowing that takes with utter and delighted seriousness the distinct otherness of the thing known’. This is a form of critical realism. Jesus’ resurrection, however, takes us beyond this, because its act of love brings the new creation forward into the present old creation: “the new creation … recontextualises and reinterprets the old” (190). In doing this, it enables us to know with a new love, to perceive and participate in the new creation at work in the old. We engage in “a whole-person activity” that “involves the body and the emotions, not just the senses and the brain”. If we try to detach parts of ourselves from knowing, we end up with A.J. Ayer’s logical positivism⁷—with supposedly ‘objective’, ‘scientfic’, knowledge, rejecting ethical knowledge as ‘subjective’ and ‘emotive’ and regarding theology or metaphysics as nonsense. (206)

Wright warns against veering off the narrow path into either a rationalist attempt to prove the truth of the resurrection or the romantic temptation to assume it because it is so heart-warming. The first tries to compel others to believe, and the second leaves faith in a private world. Neither attends to the fact that when the Age to Come breaks into the present ahead of time, our lives as bearers of God’s image find us with “a knowledge shaped by and responding to the object of knowledge … And ‘the object of knowledge’ is the unveiling of the Creator’s unbreakable love for his creation.” (206) This means that “things happen in the present time which are true anticipations of the ultimate future.” (206–207) And seeing them means “a new, multi-layered form of knowledge”, that forgiveness of sin is now a reality and we can see “creation as the Creator intended it to be”. This brings us again to the topic of the book:

And with that we open up at last the fresh possibility of natural theology: of a celebration of creation which is also a celebration of God the creator and redeemer. (207)

The NT tells us that love is not just an ethic or an emotion: it is “The highest mode of knowing”.

‘If anyone thinks they know something’, says Paul to the Corinthians, ‘they don’t yet know as they ought to know; but if anyone loves God, they are known by him’ (1 Corinthians 8.2–3).

The real knowledge isn’t your knowledge of the world or God, but God’s knowledge of you. Your answer to that ‘knowledge’ is first and foremost love, because the revelation is itself love. That’s why loving God and neighbour are the greatest commandments, overtaking all sacrifices and burnt-offerings. (207)

Paul writes to the Colossians (3:9–10), Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. This knowledge is not secret gnōsis, as Paul’s ministry shows. (207–208) Indeed, all knowledge is ultimately communal. One way or another, we always end up checking our knowledge with other people. But when this knowledge is the shared knowledge of the Creator’s love, a new kind of community emerges, and its emergence is the evidence of the gospel (Colossians 1:6-8). This is why for Paul love surpasses even faith and hope (1Corinthians 13:13). (208)

Further, knowledge is not detached observation. It entails engagement with the object of observation. This is critical realism. But when knowledge is knowledge of new creation, this is the direct result of Jesus’ love: it includes the knowledge that he has overcome the power of evil and death. “If the Messiah is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1Corinthians 15:17). It changes the way we live. Nonetheless, although this personal knowledge converges with the historical evidence, it is not ‘mathematical certainty’, and not knowledge that gives us power. “The attempt to use knowledge … especially of the risen Jesus!—as a claim to any sort of mastery will at once falsify and undermine itself.” (209) Jesus is the Lord of new creation, and his lordship is defined by the Sermon on the Mount. (210) This kind of knowing involves humility, recognising our own short-sightedness, and gratitude that we have a foretaste of the new creation, and we turn this gratitude into the image-bearing vocation to which we are called. (211)

This explains why the resurrection has appeared so impossible in the modern Western world: not because ‘science’ knows that resurrections don’t happen (that has always been known) but because “if true it would mark the true turning-point of history, whereas modern Western culture is built on the premise that the true turning-point happened in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.” (211) “The resurrection of Jesus … is the beginning of creation’s renewal.” (212) But love itself has been screened out into “irrelevant sentimentality of romantic subjectivity—but love, avoided by the Enlightenment, is the quality that

makes sense of and enriches all other modes of knowing, while rescuing them from Nietzsche’s power-trap. The love that believes the resurrection is thus the foundation for a proper awareness of the goodness of the present creation, as well as the motivation to take part in the missio Dei. ‘The Messiah’s love’, to quote Paul once more, ‘leaves us no choice’. (211)

. . .

But when the historical evidence which points to Jesus’ resurrection joins hands with the recognition that in this event we are witnessing the ultimate affirmation of the Creator’s love, and when with Christian hindsight we reflect on the promised work of the Holy Spirit, love revealed gives birth to an answering love, a love which is both faith and knowledge, knowledge of the creation as the work of God, and knowledge of God as the maker and redeemer of creation. (212)

Conclusion: knowing and loving

This is where Lessing’s “ugly ditch” is closed. The resurrection redeems the old creation. The slaves are set free. They don’t free themselves by forgetting God’s promises to Abraham. They are freed because God fulfils the promises. God’s love, expressed in both creation and redemption, reaches out, and human love, the highest form of knowing, responds. The gap is closed. It is acted out in the forgiveness of Peter. Jesus asks him, Do you love me?. Peter says he does, and the gap closes (John 21:15-19). (212)

Our Faustian culture tries to rule out this form of knowing. But love, as historical knowledge, opens itself to first-century Jewish thought and refuses to consign it to the wastebin of ‘ancient worldviews’. As theological knowledge, love explores the Second Temple cosmology and Sabbath eschatology, seeing through them to Jesus, the true image-bearer. A new loving way of knowing what Temple and Sabbath were pointing to is born in response to the Creator’s love expressed in the resurrection. And, like Peter called to feed my sheep, we receive the vocational knowledge that we are commissioned to announce the truth of new creation (John 20:21). Once we start to discern the dawn of new creation, we realise that the strange signposts in the old creation are after all signposts to ultimate reality. (213)

On Good Friday, the cross was simply the appalling instrument of Roman oppression and the death of a wonderful dream. The crucifixion was the most ‘natural’ event in Jesus life, and the most historically verifiable. This is where bringing Jesus into ‘natural theology’ must begin. It meaning emerges only in retrospect in the light of the resurrection:

… the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 1:1-4 NIV)⁸

When our love perceives the eschatological truth of new creation in the resurrection, it responds to the signpost of the crucifixion and is compelled to see it as the place where God’s creative and redemptive love might be known. This is the real centre of ‘natural theology’. (213–214)

Go back to notes on chapter five. Go forward to notes on chapter seven.

Footnotes

1. Iain McGilchrist, 2019. The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. 2nd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. (1st edn, 2012)
2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (1962). ↩
3. The resurrection of the Son of God, London: SPCK, 2003; Surprised by hope, London: SPCK, 2007; The day the revolution began, London: SPCK, 2017. ↩
4. cf Wright, ‘Apocalyptic and the Sudden Fulfilment of Divine Promise’, in Goodrich, Blackwell and Mastin, eds., Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination, 111–134. ↩
5. See R.B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Waco TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. ↩
6. He said to me, “You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. ↩
7. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. London:
   Penguin Modern Classics, 2001 [1936]. ↩
8. The translation of ὁρισθέντος as ‘appointed’ is unfortunate in its implication that Jesus was not previously God’s son. In Wright’s translation the passage reads,
   … God’s good news, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the sacred writings—the good news about his son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the king, our Lord! ↩