Notes on N.T. Wright's History and eschatology, chapter 3

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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 two. Go forward to notes on chapter four

Part 2: History, eschatology and apocalyptic

Ch 3: The shifting sand: The meanings of ‘history’

Introduction

Wright’s contention is that Christian theology needs history, but hasn’t always known what to do with it. If we pray that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done ‘on earth as in heaven’, then we are committed to a truth which bears witness to real-life history. (73-74) The NT tells us that Jesus was a man who lived at a particular time, a man from Galilee who died on a cross, and, in Wright’s words

is the full, definitive revelation of who the One True God really is and what he is up to. He is not an ‘example’ or ‘illustration’, even the ultimate illustration, of an abstract principle or a true doctrine. Principles and doctrines refer to him and must defer to him. This means history. History is inescapable. (74)

History is a necessary ingredient of ‘natural theology’, but often omitted. The Gospels themselves are accounts of history and also documents which themselves form part of history. Today’s natural theology favours a Christian apologetic that draws on the natural world, but ‘natural’ refers to the real world: Jesus belonged to that world, and the Gospels are real-world documents. To deny this because Christianity sees Jesus as God incarnate and the Gospels as revelation is a mistaken. (74-75)

The post-Renaissance streams of thought mentioned in Part 1 deliberately made precisely this mistake. (75) But reintroducing history into theology is not a simple move, as the study of history has itself been subject to the shifting sands of these very streams of thought. Post-Renaissance Epicureanism not only inserted a cleft between God and humanity, but also between past and present. The present and future become excitingly revolutionary (mdr: and for many Australians still are) and the past became remote and opaque, except for the Romantics, who tried instead to grasp a beautiful but lost world.1 (75-76) Investigating history is a risky business, as we might find things we do not want to know, but Jesus demands attention to what he is actually doing, saying and being. Wright continues,

History, I therefore suggest, requires humility, patience, penitence and love. Just because we want to think clearly, that doesn’t mean we can escape the methodological demands of Christian virtue. To cash these out: it requires humility, to understand the thoughts of people who thought differently from ourselves; patience, to go on working with the data and resist premature conclusions; penitence, to acknowledge that our traditions may have distorted original meanings and that we have preferred the distortions to the originals; and love, in that genuine history, like all genuine knowledge, involves the delighted afﬁrmation of realities and events outside ourselves, and thoughts different from our own. (77)

What is ‘history’?

Wright first discusses the various lay uses of the word ‘history’ (77-79), then moves on to a more formal set of definitions, summarised here:

‘History’ refers to events. This sense ranges from ‘all events in the past’ to ‘the knowable past’ to ‘the demonstrable past’. (79–80)
‘History’ refers to written accounts , which try to make continuous sense of past events, looking for connections and consequences among them. It always selects and arranges. (80–81)
‘History’ refers to the task of researching and writing. (81–83) This often implies “the work of discerning and displaying some kind of connection, pattern or principle—and hence, some meaning—within things that actually happened.” (83) Different historians may see different ‘meanings’ in the same set of events. What matters is that we allow the principle to emerge from the events themselves and resist “imposing an alien principle on the evidence”. (83–85)
Hence ‘history’ may also refer to a meaningful sequence of events or to writing about such a sequence. European royalty and their generals saw the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand as an indicator of the direction they “knew” history was going, a direction for which they had been preparing. (The consequences belied that ‘knowledge’.) This alleged meaningfulness is what people refer to when they talk of “being on the right side of history” and advancing the cause of ‘progress’. More formally, it is the kind of analysis done by Hegel or Marx, whereby a sequence of events has meaning in itself. (85)

The 18th century saw a clash of narratives. The Christian story saw God as ultimately in control, reaching its climax in Jesus—a story which people strove to trust and live up to. But deism gave way to Epicureanism, and in the secular narrative (especially as propounded by Hegel) the story controlled itself from within and had reached its climax in the Enlightenment. (85-86)

Initial results

Rudolf Bultmann: History and Eschatology

The present book is an edited version of Tom Wright’s 2018 Gifford Lectures entitled Discerning the Dawn: History, Eschatology. This title, and especially that of the published version, recall Rudolf Bultmann’s 1955 Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity. However, Wright’s approach to history and eschatology is very different from Bultmann’s (see section on him in ch. 2), and this section outlines the differences. But without a knowledge of Bultmann’s publication,2 I have found it impossible to summarise this section.

Critical realism and the historical task

“How is the task of history to be undertaken?” Wright proposes a form of critical realism, following Ben Meyer3 and Bernard Lonergan. The task has three phases, but they are not necessarily sequential: (95)

investigate source materials, including the central subject matter, the wider context and the worldview within which the events were recorded;
form hypotheses about how the evidence ‘makes sense’ and test them against the data and against rival hypotheses;
write a coherent narrative though which readers will understand the events.

In the case of Christian beginnings, “there is no escape from total immersion in the world of the ﬁrst century—Jewish, Greek, Roman and early Christian. Every text, every coin, every inscription counts.” (96)

Phase 2 entails “the interplay of the carefully studied data with the interpretative human imagination.” This includes the study of human motivations. We want to know who intended what, and why it happened. (96-97) We have to think into the minds of people of other cultures and epochs. (97) This is part of what Wright calls ‘the epistemology of love’: the lover is “one who simultaneously enters sympathetically into the life of the beloved while honouring and celebrating the vital differences between the two of them.” (97-98) We need to be “explicit about the reconstruction of aims and motives other than our own.”4 (98) On this basis, the historian makes abductive hypotheses, which have to stand up to all the evidence. (99-100)

Phase 3 requires selection, as it is only possible to say everything if there is very little to say. The narrative must reveal the motivations behind and the connections among events. History produces real knowledge, which like all knowledge is probabilistic—and if it is knowledge, it cannot be omitted from theological investigation. (100-101) A crucial part of this is recognising how the people involved in historical events themselves perceived those events: what meaning or pattern did they see? (103)

Early Christians believed that what happened in and through Jesus was the climax of history, and this is what faithful Christians still believe today. This is deeply counter-intuitive for people whose presupposition is that world history reached its climax with the 18th century’s Enlightenment. This presupposition meshes with the question, “if Jesus really lauched the new covenant and the new creation, how is it that the church (never mind the world) is in such a mess?” This makes it difficult even for devout Christians to get inside the worldview of the early Christians. (104)

History will not prove the truth of Christianity, but it can correct distortions and offer provisional verification of hypotheses. There is no “Christian” way of doing history any more than there is a Christian way of boiling an egg.5 (104-105)

These things were not done in a corner, as Paul said to Agrippa.6 Or, as Lesslie Newbigin used to insist, the Christian gospel is public truth or it’s nothing. The public truth of the gospel is found in its historical roots; and the historical roots are open to inspection by anyone and everyone. (105)

We must apply the epistemology of love, humbly letting the sources tell us things we may not expect. We must not decide in advance that the real meaning is already found in the creeds. If we do that, we reduce history to a private game and we falsify the gospel (105).

Historical ontology

The mediaeval meaning of ‘supernatural’ presupposed that God was active in nature, but also in supernature—in the abundance of grace. Nature and supernature were not in opposition then, nor at the Reformation, and certainly not in first-century Jewish thought, where heaven and earth overlapped and interlocked. Jesus launched God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. But modern discussion has often assumed a split between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, separating historical narrative from God’s realm, and this gives bad theology. (105-106) This lands us back to Lessing, for whom history was essentially unknowable:

If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths. That is: accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason . . . That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap.7 (fn83 of Ch3 on p300)

Cosmology and eschatology

Hegel believed in progress, with God immanent in it, but subsequent (Epicurean) revisions omitted God. The concept of progress that was central to Kulturprotestantismus saw modern European culture as the gradual arrival of God’s kingdom, a belief challenged by both Kierkegaard and Barth. The events of the twentieth century show that Hegel was wrong. This has led to a theological stance that rejects not only salvation-historical meaning in history, but also the pratcie of history itself and the possibility of gaining knowledge of historical events. (106-107)

Genuine historical study of early Christian and relevant Jewish material gives us a narrative about beliefs and motivations of first-century Jews and allows us to construct a well grounded picture of Jesus and his followers in their historical and cultural settings. This includes the Second Temple Jewish belief that events were guided by God, not in a smooth evolution, but in the sudden fulfilment of ancient promises. (107)

People will ask, “What about ‘the authority of scripture?” This authority is coherent only if it refers to God’s authority exercised in Jesus and exercised by the Holy Spirit through scripture.8 Scripture does not offer a closed world. The Gospel narratives tell the story of Jesus as public truth, the truth of events placed in coherent historical narratives by writers who saw themselves called to recount these events in order to display their meaning. They insist that meaning is to be found not primarily their writing but in the actual events themselves. This is why history matters. (107–108)

History is not historicism—whatever that means

The meaning of ‘historicism’

The common denominator of uses of the term ‘historicism’ is “the belief in the interconnectedness of events, ideas and cultures.“ (108)

Karl Popper referred to the theories of Hegel and his disciples, including Marx, as historicism.9 For them history had a direction all of its own, driven for Hegel by the Absolute Spirit, for Marx by the concepts that accumulated in the minds of various classes of society. This is the way history is going, they said, whether you like it or not. (108-110) Hegel’s legacy continued in the work of Nietzsche, Spengler and Toynbee,10 and views like theirs were the basis of the social determinisms underlying both Nazism and Communism. (112)

Historicism in practice: Politics

Wright mentions briefly the tendency of politicians through the ages to claim that they are on ‘the right side’ or ‘the cutting edge’ of history. (115)

Historicism in theology

Christian theology claims to know the end of history, but not all that comes in between. Paul writes of creation finally rescued from its ‘slavery to decay’ (Rom 8:18-30) and of the time when death will be defeated and God will be ‘all in all’ (1Cor 15:20-28). In Revelation (21:1-2) and 2 Peter (3:13) we are promised what Isaiah (65:17, 66:22) promised: new heavens and new earth. Jesus told his followers to watch out for the imminent fall of Jerusalem (Mark 13:14-23 and parallels), but early Christians often referred to the ultimate future as a surprise, like a thief in the night (Mark 13:32-37 and parallels; Luke 12:39-46; 1Thess5:6). “The book of Acts is full of scenes in which would-be faithful followers of Jesus have no idea what is going to happen next.” Early Christians believed that with Jesus the new creation had appeared, but they lived with events and looked to God to intervene. Only with the fall of Jersusalem did they read God’s action off events. (116)

We do well to read history similarly and to carry out the task and the narration as outlined above, in parallel to Jesus’ redefinition of power as weakness. We put aside large-scale theological assumptions of ‘meaning’ aside and allow the evidence to impact us. “So what happens, after all this, to Jesus and historical criticism? And what might that contribute to the possibility, or even the promise, of ‘natural theology’?” (116-117)

History and Jesus

Whilst no one comes to Jesus ‘neutral’, this does not mean that we impose our own views of Jesus onto history. We can still do history as public discourse. The positivist approach to ‘Jesus as he really was’ can be tinged with scepticism, and open to the criticism that ‘absolute proof’ is lacking. This has fuelled the the tradition that takes the phrase ‘the historical Jesus’ to mean ‘Jesus as the historian reconstructs him’ (with the implication that this is the historian’s projection) and runs from German Idealism to Anglo-Saxon Liberalism. (117-118)

Wright defends a position that says, “‘Perhaps the church has forgotten, or not fully understood, what the four Gospels were trying to tell us in their own context and their own terms; so let’s dig deeper into the Gospels themselves, in their own ﬁrst-century context, and see what happens’.” This is a reasonable suggestion, as Jesus “lived in the Second Temple Jewish world which became increasingly opaque to Christians, and actually to Jews too, after the tumultuous events of AD 66–70 and 132–135, and particularly by the fourth and ﬁfth centuries.” (118)

The Gospels themselves purport to be history, imbued with specific meanings. Their genre as Graeco-Roman biography has been defended in the literature.11 It is now clear from historical investigation that Jewish offence at Jesus was not grounded in ‘legalism’ but in the fact that Jesus offered a new and different construal of ‘God’s kingdom’, and hence a social and political challenge (see Ch 5). And this investigation exemplifies the practice of history: uncovering what the Gospels were saying in the first place. (118-120)

What can history do?

Three things, Wright suggests.

Defeating the defeaters

History can see off the sceptics. The claim that early Christians saw Jesus as less than divine (implying that we should too) is simply not compatible with historical research. The resurrection is historically attested by being recognised as both a very strange event and “the foundational and paradigmatic event within God’s new creation.” (121) The idea of new creation operating from the tomb of the old made sense in the context of Jewish thinking, where God’s and the human realm “overlap and interlock”. The results of historical study neither allow the sceptic to get away with applying the a priori idea that there is no supernatural nor permit the Christian to simply say, ‘I believe in the supernatural’. History outflanks both. (120-121)

Dismantling the distortions

History can challenge Christian misconceptions and dismantle Christian distortions. The obvious example is ‘the kingdom of God’. Jesus was perceived as a prophet announcing God’s reign. He also redefined it, showing its presence around himself and his vocation within it. He was not just describing it, he was doing it. He offered a fresh exegesis of the old kingdom-promises in the Psalms, Daniel and Isaiah. (121-122)

But, says Wright, much church tradition from at least the third century onwards has taken seriously neither Jesus’ redefinition of the Kingdom nor the Jewish context of Jesus’ kingdom-proclamation. Many Western Christians have assumed that ‘kingdom of God’ meant ‘going to heaven when you die’. This is as wrong as Schweitzer’s belief that it meant the end of the world. Jesus’ vision was that the kindom was coming ‘on earth as in heaven’, and grasping this revolutionises our reading of the Gospels. This is not just something Jesus talked out. “It is the mandate for the necessary vocation of history itself.” (122)

Wright remarks that there will be great resistance to this. It will be accused of being an Enlightenment project. But here is no escape. “The Word became flesh.” If we avoid this. we are en route to Gnosticism. “Dogma and piety alike need to submit … to the original meaning of scripture itself.” (122)

Directing the discussion

Christian theology needs to start with history. The influential fourth ecumenical council of 451 AD, the Council of Chalcedon, started from a theological statement about Jesus’ nature12 that resulted in the separation of the oriental orthodox church from the rest. Wright comments, “It screened out several dimensions of the original historical context and meaning, which, had they been retrieved, would have provided a more robust account of Christology and of other themes too.”13 (122-123) Theology, Wright asserts, “must grow out of historical exegesis of the text itself (123, Wright’s italics). In Wright’s words, “I issue a plea at this point, therefore, to the larger world of theology: do not fear or reject history. You have nothing to lose but your Platonism.” (123) He repeats his earlier claims that, despite the frequent use of the word ‘history’ among theologians in the past 250 years, no history was done. (123-124)

The very fact that Jesus was announcing the kingdom of God requires that we do history, to understand what Jesus did and what he meant by it, and to understand how his first followers understood it and how the Gospel writers understood it a short time later.

The task of the Christian historian

The Christian historian does not abandon belief in God’s sovereignty. This belief in any case does not tell him in advance what happened in the world over which God is sovereign. To say, “Because God is sovereign, because Jesus is Lord, such-and-such must have happened” or “cannot have happened” is to indulge in spurious historicism’ (124-125)

John (1:18) writes, No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. This demands that we look carefully at the history in the Gospels so as to discern who Jesus is and who God is. “We don’t know who God incarnate is until we look at the incarnate God.” Not to do this is to reject John’s Gospel (and Philippians 2). (125)

We must not look at Jesus and the Gospels “through spectacles manufactured in later centuries”. They hinder us from looking carefully at what the words ‘kingdom of God’ mean there. (126-127)

Conclusion

It is time for Christian historians to resume the task of writing “a narrative which genuinely points to real events”, along with the “meanings which make deep, rich ﬁrst-century sense”. Wright likens Christian historians to Elijah, faced with the altar that had fallen into disrepair (1Kings 18:19-46). Some had “retreated into caves, safe in their private worlds”. It is now time to rebuild the altar of “the public truth which emerges from responsible and careful historical work… . Then, and only then, we pray for the ﬁre to fall.” (127)