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

Go back to notes on chapter one. Go forward to notes on chapter three.

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 2: The questioned book

Confused debates

It follows from the account of enlightenment culture in the previous chapter that the gospel account of Jesus, and especially for the miraculous, was called into question. Restoring our ability to see Jesus as a flesh-and-blood human being is doubly difficult because we are dealing with two challenges. First, with Deist skeptics from Reimarus onwards who want to bracket Jesus out altogether. Second, with would-be orthodox Christian scholars like Karl Barth in the 1930s who talk about ’Christ’ as if this were a divine title and as if he were only tangentially related to the Jesus of the Gospels, despite the fact that John talks of the Word becoming ’flesh’ and the writer to the Hebrews says he was ‘like us in every way.’ The latter seem to want to avoid being drawn into arguments about the human reality of Jesus, and in the process fall into near-docetism,¹ thereby removing Jesus from any natural theology.

In modern Britain the only theological debate that people seem to be aware of is between belief in an interventionist God who does strange things and belief in a non-interventionist Deist God. Wright sees these as a superficial replication of the debates that went on in Germany between 1800 and 2000, which were parts of the much weightier discussions in the framework provided by the schemes of Kalnt and Hegel. As Wright puts it, the British were too busy running an empire to concern themselves with such things. It is simply assumed that ’the scholars’ have proved that God doesn’t intervene and that the four Gospels are largely fictitious. Meanwhile ’simple believers’ are assumed to be living in the ’mediaeval’ period.

Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede (The quest for the historical Jesus) was part of a German-speaking quest for eternal truths, not merely an investigation of historical facts. It was particularly about how “what was said about Jesus and the Gospels both reflected and conditioned the larger questions about God and the world.” (p46)

In continental European scholarship the Jesus Quest combined two different historical threads. One derived from the Reformer’s appeal to the ‘original meaning’ of scripture as evidence of the ‘real’ early Christian faith in opposition to Catholic tradition. The Bible was made to bear more and more weight within the church. The second was the sceptics’ attempt to find an original meaning that would undermine any attempt to reclaim early Christian faith. They merged in historical-critical study that left Protestants with little but “a largely ahistorical platonic idealism.” This has undermined Christology itself (the attempt to speak truth about Jesus).

A mainstream view in 20th century scholarship is based on the alleged discovery by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer that Jewish apocalyptic writings predicted the imminent end of the world and that Jesus shared this belief. Disappointed by Jesus’ death, early believers pinned this belief afresh to the second coming, which also failed to occur as predicted. Wright labels this view a modern myth, derived from a misunderstanding and overliteral interpretation of Jewish apocalyptic literature. This damaging misperception of Jesus was an outcome of the intellectual history outlined in chapter 1.

Wright’s next task, here summarised briefly, is to unpick something of this piece of intellectual history.

David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874)

Strauss is easily interpreted as a follower of Reimarus. His view of the historical truth of the Gospels was doubtless similar to Reimarus’, but his goal was different. He was as opposed to the rationalists as he was to naive piety. In Wright’s words (p50),

He was inviting his readers to contemplate the vast reaches of supra-historical truth as reflected in mythological dress.. . . Strauss was making a post-Lessing move: forget those historical contingencies and go straight for the eternal truths. . . he was pleading for an Idealist version of Christian faith for which actual events in first century Palestine would be more or less irrelevant.

This implicit divide between the material world and timeless ideas reflects the platonism in Christian thinking that Wright describes in the previous chapter.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Strauss was Idealist Schweitzer’s forerunner. Wright describes Schweitzer’s context as a widespread sense that 19th-century optimism was being replaced by a mood that things were falling apart and that somehow the end of the world was approaching. This is the theme of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and Schweitzer was a great Wagner fan. For Wagner the twilight of the gods leaves a secular world to fend for itself, whereas for Schweitzer Jesus’ proclamation is that the divine kingdom will abolish the world in order to replace it. The two converge, however, insofar as Jesus’ predicted world’s end did not come and humanity must face the future with the self-sacrificial love that Jesus had modelled. Wright sees this as “a glorious piece of late nineteenth-century German mythology” embedded in a broadly Epicurean cosmology with its separate and incompatible worlds of earth and heaven. (51–55)

The irony in this is that Schweitzer’s interpretation of the apocalyptic in the apocryphal books he referred to² made the error of taking their metaphors more literally than one should. Their concern was with a transformation of the present world from the current state of affairs to one in which Israel would be free (apocalyptic was a political genre), and not to the complete replacement of the earthly world by a heavenly one. Why did Schweitzer make this mistake? The answer lies in the merging of an Epicurean worldview with Christianity. If the Epicurean view that earth and heaven are radically different and separate, then for the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ to come must entail an end to the present earth.

Epicureanism forced Christianity into one of two moulds: the pietism of ‘going to Heaven when you die’; or the pseudo-Jewish view of the abolition of the present world which, however, had failed to eventuate. Actual Jewish 1st-century expectations of a transformation in this world were not understood in the late 19th or early 20th century. In this thought-world WW1 confirmed the prevailing view that the present world was falling apart. In this context, Barth insists in his commentary of Romans that the church needed a fresh world from above. (59)

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)

Bultmann sought to retrieve the real meaning of Jewish apocalyptic language—as used by the Gospel writers and Paul—by “demythologisation”. Bultmann’s “myth” combined several senses of the term, one of which was the truth-encoding images in Jewish apolcalyptic writings. He was retrieving simultaneously Strauss’ Idealism and modernist assumptions about what people can and can’t believe, and combining them in his own retrieval of Schweitzer. For many readers his buying into the modernist agenda obscures the fact that there was a grain of truth in his demythologisation—that apocalyptic imagery should not be taken literally. The question, though, is what the vivid images of Daniel 2 and 7 and later works that echo and extend them were a picture of. Recent research suggests strongly that it was political realities, but for Bultmann it was a personal spiritual reality.³ (60–61) These apocalyptic writings were about the kingdoms of this world (and the dark powers that supported them) and “the actual kingdom-establishing victory of God that would challenge, overthrow and replace them”. (61) Bultmann retained a Lutheran “two kingdoms” theology with a cleft between God and politics. Along with a dose of Idealist philosophy this rendered him blind to an interpretation that combined politics and spiritual reality, the more so as his modernism prevented any belief that dark spiritual forces could motivate political and social institutions. This modernism also rejected the actual resurrection of Jesus, leaving no room for the birth of a new creation within the old order. (61-62) Bultmann lived and preached under the Nazi government, and his favourite preaching text was 1Corinthians 7:29-31, which for him said that one should live on a different plane from political reality, expecting the impending end of the world.⁴ When Paul spoke of sin as a power acting upon human beings, Bultmann saw this as a mythologisation of the internal human struggle. (62)

Wright regards Bultmann’s readings of scripture as “exegetically inexcusable”, especially given that he was the foremost heir of the historical-critical movement of his time. To subject the scriptures themselves as historical documents but to disallow history in their subject matter was radically inconsistent. But Bultmann rejected all things Jewish, including any attempt to understand Jesus in his historical and cultural context.⁵ In this he followed Luther, Kant, Hegel and F.C. Baur. Bultmann was not interested in “the action of God in the world or the inference of God from the world.” (63)

‘Delay’ reworked: Conzelmann, Käsemann, Werner

In the mid- to late 1930s there had been hope of something new emerging in Europe, but the Nazi regime and the second World War shattered any such dream, and Bultmann and his pupils reflected their disappointment back onto the early church. As they saw it, the first generation was full of hope that God would do something radically new: they had a radical ‘verttical’ trust in God. The second generation, in their disappointment at the sacking of Jerusalem in AD 70 and then the failure of the bar-Kochba revolt in AD 135, reshaped the church in to ‘early Catholicism’.⁶ Schweitzer had even had a two-stage view. First, Jesus expected God to do something new, but went to his death to force God’s hand. Second, Jesus’ followers took on this hope—that something radical would happen in their generation, but this failed too. The only possible scriptural bases for this interpretation were John 21:22⁷ and 2Peter 3:10.⁸ But this interpretation is ahistorical: there is no sign of it in second-century writings. (63–66).

The effect of this thinking, Wright notes, was to render Jesus himself and the NT scriptures unavailable to theologians trying to consider the relationship between God and the world. Further, the idea that Jesus and his followers were disappointed that God had (allegedly) not acted reinforced the idea that God held the world at arm’s length. It also undermined the credibility of natural theology and the action of God in his world. (66)

Conclusion: The need for history

Wright’s conclusion from the survey in this chapter is that history has yet to be restored to its proper place in theologising. We urgently need to understand Jesus as a historical figure within his first-century Jewish culture, and we need to get inside the minds of his contemporaries and to understand how they perceived the world. Ironically, the “quest for the historical Jesus” was anything but historical, and the “historical-critical method” was at root ahistorical. (68)

Since the mid-18th century, on Wright’s analysis, European thought, including European Christian thought, has been increasingly Epicurean, with a modernist twist. It has separated the spheres of God and humanity in ways that are alien to first-century Jewish thinking, Bultmann in particular rejected the latter as un-modern and as antithetical to early Christianity. Barth set God over against the world. (69)

Wright asks (68)

What if we did it differently? Might it after all help us approach the questions surrounding ‘natural theology’ in new ways? Can we, after all, look at anything in the world, history included, and see it as a genuine (if broken) pointer to the new creation, and hence to a reaffirmation of the Creator himself?

Go back to notes on chapter one. Go forward to notes on chapter three.

Footnotes

1. Docetism was the belief that Jesus only seemed to be human, and that his human form was an illusion. It was rejected at the first council of Nicaea in 325. (‘Docetism’, Wikipedia) ↩
2. Wright mentions 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch in this context, and later adds Ezekiel and Daniel to the list of apocalyptic works available to first-century Jews (57). ↩
3. See e.g. A. Portier-Young, Apolcalypse against empire: Theologies of resistance in early Judaism. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2011, and Wright, The New Testament and the people of God, vol 1 (?), pp 280-286. ↩
4. Wright thinks ‘the present crisis’ (1Cor 7:26) was a largescale but short-lived famine during which his readers needed to live wisely. ↩
5. Bultmann rejected the idea that faith could in any way be based on history: see his Theology of the New testament, SCM Press, London, 1951–55, vol. 2, p127. (ch2, fn64) ↩
6. Frühkatholizismus, F.C. Baur’s label for the world of the pastoral epistles and Luke. (65) ↩
7. Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return,a what is that to you? You must follow me.” ↩
8. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. ↩