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

History and eschatology is a difficult read. It is detailed and scholarly. It assumes a knowledge of authors I have never read: David Hume, Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann and many, many others. But it is a very satisfying read, because Wright draws the rich detail together into a tapestry of ideas that takes us to the climax of history: to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Such is the book’s wealth that this review can only single out a strand that strongly spoke to me. Others have found and will find whole threads of thought that I set aside here.¹

The book is an edited version of the text of Wright’s six Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 2018. The Gifford Lectures were endowed in 1887 to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God.” Unlike many previous Gifford lecturers,² Tom Wright grasps the nettle of Natural Theology tightly, but does so to show his audience that Natural Theology as usually understood actually doesn’t stand up to inspection.

The conventional view of natural theology is captured by the adage that there are two books that lead us to God, namely the Bible and the “Book of Nature”. The adage, Wright points out, is a gross simplification of Bishop Joseph’s Analogy of Religion of 1736. Wright’s concern is that the thinking behind the adage is wrong: we cannot reason our way from nature up to God.³ We get lost on the way because this kind of natural theology circumvents Jesus and his crucifixion and resurrection.⁴

Instead, a real natural theology is based on study of the entire natural world, including humanity, and humanity includes Jesus. Jesus walked this earth about two thousand years ago, and we know about his life, his ministry, his death by crucifixion, and his counter-intuitive resurrection from the historical documents we call the Gospels. As a historian specialising in the Second Temple period in which Jesus lived, Wright brings his extensive knowledge of that period to bear on Jesus’ life to see how it was understood by contemporary Jews, some of whom became the first Christians.⁵ How this is properly done—the historical method—is a topic of chapter 3.

The idea that natural theology should include human beings feels to me like a no-brainer, but Wright, who moves in an immensely larger Christian context, needs to defend it vigorously because the humanity of Jesus has been denied by the intellectual stream that emerged from Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ work, published posthumously in the 1770s, and that stream has not completely dried up 250 years later. Reimarus was a Deist who believed in a good and wise God who could be discovered without revelation and by reason alone. He thought 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’, a quest that assumed it would disprove Christianity’s claims. Ironically, the ‘quest’ was anything but historical, and allowed interpretations that treated the Gospel events as grand metaphors or myths, a situation that persisted in Bultmann’s 1955 Gifford lectures.

At the end of his chapter 2, Wright concludes 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. Genuine historical study of relevant Jewish and early Christian material gives us a narrative of the beliefs and motivations of first-century Jews that allows the construction of 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.

We jump now to chapter 7. It begins with Luke’s (24:13-35) Emmaus Road story, where, thanks to Jesus’ telling, the two disciples suddenly come to see the cross and resurrection as the long-awaited fulfilment of Israel’s whole Scriptural narrative. Wright argues that Luke here reflects the position of the early church: they looked back to the cross and resurrection and saw in it the sudden fulfilment of a raft of ancient promises. The task of natural theology, he suggests, is to provide a Christian account of how the larger natural world might all along have been pointing to the truth of God’s kingdom, even though the signposts were broken, recognisable only in retrospect.

Wright has already (in chapter 5) described in detail two symbols that were present in much Second Temple thought: the Temple and the Sabbath. The Temple was the place where God made his presence known—in theory at least, as God had apparently not returned after his departure at the time of the exile (Ezekiel 10:18-19). Some Second Temple Jews looked forward to God’s return to the Temple, the place where heaven and earth overlapped (2 Maccabees 2:7-8).⁶ In Wright’s words, “The Temple was the place on earth where you would find yourself in heaven. The Sabbath was the moment in ordinary time when God’s new age would arrive in advance” (p166). Both see a restored creation and God’s presence on earth. They look forward to a future presence of God in the Temple and a future earth—the “age to come”— in which the conditions of the Sabbath will be eternally present (Jubilees 1:28).⁷

After the resurrection the earliest Christians realised that in Jesus God’s return had indeed been fulfilled—and that the resurrection itself declared the beginning of the Great Sabbath. The “age to come” had begun, overlapping with this “present age”, and we are living in the overlap. Human beings, made in God’s image to administer the earth on his behalf (Genesis 1:26ff), having failed in their calling, were now being restored to God’s image, manifest in Jesus, as Paul writes in Romans (8:29),⁸ 2Corinthians (3:18),⁹ and Colossians (3:9–10).¹⁰ In the last two of these Paul reminds us that this means taking up our renewed vocation.

The “present age” is full of what Wright calls “broken signposts”, the virtues which humanity is called to, but in which it has failed. Wright singles out the signposts of justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationship. We know they are important, “but we can never quite grasp of them, the way we feel we should” (p224). In retrospect we see that, broken though they were and are, they point to the resurrection and thence to the “age to come” where their potential is completely realised.

Space allows me only to trace Wright’s thoughts about the first signpost, justice. “We know that some things are fair, and some are not. Children know this without studying moral philosophy” (p226). Yet we are all willing to bend the rules. We are haunted by injustices we have perpetrated or suffered in our own lives. We complain about injustices, whether personal, national or international, and some of us take to the streets to protest—unless like Machiavelli, you think this is all an Epicurean game that you have to play. The complaints of the psalmists and the prophets remind us that injustice is not a new phenomenon. The paradox is, how can something that we know matters so much be so difficult to attain?

Wright sums up the signposts’ terrible brokenness (p235):

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.

and further (p237):

Each of the “broken signposts” seems to point only to the (literal) dead end of the ultimate broken signpost, the crucifixion. But 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. . . . (p237)

Justice was central to Israel’s prayers and 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” (pp 237–238). The resurrection enables us to see with fresh eyes. It is the climax of history.

I end this review with a considerable sense of inadequacy. I have completely neglected Wright’s insightful but devastating critique of Western culture and its antecedents and his reasoned rejection of much post-Enlightenment theology. I have given little space either to his account of how history should be conducted or to his redefinition of natural theology. And, worst perhaps, I have said nothing about his call to mission. This is an amazingly rich work. I can only recommend it or the 2018 Gifford lectures on which it is based. The series’ title is Discerning the Dawn: History, Eschatology and New Creation. The titles of the eight lectures are matched by the book’s chapter titles.

Postscript

I didn’t read any other reviews of Wright’s History and Eschatology until I had written my own. There are plenty of others, because I am writing four or five years after the book’s publication in 2019, thanks to the fact that a kind friend presented me with a copy of the book last year (or was it 2022?). I had known about the lecture series, but somehow the book’s existence had escaped me.

A Google search found me eight reviews, and I give their URLs below. All of them, it turns out, are quite different from mine, as I homed in on the theology and didn’t summarise the volume. They are also different from each other, so worth reading. All are positive, but some are at the same time critical in various ways. One is from a secular source, the Los Angeles Review of Books, written by Brad East. One is by an amateur theologian, Thomas Creedy. The other six are by north American academic specialists in theology or Biblical studies, and I will resist the temptation to review their reviews! They are Jo-Ann Badley, Jason Byassee, Russell Morton, Benjamin C. F. Shaw, Elizabeth Stice and David VanDrunen.

Footnotes

1. For more on the book’s content, see my notes. They begin here. I have hesitated to put them on line, but I hope they might serve as an advertisement for the book. ↩
2. The Gifford Lectureships are held at the Scottish Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and St. Andrews, and were established under the will of Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887). The lectures have taken place almost yearly in various formats since 1888. From the beginning, the terms of the lectures have been interpreted very broadly, with “natural” has perhaps the operative word, rather then “theology” or “God”. The selection of a New Testament scholar, Tom Wright, as Gifford lecturer seems a happy departure from the norm. ↩
3. Wright provides a more formal definition of natural theology: it seeks to “arrive at truths about God by observation of, and inference from, features of the world about us” (p29). ↩
4. A set of three posts in this blog (the first one is here) concern Alister McGrath’s book Enriching our vision of reality. Note that McGrath deliberately turns natural theology upside down by arguing from faith in God and his revelation to the findings of the nature sciences, not vice versa. ↩
5. Wright has written extensively about this, especially in the first three volumes of the series Christian origins and the question of God (vol 1: The New Testment and the people of God, 1992; vol 2: Jesus and the victory of God, 1996; vol. 3: The resurrection of the Son of God, 2003) and the more popularly oriented The day the revolution began (2017). ↩
6. When Jeremiah heard of this, he reproved them: “The place is to remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows them mercy. Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud will be seen, just as they appeared in the time of Moses and of Solomon when he prayed that the place might be greatly sanctified.” ↩
7. And the angel of the presence who went before the camp of Israel took the tables of the divisions of the years -from the time of the creation- of the law and of the testimony of the weeks of the jubilees, according to the individual years, according to all the number of the jubilees according, to the individual years, from the day of the new creation when the heavens and the earth shall be renewed and all their creation according to the powers of the heaven, and according to all the creation of the earth, until the sanctuary of the Lord shall be made in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, and all the luminaries be renewed for healing and for peace and for blessing for all the elect of Israel, and that thus it may be from that day and unto all the days of the earth. ↩
8. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. ↩
9. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. ↩
10. Do not lie to each other,a since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self,a which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. ↩