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History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology (The 2018 Gifford Lectures)

N.T. Wright
Baylor University Press, 365 pages
Reviewed by Donald K. McKim

The Gifford Lectures, delivered in four Scottish universities, is one of the most prestigious lecture series in the world. The lectures were established through the will of Adam Gifford in 1887 and are to deal with “natural theology.” How can God be known apart from the special revelation associated with the Christian Bible? Lecturers have usually been philosophers and theologians who have bracketed out the Scriptures and Jesus to explore avenues of the knowledge of God that depend on other sources, or to argue up to God from the natural world.

The 2018 Gifford Lecturer was N.T. Wright. He was the first New Testament scholar to be a lecturer since Rudolf Bultmann spoke on history and eschatology in 1954-1955.

The subtitle of Wright’s book of lectures is “Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology.” Wright argues that the Bible – and Jesus – belong to nature and to history, an insight the development of critical historical studies has made clear. Thus, the Bible and Jesus should be “allowed back into the conversation” about natural theology. “History, in other words, matters,” says Wright, “and thus Jesus and the New Testament ought by rights to be included as possible sources for the task of ‘natural theology.’”  

Wright’s interesting chapters are wide-ranging, exploring issues of “History, Eschatology and Apocalyptic” in two chapters; then “Jesus and Easter in the Jewish World” in two chapters; leading to his final two chapters considering “The Peril and Promise of Natural Theology.” 

Wright examines major movements and figures who have shaped modern views of history and knowledge into a kind of “modern variation of ancient Epicureanism.” He counters these by presenting Jesus who has shown an “epistemology of love” and a “further depth of love-knowledge.” Jesus in his resurrection “opens up a vision of new creation which precisely overlaps with, and radically transforms, the present creation — as, according to the story, Jesus’ dead body was itself transformed.” The epistemology of love means a love that is “the delighted affirmation of the otherness of that which is known,” made most visible in Jesus’ suffering death on the cross. 

In the Easter events, love responds to the “divine declaration” and “our sense of being at home in the present creation is reaffirmed as God rescues and remakes the world rather than abolishing it.” The new creation has arrived in Jesus’ resurrection, which is the redemptive transformation of the old world.

The signposts we look to in life – justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality and relationships – are “broken signposts” as we try to live through them. But now, in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God and his resurrection, the signposts can be read backwards in light of Jesus’ suffering love (a “natural theology of weakness”) and resurrection. The result is that this “early Christian new-creational eschatology, rooted in the actual events concerning Jesus must issue in the flesh-and-blood mission Dei” and in “a celebration of the coming eschaton.” This is a “radically redefined, ‘natural theology’” — the dawn of the new creation, “the ultimate reality in the world is the self-giving God revealed in Jesus.” 

This book is heavy reading. But it opens new visions and new hope!

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