History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology is the published version of N.T. Wright’s 2018 Gifford Lectures. Wright’s contribution is bold, adventurously written, and provocative. He asserts that natural theology has no compelling reason to abstain from considering the content of Christian revelation. Given that Christian revelation is intrinsically historical—that is, it has to do with God’s communicative action in actual history through Jesus of Nazareth—“Jesus and the New Testament ought by rights to be included as possible sources for the task of ‘natural theology’” (xiii). For Wright, reconsidering the relationship between nature and the supernatural in the light of Second Temple Jewish beliefs—the context of the New Testament—provides theological resources for an alternative to dead-end Enlightenment natural theologies.
Wright begins by identifying a malignancy in the Enlightenment cultural matrix from whence Lord Gifford’s lectures emerged—Epicureanism redivivus (revived). Ancient Epicureanism affirmed that religious traditions were projections meant to keep social order (a primitive anticipation of Karl Marx’s critique of religion). Epicureans held that the world is all that is, was, or will be, and that it unfolds without higher transcendent purpose (see p. 8 and throughout). Since the Enlightenment, Wright argues, “the resurgence of Epicureanism in the modern West has been the major contextualising factor, culturally as well as philosophically, within which the great questions [of natural theology] have been posed and answers given” (36).
In Wright’s estimation, the collateral damage from reviving Epicureanism is formidable, poisoning all attempts to think well about history and eschatology (and apocalypticism). In chapter 2 Wright surveys the history of modern biblical criticism from D.F. Strauss, through Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Ernst Käsemann. Such diverse figures, despite their significant differences, all accepted Epicureanism’s sharp bifurcation between heaven and earth and ruled the supernatural dimensions of the witness of the New Testament out of court prejudicially.
In chapters 3–4 Wright canvasses and critically interrogates neo-Epicurean notions of history and eschatology and explains their fatal problems. In brief, they are naive about the perspectival nature of all inquiry and have allowed Enlightenment Epicureanism, deism, and narcissism to dictate the terms and results of supposedly neutral historical inquiry.
In chapters 5–6 Wright engages texts from Genesis, the Psalms, the Prophets, and various New Testament texts to argue that Second Temple Judaism’s integration of nature and the supernatural, in its theology of the temple as microcosmos and Sabbath as micro-eschaton (that is, an advance participation in final judgment and redemption) in particular, provides a needed resource for rejoining nature and supernature, creation and history, earth and heaven. Within such texts, the “broken signposts” of creation point to and are fulfilled in the redemptive work of God through Jesus’ death on the cross and in his resurrection, which revalorizes creation.
Chapter 7, then, examines and explains how Jesus Christ’s ministry and mission recontextualizes the broken signposts of justice, beauty, freedom, truth, power, spirituality, and relationships, making possible to a natural theology of weakness instead of the self-assured and self-important Faustian project of post-Enlightenment natural theologies. Finally, in chapter 8, Wright explains how his approach to natural theology is a vocational mandate to participate in the renovation of creation incipiently present through Christ’s work.
Wright offers daring judgments on a dizzying array of persons, events, and intellectual movements in History and Eschatology. While most of the book is dedicated to discussing Second Temple Judaism and the Enlightenment and its wake, he strikes glancing blows against the theological reflection and scriptural engagement of the early church (see, e.g., 32, 105, 122, 265), and classical theism (16, 120–21) along the way. Historians and theologians who have dedicated their lives’ work to the various periods and figures he discusses will undoubtedly find problems in his broad narrations and sometimes perfunctory judgments.
Wright’s approach to natural theology is idiosyncratic. He identifies real problems with modern notions of natural theology that ostensibly, and sometimes explicitly, attempt to build bridges, or towers perhaps, to God through Pelagian ingenuity. Premodern natural theologies do not suffer from such flaws, though. That is not to say such premodern thought-forms are without problems completely, but it is not only possible to discern that achievements and advances have taken place in the history of Christian reflection; it is desirable and even imperative to do so if one believes, as Wright does, that history is only intelligible with reference to the providential work of God.
Wright proposes his contribution to natural theology from within an “epistemology of love,” which allows the objects of historical inquiry to be themselves, apart from one’s control (see throughout but especially 37–39, 84, 155, 190). Such a perspective on knowing is sorely needed today. Completely passionless inquiry is both impossible and undesirable. Wright’s own treatment of various historical periods and figures mentioned exhibits just how difficult such an epistemology is in practice, even for someone so learned as he.
One operating within a full-fledged epistemology of love might find more of value in premodern Christian theological reflection than Wright does. Such a one might even discern more of value in post-Enlightenment thinking than he detects. Both Ben F. Meyer and especially Bernard Lonergan, figures to whose authority Wright appeals in defense of his notion of critical realism, were able to speak better of and make more fruitful use of ideas and movements, both traditional and modern, for which Wright has little time.
Wright presents his novel natural theology History and Eschatology, as an alternative to the novelty—and arrogance—of Enlightenment-era natural theologies, biblical criticism, and notions of history and eschatology. But premodern Christians had useful and rich approaches to natural theology prior to the recent “discoveries” in biblical criticism from which Wright has learned and to which he continues to contribute. A critical, and Christian, realist approach to history requires not only that Christians identify and critique inadequacies in Christian tradition but also that they expect, identify, and appropriate achievements in ancient Christian thought and praxis. Wright’s work could have benefitted from less novelty and more epistemological love for such premodern reflection.
Joseph K. Gordon is professor of theology at Johnson University.
Joseph K. Gordon
Date Of Review:
January 31, 2022