History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology

by N. T. Wright

Publisher:

Baylor University Press

, 2019

Overview

How can we know about God? That question increasingly bothered scientists and philosophers in the modern period as they chipped away at previously imagined “certainties.” They refused to take on trust the “special revelation” of the Christian Bible, trying instead to argue up to God from the “natural” world. That is the theme of the Gifford Lectures, inaugurated over 130 years ago.

This natural theology has usually bracketed out the Bible and Jesus—and with them, usually, the scholars who study them.

History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology represents the first Gifford delivered by a New Testament scholar since Rudolf Bultmann in 1955. Against Bultmann’s dehistoricized approach, N. T. Wright argues that, since the philosophical and cultural movements that generated the natural theology debates also treated Jesus as a genuine human being—part of the “natural world”—there is no reason the historical Jesus should be off-limits. What would happen if we brought him back into the discussion? What, in particular, might “history” and “eschatology” really mean? And what might that say about “knowledge” itself?

This lively and wide-ranging discussion invites us to see Jesus himself in a different light by better acquainting ourselves with the first-century Jewish world. Genuine historical study challenges not only what we thought we knew but how we know it. The crucifixion of the subsequently resurrected Jesus, as solid an event as any in the “natural” world, turns out to meet, in unexpected and suggestive ways, the puzzles of the ultimate questions asked by every culture. At the same time, these events open up vistas of the eschatological promise held out to the entire natural order. The result is a larger vision, both of "natural theology" and of Jesus himself, than either the academy or the church has normally expected.

Key Features

• Invites readers to see Jesus himself in a different light by better acquainting ourselves with the first-century Jewish world
• Provides a lively and wide-ranging discussion
• Represents the first Gifford lectures delivered by a New Testament scholar since Rudolf Bultmann in 1955

Contents

Part One: Natural Theology in Its Historical Context

• 1. The Fallen Shrine: Lisbon 1755 and the Triumph of Epicureanism
• 2. The Questioned Book: Critical Scholarship and the Gospels

Part Two: History, Eschatology and Apocalyptic

• 3. The Shifting Sand: The Meanings of ‘History’
• 4. The End of the World?: Eschatology and Apocalyptic in Historical Perspective

Part Three: Jesus and Easter in the Jewish World

• 5. The Stone the Builders Rejected: Jesus, the Temple and the Kingdom
• 6. The New Creation: Resurrection and Epistemology

Part Four: The Peril and Promise of Natural Theology

• 7. Broken Signposts?: New Answers to the Right Questions
• 8. The Waiting Chalice: Natural Theology and the Missio Dei

Praise for History and Eschatology

Bible scholars, whether those that specialize in the Old or New Testament, theologians, church historians, pastors, knowingly or not, trade in the relationship of God to history. The Christian claim is that God has acted in creation in real events and persons both to reveal who God is and to redeem humans. Scholarship, especially since the Enlightenment, has distorted that relationship of God to history by reductionism, historicism and a series of blinkering false dichotomies. In History and Eschatology N. T. Wright turns to the great theme of the Gifford Lectures to respond to the game of history by proposing nothing less than an epistemology of love.

—Scot McKnight, Julius R. Mantey Chair of New Testament, Northern Seminary

This is Tom Wright at his best—an exegete, theologian, churchman, and public intellectual rolled into one. A creative and arresting contribution to ‘natural theology,’ this book argues for the plausibility of the Christian vision of the relation between God and the world by taking seriously the history of Jesus Christ, especially the promise contained in his resurrection of the new creation: the creation become God's and humans' home.

—Miroslav Volf, Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology and Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, Yale University

Product Details

• Title: History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology
• Author: N. T. Wright
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2019
• Pages: 365
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Resource ID: LLS:HSTSCHTLGYNTRTH
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-06-13T17:48:30Z

About N. T. Wright

Nicholas Thomas “Tom” Wright (1948–) is a New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian, and Anglican bishop and currently Research Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary's College in the University of St Andrews and Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Christianity Today named him one of today's top theologians. 

Wright was born in Morpeth, Northumberland, and recounts an awareness of God's presence from a young age—and that relationship with God ever since is reflected in his life and work. He's a prolific author; one of his most popular books, Surprised by Hope, frames the resurrection of the dead as the appropriate hope for all believers rather than an overemphasis on just "going to heaven when you die." He's among the leading theologians in the New Perspective on Paul debate. Wright has several honorary doctoral degrees, and in 2014, the British Academy awarded him the Burkitt Medal "in recognition of special service to biblical studies." In 2015, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Wright served as chaplain at Cambridge from 1978 to 1981, then as assistant professor of New Testament language and literature at McGill University in Montreal. Before becoming a chaplain, tutor, lecturer, and fellow at Oxford in 1986, Wright served as dean of Lichfield Cathedral, canon theologian of Westminster Abbey, and the bishop of Durham from 2003–10. In addition to the entire New Testament for Everyone Series, some of N. T. Wright's books include The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians, Who Was Jesus, The New Testament and the People of God, God and the Pandemic, Evil and the Justice of God, Surprised by Hope, and Simply Christian. He coauthored Jesus the Final Days with Craig A. Evans.