N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope": The Pirate Review, Day 3
I've added a countdown widget to the official U.S. release of Surprised by Hope, not so much for my readers' edification, but as a personal guage for how much longer I have to sleep (if you can call it that) with my trusty .38 Special under my pillow.
Chapters 3 and 4 summarize Wright's basic argument for the historicity of the biblical Easter narratives. It is essentially a summary of the entirety of The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright's masterful but super-sized scholarly treatment of the issue.
I'm not going to get too in-depth about most of the points in these chapters. Wright delivered a lecture at the Farday Institute for Science and Religion in May of last year where all of main points of these two chapters are discussed. You can listen to the lecture here. Also, Scot McKnight has summarized the main arguments of these chapters at Jesus Creed. Check them out here and here.
What I want to focus on is Wright's discussion toward the end of Chapter 4. As much as I admire Scot McKnight and have loved his review series of the book at Jesus Creed, he has unfortunately made no mention of this critical discussion, leaving it a hostage to fortune with the statement: "Tom gives some standard alternative explanations and then launches into a little bit about historiography (and in this book this section stands out as difficult to follow)."
Well, yes, it is a bit difficult to follow (and I would disagree also that it concerns historiography; I think it's more a discussion of epistemology), but I don't think that distracts from its central significance, not only for the book but for Christian aplogetics in general. Yes, it is a bit dense and philosophically nuanced, but if we can understand what Wright is getting at here, it would, I think, enhance our view of God, Jesus, the Bible, faith, etc., at the worldview-level.
The issue can be summarized like this. Wright's arguments for the historicity of the resurrection, as fully detailed in The Resurrection of the Son of God and summarized in these chapters, are almost too compelling to leave any doubt that "Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead and buried, really was raised to life on the third day with a renewed body, a new kind of physical body which left an empty tomb behind it because it had 'used up' the material of Jesus' original body, and which possessed new properties which nobody had expected or imagined but which generated significant mutations in the thinking of those who encountered it." There is simply no better, reasonable explanation for the early Christians' use of the term "resurrection" to describe this event (as that term was understood in that historical setting), the 7 astounding modifications of the classic Jewish belief in resurrection by the earliest Christians (and Wright delineates these in Chapter 4), and the belief by those early Christians that a man who had been executed by the Roman authorities was, in fact, the Jewish Messiah. For 2,000 years, alternative explanations have been scrutinized and found wanting, if not downright ridiculous.
But yet, there are millions who, when confronted with this evidence, would still deny that the resurrection as an event was historical fact. The classic Christian explanations for this phenomenon have involved "hardness of heart" themes, unless one has the Spirit they will be unable to believe that "He is Risen," and such. That is true at a doctrinal/dogmatic level, but Wright's discussion at the end of Chapter 4 seeks to unpack the doctrine. He looks, in brilliant detail, at why, when dealing with the resurrection, some come to believe and others do not.
Wright frames the issue like this:
"But this is where I want to heed carefully the warnings of those theologians who have cautioned against any attempt to stand on the ground of rationalism and to attempt to 'prove,' in some 'mathematical' fashion, something which, if it happened, ought itself to be regarded as the center not only of history but also of epistemology, not only of what we know but of how we know it. I do not claim, in other words, that I have hereby 'proved' the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint. I am offering, rather, a historical challenge to other explanations, and to the worldviews within which they gain their meaning. Precisely because at this point we are faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in the midst of the epistemological ocean as yet uncolonized by any of the warring continents. Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding.
...
[There is an] element in 'knowing,' a puzzling area beyond science (which 'knows' that which it can in principle repeat in a laboratory) and the kind of 'history' which claims to 'know' that which makes sense by analogy with our own experiences. Sometimes human beings--individuals or communities--are confronted with something which they must either reject outright or which, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.
...
We could cope--the world could cope--with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right within the middle of the old one."
So what is this new way of knowing within which one can easily accept the mountain of evidence in favor of the historicity of the resurrection, but without which one is forced, if they are honest, to say "I don't have a good explanation for what happened, but I choose to maintain my (a priori) belief that dead people don't rise and therefore conclude that something else must have happened, even though we can't tell what it was"?
Wright works up to the answer.
First, there is an epstemology of faith, exemplified by the story of "Doubting Thomas" in John 20. Thomas, the rationalist, has decided not to believe in the resurrection unless he can "see and touch" the Risen Lord, who then appears and invites Thomas to do just that, upon which Thomas' rationalistic worldview is shattered and, refusing the Lord's invitation, he declares, "My Lord and my God."
"What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief which rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply...a belief which inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which like all modes of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who has promised to put all things to rights at the last, the God who (as the sharp point where these two come together) has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving evidence which demands an explanation...In so far as I understand scientific method, when something turns up which doesn't fit the paradigm you're working with, one option at least, perhaps when all others have failed, is to change the paradigm--not to exclude everything you've known to that point, but to include it within a larger whole. That is, if you like, the Thomas challenge."
Wright then points to a second epistemological category, exemplified by Pauline theology, an epistemology of hope. For obvious reasons, he does not yet develop that area (remember the title of the book), but uses it as a springboard to jump into the climactic area of these two chapters:
"All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending but including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love..."
...which Wright goes on to attempt to describe (I don't use the word "define" because I think it simply doesn't make sense within this category). If you decide to grapple with a single issue in the entire book, if you decide to skim through the book but stop and ponder and analyze two or three paragraphs, please, please ponder and analyze these (at pp.84-86) and then go back and rethink everything you believe, including Christianity, in light of it:
"Here I go back to Wittgenstein...for a famous and haunting aphorism: 'It is love that believes the resurrection.' 'Simon, son of John,' says Jesus, 'do you love me?' There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what the world reality consists of. The reality which is the resurrection cannot simply be 'known' from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that's the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world which is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing which involves us in new ways, an epistemology which draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of quasi-scientific research, but that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is 'love,' in the full Johannine sense of agape.
...
The sceptic will at once suggest that this is a way of collapsing the truth of Easter once more into mere subjectivism. Not so. Just because it takes agape to believe the resurrection, that doesn't mean that all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is love we are talking about, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the point at which much moder epistemology breaks down. The sterile antithesis of 'objective' and 'subjective'...is overcome by the epistemology of love which is called into being as the necessary mode of knowing for those who will live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't.
...
That is why...we cannot use a supposedly 'objective' historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun has risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn't look like it did last night, and that would-be 'normal' explanations for this won't do. Maybe, we think after the historical argument have done their work, maybe morning has come and the whole world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won't rely on the candles any more, not because we don't believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home."
And finally...
"All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love."
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
Chapters 3 & 4
Early Christian Hope in its Historical Setting
and
The Strange Story of Easter
Chapters 3 and 4 summarize Wright's basic argument for the historicity of the biblical Easter narratives. It is essentially a summary of the entirety of The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright's masterful but super-sized scholarly treatment of the issue.
I'm not going to get too in-depth about most of the points in these chapters. Wright delivered a lecture at the Farday Institute for Science and Religion in May of last year where all of main points of these two chapters are discussed. You can listen to the lecture here. Also, Scot McKnight has summarized the main arguments of these chapters at Jesus Creed. Check them out here and here.
What I want to focus on is Wright's discussion toward the end of Chapter 4. As much as I admire Scot McKnight and have loved his review series of the book at Jesus Creed, he has unfortunately made no mention of this critical discussion, leaving it a hostage to fortune with the statement: "Tom gives some standard alternative explanations and then launches into a little bit about historiography (and in this book this section stands out as difficult to follow)."
Well, yes, it is a bit difficult to follow (and I would disagree also that it concerns historiography; I think it's more a discussion of epistemology), but I don't think that distracts from its central significance, not only for the book but for Christian aplogetics in general. Yes, it is a bit dense and philosophically nuanced, but if we can understand what Wright is getting at here, it would, I think, enhance our view of God, Jesus, the Bible, faith, etc., at the worldview-level.
The issue can be summarized like this. Wright's arguments for the historicity of the resurrection, as fully detailed in The Resurrection of the Son of God and summarized in these chapters, are almost too compelling to leave any doubt that "Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead and buried, really was raised to life on the third day with a renewed body, a new kind of physical body which left an empty tomb behind it because it had 'used up' the material of Jesus' original body, and which possessed new properties which nobody had expected or imagined but which generated significant mutations in the thinking of those who encountered it." There is simply no better, reasonable explanation for the early Christians' use of the term "resurrection" to describe this event (as that term was understood in that historical setting), the 7 astounding modifications of the classic Jewish belief in resurrection by the earliest Christians (and Wright delineates these in Chapter 4), and the belief by those early Christians that a man who had been executed by the Roman authorities was, in fact, the Jewish Messiah. For 2,000 years, alternative explanations have been scrutinized and found wanting, if not downright ridiculous.
But yet, there are millions who, when confronted with this evidence, would still deny that the resurrection as an event was historical fact. The classic Christian explanations for this phenomenon have involved "hardness of heart" themes, unless one has the Spirit they will be unable to believe that "He is Risen," and such. That is true at a doctrinal/dogmatic level, but Wright's discussion at the end of Chapter 4 seeks to unpack the doctrine. He looks, in brilliant detail, at why, when dealing with the resurrection, some come to believe and others do not.
Wright frames the issue like this:
"But this is where I want to heed carefully the warnings of those theologians who have cautioned against any attempt to stand on the ground of rationalism and to attempt to 'prove,' in some 'mathematical' fashion, something which, if it happened, ought itself to be regarded as the center not only of history but also of epistemology, not only of what we know but of how we know it. I do not claim, in other words, that I have hereby 'proved' the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint. I am offering, rather, a historical challenge to other explanations, and to the worldviews within which they gain their meaning. Precisely because at this point we are faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in the midst of the epistemological ocean as yet uncolonized by any of the warring continents. Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding.
...
[There is an] element in 'knowing,' a puzzling area beyond science (which 'knows' that which it can in principle repeat in a laboratory) and the kind of 'history' which claims to 'know' that which makes sense by analogy with our own experiences. Sometimes human beings--individuals or communities--are confronted with something which they must either reject outright or which, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.
...
We could cope--the world could cope--with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right within the middle of the old one."
So what is this new way of knowing within which one can easily accept the mountain of evidence in favor of the historicity of the resurrection, but without which one is forced, if they are honest, to say "I don't have a good explanation for what happened, but I choose to maintain my (a priori) belief that dead people don't rise and therefore conclude that something else must have happened, even though we can't tell what it was"?
Wright works up to the answer.
First, there is an epstemology of faith, exemplified by the story of "Doubting Thomas" in John 20. Thomas, the rationalist, has decided not to believe in the resurrection unless he can "see and touch" the Risen Lord, who then appears and invites Thomas to do just that, upon which Thomas' rationalistic worldview is shattered and, refusing the Lord's invitation, he declares, "My Lord and my God."
"What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief which rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply...a belief which inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which like all modes of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who has promised to put all things to rights at the last, the God who (as the sharp point where these two come together) has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving evidence which demands an explanation...In so far as I understand scientific method, when something turns up which doesn't fit the paradigm you're working with, one option at least, perhaps when all others have failed, is to change the paradigm--not to exclude everything you've known to that point, but to include it within a larger whole. That is, if you like, the Thomas challenge."
Wright then points to a second epistemological category, exemplified by Pauline theology, an epistemology of hope. For obvious reasons, he does not yet develop that area (remember the title of the book), but uses it as a springboard to jump into the climactic area of these two chapters:
"All of which brings us to Peter. Epistemologies of faith and hope, both transcending but including historical and scientific knowing, point on to an epistemology of love..."
...which Wright goes on to attempt to describe (I don't use the word "define" because I think it simply doesn't make sense within this category). If you decide to grapple with a single issue in the entire book, if you decide to skim through the book but stop and ponder and analyze two or three paragraphs, please, please ponder and analyze these (at pp.84-86) and then go back and rethink everything you believe, including Christianity, in light of it:
"Here I go back to Wittgenstein...for a famous and haunting aphorism: 'It is love that believes the resurrection.' 'Simon, son of John,' says Jesus, 'do you love me?' There is a whole world in that question, a world of personal invitation and challenge, of the remaking of a human being after disloyalty and disaster, of the refashioning of epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the new ontology, the question of what the world reality consists of. The reality which is the resurrection cannot simply be 'known' from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that's the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world which is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing which involves us in new ways, an epistemology which draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of quasi-scientific research, but that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is 'love,' in the full Johannine sense of agape.
...
The sceptic will at once suggest that this is a way of collapsing the truth of Easter once more into mere subjectivism. Not so. Just because it takes agape to believe the resurrection, that doesn't mean that all that happened was that Peter and the others felt their hearts strangely warmed. Precisely because it is love we are talking about, it must have a correlative reality in the world outside the lover. Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the point at which much moder epistemology breaks down. The sterile antithesis of 'objective' and 'subjective'...is overcome by the epistemology of love which is called into being as the necessary mode of knowing for those who will live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't.
...
That is why...we cannot use a supposedly 'objective' historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun has risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn't look like it did last night, and that would-be 'normal' explanations for this won't do. Maybe, we think after the historical argument have done their work, maybe morning has come and the whole world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won't rely on the candles any more, not because we don't believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home."
And finally...
"All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love."
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
0 Comments:
Post a Comment