The Reality of God and Historical Method

Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright

Samuel V. Adams

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780830849147
• eBook ISBN: 9780830899500
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

After a flurry of heated debates in the mid-twentieth century over the relationship between faith and history, the dust seems to have settled. The parties have long since dispersed into their separate camps. The positions are entrenched and loyalties are staked out.

This New Explorations in Theology volume is a deliberate attempt to kick up the dust again, but this time as a constructive development of what is now being called "apocalyptic theology." Samuel Adams argues that any historiography interested in contributing to theological knowledge must take into consideration, at a methodological level, the reality of God that has invaded history in Jesus Christ. He explores this idea in critical dialogue with the writings of New Testament historian and theologian N. T. Wright, whose work has significantly shaped the current conversation on this problem.

The Reality of God and Historical Method is a fresh, bold, and interdisciplinary exploration of the question: How is it possible to say that a particular historical person is the reconciliation of the world?

Featuring new monographs with cutting-edge research, New Explorations in Theology provides a platform for constructive, creative work in the areas of systematic, historical, philosophical, biblical, and practical theology.

1

History and Theology According to the Historian

N. T. WRIGHT’S HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD

IN ONE SECTION OF N. T. WRIGHT’S Jesus and the Victory of God, the repetition of the phrase serious history1 signals one of the underlying concerns of Wright’s entire project, a project that aims at restoring the relationship between Christian theology and methodologically rigorous historical scholarship. This concern for renewed attention to the work of historians for the sake of theological discourse signals a renewed confidence in the results of historical scholarship to both encourage and correct orthodox Christian faith. This occurs through a more nuanced and careful understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and the historical events that gave rise to the Christian movement.

The Christian is committed to the belief that certain things are true about the past. . . . This belief will drive the Christian to history, as a hypothesis drives the scientist to the laboratory. . . . The appeal to history with which the Enlightenment challenged the dogmatic theology of the eighteenth century and after is one which can and must be taken on board within the mainline Christian theological worldview.2

Here Wright makes two points that need to be foregrounded before going further. First, his entire project is premised upon the commitment of the Christian faith to the reality of the events to which it refers. This commitment, however, leaves the description—both historical and theological—open to be informed and corrected by a proper historical method.3 Second, the critical turn to rigorous history during the Enlightenment, while seemingly detrimental to faith, is nevertheless a necessary development if the first point is to be taken to be axiomatic.

In light of these two points, Wright’s project develops within his own telling of the history of the relationship between theological and biblical scholarship as it has been shaped by historical forces, whether political, philosophical or theological. His account is at once both a declension narrative and a hopeful, programmatic call for a renewed commitment to serious history. In short, the Enlightenment’s historical project rejected the a priori of faith because, in the eyes of the enlightened, it skewed the results of historical investigation away from that which could be known as fact. It did this unaware that it was making just as questionable assumptions under the guise of freedom and objectivity. Yet even as it imported its own problematic set of assumptions, the Enlightenment nevertheless provided an important turn to the significance of scientific historical investigation and the importance of the historical question for the Christian faith. This is a lesson that the church is still struggling to learn. Without history, and the corrective that the discipline provides, “there is no check on Christianity’s propensity to remake Jesus, never mind the Christian god, in its own image.”4 The historian stands as an important point of contact between the past events that make up the source of Christianity’s confessions and the theologian’s efforts to articulate the significance of those events for contexts that present themselves ever anew.

In NTPG Wright identifies three movements within the history of Western culture that transformed the way the New Testament is read. These three historical movements are the following: (1) pre-Enlightenment: precritical reading; (2) Enlightenment/modernity: historical and theological reading; and (3) postmodernity: postmodern reading.5 This chapter will begin by examining the way in which Wright depicts the dynamic relationship between history and theology as it undergoes significant philosophical, theological and political pressures during each of these three periods, and how this history has come to determine the place of history vis-à-vis theology today.6 Moving from Wright’s narrative to his constructive proposal, I will focus on the history/theology relationship that is corrected by his account of “critical realism” (CR). This means looking for the way he articulates the problems relating history and theology from the perspective of his constructive, critically realist proposal. My articulation of Wright’s method will largely be based upon a reading of his account of the various quests for the historical Jesus in JVG, and his methodological reflections in the first two parts of NTPG.

The thesis of this chapter is that Wright’s methodological proposals are specifically designed to reconcile theology and history, and to do so in such a way that their reconciliation is philosophically justified according to a particular epistemological theory (CR). Wright’s version of CR is designed to answer the problem of history and theology, but in doing so he leaves the ontological and metaphysical questions unanswered. Yet it is just these questions that need to be addressed in order for Wright’s CR to be true to the unique objects of both history and theology. In support of this thesis, the broad task of this chapter will be to describe (1) the threefold historical context in which Wright has set this return to the historian’s task, (2) Wright’s specific critique of this context in his constructive account of CR and (3) an examination of the questions that his critical realist proposal raises for a continued program of reconciliation between history and theology.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

From the Precritical Period to the Reformation

Wright bases his programmatic retrieval of the discipline of history for theology and biblical studies in a narrative that begins with the Reformation. When reading Wright’s work it is hard to find an ecclesial situation or historical moment when things were exactly right. Yet if he is telling a declension narrative, it is one that has its high point in the simple, pre-Enlightenment assumption that the Bible reports actual occurrences and that the veracity of its stories are what we would consider today to be “historical.” The Bible was assumed to be speaking of real events. This is not to say that this assumption is without its own problems, only that the assumption that Christian belief is inextricably bound together with beliefs about historical events is the right assumption to have. Nevertheless, prior to the critical movements of the Enlightenment, the situation of Christians vis-à-vis history was such that it could “today be criticized on (at least) three grounds . . . : it fails to take the text seriously historically, it fails to integrate it into the theology of the New Testament as a whole, and it is insufficiently critical of its own presuppositions and standpoint.”7 Without the safeguards of a proper historical discipline, these criticisms come to characterize Wright’s declension narrative. In JVG, Wright tells the story of modern historical Jesus studies by beginning with the pre-Enlightenment, precritical context of the sixteenth-century Reformers. What particular shift, in Wright’s view, did the Reformation effect that might signal a declension away from a more healthy—if only intuitive—union of theology and history?

Pro me. During the Reformation, as Wright tells it, a significant shift occurred as doctrines became centered around the question of benefits pro me,8 or how the teachings of the Christian church were soteriologically efficacious within the current situation of the individual Christian living in Europe.9 This meant that the narrative contexts in which the Christian teachings made sense were discarded in favor of more propositional formulations that could be articulated in a variety of confessions with certainty and clarity. In the practical use of the Bible, this looked like a favoring of the more theologically oriented epistles over the more narrative-based Gospels.10 While this benefitted the need for doctrinal clarity in the face of ecclesial abuse, the negative result was that the stories that made sense of the doctrines and in which they found their proper horizon of meaning were lost precisely as the crucial hermeneutical context for the teaching of the church. Jesus’ death and resurrection made sense according to the demands of a newly reinvigorated personal soteriology, yet the stories that made up the bulk of the Gospels, that made sense “historically” of why Jesus was crucified (i.e., social, cultural, political and economic reasons), were seen to be of lesser importance. Thus, the ecclesiological and political break with Rome can be seen to be analogous to the theological movement away from the historical particularity of Jesus and its significance for the pressing questions of the day.11 According to this narrative, we could say that the doctrinal controversies that made up the Reformation took the historical basis of the Christian faith for granted, focusing instead on the sources of the tradition, the texts themselves, as the basis of the propositional content of Christian theology. The Bible itself came to replace the historical events to which the Bible bore witness.

For Wright this is all quite nicely displayed in Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) dictum, Hoc est Christum cognoscere, beneficia eius cognoscere: to know Christ is to know his benefits. After quoting the dictum in JVG, Wright quotes Melanchthon’s following question: “Unless one knows why Christ took upon himself human flesh and was crucified what advantage would accrue from having learned his life’s history?”12 In NTPG and JVG, the pro me of the gospel is identified with the benefits of Christ that Melanchthon prioritizes, and Wright interprets these benefits against the historical question of Jesus. Melanchthon’s dictum stands for this rupture between Christology and the historical Jesus. In the context of politically charged theological disputes, in which rupture and discontinuity were both threat and possibility, the Reformation, on the side of discontinuity, set the stage theologically (and politically) for the major philosophical shifts that were to come with the Enlightenment. According to Wright, by prioritizing doctrines over history according to the criterion of pro me, the Reformers could, in principle, ignore the historical question and instead settle theological disputes in abstract, conceptual terms. Their concern to break ecclesially and politically with the medieval church in favor of continuity with Christ and the apostles by faith came with a similar break with the history of Jesus, the first-century Jew. “Continuity with Christ meant sitting loose to the actuality of Jesus, to his Jewishness, to his own aims and objectives.”13 The Jesus of history could easily be transposed into the abstract, conceptual Christ. By opening this door, the Reformers made it possible for theology, in its movement forward from the Reformation into the crucible of the Enlightenment, to adapt to a variety of new historical claims. This in turn would give theologians an increased freedom to articulate theological claims regardless of changing historical understanding.

History and doctrine. In Wright’s account, this “divorce” between history and doctrine became a key moment in the history of theological development. Politically, the question of authority was of such significance during the Reformation that theological innovations surrounding the source of religious authority determined the rise and fall of cities, states and empires. The Reformers set the question up in terms of Scripture, and answered with the doctrine of sola scriptura, making the Bible, but especially the proclamation of its doctrines, the source of authority over and against the Roman Catholic magisterium. While this break with the authority of Rome was based upon the Bible itself, the question of authority was never directed to the Bible’s historicity, but rested with the teaching of either “pope or preacher.”14 In Wright’s understanding, the debates assumed the abstract Christ: “The icon was in place, and nobody asked whether the Christ it portrayed—and in whose name so much good and ill was done—was at all like the Jesus whom it claimed to represent.”15

The Enlightenment: Idealism and Realism

The Enlightenment and the movement of modernity can be characterized according to a certain paradoxical tension between materialistic empiricism and subjective idealism. The Enlightenment was the era in which the prioritization of reason, following the Renaissance, was realized first in the elevation of objective scientific investigation. The remarkable scientific and technological successes that were transforming almost every area of life and inquiry were validations of the transformative power of reason. It was also the era of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who radically transformed philosophy into its modern form and made subject-oriented standards of universal reason and criticism dominant. In a paradoxical way, with the Kantian revolution, Gary Dorrien writes, “the seemingly unstoppable march of materialistic empiricism was stopped in its tracks.”16 The Cartesian search for the foundation of knowledge of the external world in the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 History and Theology According to the Historian: N. T. Wright’s Historical and Theological Method
• 2 Theology According to the Theologians: Critical Realism and the Object of Knowledge in Theology
• 3 Apocalyptic, Continuity and Discontinuity: Soteriological Implications for a Theology of History
• 4 Christology and Creation: Furthering the Apocalyptic Logic
• 5 History According to the Theologians: From a Theology of History to a Theology of Historiography
• 6 An Apocalyptic Reappraisal of Apocalyptic
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author and Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for The Reality of God and Historical Method
• About the Author
• New Explorations in Theology
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright