The Reality of God and Historical Method By Samuel V. Adams - EXCERPT

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T H E R E A L I T Y

O F G O D A N DH I S T O R I C A L

M E T H O D

A P O C A LY P T I C T H E O L O G Y I N

C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H N . T. W R I G H T

S A M U E L V. A D A M S

N E W E X P L O R A T I O N S

I N T H E O L O G Y



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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adams, Samuel V., - Te reality of God and historical method : apocalyptic theology in conversation with N. . Wright /Samuel V. Adams. pages cm.—(New explorations in theology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN - - - - (pbk. : alk. paper) . End of the world. . History—Religious aspects—Christianity. . Teology—Methodology.

. Wright, N. . (Nicholas Tomas) I. itle. B .A —dc

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Contents Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

History and Theology According to the Historian:N. T. Wright’s Historical and Theological Method

he Historical Context From Critique to Construct Conclusion

Theology According to the Theologians:Critical Realism and the Object of Knowledge in Theology

CRw and the Object o Knowledge he Condition: Søren Kierkegaard

John : - Conclusion

Apocalyptic, Continuity and Discontinuity:Soteriological Implications for a Theology of History

A Rupture in Understanding: A Properly heologicalHermeneutic Is Apocalyptic

Apocalyptic and Soteriology: Beginning with theNew Beginning

Conclusion

Christology and Creation: Furthering the Apocalyptic Logic

Christology: Anhypostasia and EnhypostasiaCreation and Apocalyptic N. . Wright and Apocalyptic Reconsidered Conclusion




History According to the Theologians:From a Theology of History to a Theology of Historiography

oward a heology o History and Historiography A heology o History Historiography According to heology: hree heses Conclusion

An Apocalyptic Reappraisal of Apocalyptic

he Controversy

Apocalypses and the Covenant: Reading Irruptionin the Context o a Long Story

Paul’s Epistemology Apocalypse and the Apocalyptic Logic o the

Singular Apocalypse he Apocalypse o Jesus Christ as an Apocalypse he Question o Israel

Conclusion

Conclusion

Bibliography

Author and Subject Index

Scripture Index




Introduction

N . Tis is a book on method.As Jeffrey Stout has amously written, “preoccupation with method is likeclearing your throat: it can go on or only so long be ore you lose youraudience.” It is also true that there are de enders o method. Method is, inone sense, simply a reection on assumptions; to assume without exami-nation is to be trapped in an unwitting solipsism. No one does theology ina vacuum, and there is no Archimedean perspective rom which to lif theweight o the subject matter with the ever-elusive lever o objectivity.Without reection on method we would all be the masters o our own Pro-crustean beds. Te postmodern situation, whatever it is, is at least anawareness that we all start embedded in contexts and language games thatneed every once in a while to “be dug out and inspected.” o dig out and

inspect is also a contextual exercise, and around and around we go. . . . Mytask in this book on historical and theological method is not to limit myselto methodological questions, but to engage these questions within a con-structive theological argument. Te central part o this book, then, readsmore like the beginnings o a systematic theology; it is systematic to theextent that it argues or a particular, sequential logic as Christian dogmaticsare brought into conversation with the question o historical method. Tis

book is also a critique, a critical dialogue with one o today’s preeminent

1Jeffrey Stout, Ethics Afer Babel: Te Languages o Morals and Teir Discontents (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, ), .

2N PG, .




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biblical scholars, N. . Wright. Wright’s work on method sets the stage, andhis continuing work on the question o God in the New estament provides

the primary dialogical material or my constructive arguments. But morethan anything this book is an exercise in thinking beyond the question oGod or theology and history to the question o the reality o God, and whatmethodological impositions are necessarily implied or both areas o inquiry.

I Ernst roeltsch was right in saying that the intellectual revolutions o thesixteenth century introduced a crisis or Christianity o “world-historicaldimensions,” and that this crisis made the traditional historical basis o Chris-

tianity untenable, then the work o N. . Wright has been a major orce in an-swering that crisis with the scientic and methodological rigor needed to re-store the historical grounding o traditional orthodox Christianity. roeltsch,o course, was working within the modern problematic created by Lessing’s

“ugly ditch,” the gap between the “contingent truths o history” and the “nec-essary truths o reason.” Ever since Lessing published and commented onReimarus’s treatise, modern religious thinkers have produced a variety o at-

tempts to overcome this gap and provide the believer with the appropriateconception o the relationship between historical events and the experience oaith. Given the total cultural inuence o Christianity in Europe, these debates

all centered around the historical question o Jesus and the signicance hishistoricity could have or aith. roeltsch asks the paradigmatic question as itaddresses the modern crisis: “Whether we possess enough certain knowledgeabout him to understand historically the emergence o Christianity, let alone

justi y attaching religious aith and conviction to the historical act.”o the rst o these concerns, Wright has done a signicant amount o

work, making strong historical arguments that make sense o the emergenceo Christianity as it is inseparably linked to the messianic event that took placearound the historic person o Jesus o Nazareth. Te rst three volumes in hisChristian Origins and the Question o God series develop a signicant andcoherent account o the historical orces that led a rst-century Jew to becrucied and or his ollowers to come to the conclusion that he was indeed

3Ernst roeltsch, Writings on Teology and Religion , trans. and ed. Robert Morgan and MichaelPye (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, ), .

4Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Philosophical and Teological Writings , trans. and ed. H. B. Nisbet(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .

5 roeltsch, Writings on Teology and Religion , .




Introduction

who he claimed to be. o the second concern Wright also directs his attention,raising the overall question in his series as the very question that, according

to Lessing, cannot be asked; that is, he raises the question o God. How can he,and or that matter, anybody, move rom the historical questions to the theo-logical question? How does Wright move rom historical arguments to theo-logical ones? Are his moves valid? Do they overcome the broad, ugly ditch?

O course, it can be argued that the modern assumption behind Lessing’sgap is simply wrong. Tere is no gap. Tis is just how knowledge works. o alarge extent this is the sort o move that Wright makes. He rethinks the way we

know things historically and theologically so that the gap loses its central orce.It remains to be seen i this attempt succeeds. Te purpose o this book, then,is to examine the question o God, as Wright appropriately ocuses our at-tention, but to examine it not rom the historian’s side o things but rather romthe side o the theologian. Can what theologians say about God make sense oboth the historical question and the theological question and articulate themin such a way that does justice to both? At its most basic level, the question I

am asking is this: What does the reality o God mean or historical knowledge?Tis is, afer all, what theologians do best: they allow the reality o God to de-termine their method and attempt to con orm their ormulations and systemsas best as they can to this reality. O course, it ofen works the other way around!Tere is no shortage o theology that has endeavored, wittingly or unwittingly,to con orm God to human ormulations and limits. Nevertheless, it makessense to ask the historian who is investigating God, even “the question o God,”to do what theologians ought to do, that is, to work out a method that somehowmakes room or the reality o the god in question.

o make the central question o this present work hinge upon the reality oGod is also to associate it with a particular theological trajectory (i not a de -inite tradition) that has attempted to accommodate theological work to thepriority o the living and active Word o God. Tis trajectory, roughly sketchedand with many missing voices, ollows rom the Protestant Re ormation toSøren Kierkegaard; rom Kierkegaard’s radical opposition to Christendom it

6One way this unwittingly happens is through the pronouns we use to re er to God. Our over-whelming use o masculine pronouns in re erence to God tends to con orm God to cultural normso masculinity. Nevertheless, my own prose and many o the sources re erenced in these pages usethis traditional ormula and, rather than attempt the awkward reconguration o this use through various devices, I have let this use stand. I ask only or the reader’s patience in this area.




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proceeds to Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and, more recently, to . F. or-rance. A contemporary appropriation o the basic insights o Kierkegaard,

Barth and Bonhoeffer have been brought together with a certain reading oPaul led, in the United States, by J. Louis Martyn, which is now going by thename apocalyptic theology . While remaining controversial, this movement isneither “closed” nor denite, so it remains to be seen exactly how its particularcontribution will emerge and what difference it will have on the overall theo-logical scene. It is rom within this trajectory, roughly termed apocalyptic, thatthe question o the reality o God or historical method that I am addressing

will both be articulated and answered. By choosing this trajectory rom whichto mount a critique o Wright’s method, I am simply affirming that it offers aparticular tradition o theological questioning that cannot be avoided i theaim o this book’s thesis is to be accomplished. In other words, to raise thesequestions against the background o Wright’s historical method is to obligeonesel to engage this apocalyptic trajectory. In this sense, then, this book isan apocalyptic critique o the theological and historical method o the work

o N. . Wright. But it engages in this critique not only in order to bring to-gether two unique perspectives, but also to urther both the understanding othe theological implications o Wright’s work and the development o thisapocalyptic theological trajectory.

Te book moves ahead in six chapters. Te rst is an overview and de-scription o Wright’s historical and theological method as they both aregrounded in his critical realist epistemology. Te second chapter argues ora particular theological epistemology that goes beyond and corrects theepistemological and hermeneutical prolegomena o Wright’s major project.Tis is where the constructive theological contribution begins. In the thirdand ourth chapters the apocalyptic approach is dened and articulated ac-cording to a progression rom soteriology to Christology to creation. Ten,in the fh chapter, this theological work is directed rst to a theology o

7Te reader should bear in mind the difference between apocalyptic as a specic kind o theology and apocalyptic as a specic literary genre. In order to avoid using scare quotes throughout the book,I have instead lef it up to context to determine which meaning o the word is operative. Te con-tested status o “apocalyptic” will be addressed in chapter three and will be the subject o thenal chapter, in which the implications o my argument will be traced with specic re erence tothe way in which Wright interprets the term apocalyptic and its use ulness or constructive theologi-cal proposals. At this point I simply ask or patience and openness rom readers as I employ this term.




Introduction

history and then nally to a theology o historiography that is presented incritical dialogue with Wright’s historical method. Te sixth and nal chapter

brings together the apocalyptic theology and evaluation o Wright’s methodinto critical engagement with the question o apocalyptic literature andPauline apocalyptic. What does it mean to say that Paul was an apocalypticthinker? How does Wright articulate this, and how might the method-ological and theological arguments presented in the previous chapters re-spond to Wright’s concerns, as well as open doors to new ways o imaginingthe relationship between history and theology? Finally, this chapter argues

or an apocalyptic theology that takes seriously both the covenant withIsrael and the new creation in such a way that holds together a commitmentto the present reality o history and, at the same time, to the radical ruptureand discontinuity that the apocalypse o Jesus Christ is or this history.






History and heology According to the Historian

Here Wright makes two points that need to be oregrounded be ore goingurther. First, his entire project is premised upon the commitment o the

Christian aith to the reality o the events to which it re ers. Tis com-mitment, however, leaves the description—both historical and theological—open to be in ormed and corrected by a proper historical method. Second,the critical turn to rigorous history during the Enlightenment, while seem-ingly detrimental to aith, is nevertheless a necessary development i the rstpoint is to be taken to be axiomatic.

In light o these two points, Wright’s project develops within his own telling

o the history o the relationship between theological and biblical scholarshipas it has been shaped by historical orces, whether political, philosophical ortheological. His account is at once both a declension narrative and a hope ul,programmatic call or a renewed commitment to serious history. In short, theEnlightenment’s historical project rejected the a priori o aith because, in theeyes o the enlightened, it skewed the results o historical investigation away

rom that which could be known as act. It did this unaware that it was making

just as questionable assumptions under the guise o reedom and objectivity.Yet even as it imported its own problematic set o assumptions, the Enlight-enment nevertheless provided an important turn to the signicance o scien-tic historical investigation and the importance o the historical question orthe Christian aith. Tis is a lesson that the church is still struggling to learn.Without history, and the corrective that the discipline provides, “there is nocheck on Christianity’s propensity to remake Jesus, never mind the Christiangod, in its own image.” Te historian stands as an important point o contactbetween the past events that make up the source o Christianity’s con essionsand the theologian’s efforts to articulate the signicance o those events orcontexts that present themselves ever anew.

In N PG Wright identies three movements within the history oWestern culture that trans ormed the way the New estament is read. Tesethree historical movements are the ollowing: ( ) pre-Enlightenment: pre-critical reading; ( ) Enlightenment/modernity: historical and theologicalreading; and ( ) postmodernity: postmodern reading. Tis chapter will

3See, or example, JVG, .4N PG, .5Ibid., .




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begin by examining the way in which Wright depicts the dynamic rela-tionship between history and theology as it undergoes signicant philo-

sophical, theological and political pressures during each o these three pe-riods, and how this history has come to determine the place o history

vis-à-vis theology today. Moving rom Wright’s narrative to his con-structive proposal, I will ocus on the history/theology relationship that iscorrected by his account o “critical realism” (CR). Tis means looking orthe way he articulates the problems relating history and theology rom theperspective o his constructive, critically realist proposal. My articulation o

Wright’s method will largely be based upon a reading o his account o the various quests or the historical Jesus in JVG, and his methodological reec-tions in the rst two parts o N PG.

Te thesis o this chapter is that Wright’s methodological proposals arespecically designed to reconcile theology and history, and to do so in sucha way that their reconciliation is philosophically justied according to aparticular epistemological theory (CR). Wright’s version o CR is designed

to answer the problem o history and theology, but in doing so he leaves theontological and metaphysical questions unanswered. Yet it is just these ques-tions that need to be addressed in order or Wright’s CR to be true to theunique objects o both history and theology. In support o this thesis, thebroad task o this chapter will be to describe ( ) the three old historicalcontext in which Wright has set this return to the historian’s task, ( ) Wright’sspecic critique o this context in his constructive account o CR and ( ) anexamination o the questions that his critical realist proposal raises or acontinued program o reconciliation between history and theology.

T H C

From the Precritical Period to the Reformation

Wright bases his programmatic retrieval o the discipline o history or the-

6Wright names three disciplines that the study o the New estament involves: literature, history andtheology. I am ocusing my attention on the latter two, leaving the literary questions aside. Tis isnot because they are unrelated, or I take it that these three disciplines are integral to one another,but rather or the sake o clarity and as a way o limiting the ollowing discussion. In any case,Wright sees the core issue at the heart o each discipline to be epistemological. See N PG, .





ology and biblical studies in a narrative that begins with the Re ormation.When reading Wright’s work it is hard to nd an ecclesial situation or his-

torical moment when things were exactly right. Yet i he is telling a de-clension narrative, it is one that has its high point in the simple, pre-Enlightenment assumption that the Bible reports actual occurrences andthat the veracity o its stories are what we would consider today to be “his-torical.” Te Bible was assumed to be speaking o real events. Tis is not tosay that this assumption is without its own problems, only that the as-sumption that Christian belie is inextricably bound together with belie s

about historical events is the right assumption to have. Nevertheless, priorto the critical movements o the Enlightenment, the situation o Christians

vis-à-vis history was such that it could “today be criticized on (at least) threegrounds . . . : it ails to take the text seriously historically, it ails to integrateit into the theology o the New estament as a whole, and it is insufficientlycritical o its own presuppositions and standpoint.” Without the sa eguardso a proper historical discipline, these criticisms come to characterize

Wright’s declension narrative. In JVG, Wright tells the story o modern his-torical Jesus studies by beginning with the pre-Enlightenment, precriticalcontext o the sixteenth-century Re ormers. What particular shif, inWright’s view, did the Re ormation effect that might signal a declension away

rom a more healthy—i only intuitive—union o theology and history?Pro me. During the Re ormation, as Wright tells it, a signicant shif oc-

curred as doctrines became centered around the question o benets pro me, or how the teachings o the Christian church were soteriologically efficaciouswithin the current situation o the individual Christian living in Europe. Tis meant that the narrative contexts in which the Christian teachings madesense were discarded in avor o more propositional ormulations that couldbe articulated in a variety o con essions with certainty and clarity. In thepractical use o the Bible, this looked like a avoring o the more theologicallyoriented epistles over the more narrative-based Gospels. While this bene-tted the need or doctrinal clarity in the ace o ecclesial abuse, the negative

7Ibid.8 JVG, .9Ibid., .

10Ibid., - .




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result was that the stories that made sense o the doctrines and in which theyound their proper horizon o meaning were lost precisely as the crucial

hermeneutical context or the teaching o the church. Jesus’ death and resur-rection made sense according to the demands o a newly reinvigorated per-sonal soteriology, yet the stories that made up the bulk o the Gospels, thatmade sense “historically” o why Jesus was crucied (i.e., social, cultural,political and economic reasons), were seen to be o lesser importance. Tus,the ecclesiological and political break with Rome can be seen to be analogousto the theological movement away rom the historical particularity o Jesus

and its signicance or the pressing questions o the day. According to thisnarrative, we could say that the doctrinal controversies that made up theRe ormation took the historical basis o the Christian aith or granted, o-cusing instead on the sources o the tradition, the texts themselves, as thebasis o the propositional content o Christian theology. Te Bible itsel cameto replace the historical events to which the Bible bore witness.

For Wright this is all quite nicely displayed in Philip Melanchthon’s

( – ) dictum,Hoc est Christum cognoscere, benecia eius cognoscere:to know Christ is to know his benets. Afer quoting the dictum in JVG,Wright quotes Melanchthon’s ollowing question: “Unless one knows whyChrist took upon himsel human esh and was crucied what advantagewould accrue rom having learned his li e’s history?” In N PG and JVG,the pro me o the gospel is identied with the benets o Christ that Mel-anchthon prioritizes, and Wright interprets these benets against the his-torical question o Jesus. Melanchthon’s dictum stands or this rupture be-tween Christology and the historical Jesus. In the context o politicallycharged theological disputes, in which rupture and discontinuity were boththreat and possibility, the Re ormation, on the side o discontinuity, set thestage theologically (and politically) or the major philosophical shifs thatwere to come with the Enlightenment. According to Wright, by prioritizingdoctrines over history according to the criterion o pro me, the Re ormerscould, in principle, ignore the historical question and instead settle theo-logical disputes in abstract, conceptual terms. Teir concern to break eccle-

11Ibid., . It should be noted that here Wright makes his claim based upon his reading o themodern heirs o the Re ormation: Lutherans Martin Kähler and Rudol Bultmann.

12Quoted in JVG, . C .N PG, .





sially and politically with the medieval church in avor o continuity withChrist and the apostles by aith came with a similar break with the history

o Jesus, the rst-century Jew. “Continuity with Christ meant sitting looseto the actuality o Jesus, to his Jewishness, to his own aims and objectives.” Te Jesus o history could easily be transposed into the abstract, conceptualChrist. By opening this door, the Re ormers made it possible or theology,in its movement orward rom the Re ormation into the crucible o theEnlightenment, to adapt to a variety o new historical claims. Tis in turnwould give theologians an increased reedom to articulate theological claims

regardless o changing historical understanding.History and doctrine. In Wright’s account, this “divorce” between history

and doctrine became a key moment in the history o theological development.Politically, the question o authority was o such signicance during the Re or-mation that theological innovations surrounding the source o religious au-thority determined the rise and all o cities, states and empires. Te Re ormersset the question up in terms o Scripture, and answered with the doctrine o

sola scriptura, making the Bible, but especially the proclamation o its doctrines,the source o authority over and against the Roman Catholic magisterium.While this break with the authority o Rome was based upon the Bible itsel ,the question o authority was never directed to the Bible’s historicity, but restedwith the teaching o either “pope or preacher.” In Wright’s understanding, thedebates assumed the abstract Christ: “Te icon was in place, and nobody askedwhether the Christ it portrayed—and in whose name so much good and ill wasdone—was at all like the Jesus whom it claimed to represent.”

Te Enlightenment: Idealism and Realism

Te Enlightenment and the movement o modernity can be characterizedaccording to a certain paradoxical tension between materialistic empiricismand subjective idealism. Te Enlightenment was the era in which the pri-oritization o reason, ollowing the Renaissance, was realized rst in the

elevation o objective scientic investigation. Te remarkable scientic and

13 JVG, .14 JVG, .15Ibid.




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technological successes that were trans orming almost every area o li e andinquiry were validations o the trans ormative power o reason. It was also

the era o Immanuel Kant ( – ), who radically trans ormed phi-losophy into its modern orm and made subject-oriented standards o uni-

versal reason and criticism dominant. In a paradoxical way, with the Kantianrevolution, Gary Dorrien writes, “the seemingly unstoppable march o ma-terialistic empiricism was stopped in its tracks.” Te Cartesian search orthe oundation o knowledge o the external world in the thinking subjectturned, by means o Kant’s “transcendental move,” toward a subjectivism

that tended to reject the very possibility o knowledge o external reality.And yet the empirical tradition continued alongside the subjective, leavingus with a modern legacy o pro oundly signicant technological ad-

vancement and conceptually abstract philosophical systems. Tese two em-phases uniquely positioned theology and biblical scholarship in such a waythat the tension between them came to determine the next several hundredyears o Christian intellectual effort.

On the one hand, there was that which in a broad sense can be termed re-alism, bolstered by empiricism, which was condently committed to the cor-respondence between what one observed and what a thing is in itself . Tesuccesses o the natural sciences in the rapidly expanding knowledge othe physical world were taken as sure evidence conrming the validity o therealist’s condent march toward a holistic account o a thoroughly demys-tied natural world. On the other hand, and in a seemingly contrary move,was the Kantian turn to the subject, the emergence o various mani estationso idealism and the critical theory that developed in the wake o increasingsuspicion that any meaning could be ound in an object that was not deter-mined by the knowing subject. Tese two divergent paths, realism and ide-alism, become crucial to understanding Wright’s programmatic retrieval othe study o history or biblical studies and theology. Christian theology

16Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: Te Idealistic Logic o Modern Teology(Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, ), .

17See or example, Wright’s use o both terms as he describes the alternative paths taken, with thepath rom Lessing to Bultmann describing idealism, and Wrede, Räisänen and the “biblical the-ology” school standing in or realism. See N PG, , . Colin Gunton, whom Wright citespositively, also makes this distinction by using these two terms. See Gunton, Enlightenment and

Alienation: An Essay oward a rinitarian Teology (Eugene, OR: Wip and Stock, [ ]),- ; c .N PG, n .





could take either path. Te rst path, that o realism, would move down theroad o rigorous historical inquiry—and suffer the consequences. Te

second, that o idealism, would pick up Christian doctrines and take themaway rom their historical rootedness and along multiple paths that wouldinclude subject-oriented idealism, existentialism and speculative, pro-gressive Hegelian systems. Here, the Hegelian approach is exemplied byD. F. Strauss, while Rudol Bultmann exemplies the neo-Kantian trajectory within New estament interpretation and theology. Te latter doesso according to modied Heideggerian categories.

Te Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith . One way Wright narrates thesplit between realism and idealism is by telling the story o the origins o thequest or the historical Jesus (in JVG). Along the rst path, that o historicalinquiry, the Enlightenment ollowed the lead o Reimarus ( – ) whoin his posthumously published Fragments ( ) sought, according toWright, to “destroy Christianity (as he knew it) at its root, by showing thatit rested on historical distortion or antasy.” Following Colin Brown,

Wright claims that Reimarus was inuenced by the antisupernaturalism oEnglish Deism and instigated the “Quest” or the historical Jesus “as anexplicitly anti-theological, anti-Christian, anti-dogmatic movement.” Given the political climate and the Enlightenment radicals’ motivation(Spinoza, Lessing et al.) to break ree rom the constraints o tradition, the

18See N PG, , or Wright’s use o Idealism to describe the philosophical context o much Prot-estant theology, “happier with abstract ideas than with concrete history.”

19D. F. Strauss, Te Li e o Jesus Critically Examined , th ed. trans. George Eliot (London: SwanSonnenschein & Co., ), : “In his discourse to the church [the theologian] will indeedadhere to the orms o the popular conception, but on every opportunity he will exhibit theirspiritual signicance, which to him constitutes their sole truth, and thus prepare—though sucha result is only to be thought o as an unending progress—the resolution o those orms intotheir original ideas in the consciousness o the church also.”

20Anthony C. Tistelton, Te wo Horizons: New estament Hermeneutics and Philosophical De-scription with Special Re erence to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein (GrandRapids: Eerdmans, ), - .

21Ibid., . C . Roger A. Johnson,Te Origins o Demythologizing: Philosophy and Historiographyin the Teology o Rudol Bultmann , Studies in the History o Religions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ).

22 JVG, .23Ibid., and c . Colin Brown, Jesus in European Protestant Tought, – (Grand Rapids:

Baker Books, ).24 JVG, .25C . Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making o Modernity –

(Ox ord: Ox ord University Press, ).




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discovery o Reimarus by Lessing was an opportunity to urther their goals.Te point o all o this was not to provide a more accurate historical basis

or the Christian aith, but rather to ree the individual rom the constraintso religion and, in this new ound reedom, to discover what are the eternaland universal truths o reason.

Tis brings us to Lessing’s “broad ugly ditch.” On one side o the ditchare the contingent truths o history, the events that we know through senseperception and experience, whether in the present or in the past; and on theother are the necessary truths o reason, those truths that are not contingent

because they are not based upon historical events, events that could havebeen otherwise. Lessing’s ditch essentially was a deepening o the divide in-dicated by Melanchthon’s dictum. Te payoff with respect to Christian the-ology was that an abstract Christ could now be associated with the universaltruths o reason, while the historical basis o Christian aith, along with theecclesiastical orms o authority that were related to it, could easily be dis-missed as irrelevant. As Lessing wrote, “I do not deny or a moment that

Christ per ormed miracles. But since . . . they are merely reports o miracles. . . I do deny that they can and should bind me to the least aith in the otherteachings o Christ. I accept these other teachings or other reasons.” Tepoint that historical investigation was afer, apart rom simply the desire toknow the past, was akin to the willingness o the Re ormers to break with thetraditions o the past, to introduce a rupture in history that would ree theindividual rom dogmatic claims (and old political loyalties) based upon pasthistory. I that history could be put in question, then those binding claimscould be undone and humanity would be ree to live and govern accordingto the universal authority o reason. So or the theologians ollowing the patho rigorous historical investigation, the only possibility was to abandonchurch teaching in the ace o a discredited historical oundation, or toabandon history as a oundational component o Christian identity.

In JVG Wright describes the work o Reimarus as “simply exploiting thesplit between history and aith implicit in the emphasis o Melanchthon’sdictum. . . . [Reimarus] claimed that the gospels were records o early

26Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Philosophical and Teological Writings , trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridgeexts in the History o Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), - .

27Ibid., .





Christian aith, not transcripts o history, and that when we study the actualhistory we discover a very different picture.” Tis emphasis on the study o

history, while aimed at discrediting the historical oundation o the Christianaith, nevertheless opened the door or an important corrective to the Re -

ormation’s emphasis on the abstract conceptual Christ. Wright points outthe irony o the turn to history ollowing Reimarus. “Te ascinating thing,looking back two hundred years later, is that the appeal to history againsthistory, as it were, has ailed. History has shown itsel to contain more thanthe idealists believed it could.” Historical investigation, it turns out, is not

only essential or retaining the historical basis o the Christian aith, butgood historical method—serious history—is in act less damning o a his-torically grounded Christian aith than Reimarus, Lessing, Strauss andothers thought. Te realist path, the path that chased down the empiricalbut contingent truths o history, led ever urther into a discovery o a pastthat affirmed the Christian aith even without the help o the ecclesial au-thorities who had always predetermined what one would nd at its end.

By using the term idealist in the passage just cited to re er to the Re or-mation split between history and aith, Wright points us toward the otherpath rom this division through the Enlightenment. While somewhat anach-ronistically used to re er to the direct intellectual heritage o the Re ormation,Wright’s use o idealism rst gains meaning in re erence to the abstract con-ceptual nature o Christian theology, as opposed to the concrete historicalre erence that Christian thought has always assumed. Te idealist path canin this sense be traced rom Melanchthon’s dictum to Lessing, through Kantand all the way to Bultmann and Barth. In this trajectory, i attention waspaid to the past, it was to the experience o the believing subject that boretheological signicance, and not to the historical events themselves. Tisbecame a major orce in German theology through the modern period.

“Bultmann in his way, and Karl Barth in his, ensured that little was done toadvance genuine historical work on Jesus in the years between the wars. At-tention was ocused instead on early Christian aith and experience, in thebelie that there, rather than in a dubiously reconstructed Jesus, lay the keyto the divine revelation that was presumed to have taken place in early

28 JVG, .29Ibid., .




R G H M

Christianity.” Te act that historical-critical work has continued alongsidethe idealist movement can be attributed to the enduring signicance o Less-

ing’s ditch. Tese two trends, both a thoroughgoing realism in historical investigation and the speculative retreat into the realm o the subject, idealism,were able to be maintained because o the assumed incompatibility betweencontingent historical events and the universal truths known to the rationalsubject. Te idealist is not interested in learning about reality as i events inthemselves were meaning ul, but, as Wright argues, “one looked at the historyin order then to look elsewhere, to the other side o Lessing’s ‘ugly ditch,’ to

the eternal truths o reason unsullied by the contingent acts o everydayevents, even extraordinary ones like those o Jesus.”

Te intellectual context that Wright is outlining can, at this point, bedescribed along the lines o a signicant split between the Jesus o historyand the Jesus o aith. Te Jesus o history, the real man who lived and taughtin Palestine, is understood apart rom aith and, perhaps most signicantly,apart rom the miraculous. As Murray Rae notes, the Enlightenment quest

or the historical Jesus that Reimarus and Lessing introduced was com-mitted, as was Spinoza, to the category o immanence. Te Jesus o historyis limited to explanations that make sense within known possibilities. TeJesus o aith, on the other hand, is an open possibility, a gure who can bemolded and articulated according to various speculative schemes and ideals,and whose true reality may indeed be simply but power ully existential. So,

or example, Wright characterizes Albert Schweitzer’s nal portrait o Jesuslike this: “He thus took upon himsel the Great Affliction which was to breakupon Israel and the world. Te bridge between his historical li e and Chris-tianity is ormed by his personality: he towers over history, and calls peopleto ollow him in changing the world. Te very ailure o his hopes sets them

ree rom Jewish shackles, to become, in their new guise, the hope o theworld.” I we go back to the ruptures, ecclesial and theological, o the Re -ormation, we can see the way in which doctrines, i they are to be main-tained despite being ruptured rom their narratival contexts, can move in

30Ibid., .31Ibid., .32Murray Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision o the Incarnation: By Faith rans ormed (Ox ord: OUP, ),

. C . Benedict de Spinoza,Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, ), .33 JVG, .





either direction. Tey can be picked up and transported into an idealistramework, or, i historical oundations remain signicant, doctrines can be

the theological commitments that predetermine our reading o history.Te dilemma for faith. Tis last point regarding the priority o theological

commitments is signicant, because it identies what remained or many theonly possibility or the church i it is to maintain its commitment to the nec-essary relationship between history and theology: a commitment to the a -rmation o biblical history even in the ace o the severe dismantling o thehistorical sources o Christian aith. Tose who took this path had to do so

in aith and against increasing pressure in the opposite direction rom aca-demic historians. I the path o idealism is rejected and an affirmation madethat the historicity o the Christian aith ultimately matters, then this appearsto be the only option. Indeed, or Wright it is the case that “the rootedness oChristianity in history is nonnegotiable.” Te temptation or orthodoxChristians can be simply to avoid the Enlightenment critique o the historicalevents that gave rise to the Christian aith. In the case o Jesus, this ofen in-

volves a prior commitment to the divinity o Jesus, ahead o historical inves-tigation, and then whatever historical work ollows must reect this com-mitment. Te result is a portrait o Jesus that is iconic, “use ul or devotion,but probably unlike the original subject.” I , however, we commit ourselvesto rigorous historical investigation, leaving the question o divinity aside,there is the ear ( or some) that “we will thereby ‘disprove,’ or at least seriouslyundermine, orthodox theology.” Tis is precisely what happened or thosewho ollowed the trajectory represented by Reimarus. Te picture thatemerges in this telling o the relationship between Christian theology and thepressures o the Enlightenment is o the difficult position in which Christian

aith nds itsel . On the one hand aith relies upon history to make sense oits very existence, and yet historical investigation ollowing the Enlight-enment has been highly critical o Christianity’s historical claims.

I the church orsakes history or the idealist side o the picture, Christianaith retreats to a subjectivism, insulated and sa e rom the pressures o his-

torical research. Yet here it becomes unclear that what we have is genuine

34N PG, .35 JVG, .36Ibid.




R G H M

Christianity, i genuine Christianity depends upon a particular history. Tetension between realism and idealism that emerged during the Enlightenment

orced Christian theology into the difficult position created by these polarorces working against each other. Wright’s theological dialogue partners,

those who represent the most serious declension in his narrative, are primarilythose who have done theology on the idealist end o the spectrum. Tesetheologians have attempted to protect the Christian aith rom the work o thehistorian and, like the older brother in the parable o the prodigal son, remaindistrust ul o the historian’s return to the household o aith. Wright’s project

is intended to resolve this tension through a ully committed and rigoroushistorical investigation, and by bringing to the table equally rigorous theo-logical questions, all the while maintaining the nonnegotiable relationshipbetween history and theology. “Te underlying argument . . . is that the splitis not warranted: that rigorous history . . . and rigorous theology . . . belongtogether, and never more so than in discussion o Jesus.”

Wright’s project, then, can be understood to be a thoroughgoing attempt

to halt the decline in the relationship between theology and history with acomprehensive methodological approach that takes seriously both poles othe Enlightenment, realism and idealism, and effects a kind o synthesis othe two that can maintain an orthodox Christian aith in an intellectuallyrigorous and philosophically credible way.

Postmodernism

Wright’s account o the postmodern turn, while only cursory, emphasizes thedialectic o realism and idealism. His account ocuses on the world o post-modern literary criticism as a turn toward an emphasis on the act o readingrather than on the reality o the events to which texts re er. His response tothis is both appreciative and critical. Te postmodern ocus on the reader can

37See the description o a via negativa in Jesus studies represented at the outset o JVG by quota-tions rom Schweitzer, Bultmann, Barth, Light oot and Bornkamm. JVG, .

38Te parable o the prodigal son is used by Wright to describe the relationship between thetheologian (elder brother) and the historian (prodigal). See JVG, . O course, there is no evi-dence in the parable that the younger son repented o his ways. Te emphasis is on the Father’sacceptance, not the wayward son’s trans ormation!

39Ibid.40N PG, .





be seen as an extension o the Enlightenment’s turn to the subject, where thequestion o external reality is only answered in terms o subjectivity and not

objectivity. Postmodern reading ocuses on the reader’s experience o the text.Tis can point to an important aspect o the hermeneutical enterprise that isneglected i the text is seen as a simple window into another world, but theopposite danger is that the text becomes only a mirror, reecting only thereader to the reader’s sel . Te text as object, to be dealt with as external tothe reader, locates the positive aspect o the postmodern literary turn in lighto the concern or a realist account o reading. On the other hand, the sub-

jective element—in other words, the ocus on the reader and her experiencein reading—points to the idealist strand and the critical aspect o the herme-neutical question. Wright’s own project takes signicant strides toward ad-dressing these issues in the third chapter o N PG, where he takes up andprovides a detailed account o both story and worldview.

Signicantly, we see Wright continuing to hold together the idealist andrealist strands as essential correctives to each other in a generous movement,

welcoming the insights o the postmodern critique while retaining a senseo the necessary grounding o Christian thought in a reality external to thesubject. Te postmodern text is one possible open door to this ground,while the postmodern account o the reader provides the critical distanceneeded or appropriate epistemological humility.

F C C

Introduction: Idealism, Realism and Critical Realism

Te previous section described the way in which N. . Wright articulatesthe tension between history and theology by attending to the narrativeshe tells about the Re ormation, the Enlightenment and postmodernity. Inboth JVGand N PG we nd a variety o terms that can generally be clus-tered around two intellectual trajectories rom this narrative, two trajec-

tories I have already begun re erring to as realism and idealism. Te choiceo these terms is not meant to re er to their technical philosophical use,although the terms can include them, but rather to indicate the twin poles

41See ibid., .




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The Reality of God and Historical Method By Samuel V. Adams - EXCERPT