Posted on: April 16th, 2020 NT Wright on History & Eschatology
NT Wright’s 2018 Gifford Lectures are well worth grappling with, as is the book-form version of the same, History and Eschatology. While I take issues with his historiographical methodology (wh is a bit too positivistic), I think that his presentation of the actual view of first century Jewish thought is absolutely superb.
If we ask the question, “What is history, and what are its contents?” then the Christian can start with St. Paul & the Gospel writers (that is, the apostolic teaching of the NT itself).
But before we can ask, “What do the NT writers think history and its contents are?” we must investigate the historically conditioned character of their minds.
Ah, but before we can ask about the historically conditioned character of their minds, we must first ask about the historically conditioned character of our minds (that is, of the minds of modern interpreters, especially those who practice historical-critical method of biblical interpretation).
There are, then, three levels of history in view in NT Wright’s lecture series (and his book History and Eschatology):
- the history which conditions the modern mind (which NTW rightly describes in terms of Epicureanism);
- the history which conditioned the ancient (first century) mind (predominantly, at least in this lecture series/book, second Temple Judaism with its biblical themes of Temple, Sabbath, & Image);
- the history which those ancient writers took to be real and determinative: the redemptive history—which is always already eschatological—of God’s covenant people.
After each of these investigations has been made, it is theoretically possible finally to ask: Can we ourselves adopt the apostles’ same position on history, namely the embrace of the historia salutis as narrated in Scripture? The striking reality is that, given many strands of postmodern theory (themselves neoplatonic in inspiration) this latter possibility is (in the spirit of Ricœur’s “after the desert of criticism we long to believe again”) actually quite plausible and attractive.
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