BEN: It appears that one of your main concerns in this book is to insist that since history and historical figures like Jesus are part of the realm of space and time, that what they have to say or contribute to the discussion of natural theology should not be eliminated a priori, just because that material comes from a source of revelation, the Scriptures, and so it would be a category mistake to include it. You attribute this exclusion to,... Read more

BEN: One of the real strengths of this book is that you are able to chronicle the intellectual history from ancient Epicureanism to the present and show how the dominant world view today is not much different from ancient Epicureanism in the way it brackets out God and ‘the supernatural’ from history and ‘natural causation’. Since most of our audience will associate Epicureanism with hedonism, the pleasures of the palate and the flesh, explain what you mean by Epicureanism, and... Read more

BEN: As you rightly note, the Gifford lectures committee has seldom invited a Biblical scholar to come and discourse on ‘natural theology’ (as opposed to ‘unnatural’ theology?), and it seems especially ironic that the last ones before you were James Barr and before that Rudolph Bultmann. Bultmann could hardly be more different in perspective than you. Why do you suppose Biblical scholars are so seldom invited? Do you think the committee somehow thinks ‘natural’ theology is somehow not really connected... Read more

As he sums up his argument in Chapter 8, Tom emphasizes the following: “What counts for the whole argument– the whole biblically based, theologically oriented argument– is new creation. Not skeptical historiography.not existentialized eschatology, but a new creation, a rescued, renewed and transformed creation in which the first creation, the ‘natural’ world is not cancelled out, as though by (in the modern sense) a ‘supernatural’ irruption or invasion, but rather rescued, put right and transformed. The point is precisely that,... Read more

If one is looking for natural theological signposts in a broken world, they will of course be broken signposts to the road forward, to where God wants things to go. Tom suggests in Chapter 7 various of these broken signposts, but not before offering the zinger: “the platonic eschatology of Western Christianity (‘souls going to heaven’) has generated a moralistic anthropology (‘my problem is sin’) which has then produced a pagan soteriology (‘God so hated the world that he killed... Read more

Chapter Six is entitled The New Creation, and in many ways it revisits Tom’s classic text Resurrection and the Son of God, debunking various objections to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, among other things. But near the beginning of the chapter there is this interesting observation “The model of ‘knowledge’ which has been privileged in Western culture is certainly focused on the left brain… but it is also…an attempt at controlling epistemology, a ‘knowing’ in the service of power.” (p.... Read more

On p. 155 Tom sums up how he sees the problem of modernity in dealing with Christ– “epistemology has tried to do without the notion of ‘love’, producing historical study a false antithesis of rationalist certainty-hunting on the one hand and skepticism on the other; Jesus and his first followers have been portrayed as holding an imminent-end-of-the-world belief which has distorted other features; and the question of God and the world, of which natural theology is one aspect, has suffered.”... Read more

Despite all the good that came out of the Enlightenment including the recovery of ancient sources of all kinds, and an interest in their historical substance (see my lecture on The Bible and the Reformation in JETS), there was, as Wright notes “Enlightenment’s radical split of cosmology and history are bound to produce false readings….if we think of a closed continuum of Epicurean world-development then anything to do with ‘God’ must by definition be entirely separate….This is one reason why... Read more

“Genuinely historical study of the relevant Jewish and early Christian material produces a narrative about beliefs that were actually held and that, through the consequent human motivations, generated actual events, in the light of which we can and should construct a mature, genuinely grounded picture of Jesus and his first followers within their historical and cultural settings… The Gospel narratives do what Paul did in his travels; they displayed the Jesus-story as public truth, the truth of events which were... Read more

In some ways, chapter 3, entitled Shifting Sands, is the most important chapter in the book. It presents us with Tom Wright’s definition of what history is and what it does, and why it is important for theology, including natural theology. Wright stresses that history is a necessary, though often absent, ingredient in natural theology. Doing history requires: “humility to understand the thoughts of people who thought differently from ourselves; patience to go one working with the data and resist... Read more