{"id":55,"date":"2008-04-18T11:01:09","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T11:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/blogalogue\/2008\/04\/nt-wright-evil-unbelief-and-th.html"},"modified":"2008-04-18T11:01:09","modified_gmt":"2008-04-18T11:01:09","slug":"nt-wright-evil-unbelief-and-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/blogalogue\/2008\/04\/nt-wright-evil-unbelief-and-th.html","title":{"rendered":"N.T. Wright: God’s Plan to Rescue Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks, Bart, for the clear and actually moving account of your former faith, your questionings, and your eventual abandonment of Christian belief. I was glad to hear you say that you wrote the book not to encourage others to follow you into agnosticism (though I guess that is how the book may well work rhetorically for some), but to encourage all of us to think<\/em>. That is something I constantly tell people: I believe in the authority of scripture, and in Christian tradition as the community of discourse within which Christians hear that scripture \u2013 but also, importantly, in the proper use of reason. Our culture has fallen prey to emotivism, leading people to say \u2018I feel\u2019 when they mean \u2018I think\u2019, and then \u2013 an easy shift \u2013 to allow feeling to trump thinking, and then to replace it altogether. That way, I think we agree, lie chaos and folly.
\nThere are two large, general elements of your book, and your blog post, which I want to chew over in this first response.<\/p>\n


\nFirst, picking up that point about thinking and feeling, I do think the rhetorical impact both of your book and of your brief opening statement is to make a powerful appeal to the emotions, perhaps particularly to the emotions of western persons such as ourselves who are insulated, geographically and culturally, from so many of the world\u2019s horrors. You spend a good deal of time in the book, and even in your brief posting, detailing some of these horrors, as though to remind readers of what (surely?) all intelligent people know already. (I wouldn\u2019t have been able to rattle off the actual statistics, but none of the phenomena came as a surprise.)
\nThere are of course multiple miseries in the world, and for many (most?) of them it\u2019s impossible to say, \u2018There, look, some good came out of it.\u2019 I think we both react in the same way against that suggestion. I once heard Rowan Williams suggest that it might actually be immoral to try to \u2018solve\u2019 the problem of evil, because as soon as you say, \u2018There, look, that makes it all right, doesn\u2019t it?\u2019 you have radically belittled the problem, blinding yourself to the real, powerful and radical nature of evil. But I\u2019m not sure what logical or moral (as opposed to rhetorical) force you add to your case by describing in such detail the horrors of the world.
\nIn a sense, you simply bring us back to where western Europe found itself after the Lisbon earthquake on All Saints Day 1755. Up to then some had said, \u2018Look at the world, think about it, and you\u2019ll see that God exists and that Christianity is true.\u2019 The earthquake was a wake-up call to casual western religion, and precipitated the whole Enlightenment revolution, first towards a detached Deism and then into agnosticism or atheism. Have you done anything other than recapitulate that moment? And, if you haven\u2019t, I guess I want to ask: were you not aware, earlier, of the scale of evil in the world \u2013 the Holocaust, the dying babies, the inexplicable \u2018natural\u2019 disasters, and so on? You\u2019re not implying, are you, that people (like me, for instance) who still hold to Christian faith are somehow failing to notice these horrors, or to reflect soberly and deeply on them? And if, as you say, your book (and your blog posting) do not actually constitute an argument against Christian faith (\u2018If you reflect on these issues you\u2019ll see that the Christian claim is incredible\u2019), might it not seem that the shift in your own position which you have described is a shift which came about, not because of logical argument, but because of other (unspecified) factors, with the problem of suffering providing a kind of intellectual backdrop to a journey whose main energy was supplied from elsewhere? I\u2019m not saying the arguments are unimportant. But I\u2019m trying to understand what you\u2019re saying when you deny that they constitute an appeal to anyone else to follow your journey.
\nThe second large, general point concerns your handling, and description, of the Bible and Christian faith. I want to take issue with your analysis of the biblical material. This is where I must refer to my own treatment of the same problem in Evil and the Justice of God<\/a>, which forms part of the groundwork for my new book Surprised by Hope<\/a>. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve read either of them, but in the former I give a very different account from you of the Old Testament material, seeing the call of Abraham not (as on your p. 66) as God simply calling Abraham \u2018to be in a special relationship with him\u2019 but as the moment when God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery. In other words, I read the story of Israel as a whole (not merely in its individual parts, which by themselves, taken out of that context, might be reduced to \u2018Israel sinned; God punished them\u2019, etc.,) as the story of theodicy-in-practice: \u2018this is the narrative through whose outworking the creator God will eventually put all things to rights.\u2019 Hence the promises of Isaiah 11 and so forth.
\nFrom this there flow three sub-points. First, your reading of \u2018apocalyptic\u2019 seems to me inaccurate in terms of substance and quite out of date in terms of scholarship. The sharp disjunction between \u2018prophetic\u2019 and \u2018apocalyptic,\u2019 and the characterization of apocalyptic in terms of dualism, pessimism, etc., is very misleading, growing out of an older scholarship which had no sympathy for what the apocalyptists were trying to do.
\nSecond, I was startled that when discussing Paul you never even mentioned that Romans is all about \u2018the righteousness of God,’ i.e. the very question of your whole book; you reduce Paul\u2019s understanding to a simplistic substitutionary account of the cross, which, though important, doesn\u2019t catch the whole picture or his whole argument.
\nThird, you never factored in the way in which the gospels offer themselves as the climax of precisely that Abraham-rooted story of Israel-as-God\u2019s-answer-to-the-problem. Jesus\u2019 inauguration of God\u2019s Kingdom (and the culmination of that kingdom-inauguration in the cross and resurrection), as I have argued elsewhere, was precisely his answer to the question \u2018what does it look like when God is running the world\u2019 \u2013 the very question of your whole book. It wasn\u2019t clear to me whether you were saying that Jesus was mistaken in his beliefs and teachings . . . I did have the sense, frequently, that the form of Christian belief you were rejecting was a particular kind of north American Protestantism which I don\u2019t believe itself did justice to the material.
\nIn particular, of course, the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely central for me. Like many people ancient and modern, you don\u2019t find it credible. If I didn\u2019t believe it I wouldn\u2019t have the beliefs I do about other things.
\nThere is much besides, but this will do for a start. I suspect we are going to be frustrated at being limited to three posts. We\u2019ve both already more than doubled our 500-word target on these first posts. I\u2019m happy with that if you are.
\nLook forward to hearing back
\nTom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks, Bart, for the clear and actually moving account of your former faith, your questionings, and your eventual abandonment of Christian belief. I was glad to hear you say that you wrote the book not to encourage others to follow you into agnosticism (though I guess that is how the book may well work rhetorically…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-is-our-pain-gods-problem"],"yoast_head":"\nN.T. 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