Note: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of CRUX (Vol. 55, No. 4).

A theologian, given a free hand for a topic, ought in principle to talk about God. And a Christian theologian ought to talk about Jesus and God. That may sound easy, but, like many things, it gets more complicated as you get closer. My recent work has been exploring this in relation to what is called “natural theology,” arising from the Gifford Lectures that I delivered last year in Aberdeen and that I have now revised for publication (History and Eschatology). I see “natural theology” as the challenge of public truth. The idea of observing the natural world and arguing up to God is as old as the ancient philosophers. But what now has been called “natural theology” has been the challenge to say something about God in a way that is open to public investigation, rather than being merely the private truth of those who already believe. My particular proposal is that this public truth needs to have Jesus at the middle of it. I would like to summarize my views, taking the argument of the original lectures forward in ways that I have tried to incorporate into the version recently published. 

My late mother, shortly before she died, asked me what the Giffords were about. When I said “natural theology,” that didn’t mean much to her, so I put it like this. Some people used to think that you could look at the world of nature and figure out God from there. Other people have thought that wasn’t such a good idea. But since Jesus himself was part of the world of nature, why shouldn’t we include him too? And if we did, might we perhaps learn something new about knowledge itself? My mother thought for a moment and then said, firmly, “I’m glad I don’t have to listen to those lectures.” 

Putting Jesus in the mix has been strangely unfashionable. What tends to happen is that Jesus gets left out until the very last minute, when the theologian or philosopher, having constructed an outline picture of God on other grounds, finally asks what it would mean to think of Jesus as the incarnation or embodiment of this God. I decided to try it the other way round—to the consternation of some who think it’s cheating to put Jesus in the picture from the start. But actually it’s cheating not to. Jesus was, after all, a human being who lived at a particular place and time. The world of history—of space, time, and matter—is part of the “natural” world. 

But the world of history has seemed, over the last two or three hundred years of Western thought, to be much harder to get at, much harder to “use,” than the world of the natural sciences. How can we be sure this happened, or that happened? When it comes to Jesus, can we be sure of what he really did and said? Do we really know he even existed? Can we be sure that he rose from the dead? And, if not, what then happens to Christian theology? 

Here we run into a serious problem, about the word “history” itself. What do we mean by “history”? I want to say a few things about that, and then move to considering, from a genuinely historical point of view, three of the most vital things about Jesus’s public life (space, time, and the future) before we put the picture together and see how to approach the whole question of Jesus and God. 

The Meanings of “History”

Some of the most important words in the English language are annoyingly ambiguous. The word “love” is an obvious example; C. S. Lewis suggested that it had at least four basic meanings. Well, the word “history” has at least three quite different meanings. First, there is “history” as the past; events that have happened: what “historians” study. Second, there is “history” as things written about the past: what “historians” produce. Third, there is “history” as the task; research, debating, and writing it all up: what “historians” do. 

Genesis was written to say, among many other things, that God’s good creation is a combined heaven/earth reality, with humans called to stand at the dangerous point of intersection between the two.We move easily between these—perhaps too easily. When a racing driver crashes, the commentator shouts, “He’s history.” That’s the first: the past. Churchill said, “History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.” That’s the second: things written about the past, almost always including some kind of evaluation. With that evaluation comes more complication: Hillary Clinton, watching the so-called Arab Spring unfold, declared that it was important “to be on the right side of history,” which seems to assume that world events move inexorably in a particular direction, the view some call “historicism.” Meanwhile, on the other side, a recent political writer declares that “history is full of surprises.” That has the ring of truth; after all, we know very little of the past, almost nothing when we compare our knowledge with the sum total of all past events, and precisely none of the future. All this shows how complicated the word quickly becomes. And the “task” emerges when you ask a student what they are studying, and they say, “I’m doing history.” 

All that might be just applied common sense. But in theology we are confronted with the historical study of Jesus. Many people have become very suspicious of such study, since most “historical Jesus” portraits have seemed to be trying to cut him down to size, to say that he wasn’t the Son of God until the later church decided to call him that, and so on, so that Christianity is actually based on a mistake. That was the conclusion that many two or three hundred years ago wanted to reach, since they preferred either deism (God as a distant Absentee Landlord) or rank Epicureanism (with the gods out of the picture altogether). Both of those theologies sit well with a “merely human” Jesus: a “historical Jesus”—in the first sense of “history,” the what-actually-happened sense—trimmed down to suit modern preconceptions. 

Many, seeing this, have suggested that the best we can do is “the historical Jesus” in the second sense of “history”: the “what-historians-write” sense. All we have is my reconstruction or your reconstruction, but never the real thing. Now it is true that we always have to be aware, as with any historical writing, who is writing and from what point of view. But this doesn’t mean we can never get real information about the past. When we see a report of a football match between teams from two neighbouring cities, we expect there to be plenty of local bias depending on which paper we’re reading. But we don’t expect them to get the score wrong. 

The low point of “historical Jesus” research was the so-called “Jesus Seminar,” organized by some American scholars in the 1990s. Unfortunately, some have used their very negative work as an excuse for abandoning “history” in the third sense—the task of history—altogether. This is where the verbal slippage really kicks in. Some theologians have said, “Don’t give us ‘history’ in terms of research and reconstruction: that is bound to cut Jesus down to size.” Instead, they say, we must believe that Jesus is the Lord of “history”—but “history” now neither as “what historians do” nor “what historians produce,” nor even as “what historians study”; but in a massive, all-embracing, extended sense of “everything that ever happened or ever will.” Such theologians will claim that God is sovereign over “history” in this sense, or that Jesus is somehow “the Lord of history” in this sense, but claims like this tell us precisely nothing about what actually happened, about who Jesus actually was and what he meant by what he did and said. It is a bit like asking your bank manager what you’ve got in your bank account and receiving the reply “money.” Saying “history” in this huge, generalized sense may be true at one level, but it isn’t helpful. If we want—as theologians and preachers rightly want—to talk about God incarnate, we ought not to do so until we have looked very carefully—and that means historically—at the incarnate God. Otherwise we merely put the cart before the horse. Nobody has seen God, declared John; the only begotten Son of God has revealed him.

So we have, on the one hand, some sceptics saying that Jesus was just a Jewish teacher whose followers decided to start a new religion in his memory. And on the other hand, we have some theologians, reacting not just against that but against any attempt to investigate Jesus, declaring grandly that since he is the Lord of history, that’s all we need to know. But actually neither group are doing real “history” at all. And this has left many ordinary Christians, including many hard-working clergy, bothered and unsure whether they can really trust the Gospels, whether they can really be sure about who Jesus was. Nor can we simply appeal to the authority of Scripture since though we may believe in it, the people we are trying to convince do not. I want to suggest some ways forward. 

There is no secret to how good history is done. There are generally accepted principles among real historians. First, history is real knowledge, not merely “opinion” or “guesswork.” It follows the accepted methods of the natural sciences: you collect all the relevant data, you form hypotheses, and you test and modify and ultimately verify those hypotheses. Most hard science studies the repeatable; history, like astronomy or geology, studies the unrepeatable. But the method is the same. 

Second, history involves inquiring after human motivation, which means thinking into the minds of people who think differently to us. History asks why certain things happened, looking for clues to human motivation.

Third, history, unlike mere chronicle, which just collects unrelated data, always aims at a connected narrative in which cause and effect (including the “law of unintended consequences”) are appropriately displayed.

All this is part of what I and others have loosely called “critical realism,” which is a fancy way of saying that we know “fake news” occurs but that doesn’t mean nothing happens. And “critical realism” needs to employ what has been called the “epistemology of love.” When historians think into the minds of other people, it takes an act of sympathetic imagination; but that exists, like love itself, in the fragile space between lustful projection, on the one hand—imagining the other to be what I want them to be—and, on the other, a detached indifference in which we don’t try to get inside the other mind at all. It is remarkable just how much scholarship about Jesus that has called itself “historical-critical” has not, in fact, employed the historians’ principles, but has remained content with anachronistic frameworks of thought and inappropriate pseudo-scientific methods. It has often been mostly critical and hardly at all historical. 

Space, Time, and the Forgotten Hope

As historians, we know quite a bit about the larger first-century world. The Romans took control of Judaea and Galilee in 63 BC, but after a century or so they lost patience, defeated the rebellious Jews, and destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in AD 70. Jesus’s public career took place right in the middle of that period. Resistance to Rome was then smouldering, rather than in open flame, but rebellion was never far from the surface. Jesus was himself executed as a rebel king, in the early 30s, after a short public career. 

We know all of this beyond any doubt whatsoever. We also know, uncontroversially, certain vital things about Jesus’s public career. Its theme was the announcement of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, an announcement that Jesus made in deed and word. The theme of God’s kingdom, clear in Israel’s Scriptures, was current in revolutionary movements. The revolutionaries wanted God alone to be king rather than the present wicked rulers. Jesus explicitly hooked his own announcement into the ancient prophecies (“the time is fulfilled”—in other words, the time promised by the prophets), and he radically reinterpreted its meaning through dramatic actions (particularly healings and parties) and sharp-edged little stories (the parables). 

This vivid picture of Jesus is not open to doubt. The evidence converges and makes excellent sense precisely in the complex world of the first third of the first century. By the time the Gospels were written, the issues had moved on. But this historical basis for understanding Jesus has not been explored, let alone exploited, either by the sceptics, who have concentrated their fire elsewhere, or by the systematic theologians, who have usually only wanted to find in the Gospels advance hints of much later dogmatic puzzles. If we are to understand Jesus himself—and if, with the New Testament, we are going to think in terms of looking hard at Jesus in order to get the most accurate glimpse of God himself—then we have to do the historical work of understanding what Jesus meant by his kingdom-announcement.

Three features of Jesus’s public career stand out as being badly understood in later tradition. They are the temple, the Sabbath, and the future: space, time, and history. These are vital. 

Temple

Before the 1980s, the question of Jesus’s attitude to the temple, and particularly his action in the temple, wasn’t central to historical-Jesus research. But more recently, several who have studied the first-century Jewish world in its own right have highlighted Jesus’s temple-action as the climax of a program of “Jewish restoration eschatology.” This was not about “the end of the world.” It was about the fulfilment of God’s promise to turn the present world inside out, to rescue Israel from pagan domination, and perhaps even to establish worldwide justice and peace. And what Jesus said and did in relation to the temple fits within that program.

So what did the temple mean to a first-century Jew? This is vital. The temple was directly related to creation itself, and to the promise of new creation. 

The opening chapters of Genesis portray the creation of heaven and earth as the construction of a temple. Creation is built, like a temple, in seven stages, and the final element is the image, reflecting the divine presence into the world and channelling worship from creation back to the Creator. A temple—any temple in the ancient world—was designed as a place where heaven and earth would come together, would overlap and interlock. Our modern culture has embraced a version of ancient Epicureanism, in which, though the gods may exist, they are a long way away, and have nothing to do with us. Hardly anyone in the ancient world thought like that. Genesis was written to say, among many other things, that God’s good creation is a combined heaven/earth reality, with humans called to stand at the dangerous point of intersection between the two, and that God himself has created this bipartite world for his own use, wanting to come and dwell with his human creatures, to take his rest among them in his own true home. 

This plays out in the overall shape of Genesis and Exodus. When the children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt, Moses said to Pharaoh that they should be set free “to worship our God in the desert.” The climax of Exodus is not the crossing of the Red Sea, nor the giving of the law on Sinai. These were just preparatory. The climax comes—after the Israelites have nearly blown it all with the golden calf!—with the tabernacle. It is a small model of creation itself, from the stars to the plants. And the glorious divine presence, what later rabbis would call the Shekinah, the Tabernacling, comes to dwell there in holy majesty. There is a narrative arc all the way from Genesis 1 to Exodus 40, picked up exactly by the prologue to John’s Gospel: the Word became flesh, and tabernacled in our midst. 

There is a vital twist here that many ignore. The wilderness tabernacle and later the Jerusalem temple were signposts pointing forward to an even greater reality. They spoke of what the Creator God longed to do with the whole of creation. The glorious filling of the wilderness tent pointed to the ultimate filling of all creation. The residual Platonism of much modern Christianity means that we easily think of God’s presence in a church or Christian assembly as giving us a safe place away from the world, a sign to a disembodied reality called “heaven” rather than a sign of what God intends ultimately for the whole world. 

Take Psalm 72, which celebrates the coming true king who will do justice for the poor, the outcast and helpless, the widow, and the orphan. This is one of the king’s three jobs; the other two are to repel Israel’s enemies and to build or restore the temple. All these are aimed at one purpose: the coming of the divine glory to dwell with his people. The king repels the pagan enemies to cleanse the land for God to live there; he builds the temple so that the divine glory may dwell there; and in Psalm 72 he does justice for the poor so that the divine glory may dwell in all the earth. The whole world is claimed as God’s holy land, and the temple’s heaven-and-earth reality points to the heaven-and-earth reality of the whole renewed creation. And, as in Genesis 1, the heaven-and-earth reality is focused on the human being through whom it all happens. The king is the true image-bearer, the true human being. Some Jews were already reading Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 in just this way. Jesus seems to have made these traditions his own. Once you see this, you will never read the Gospels the same way again.

So what happens when, as historians, we put Jesus and his public career into this world, a world of promised glory for temple and creation? 

Jesus appears as a prophet announcing God’s kingdom, but it soon becomes clear that he believes himself to be more than a prophet. He is the true king, even though he is redefining kingship around himself in a creative new synthesis of Israel’s Scriptures. He isn’t planning armed revolt, as a would-be Messiah might have done, but he is doing the things that Isaiah prophesied, healing the sick and so forth. And when he publicly forgives sins, he is claiming to do and be what the temple was and did, slicing through protocol and offering people on the street what you would normally get by going to the temple. His regular and notorious feasting with “sinners” and “outcasts” looks like a dramatic enactment of Psalm 72, reinforced by parables like the prodigal son. 

Jesus was declaring that the age to come had arrived in the present, not now as a weekly advance celebration, but as a new, permanent reality, running concurrently with the ongoing present age.So Jesus’s public career offers, throughout, an implicit challenge to the temple. This becomes explicit in his final arrival in Jerusalem (Matt. 21:12–17). His action in the temple is not a demand for reform. It is an acted parable of the temple’s coming destruction, of the divine judgment that will be enacted by Rome. When he stops the flow of sacrificial animals, he is performing a symbolic demonstration of the temple’s upcoming destruction. At the same time, he is offering something radically different, something symbolized by his own quasi-Passover meal with his friends. Then, when Jesus dies, the temple veil is torn in two—again symbolizing its imminent destruction. Something has happened—something is happening—as a result of which the temple is both redundant in the face of the promised reality and under judgment, as it was in the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, because of the wickedness of its officials and of the Judeans in general. When we put all of this in the context of what, I stress, was the normal way of understanding the temple, the implication is massive. Jesus believed that he was the true King, and that in his words and deeds the glorious and devastating presence of Israel’s God was manifest at last. He was the place where and the means by which heaven and earth would come together at last. He was the true Image. And he believed that, with his forthcoming death and its aftermath, the kingdom would indeed be established in a whole new way, on earth as in heaven.

But how would this work? How could the age to come break into the present age rather than merely abolish and replace it, as so many have supposed? For that, we turn from space to time; from the temple to the Sabbath.

Sabbath

What I have just said about the temple applies even more to the Sabbath. The Sabbath was to time what the temple was to place. The temple was where heaven and earth met, held together in a dangerous symbiosis, with the image-bearing humans standing at the fault line in worship and obedience. The Sabbath was where the age to come broke in to the present age, so that God’s future and God’s present were held together, again with the human beings standing at the threshold in a single moment of rest and celebration, with the past coming forward as well: the creation, the original Exodus, and all the other moments of divine triumph in Israel’s history.

Just as modern Christianity hasn’t known what to do about the temple and Jesus’s sayings and actions in relation to it, so we haven’t known what to do with the Sabbath. The Sabbath stories in the Gospels have been treated as a clash between “Jewish legalism” and “Christian freedom.” But that’s not the point. Jesus’s opening announcement about the kingdom was that “the time was fulfilled.” His Nazareth sermon in Luke 4 announces the Jubilee, the seventh seven, the year of release. This was the great Sabbath; and the Sabbath was when, every week, the age to come would appear in advance in the midst of the present age. Thus, even in the ongoing world of sin and death, one might live for a day in the promised new age of blessing, healing, and forgiveness. Thus, if the temple was a signpost to God’s ultimate intention to fill the whole world with his presence, the Sabbaths were advance glimpses of the age to come, the future somehow nesting dangerously in the present. The Sabbath candles were the sign that one day God’s new day would dawn. And Jesus was declaring that the day had come at last. You don’t need candles once the sun has risen.

The Sabbath controversies, therefore, reflect the “already” of the kingdom; the presence of God’s new day. “If it’s by God’s finger that I cast out demons, then God’s kingdom has come upon you” (Luke 11:20 Kingdom New Testament). Jesus’s parables fit exactly here. They were designed to affirm the Jewish expectation of God’s coming kingdom on earth as in heaven, to announce that this expectation was now being fulfilled, and to redefine the meaning of the kingdom, away from the revolutionary aspirations and toward Jesus’s own understanding of the Scriptures and of his own vocation. 

So where did Jesus suppose it was all going to end? What do we then do with what we’ve normally called “eschatology”?

The Future

The failure of Western Christianity to understand the first-century Jewish idea of time has resulted in a caricature. For a hundred years and more, students have been taught that Jesus and his first followers expected the actual end of the world at any moment. How did this mistake arise? 

In the nineteenth century, many European scholars had been convinced that progressive advances of Western culture constituted the steady arrival of the kingdom of God. But the mask had begun to slip. Kierkegaard had denounced the Hegelian idea of progressive development. Nietzsche was saying that the whole thing was a fraud. Karl Marx had transformed Hegel’s secularized “progress” into revolution, a secularized version of Jewish apocalyptic. And two young scholars, Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, caught the mood of the times. They declared that first-century Jews, and Jesus in particular, believed in the imminent end of the world, and that that’s what they meant by the kingdom of God. This has become received scholarly orthodoxy in many circles to this day. 

But Weiss and Schweitzer got it wrong. They had not studied Jewish apocalyptic in its historical and political context. Schweitzer was a brilliant philosopher and musician, an expert on J. S. Bach but also a massive fan of Richard Wagner, particularly of the Ring cycle. Schweitzer attended performances of the Ring in Bayreuth four times during the very years he was writing about Jesus and the kingdom of God. The Ring, as you may know, offers precisely a Nietzschean vision of the end of the world: “the truth that everything ends.” Schweitzer transposed this into a first-century fantasy. Many saw his work as a word for the times, a warning to the nineteenth-century optimism that was indeed about to crash and burn. The warning was echoed by Karl Barth in his post-war Romans commentary. To this day, confusion continues.

But the answer to confusion is careful historical exegesis. In particular, we need to ask the question: what did “apocalyptic” language mean in the first century? When first-century Jews echoed books such as Daniel, or 1 Enoch, what were they talking about?

The post-Enlightenment philosophical climate, dominated by Epicureanism, was bound to give the wrong answer. If you start by supposing that “heaven” is utterly different to “earth,” then if “heaven” comes to reign, earth will have to be abolished to make room. But that is neither biblical nor Jewish. Likewise, the idea of leaving “earth” and “going to heaven” is actually a Platonic notion, not an early Christian one. Jesus himself spoke of, and taught people to pray for, God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, an idea that Epicureanism finds impossible and Platonism undesirable. 

Instead of both of those options, the first-century retrieval of Daniel and 1 Enoch was what we would call “political”—but the “political” here was thoroughly mixed with the “theological.” God is Creator of all and Lord of all. When Isaiah described the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from heaven, he was talking about the fall of Babylon: what other language would be appropriate for an event that would, in that world, be like a combination of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and 9/11? When Jeremiah warned that the created order would unmake itself and go back to being “without form and void,” he worried that he might turn out to be a false prophet, not because the world was still going on but because the temple had not fallen. The temple was the ultimate heaven-and-earth place. If the temple fell, heaven and earth themselves would have come apart at the seams. 

We know from the historian Josephus, and from the book we call 4 Ezra, how Daniel was being read in Jesus’s day. Daniel 2 has the statue with the head of gold and the feet of clay, smashed by a stone that becomes a mountain. Daniel 7 has the four monsters and the exaltation of “one like a son of man.” Fourth Ezra, referring back to Daniel, has an obviously Roman eagle being attacked by an obviously messianic lion. It’s all the same thing. The language of “apocalyptic,” of dreams and visions in which God’s coming kingdom overthrows and replaces the kingdoms of the world, was not about “the end of the world” in the modern sense. That theory has given the impression of the first Christians as simple pre-scientific folk cherishing strange ideas long since falsified—which neatly absolves us from having to follow their theology or ethics either. That line is merely self-serving, part of the gangrene of liberal reductionism.

So when we put all this together, what do we find about Jesus’s announcement of the kingdom? He was indeed talking about an end and a beginning—but it was the end, not of the space-time universe, but of the long years in which Israel’s temple had been the focal point of “heaven and earth,” in which the Sabbaths were forward-looking signposts. The sun was rising, and the candles were no longer needed. Jesus was declaring that the age to come had arrived in the present, not now as a weekly advance celebration, but as a new, permanent reality, running concurrently with the ongoing present age, until a yet future date. Jesus’s followers from then on would find themselves living simultaneously in two different theological time zones. Paul frequently refers to that kind of theological jet-lag, insisting that it’s time to wake up even though others around are still asleep. 

But with Jesus there are two further wrinkles, which Paul already takes as read and develops. For Jesus, the ultimate victory over the powers of darkness which would establish God’s kingdom was yet to happen. The victory over evil spirits in the present time, during Jesus’s public career, was a sign of an early victory, but there was a darker battle yet to be fought. That is at the heart of Jesus’s understanding of his own approaching death. I have written about this in my book The Day the Revolution Began: for Jesus, Paul, and the Gospel writers, the cross is the victory over the dark enslaving powers. This victory is achieved through what we may call “representative substitution.” The different modern theories of “atonement” regularly miss this point and are wrongly played off against one another. But for the early Christians, the victory had indeed been won. Caesar was still ruling the world and the temple was still standing; but both were tottering. A new reality had been launched upon the world: a perpetual Sabbath, a new kind of temple. They believed all this, of course, because they believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, demonstrating his victory over evil by his victory over evil’s consequence, namely death. All that is of course a vast topic for another time; as is the question of what this kingdom then looks like in the time between the resurrection and Jesus’s final return. 

The other wrinkle—and more than a wrinkle!—is that at the heart of the Jewish vision of the future was the hope, closely bound up with the temple, that Israel’s God would return in person to rescue his people and set up his kingdom. Isaiah says that explicitly; so do Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Malachi. All four Gospels and Paul draw on those texts and insist that they came true with and in Jesus. Historical critics and theologians alike have ignored this. But I believe it is at the very heart of New Testament Christology: that when we view Jesus’s public career, climaxing in his death, resurrection, and ascension, we should think, “This is what it looked like when Israel’s God returned in glory, when he came suddenly to his temple.” Can history “prove” the truth of such a claim? No, but history can radically clarify what the claim involves, so that the fuller “knowledge” we seek comes together in all its coherence.

But for now I want to bring this article back to where it began by asking what we learn from all of this about the question of Jesus and God. If this is indeed a properly historical account of Jesus, a Jesus fully at home in the real first-century world, where does it leave us with the question of “natural theology”?

Jesus and “Natural Theology”

I have suggested that historical study of the first century poses a direct challenge to the modern Epicurean framework. In particular, it challenges what has been essentially a Faustian pact, in which the real heart of knowledge, namely love itself, has been pushed aside so that a ruthlessly driven “progress” could proceed unchecked. Well, that project has produced, as well as wars, a massive Western arrogance, an attempted Epicurean paradise removed from the rest of the world, a secular temple, a secular age to come. What we are witnessing is a parody of the gospel—which is why, in the modern world, Christianity is seen as a “religion,” which by definition is split off from real life. That is the political analogue of the failure of “natural theology.” Even if we don’t want to engage the question for philosophical reasons, the urgent political crises of our day ought to tell us this is not just about spirituality or “religion.” It is about which God or gods are ruling the world, which God or gods we are going to serve. 

The question, then, of “Jesus and natural theology,” which then begs the second question of “which divinities are we serving?” can be approached in three interlocking ways. They focus on the central gospel themes: the cross, the resurrection, and the mission of God.

First, the paradox of the cross meets the paradox of human longing. There are seven vital strands of human life: justice, freedom, beauty, spirituality, truth, power, and love. In each case, we know they are crucially important but we find them elusive, harder to attain and hold on to than we want. We feel them to be clues to the meaning of life, but they appear to let us down: justice is denied or distorted, freedom is twisted into licence or new forms of slavery, the sunset disappears, spirituality becomes self-serving fantasy, truth becomes fake news, power corrupts, and love changes either into lust or into grief. This is why many see “natural theology” as pointless: all the things that might appear to be signals of transcendence, of ultimate meaning, turn to dust and ashes as we reach out to grasp them. My point, however, is that the gospel story of Jesus going to his death meets this dark human narrative at its low point. The story of Jesus does not enable us to stretch ourselves up to God; it declares that God has come down to us, to meet us in our dust and ashes. That, I believe, is part of the secret of its power, the reason why the cross, in pictures or statues or art or music—perhaps especially in music—has the power to leap over human scepticism and incomprehension and to open up recesses of the human imagination and understanding. It is precisely at the point where Jesus appears to have failed (in what his followers thought was a bid to establish an ordinary kingdom) that we have a strong sense of ultimate connection. The cross, as we say, “finds us where we are.”

In particular, second, it therefore has the capacity to awaken a genuine love. To repeat, “love” here is not fantasy or sentiment. It is the delighted recognition of a truth beyond ourselves, reaching out in response to a reality not from ourselves but somehow for ourselves. “The son of God loved me and gave himself for me”: yes, but that can only be said in the light of the resurrection. That is why Ludwig Wittgenstein said, startlingly, “it is love that believes the resurrection.” The actual events of the gospel, focusing on Jesus’s death and resurrection, evoke that love, as a new dimension to the ordinary “epistemology of love,” which is required in any case for all good history. This new dimension opens up because in the resurrection it becomes clear that the Creator of the world has declared his love for his creation, including for us, not just in theory but in practice. The news that Jesus has been raised and is now alive in a whole new way—bodily but with a transformed, immortal physicality—tells us that our deepest longings, framed and frustrated in equal measure by our present created but corruptible existence, are redemptively affirmed. They are not, they cannot be, affirmed as they stand, because of their now inherent corruption; but the act of redemption is also the real reaffirmation, and with it the revelation of the Creator’s love. The love that believes the resurrection is therefore an answering love, which is the ultimate form of knowledge: as Paul says, based not on our knowledge of God but on God’s knowledge of us. This kind of knowledge—the knowledge that refuses the Faustian pact of modernity and allows love to set the terms—includes, but also transcends, the good historical arguments in which Jesus’s resurrection is the only answer to the question of how Christianity began in the first place. History is important, but by itself the best historical arguments may never convince the sceptic. The sort of knowledge I am talking about, based on answering love, includes, and also transcends, the emotional appeal that is all many can hear in the word “love” but that would by itself result in private experience rather than public truth. Again, saying, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart,” though it may be true, lacks the power to convince others. It may, they will say, be “true for you” but not “true for me.” No: the message of Jesus’s resurrection is the message that new creation is launched because the powers of darkness have been defeated on the cross. And the message of new creation is the message of a deeper love, a deeper sense of welcome home, than humans otherwise imagine. And with all this, as we see in the response of Mary, Thomas, and Peter in John’s account of the resurrection, the ultimate mystery opens before us: “My Lord,” says Thomas, “and my God” (John 20:28).

All this only really appears when the hard historical work has been done, so that we see what the four Gospels are really telling us, above and beyond the truncated modern understandings. Of course, none of this proves anything in the shrunken sense of a mathematical “proof”; but the shrill demand for such things is itself a trick of the Faustian reductionism to which our culture has been subjected for many years. And once we recognize that the claim of Jesus himself, and his first followers, had nothing to do with the end of the space-time world and everything to do with the great Sabbath, the transformative arrival of the age to come within the present age, and with it the dangerous joining of heaven and earth in Jesus himself and by his Spirit, then the believing love that answers the Creator’s love in raising Jesus can be seen for what it is. It is not the adoption of a cold dogma, but the embrace of, and commitment to, the project of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. And that leads to my third and final point.

Following from this interpretation of the cross, and this understanding of the resurrection and with it of Christology, we have the Spirit-driven mission of the church. Just as the temple was an effective advance sign of God’s ultimate intention to flood the whole creation with his own glorious presence; just as the Sabbaths were effective advance signposts to the age to come; so the Spirit-led mission of the church is the effective advance sign of that coming age in which creation will be transformed and the divine justice, beauty, and love will fill all things, so that God may be all in all. This means that the church’s mission—including the announcement that God raised Jesus from the dead and that through his death the power of evil has been defeated so that forgiveness of sins is now freely offered to all—this mission must be framed in terms of new creation. If justice, freedom, beauty, spirituality, truth, power, and love are reaffirmed as the genuine God-given longings that seemed to have failed in the cross, their reaffirmation in the resurrection means that by the Spirit the church must work at all of them simultaneously, not resting content with the Platonic promise of a disembodied heaven or the gnostic delusion of self-discovery. The mission of God thus belongs, quite properly, as part of “natural theology,” since it addresses the puzzled awareness of all humans living within the world of “nature” itself. 

So, to conclude: I do not believe that one can straightforwardly start with a test-tube and a telescope and argue your way up to God. But if the test tube reminds you to look to the larger world, including the world of history, including the fact of Jesus, then, if you look with answering love, you will glimpse in his face, as Paul says, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.