Famed lifelong atheist philosophy professor Antony Flew now believes in God.  He declares in his recently published autobiography, There is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (Doubleday, 2007), that Christianity is the religion to beat.  A key current conversation partner for Flew is prolific New Testament scholar, professor and Anglican bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright.  Pages 187-213 of Appendix B in this volume print a response Wright wrote to some of Flew’s recent questions.  After a brief rehearsal of the massive historical evidence for Jesus’ existence (pp. 187-88), Wright turns to the grounds for believing Jesus as God incarnate (pp. 188-95).  Wright’s points lucidly sum up major swaths of his earlier, much bigger books on Jesus, most notably Jesus and the Victory of God (SPCK and Fortress, 1996).

First, Wright observes that the five key ways Jews spoke about the one God of the universe acting in this world—through his Word, his Wisdom, his Glory, his Law and his Spirit, are all five key ways Jesus is presented in the Gospels as functioning.  Moreover, in a world in which many Jews found themselves dispersed throughout the Roman empire, away from their ancestral homeland, and in which even those Jews living in Israel were painfully aware on a daily basis that they were living in occupied territory (by the Romans), people were longing for God to return, as it were, and end the “exile,” both real and metaphorical.  As Jesus’ ministry unfolds and as he announces his final climactic trip to Jerusalem, Jesus himself keeps speaking about his own return to do precisely the kind of things for which Israel was longing.

This approach to the incarnation is worlds apart from the fourth and fifth century theological debate, replete with its councils and creeds.  No one is yet talking about the second person of the Trinity, ontologically equal with Father and Spirit, with fully divine and human natures.  These conclusions are not invalid inferences from previous theological developments as the Christian religion grew.  But in the first third of the first century, something remarkable led a group of (at first) exclusively Jewish followers of Jesus, to speak of him acting (and to speak of him speaking about himself as acting) in all the major ways that God alone, in their estimation, could act.  These are astonishing claims that only an astonishing individual, Jesus of Nazareth, could generate.

After printing Wright’s words, Flew concludes, “I am very much impressed with Bishop Wright’s approach, which is absolutely fresh.  He presents the case for Christianity as something new for the first time.  This is enormously important, especially in the United Kingdom, where the Christian religion has virtually disappeared.  It is absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful” (p. 213).

These are strong and encouraging words.  But there is still more which I will explore in this week’s final post on this topic.