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We will only learn from the historical record if we are honest about our prior conception of God. Here there are three options. The first is pantheism. Pantheism pictures the universe and God as one and the same—God is in everything and everything is in God. This is the God of both ancient Stoicism and contemporary New Age spirituality. And while Wright insists that God is always at work in his creation, the created order as it now exists is not always working in God. Radical evil is real, and pantheism's only response is suicide (Stoicism) or denial (New Ageism).
The second option is deism, given a peculiarly modern twist in its "moralistic, therapeutic" form. Deism pictures the supernatural realm and the natural realm as two distinct circles. God is in heaven and we are on earth, and neither has (nor desires) much to do with the other. This option is quite appealing, says Wright, "when you're sitting in front of the television or hooked up to a portable stereo, one hand glued to the cell phone for text messaging, the other clutching a mug of specialist coffee." When life is good, why worry about God? Naturally, life is not always good, but the promise of cozy deism is that happiness will quickly be restored to those who confess their mistakes and pray to God in heaven. While the pastor in Wright is pretty gentle with this sort of thing, he is stern enough to add that "quickly" is a relative term. Yes, God wants (and promises) our happiness; but on his schedule, not ours.
The third option is the only fully Christian conception of God. Here, God and his creation are distinct, and heaven (the supernatural) and earth (the natural) are overlapping and interlocking. What's more, there are thin places where no "random invasion of earth by alien ('supernatural'?) force" is necessary for God to reveal himself. But looking at God directly is like "staring at the Sun." God
can't be defined in terms of anything or anyone else. It isn't the case that there is such a thing as "divinity" and that he's simply another example, even the supreme one, of this category. Nor is it the case that all things that exist, including God, share in something we might call "being" or "existence," so that God would then be the supremely existing being. He is his own category, not part of a larger one.
How, then, is God to be known? And why should we believe that such a God even exists?
Wright is quick to say that the existence of such a God can't be "proved." (In fact, he may be a bit too quick. As Ralph McInerny obserbed in his Gifford Lectures, the Catholic Church has made "a dogmatic declaration that dogma is not necessary for one to know that God exists."1) But, given the "echoes of a voice" mentioned earlier, he argues that those who are intellectually honest can't help but be impressed by the congruence of the historical data, Christian doctrine, and this third conception of God.
If we want to go beyond congruence, says Wright, we must begin by looking at Jesus. And when we do, we must remember that Jesus was a Jew. This assertion is not trivial, nor does it entail disrespect to our Jewish cousins. Only by seeing Jesus in his historical context, where he experienced from birth the hopes, fears, frustrations, and failures of Jews under Roman rule, can we begin to understand the New Testament. Simply Christian does this, but since it is impossible to summarize its richly detailed account, I will consider a single (and perhaps singularly important) example—the Jews' hope for a Messiah.
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