I should say this up front: the idea that I’m going to be able to intelligently “review” Wright’s massive Jesus and the Victory of God in a 250-word blog post is ridiculous at best, and insane at worst. But I’m posting individual reviews for each book I finish this year, so here goes.

I first became familiar with N. T. Wright through some of his shorter books: What Saint Paul Really Said, Simply Christian, and, of course, Surprised by Hope. Somewhere along the way I found out that he has written a three-volume set specifically about Jesus, and so I requested one of the volumes for Christmas back a year ago. (Why I requested Volume Two of a three volume set is beyond me… but I did.)

Sure, there have been a million books written about Jesus. So why does Wright’s stand out? Wright takes the angle of exploring what I’ll call the “historical” Jesus. What was Jesus, the man, thinking? What were his goals? How did the things he said fit into the theological and political scene of first-century Palestine? Wright answers these questions brilliantly, with clarity and insight.

As just a small example, Wright at one point asks this question: Did Jesus know that he was the Son of God? Certainly we affirm that Jesus was fully man and fully God, but how did Jesus the man know that he was God? Wright gives by way of answer this analogy: Jesus knew he was the Son of God in the same way a musician knows they are a musician. They have the skills and abilities of a musician, and something deep within them says ‘I simply must make this music’. As such, a person knows they are a musician. Similarly, Jesus knew he had the skills and abilities of the Messiah, and had the internal calling. It may not be a perfect analogy, but it certainly provides opportunity to stop and think.

Jesus and the Victory of God deals with Jesus’ life and teaching, leading right up to his death. Wright then devotes the entire third volume in his series to the Resurrection. (I got that book for Christmas this year.) Jesus and the Victory of God isn’t a simple read – it’s more like a college-level scholarly text. But if you’re willing to make the effort to dig through it, it will reward you with insight into the life and purposes of Jesus.

Definitely recommended. [You can buy Jesus and the Victory of God from amazon.com.]

So it’s been far too long since I posted my original review of Surprised by Hope, the latest book from N. T. Wright. As you may recall from that review, I found myself stunned by the clarity and richness of Wright’s exposition of the doctrines of heaven and the resurrection. (As Wright so cleverly puts it, “heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world!”) Finally I’m finding some time to come back to it and interact more fully here. Surprised by Hope is split into three broad sections: ‘Setting the Scene’, ‘God’s Future Plan’, and ‘Hope in Practice: Resurrection and the Mission of the Church’. In this post I want to just address the first chapter, titled ‘All Dressed Up and No Place to Go’.

Wright opens Surprised by Hope by positing two questions which he says are often dealt with quite separately but that should really be tied together.

First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven,” of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth”, and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together.

Wright then goes on to highlight just a few of the various beliefs commonly held today regarding death and the afterlife. From the ancestor worship of Africans and Buddhists to the Islamic hope of paradise to the Jewish hope of resurrection, and finally to the Christian view… but what, exactly, is the Christian view? Wright asserts that while there are many popular views of the afterlife in today’s culture, “so far as I can tell, most people don’t know what orthodox Christian belief is.” Yes, there is some belief in “life after death”, but what form does it take, and in what places? What about this word “resurrection”? Wright wants to clear up confusion on these issues.

It’s hard to do much commentary on this first introductory chapter, but it certainly sets the scene for the book. More to come.

Also in this series:

Few writers have gained the attention of, and made waves in, the Christian blogosphere in recent memory in quite the way that N. T. Wright has. (The other that immediately comes to mind is Mark Driscoll, but his similarity with Wright probably ends about right there.) A “Lord Bishop” (ach, a hierarchical title!) in the Anglican (aren’t they all liberals?) Church, Wright is a brilliant yet down-to-earth scholar of the New Testament. He has written a thick three-volume set on Jesus (one volume of which I received as a Christmas gift and am still wading through), a defense and apologetic of Christian beliefs (Simply Christian), and a little book that went off like a bomb in the Reformed world called What St. Paul Really Said. (As a non-Reformed evangelical, I don’t really get what the huge deal is about, though I do appreciate the insights that Wright has to Paul.)

I have been listening to as many of Wright’s messages as I could get my hands on over the past year (check out ntwrightpage.com – a great resource!) and have heard much that seemed to make sense, though it seemed different than what I’ve learned in the evangelical church, regarding the resurrection, heaven, and the end times. So when I heard that Wright was writing a book to sum up those arguments, I put it on my to-buy list and grabbed it as soon as it was released.

Surprised By Hope runs just over 300 pages (not counting the copious end notes) and is full of the reminder of the hope of Christians not for some ethereal existence in some far-off “heaven”, but for a resurrected body (similar to Jesus’ prototype) and eternal existence as a part of a redeemed and restored creation on the “new earth”. Wright makes powerful arguments that this hope of resurrection is consistent with the belief of Israelites before Christ, with the belief of the early church, and that it makes much more sense of the gospels and of Paul than do some of today’s more popular views of heaven.

I have completed one pass through Surprised By Hope and have managed to mark up almost every page. What I have found has been eye-opening; not so much that it is a hugely different doctrine than what my denomination holds to, but more that it sets out so clearly beliefs that we tend to get muddled up and then just gloss over. Wright hits it on the head in Chapter 2:

It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about “going to heaven when you die” and not a lot about a postmortem hell either. The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante’s classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination.

And a bit later:

Most Christians today… remain satisfied with what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope. Indeed, the popular picture is reinforced again and again in hymns, prayers, monuments, and even quite serious works of theology and history. It is simply assumed that the word heaven is the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.

Yeah, that’s me. That’s what I’ve been taught… though not so much taught it, because other than a requisite Sunday School class teaching the standard dispensational view of the book of Revelation, we don’t teach it much more than the usual thumbnail sketch: heaven is where Christians go when they die. They are there forever in God’s presence. It’s pretty much an eternal conversation with the saints of old who you want to get to know, and there’s some idea of worshiping God, though we’re not quite sure what that’ll look like, and then the glassy sea, and crowns, and well, yeah, it’s a bit muddled. We don’t teach it much because we don’t have a coherent framework that incorporates the gospel with the resurrection and then applies it to our mission today. Sure, if we’re current we’ll talk about things like contextualization, of paying attention to the culture and being in the community, but we see it with just the end goal of being “normal” people so we’ll have an in with the non-Christians who we want to tell about Jesus. Wright is saying throughout the book that there’s more to it than that, and he makes a powerful argument.

I’m planning on chewing on the book with multiple blog posts over the next week or two; I also now need to make another pass through the New Testament with this new understanding in mind and see how it fits. Oh, and to Dad and to Richard: I have ordered you copies and they’re on the way.

[You can buy Surprised by Hope from Amazon.com.]

Yesterday was Day 2 of the RTCA committee meeting here in Augusta. (Why am I posting a day behind, you ask? Because there’s free wi-fi in the convention center, but they want $10/day to get it in my room. I don’t need it that bad… so I’m only online during the day.) The meetings were rather uneventful.

Traveled around Augusta last night, and was surprised a bit when I drove past the famed Augusta National golf club. For some reason when I picture golf courses I think of them as big, open, in beautiful surroundings. Augusta National (where they play the Masters every year) is plopped down right in the middle of an older, poor part of town. I suppose maybe years ago when they built it it was on the outskirts, but now it’s just a walled-off enclave in the middle of the ‘hood. Strange.

Last night I found a shopping mall (boring; all shopping malls are about the same. why do I continue to seek them out?), a bookstore (also the same, but good for buying gifts for the girls), and a steakhouse restaurant (mediocre at best – disappointing). But I spent most of my time at the restaurant and then in the hotel after dinner working through N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. There will be several blog posts on it here in the near future, but let me say right now that this is one of those books that has been an “aha” book for me. It simply makes sense and puts the pieces together in a way that no book has done for me since reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man back in college. Oh, and Dad, if you read this: I ordered you a copy this morning, so don’t buy one.

Time for the meeting to start again. Gonna make sure those Synthetic Vision Systems are safe.

Very few things do I enjoy more than finally getting my hands on a new book that I’d been looking forward to. This week is like the double-bonus: Tim Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism and N.T. Wright’s Suprised By Hope: Rethinking the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. I’m about a third of the way through Keller’s book, and I’m quite enjoying it. Nothing groundbreaking so far, but he provides solid, consistent answers to common objections to Christianity in his usual understated, lucid style. You’ve read a lot of the same stuff from C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man and other volumes, but Keller lays it out in a very readable style. Can’t wait to get to the end.

I’m almost more keen (if that’s possible) to wade through Wright’s latest tome. My only fear is that if I end up agreeing with him too much I may start to run afoul of the standard evangelical dispensational and pre-mil standpoint that is codified in Noelridge’s (and Imago Christi’s) doctrinal statements. But I need to wade through it and wrestle with it. I’ve heard a bunch of recordings of the talks that Wright has given on the end times over the past couple of years, and they’ve made a lot of sense. So I’m very happy to have a more concrete, written version to work through. Expect some blog posts on that topic.

It’s not a book, but on a separate note, I picked up Say I Am You, the latest CD from The Weepies, with a gift card yesterday on Geof’s recommendation. Good stuff.