N. T. Wright
- The “strange silence” of the Bible in the stories. Up to this point, the gospel writers consistently used allusions to and quotations from the Old Testament to show that Jesus' death was “according to the scriptures”. The resurrection narratives, though, have almost no such references. If the resurrection accounts were invented much later, you would expect the writers to stay consistent.
- The presence of women as principal witnesses. As has often been remarked upon, women were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. Yet there they are in all the resurrection accounts.
- The portrait of Jesus himself. If the resurrection stories were written later, you’d expect a shining, transfigured Jesus. Instead, you get Jesus mistaken for a gardener and as a human being with a body that was in many ways quite normal.
- The resurrection accounts never mention the future Christian hope. In every account since then and in every Easter sermon preached, the conclusion is drawn: Jesus is raised, therefore there is life after death. But in these accounts, no such conclusions are drawn.
- The Christians, though coming from a broad spectrum of philosophical and religious backgrounds, quickly agreed on a single, “two-step” view of life after death: a temporary, spiritual time with God until the final, bodily resurrection.
- The resurrection became more important - it moved “from the circumference to the center”.
- The understanding of the resurrected body moved from some vague Jewish beliefs to a solid belief in a material, transformed human body.
- The early Christians came to understand the resurrection as “split into two” - the prototype of Jesus resurrection, which points forward then to the resurrection at the end of days.
- Because God had inaugurated the resurrection in Jesus, the Christians now “believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.”
- The metaphorical use of resurrection changed from being about the restoration of ethnic Israel to being about the restoration of humans in general.
- Resurrection became associated with the Jewish views of messiahship. To this point, no one had expected the Messiah to die and be resurrected; from this point on, they understood it to be the case.
- Overview
- Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go?
- Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise?
- Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting (this post)
- Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
- Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
- Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
- Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
- Chapter 8: When He Appears
- Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
- Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
- Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
- Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
- Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
- Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
- Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future
- Overview
- Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go?
- Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise? (this post)
- Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting
- Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
- Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
- Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
- Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
- Chapter 8: When He Appears
- Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
- Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
- Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
- Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
- Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
- Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
- Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future
- Overview
- Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and No Place To Go? (this post)
- Chapter 2: Puzzled About Paradise?
- Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting
- Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter
- Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?
- Chapter 6: What the Whole World’s Waiting For
- Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation
- Chapter 8: When He Appears
- Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge
- Chapter 10: The Redemption of Our Bodies
- Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell
- Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God
- Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom
- Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots
- Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future
Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera
I have a small handful of theological books in my past that I look back on as turning points - books that spoke to me at my particular place and time, opened my eyes, and set my thinking about God in a new direction. The first of those is NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope; the second is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I’ll give it a week or two before I inscribe this in stone, but I’m inclined to think that Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of the Free is the next one. Let me try to explain.
In the Protestant church (at least), there has been much ink spilled over the years to systematize atonement theories, that is, to organize all the teaching about Jesus’ death and how it works to save us into some sort of coherent, synthesized framework. In the conservative evangelical world of my first 40 years as a Christian, the predominant, nay, the only acceptable atonement theory is penal substitutionary atonement, usually abbreviated PSA. PSA says that each of us, as a sinner, deserve God’s punishment, but that Jesus died in our place, taking that wrath upon himself. The children’s bibles usually summarize it as “Jesus died so I don’t have to”.
Rillera says that PSA fails to pay attention to how sacrifices worked in the Old Testament, and as such then horribly misreads the New Testament (particularly Paul and Hebrews). This may be the book that inspires me to go back to where I always get bogged down in the Bible In A Year reading plans, and do a close reading of Leviticus.
Rillera starts right off the bat in chapter 1 by making the assertion that
There is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah.
He notes that “for sins that called for capital punishment, of for the sinner to be “cut off”, there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation”, and that far from animal blood on the altar being a substitute for human blood, human blood actually defiled the altar rather than purifying it. Neither was that animal sacrifice about the animal suffering; to maltreat the animal “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God”, no longer being “without blemish”. Already you can see the distinctions being drawn between this close reading of Levitical sacrifices and the usual broad arguments made in favor of PSA.
Lamb of the Free takes 4 chapters - a full 150 pages - to review OT sacrifices. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. But I have a new understanding and appreciation for paying attention to those details now! Then in chapter 5 he turns the corner to talk about Jesus, and summarizes his arguments thusly:
(1) According to the Gospels, Jesus’s life and ministry operated entirely consistent with and within OT purity laws and concern for the sanctuary.
(2) Jesus was a source of contagious holiness that nullified the sources of the major ritual impurities as well as moral impurity.
(3) Thus, Jesus was not anti-purity and he was not rejecting the temple per se.
(4) Jesus’ appropriation of the prophetic critique of sacrifice fits entirely within the framework of the grave consequences of moral impurity. That is, like the prophets, Jesus is not critiquing sacrifice per se, but rather moral impurity, which will cause another exile and the destruction of the sanctuary.
(5) But, his followers will be able to experience the moral purification he offers.
(6)The only sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death that is attributed to Jesus himself occurs at the Lord’s Supper. At this meal Jesus combines two communal well-being sacrifices… to explain the importance of his death. However, the notion of kipper [atonement] is not used in any of these accounts…
There’s a lot there, and Rillera unpacks it through the second half of the book. (I was particularly enthusiastic at his point (2), as it dovetails neatly with Richard Beck’s Unclean, where Beck argues that Jesus’ holiness was of such a quality that indeed, sin didn’t stick to him, but rather his holiness “stuck to”, and purified, other people’s sin and sickness.) Rillera says that Jesus’ death conquered death because even death was transformed by Jesus’ touch, and that Jesus came and died not as a substitution but rather as a peace offering from God to humankind. (His unpacking of Romans 3:25-26 and the word hilastērion was particularly wonderful here.) Jesus’ suffering under sin and death was in solidarity with humankind, and uniquely served to ultimately purify humankind from death and sin. (Really, I’m trying to write a single blog post here and summarize a 300 page book. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re still interested, go buy the book and read it. If you want to read it but it’s too pricy for you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I’m serious.)
I’ll wrap this up with a beautiful paragraph from a chapter near the end titled “When Jesus’s Death is Not a Sacrifice”. In examining 1 Peter 2, Rillera says this:
First Peter says that Jesus dies as an “example so that you should follow his steps”. In short, Jesus’s death is a participatory reality; it is something we are called to follow and share in experientially ourselves. The logic is not: Jesus died so I don’t have to. It is: Jesus died (redeeming us from slavery and forming us into a kingdom of priests in 2:5, 9) so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him; the just for the unjust (3:18) and trusting in a God who judges justly (2:23; 4:19). This is what it means to “suffer…for being a ‘Christian’” (4:15-16). It does not particularly matter why a Christ-follower is suffering or being persecuted; it only matters that they bear the injustice of the world in a Christ-like, and therefore, a Servant-like manner.
There are a dozen other bits I’d love to share - maybe in another post soon. But for now, I’m thankful for Andrew Remington Rillera and his wonderful work in Lamb of the Free. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.
Finished Reading: The Day the Revolution Began by N. T. Wright
When the good Bishop N. T. Wright has a new book out it’s an automatic purchase for me at this point. And Wright does not disappoint with The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. Wright examines the meaning of Jesus' death in his usual lucid style, with a focus on what understanding the first-century Christians would’ve had of that death.
Wright keys on Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15 that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures”. This launches him on a review of the Old Testament idea of salvation and forgiveness of sins, and how for Israel “forgiveness of sins” was closely tied to the covenant promise of restoration from exile.
Wright then takes the reader through the various New Testament discussions of the meaning of the crucifixion to make the case that “salvation” isn’t really primarily about individual salvation (though individuals are saved), but is rather about the restoration and blessing of the whole earth through Israel in fulfillment of God’s covenant promise to Abraham.
Wright, as usual, says some things that undoubtedly set some conservative theologians on edge. Notable among these is his contention that Jesus' death isn’t really about some sort of penal substitution. That, says Wright, is still buying into a system of works righteousness - even if the works aren’t our works - that isn’t borne out in the Bible’s view of God’s love as shown in His covenant promises.
Wright makes the case that salvation is really about much more than we are led to believe. And while he acknowledges that theologians will typically provide a more nuanced view, he believes (and I agree) that at the lay level in evangelicalism, the understanding of salvation is very individual and transactional - people sin, which makes God angry, a price must be paid, Jesus pays that price to step in the way of God’s anger, people are saved to go to heaven. I don’t think that Wright would disagree with any of those statements… from a certain point of view. However, his picture of salvation is much wider and more appealing. It’s really worth a read and consideration.
This volume would be a nice companion piece to go alongside Surprised by Hope - which itself is still the volume I’d encourage people to read if they need an intro to Wright. Good stuff.
NTW on 'a central part of the Christian vocation'
[F]ollowers of Jesus have no choice. A central part of our vocation is, prayerfully and thoughtfully, to remind people with power, both official (government ministers) and unofficial (backstreet bullies), that there is a different way to be human. A true way. The Jesus way. This doesn’t mean “electing into office someone who shares our particular agenda”; that might or might not be appropriate. It means being prepared, whoever the current officials are, to do what Jesus did with Pontius Pilate: confront them with a different vision of kingdom, truth, and power.
-- N. T. Wright, The Day The Revolution Began, p. 401
NT Wright on the intersection of the Bible, ethics, and doctrine
In a recent interview by Jonathan Merritt on Religion News Service, Anglican bishop NT Wright had this to say about the Bible and how we work out ethics and doctrine (emphasis mine):
…it’s important that we do not reduce the Bible to a collection of true doctrines and right ethics. There are plenty of true doctrines and right ethics there, of course, but they come within the larger thing, which is the story of how the Creator is rescuing and restoring the whole creation, with his rescue and restoration of humans at the heart of it. In other words, it isn’t about “do we allow this or that?” To ask the question that way is already to admit defeat, to think in terms of behavior as a set of quasi-arbitrary, and hence negotiable, rules. We must ask, with Paul, “This new creation God has launched in Jesus—what does it look like, and how can we live well as genuine humans, as both a sign and a means of that renewal?” We need to remind ourselves that the entire biblical sexual ethic is deeply counter-intuitive. All human beings some of the time, and some human beings most of the time, have deep heartfelt longings for kinds of sexual intimacy or gratification (multiple partners, pornography, whatever) which do not reflect the creator’s best intentions for his human creatures, intentions through which new wisdom and flourishing will come to birth. Sexual restraint is mandatory for all, difficult for most, extremely challenging for some. God is gracious and merciful but this never means “so his creational standards don’t really matter after all.”
Such good perspective. I didn’t realize until reading this interview that Wright has a new book out: Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues. Another one to add to my reading pile!
N. T. Wright sings
Monday night I had the privilege of meeting Bishop N. T. Wright and hearing him speak in Nashville, TN. I’ve written about it for 800 words over at the BHT, so I won’t repeat that here.
After his talk and some Q&A he was pressed to pick up a guitar, and the second song he sang was this one. The story is that he was bored during a conference and so wrote these lyrics about Genesis to the tune of “Yesterday”. Francis Collins (brilliant scientist, Christian, and currently director of the National Institutes of Health) made some tweaks to them and (as the story goes) they sang this song at a BioLogos conference in New York.
Sorry for the lousy video quality; the sound is good, though.
The people of God are like... a political advance team
After recently finishing N. T. Wright’s Simply Jesus, I’ve been thinking again on Wright’s view of the church’s work as inaugurating the Kingdom of God here on the earth. Even though we know it won’t come into perfection until Jesus' return, Wright says, is no excuse that we shouldn’t start working on it now. I love this bit of reasoning from Wright’s Surprised by Hope:
What would you say to someone who said, rightly, that God would make them completely holy in the resurrection and that they would never reach this state of complete holiness until then - and who then went on to say, wrongly, that therefore there was no point in even trying to live a holy life until that time? You would press for some form of inaugurated eschatology. You would insist that the new life of the Spirit, in obedience to the lordship of Jesus Christ, should produce a radical transformation of behavior in the present life, anticipating the life to come…
…Apply the same to Romans 8! How do you answer someone who says, rightly, that the world will not be completely just and right until the new creation and who deduces, wrongly, that there is no point trying to bring justice to the world… until that time? [I]nsist on inaugurated eschatology, on a radical transformation of the way we behave as a worldwide community, anticipating the eventual time when God will be all in all even though we agree things won’t be complete until then.
The analogy that’s been rattling around in my head in this election year is of the people of God as a political advance team. Say that you’re the supporter of a candidate that you know is ultimately going to win. Your work as part of the advance team is to get the word out - in hopes that others will join the team, and to get the groundwork done so that things are ready when the winner finally shows up. Then, when the new ruler is in place, the people that were on his side the whole time are the ones who are rewarded - with good things from the kingdom and with places of responsibility.
So, too, in many ways with the kingdom. We know who the ultimate ‘winner’ and coming ruler is. He has already conquered death and is the prototype of the new creation. But until He comes to set up his complete rule, we are here, spreading the word. Jesus is Lord. We’re doing as much ground work as He enables us to do. 1 Cor 15 says that ‘our works are not in vain in the Lord’. Those works have a purpose. And when Jesus finally does return, it’s not a stretch to the understanding that ruling and reigning with Christ may be something akin to the leadership positions and ambassadorships that come today to the early and long-time supporters of a new ruler.
So… get the word out. Get people on the team. Get the work started. Wait expectantly. Come soon, Lord Jesus.
Book Review: <em>Jesus and the Victory of God</em> by N. T. Wright
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.]
The Strange Story of Easter: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 4
Having noted in chapter three that something happened to cause the early Christians' belief in resurrection to be vastly different from their former religious or cultural beliefs, in chapter 4 N. T. Wright sets out to make the case for a real, historical Easter. He starts out be listing four “strange features” shared by the accounts in the canonical gospels which, he says, should compel us to take them seriously as early accounts. Those features:
Wright goes on to address with great clarity some of the other common objections to the resurrection, including hallucination, cognitive dissonance, the swoon theory, mistaken identity, and the like. Each of them is reasonably discarded.
Finally, Wright concludes,
In any other historical inquiry, the answer would be so obvious that it would hardly need saying. Here of course, this obvious answer (“well, it actually happened”) is so shocking, so earth shattering, that we rightly pause before leaping into the unknown. And here indeed, as some skeptical friends have cheerfully pointed out to me, it is always possible for anyone to follow the argument so far and to say simply, “I don’t have a good explanation for what happened to cause the empty tomb and the appearances, but I choose to maintain my belief that dead people don’t rise and therefore conclude that something else must have happened, even though we can’t tell what it was.” That is fine; I respect that position; but I simply note that it is indeed then a matter of choice, not a matter of saying that something called scientific historiography forces us to take that route.
Wright’s other main argument in chapter four is for those who discount a “real” resurrection based on “science”. He notes that
…there are different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable… historians don’t of course see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can’t repeat them in the laboratory.
But when people say “But that can’t have happened because we know that that sort of thing doesn’t actually happen,” then they are appealing to a would-be scientific principle of history, namely, the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quote gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.
There’s a lot more to this chapter but it would be uncharitable to just quote the whole thing. Suffice it to say that Wright very convincingly argues that there is really no good explanation for all that has happened since other than that Jesus was truly resurrected from the dead. “Sometimes,” he notes, “human beings - individuals or communities - are confronted with something that they must reject outright or that, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.” Having thus set out the framework in part one of Surprised by Hope, Wright will continue to discuss what that worldview looks like when it comes to future things.
Early Christian Hope in Its Historical Setting: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 3
Let’s start at the very beginning, says a familiar song from a classic musical, it’s a very good place to start.. And start at the beginning N. T. Wright does in Chapter 3 of Surprised by Hope. In fact, Wright is in a supremely-qualified position to start at “the beginning” given his preeminence as a New Testament scholar. Wright’s question for chapter three is this: how did the early church talk about the resurrection? What was their view? The answers provide some keen insights into truths about the resurrection of Jesus.
In the ancient Jewish tradition, Wright says, they did have a concept of resurrection. But their view of resurrection wasn’t some vague concept of “life after death”. Instead, what they looked forward to was a bodily resurrection of the righteous at the end of time. When Jesus tells Martha that she will see her brother Lazarus again, and she replies “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day”, that’s what they’re talking about. So when the early Jewish writers then spoke of Jesus resurrection and being bodily alive right now, they understood that they were describing something that had never happened before. The resurrection was the thing that set Jesus apart.
Wright then discusses seven ways in which the Christian view of resurrection soon mutated from the traditional Jewish view of resurrection:
It is important here, Wright says, to see this key development of a very early belief that “Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar is not.” This, says Wright,
…is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. … Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that. It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did.
So, Wright says, there was a definite shift in the religious views as Jews became Christians following Easter. So what happened, really, on that historical Easter? That’s the question Wright will address in Chapter 4.
Also in this series:
Puzzled About Paradise? Surprised by Hope, Chapter 2
In Chapter 2 of Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright examines the wide sweep of confusing views that the Church has commonly held about death over the past few centuries. I found them quite familiar. From the stern “death is our enemy” position all the way over to the “death is our friend to take us out of this place” end of things, Wright quotes familiar hymns (most of which you’ve probably sung in church before) to point out the varied viewpoints. Really, how do you even begin to start to rectify John Donne’s “Death be not proud… Death, thou shalt die”, with Abide With Me’s “heav’n’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee”? There’s a disconnect there somewhere. Wright reminds us that “God’s intention is not to let death have its way with us.” Death is an enemy, one that has been and will be defeated.
So, then, what about heaven? The common Christian conception of heaven, Wright says, and I find this true in my experience, is that it 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.” Not so, says Wright - “there is actually very little in the Bible about ‘going to heaven when you die’ and not a lot about a postmortem hell either”. Rather, Wright says, “Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hudden, dimension of our ordinary life - God’s dimension, if you like.”
Wright goes on to ask a series of questions that he will answer later in the book: What about the human soul? What is it? What do we mean by “Jesus coming to judge the living and the dead”? What do we mean by “the communion of the saints”? In this final introductory chapter, Wright definitely impresses us enough that there is widespread confusion, not just from outside the church about the church’s beliefs, but from inside as well. It is that confusion that he hopes to iron out in future chapters.
Also in this series:
Wrestling with Tom: Surprised by Hope, Chapter 1
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:
Wrestling with Tom: An American Evangelical's coming-to-grips with N. T. Wright's Surprised By Hope
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.]
Another post from Augusta
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.