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:

  • 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

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:

  • 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

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.]

Tim Keller's The Reason For God - a review

Tim Keller has been a favorite speaker of mine for some time now. As pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, he reaches thousands each week. He has also become a fixture at pastor’s conferences including John Piper’s conference in Minneapolis (where I saw Keller in person a couple years ago) and Mark Driscoll’s Acts 29 conferences. His dry wit and humor coupled with great insight on ministering to the city make him a must-listen for me.

(As a brief aside, I made this analogy at Piper’s conference a couple years ago: if Piper’s conference were Star Wars, Mark Driscoll would be Han Solo, Piper would be Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tim Keller is quite easily Yoda. Quite easily.)

When I heard that he had written a new book, I eagerly ordered it (thank you, wtsbooks.com) and put it at the top of my reading stack.

God and Reason have been hot topics lately in the book world; it seems to be the topic du jure for atheists who want to trash Christianity. Keller’s book seems to be something of a response to those books, proposing, as the title suggests, The Reason for God. There has been significant buzz in the Christian blogosphere surrounding the book, and a not-insignificant marketing blitz as well - it’s not often that a new Christian apologetic comes complete with its own website.

Quite frankly, I found The Reason for God to be underwhelming. Keller spends the first half of the book responding to common objections to Christianity (“why is Christianity so exclusive?” “How can God send people to hell?”, etc) and then takes the second half on the positive side of the bargain, explaining why he thinks Christianity is true, and then laying out a bit about Christian beliefs. While the reasoning was solid, it wasn’t anything groundbreaking - it’s the same stuff you’ll find by reading C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity and N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian. In fact, Keller quotes extensively from Lewis and philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Too often it seemed to me Keller should just be suggesting that we buy and read Lewis and Plantinga rather than reading his repackaged version.

The first half of the book kept my interest pretty well, but I will admit to a waning interest and a lot of skimming toward the end. This isn’t to say that The Reason for God is a bad book, or not worth reading. Put into the right hands, it could be a good introduction to the rational, logical reasons for Christianity. I don’t think it’d answer all of the serious intellectual doubter’s questions, but it’d be a start; good for your college seeker, too. But for someone who’s already familiar with the arguments, has already read Lewis and the like? Don’t bother. Or buy it for the quick read and then give it away. Here’s hoping for something more fresh and insightful next time from the capable Dr. Keller.

Should this really be our fight?

“Clergy fight same sex marriage”. This headline stared out at me from this morning’s copy of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The sub-heading (which was used as the title of the online version of the story) gives more detail: “Iowa church leaders planning rally ‘defending marriage’”.

A coalition of church leaders today announced plans for an Oct. 28 prayer rally and other actions to defend traditional marriage in the face of a district judge’s ruling striking down a same-sex marriage ban – a development they warned could convert Iowa into the nation’s “Rainbow Vegas.”

“This is a call to arms,” said Dan Berry of Cornerstone Family Church. “The sleeping giant is being awakened.”

Later in the story, the Rev. Keith Ratliff of Maple Street Missionary Baptist Church in Des Moines said the “…campaign is not geared toward hate or fear of homosexuals, but rather seeks to preserve the longstanding, family-based and Bible-backed tradition of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman.”

The final, colorful quote in the story comes from Chuck Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center, who warns that if the same-sex marriage ban is permanently reversed, Iowa will be come “the Rainbow Vegas”.

We have gotten all too familiar with hearing pastors and Christian leaders like these over the past two decades. On a national level, radio hosts like Dr. Dobson, televangelists/presidential candidates such as Pat Robertson, and leaders of movements like the Moral Majority (the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, an OK guy in my book), and later on the Christian Coalition (Ralph Reed, who turned out to be a bit more crooked), urged their listeners or viewers to call their congressman, write their legislator, to stop this piece of legislation, encourage that one, or to decry a recent judicial ruling.

There is a place in the life of a Christian for speaking the truth to our community. In many cases that should and will include involvement in the political arena. At our church this past week we had a petition on the table in the foyer urging Iowa lawmakers to pass a state constitutional amendment in “defense of marriage”, and to urge them to support an amendment to the federal constitution as well. One of our elders, during announcement time in the service, asked folks to consider signing it. Many did. (I didn’t. I’m not so sure that we should change the constitution for something like this.) But I fear for the sake of the Gospel and our churches when what our pastors are known for are leading the “sleeping giant” into the political arena when those rascally judges finally go too far. (Why is the church “sleeping”, anyway? Maybe that’s problem numero uno.)

Particularly disgusting to me was the quote from Mr. Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center, pulling out the scare tactics to warn good little church people that their beloved, safe hometowns will become a “Rainbow Vegas”. “Ooh! Run away!!! Gay people!!! Be afraid!” I don’t know whether Hurley is a pastor or not, but the IFPC website is pretty plainly espousing Christianity, including on their site a Prayer Request page with a quote from John Bunyan. Mr. Hurley, I see plenty of prayer requests on that page for new donors, success in the courts and the legislature, and politically active people. But where’s the prayer request that these people who you fear so strongly would hear the good news of Jesus Christ and be freed from their bondage to sin? If we’re going to rouse the “sleeping giant” of the church, why are you only rousing them to join the political fight against your adversaries rather than rousing them to minister to and serve those same people?

Our primary command as believers in Jesus Christ is the Great Commission: to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel. We are not to huddle in a spirit of fear, desperately attempting to protect our little enclave against the evil world around us. Christ has already won the victory. It’s over. Instead, we need to go to “those people”, and love them. Serve them. Find out who they are. What makes them tick. Show them the love of Christ in action, so that when we find avenues to share it verbally, they will already understand. We are not to fear “them”, but rather to fear for them, knowing that we, too, were once hopelessly ensnared in sin. Our new righteousness is not our own; we dare not boast in it. Only in Christ.

Change comes from the inside. Pass all the laws you want, legislate your own specific understanding of perfect morality, but if you don’t change the hearts, laws aren’t gonna do any good. (See: The Prohibition.) However, if lives are changed by the power of God, pass or repeal all the laws you want; people living for Christ will make whatever country they live in the kind of country that you probably want it to be. I fear that the siren song of political power has been too attractive to the Church. Let’s stop being distracted by it, and focus instead on loving our neighbor.

Thoughts on Consumerism

Found this wonderful little article from Will Willimon entitled “Resisting the Clutches of Consumerism”. A good read, especially this time of year.

…the “user friendly” approach to church won’t work. There is no way to entice people off the streets with hymns that are based on advertising jingles and end up with the cross-bearing, self-sacrificial, burden-bearing Jesus. Evangelism cannot be based upon our basic selfishness (“Come to Jesus and get everything you want fixed.”) and end up with anything resembling historic Christianity.

Good stuff, for sure. Go read the whole thing.

Dr. John Stackhouse on Christians' Political Concerns

Dr. John Stackhouse of Regent College in Vancouver, BC, is in Cedar Rapids this weekend speaking. He’ll be at Coe College tonight, First Lutheran Church tomorrow night, and then at Noelridge and First Lutheran on Sunday morning. (Visit recminusa.org for more details.)

I got to meet him at lunch today. I was invited to a regular lunch meeting that my pastor has with some musician-types each Thursday, and Dr. Stackhouse was invited to join us all for lunch. He is a fascinating man; seeming to be equally conversant in music, politics, religion, and philosophy, he bantered with the group all the while engaging us in some serious thought.

At one point the discussion turned to politics, and one of the regulars was lamenting that so many people have started to view politics as single-issues; they’ll make their voting decision based strictly on a candidate’s view on, say, abortion, or gay rights. It’s frustrating to those of us who think there are multiple issues that are important. Dr. Stackhouse agreed that it is very difficult; in reality there may be 30 or 40 issues that a thinking person could be versed on, and vote around. What he suggested, though, was that pastors and other leaders should encourage their people to think around a rather short list, perhaps five or six issues that as Christians we should care about.

He only listed two for us:

  • How will this issue affect the poor?
  • How will this issue affect our ability to freely share the gospel?

He suggested that there might be just a few more. What do you think? Is this a reasonable framework around which to decide how votes will be cast? What items would you add to the list?

Don't know much about... anything!

Last night I took the opportunity to visit Conversation Cafe, a discussion group at a local coffeehouse that is led by my pastor. The guest speaker for the night was Rick, the minister from the local Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. It was, to say the least, an interesting night.

Rick is an older single man who has a fascinating life story. He has at various times in his life been a New York City taxicab driver, a journalist, a lawyer, and a teacher, in addition to being a minister for the past 15 years. He shared some of his beliefs and perspectives on spirituality, and it was quite a grab bag. He is an agnostic, but chooses to believe that God exists. He is happy with belief in things that he can see, feel, touch, and quantify, but is really unwilling to make truth judgements outside of that experience.

Rick told us that UUs are “sin shy”; they would acknowledge that there is some human behavior that just seems “evil” and that we can’t explain any other way, but that for most human actions that seem to be “sin” there is some other more useful explanation for their behavior, be it conditioning, circumstance, or something similar. He told us that the UU church has no creed, which is “actually harder than having a creed”, because you have to figure things out for yourself. Each person at that church can define God to be whatever they want God to be.

There was a decent bit of discussion throughout the night, but I felt like on the key questions he either didn’t understand quite what we were asking, or was quite skilled at dodging them. I tried to ask about one major conflict I saw in his thinking; maybe I didn’t phrase the question well. But I was trying to ask this: in one breath you say that God is whatever you make him to be, that your observations and reason are the definers of truth and reality for you. But in the next breath you admit that you are human, with a finite understanding, uncertainty, and weakness. Isn’t there a conflict there? Doesn’t that make your “truth” weak and uncertain? Doesn’t that make God weak and uncertain? I’m not sure he really understood the question; basically he just agreed that yes, he is human, and uncertainty is part of the human condition.

My heart breaks for this man who is so close to understanding some things, but still so far away. He spoke very candidly about having, in years past, a drinking problem. And it frustrated him greatly, because he saw it as a “moral failure”, and couldn’t figure out how to get past it. Thinking of it as a moral failure “wasn’t useful” and “didn’t take you anywhere”. So he associated with some folks who encouraged him to see the drinking problem as a sickness rather than a moral failure, and he decided to accept that “truth” since it was useful, and allowed him a path to move on. Rick is so close; if only his eyes were opened to see that he is right, that sin (aka “moral failure”) is a dead end, and that we as humans are stuck. If only he could understand that the reason Jesus came, died, and rose again was to solve that sin problem. My prayer for Rick will be that he can come to faith in a God larger than his understanding, and know the grace that is greater than all our sins.

How far do we go to be "relevant"?

That’s the question that the InternetMonk asks in a column over the weekend. His summary:

The Gospel is relevant. Our methods can’t be irrelevant, but they have to allow the relevance of Christ to come to the forefront.

Amen, brother.

reasonable theological concern, or overly picky?

I was thinking through some songs that we haven’t sung for a while in church, and this issue came to mind, so I thought I’d share it here. One of my main criterion when selecting songs for the church to sing (and I plan the music for almost every week) is that they be theologically sound. This manages to disqualify a substantive number of modern praise songs, and a surprising number of older hymns from our hymnal. I might go so far as to say that this is my primary criterion. Certainly there are others; singability is right up there. But theological correctness has got to be at the top of the list.

So we come to today’s topic: the old chorus “Create In Me A Clean Heart”. The text is pretty much straight from Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart oh God,
And renew a right spirit within me.
Create in me a clean heart oh God,
And renew a right spirit within me.

Cast me not away from Thy presence oh Lord,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation,
And renew a right spirit within me.

My theological nit is with the fifth and sixth lines. When David penned these words some 1500 years before Christ, the threat of having the Holy Spirit taken from him was quite a real one; he had seen a similar thing happen to Saul when Saul rebelled against God. At that time the Holy Spirit didn’t indwell all those who believed in God, but God specifically directed the Spirit to rest on certain people at certain times. But now we’re after Pentecost, and so those that believe are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit remains as a seal of our salvation. We’re not in danger of having God take it away.

So on to my theological question. While I love the submissive attitude of the first part of this chorus, I have real questions about singing those two lines, because I think they represent a fear or concern that we shouldn’t have. Is this an appropriate distinction to make? Or am I being overly picky? Your thoughts are appreciated.