‘But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about.
This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The NT, true to its OT roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood with that context- not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole part of being saved saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role within the larger picture and purpose.
And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alternatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question.
To insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question- to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world- maybe to make a mistake similar to the one made by the Jewish people in the 1st Century, the mistake that both Jesus and Paul addressed. Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescue Israel?
What the Gospel of Jesus revealed however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? ’
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Beginning at the Beginning 2
One of my blogs earlier this month was about the importance of beginning at the beginning when it comes to trying to understand God's story with us. It wasn’t a very good blog I don’t think- not very clear. This, however, is a good example of the danger I was trying to point out when we begin the Bible in Genesis 3, and forget about the first two chapter:
‘Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. Salvation means, of course, rescue. But what are we ultimately rescued from? The obvious answer is death. But if, when we die, all that happens is that our bodies decompose while our souls (or whatever word we want to use for our continuous existence) go elsewhere, this doesn’t mean we’ve been rescued from death.
It simply means that we’ve died.’
'And if God’s good creation- of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams- really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!
As we have seen, the whole of the bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs reinforced not only in popular teaching but also in liturgies, public prayers hymns and homilies of every kind.
Another difficulty I have with so many theologies and lifestyles that begin their world in Genesis 3, is that it teaches us (at least subconsciously) that God’s original plan failed, that we are a Plan B of sorts:
‘To snatch souls away to a disembodied heaven would destroy the whole point. God is to become king of the whole world at last. And he will do this not by declaring that the inner dynamic of creation (that is to be ruled by humans) was a mistake, nor by declaring that the inner dynamic of his covenant (that Israel would be the means of saving the nations) was a failure, but rather by fulfilling them both. That is more or less what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about’
‘The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed- it isn’t too strong a word- to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation, they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.’
‘Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. Salvation means, of course, rescue. But what are we ultimately rescued from? The obvious answer is death. But if, when we die, all that happens is that our bodies decompose while our souls (or whatever word we want to use for our continuous existence) go elsewhere, this doesn’t mean we’ve been rescued from death.
It simply means that we’ve died.’
'And if God’s good creation- of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams- really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!
As we have seen, the whole of the bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs reinforced not only in popular teaching but also in liturgies, public prayers hymns and homilies of every kind.
Another difficulty I have with so many theologies and lifestyles that begin their world in Genesis 3, is that it teaches us (at least subconsciously) that God’s original plan failed, that we are a Plan B of sorts:
‘To snatch souls away to a disembodied heaven would destroy the whole point. God is to become king of the whole world at last. And he will do this not by declaring that the inner dynamic of creation (that is to be ruled by humans) was a mistake, nor by declaring that the inner dynamic of his covenant (that Israel would be the means of saving the nations) was a failure, but rather by fulfilling them both. That is more or less what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about’
‘The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed- it isn’t too strong a word- to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation, they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.’
Evangelism
‘The word evangelism still sends shivers down the spines of many people. There are various reasons for this. Some people have been scared off by frightening or bullying harangues or tactless and offensive or embarrassing and naïve presentations of the gospel. Others have never suffered such indignities but heard or read about them and are glad to have a good excuse to pour scorn on all evangelism- as though, because some people do it badly, nobody should ever do it at all.’
‘Much evangelism has, of course, consisted of taking the traditional framework of a heaven-and-hell expectation and persuading people that it’s time they consider the heaven option and grab it while they have the chance. What’s stopping them getting there is sin; the solution is provided in Jesus Christ; all the have to do is to accept it!
Millions of Christians today are Christians because they heard that message and responded to it. Am I therefore saying-since plainly I think that way of putting things is at best lopsided- that they have been deceived or mistaken?
No.
God gloriously honours all kinds of ways of announcing the good news. I do not suppose for a moment that my own way of preaching or talking to individuals about God is perfect and without flaws, and yet God (I believe) has graciously honoured some at least of what I do. No doubt he would have been far more honoured if I had done it better and more prayerfully. No doubt the flaws in my own preaching, and the difficult flaws in other presentations, will eventually show up in the Christian lives of those who come to faith as a result, and no doubt we all ought to polish up and improve what we do for the sake of our hearers and the honour of God. But, as every generation knows, it isn’t the quality of the preaching that counts but the faithfulness of God…God works as a result of prayers and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness.
But none of this is an excuse for not understanding what happens when we evangelize or not shaping the way we do it in accordance with the full biblical gospel.’
‘Much evangelism has, of course, consisted of taking the traditional framework of a heaven-and-hell expectation and persuading people that it’s time they consider the heaven option and grab it while they have the chance. What’s stopping them getting there is sin; the solution is provided in Jesus Christ; all the have to do is to accept it!
Millions of Christians today are Christians because they heard that message and responded to it. Am I therefore saying-since plainly I think that way of putting things is at best lopsided- that they have been deceived or mistaken?
No.
God gloriously honours all kinds of ways of announcing the good news. I do not suppose for a moment that my own way of preaching or talking to individuals about God is perfect and without flaws, and yet God (I believe) has graciously honoured some at least of what I do. No doubt he would have been far more honoured if I had done it better and more prayerfully. No doubt the flaws in my own preaching, and the difficult flaws in other presentations, will eventually show up in the Christian lives of those who come to faith as a result, and no doubt we all ought to polish up and improve what we do for the sake of our hearers and the honour of God. But, as every generation knows, it isn’t the quality of the preaching that counts but the faithfulness of God…God works as a result of prayers and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness.
But none of this is an excuse for not understanding what happens when we evangelize or not shaping the way we do it in accordance with the full biblical gospel.’
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
So What?
To me, this is what distinguishes Wright’s book with others like it. It is one thing to disagree with something. It is another thing to articulate why you disagree (although sometimes discussing this is not worth the hassle...). It is, additionally, an entirely other (and much more admirable) thing to then articulate what you believe instead. Wright does all three with an eloquence, love, respect and authority that unfortunately are not often found in discussions on these topics.
Perhaps most importantly, the book does not end there. He beings the book to a wonderfully relevant conclusion by asking 'so what?'.
‘We have now reached the point where we must ask: So what? Is all this talk about God’s ultimate future, about ‘life after life after death,’ simply a matter of tidying up our beliefs about what will happen in the very end, or does it have any practical consequences here and now?’
‘When the NT strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom. Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.’
‘The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future. And what he was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way of the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose- and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project’
‘The promise of new creation…is not and cannot be simply about straightening out ideas about life after death. It is about the mission of the church…it’s not falling back into the tired old split-level world where some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace and hope in the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the NT and everything to do with the silent enslavement of many Christians (both conservative and radical) to the Platonic ideology of the Enlightenment’
‘What you do for the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nature, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make…
I have no idea precisely what this will mean in practice. I am putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find once we get to where the signpost is pointing’
NB- anyone who has just read the above quote and finishes frustrated at the apparent lack of a photograph needs their head seen to and a large dose of mystery.
‘But if God really does intend to redeem rather than reject his created world of space, time, and matter, we are faced with the question: what might it look like to celebrate that redemption, that healing and transformation, in the present, and thereby appropriately to anticipate God’s final intention?’
‘We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility, as many Christians try to do, not least within some parts of fundamentalism, by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns. That is classic dualism. Many people embrace it enthusiastically. It leaves the church with nothing to do in the present except care for the wounded as best we can while we wait for a different kind of salvation altogether.’
‘Much conservative theology, not least in the United States, where it counts heavily at the moment, has also served to reinforce the dominance of the West. The Cold War years enabled the United States to build up its persona as God’s answer to communism. Many conservative churches there still live by the belief that what’s good for America is good for God- with the result, for instance, that if their country needs to produce more acid rain in order to keep up car production, then God must be happy with it and anyone who talks about polultion or is disappointed that the president didn’t sign the Kyoto protocol is somehow anti-Christian or is simply producing a ‘baptized neosocialism,’ as one reviewer accused me of. Rampant belief in the rapture lends strong support to this, as we saw earlier: Armageddon is coming, so who cares what state the planet is in? The irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets, and military power.’
Perhaps most importantly, the book does not end there. He beings the book to a wonderfully relevant conclusion by asking 'so what?'.
‘We have now reached the point where we must ask: So what? Is all this talk about God’s ultimate future, about ‘life after life after death,’ simply a matter of tidying up our beliefs about what will happen in the very end, or does it have any practical consequences here and now?’
‘When the NT strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom. Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.’
‘The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future. And what he was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way of the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose- and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project’
‘The promise of new creation…is not and cannot be simply about straightening out ideas about life after death. It is about the mission of the church…it’s not falling back into the tired old split-level world where some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace and hope in the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the NT and everything to do with the silent enslavement of many Christians (both conservative and radical) to the Platonic ideology of the Enlightenment’
‘What you do for the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nature, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make…
I have no idea precisely what this will mean in practice. I am putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find once we get to where the signpost is pointing’
NB- anyone who has just read the above quote and finishes frustrated at the apparent lack of a photograph needs their head seen to and a large dose of mystery.
‘But if God really does intend to redeem rather than reject his created world of space, time, and matter, we are faced with the question: what might it look like to celebrate that redemption, that healing and transformation, in the present, and thereby appropriately to anticipate God’s final intention?’
‘We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility, as many Christians try to do, not least within some parts of fundamentalism, by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns. That is classic dualism. Many people embrace it enthusiastically. It leaves the church with nothing to do in the present except care for the wounded as best we can while we wait for a different kind of salvation altogether.’
‘Much conservative theology, not least in the United States, where it counts heavily at the moment, has also served to reinforce the dominance of the West. The Cold War years enabled the United States to build up its persona as God’s answer to communism. Many conservative churches there still live by the belief that what’s good for America is good for God- with the result, for instance, that if their country needs to produce more acid rain in order to keep up car production, then God must be happy with it and anyone who talks about polultion or is disappointed that the president didn’t sign the Kyoto protocol is somehow anti-Christian or is simply producing a ‘baptized neosocialism,’ as one reviewer accused me of. Rampant belief in the rapture lends strong support to this, as we saw earlier: Armageddon is coming, so who cares what state the planet is in? The irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets, and military power.’
Transformation of the Body
‘We begin once more with Paul. I stressed in the previous chapter that when Paul speaks in Philippians 3 of being “citizens of heaven” he doesn’t mean that we shall retire when we have finished our work here. He says in the next line that Jesus will come from heaven in order to transform the present humble body into a glorious body like his own and that he will do this by the power through which he makes all things subject to himself. This little statement contains in a nutshell more or less all Paul’s thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about’
‘The Resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in it glory and power, will be the model for out own’
‘Who will be raised from the dead? All people, according to John and perhaps Paul, but for Paul at least there is a special sense of resurrection that clearly applies to those who are in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit…
Where will the resurrection take place? On the new earth, joined as it will then be to the new heaven…in this new world there will be no problem of overcrowding (as some, at the risk of bathos, have ventured to suggest). Apart from the question of whether every human will be raised or some, we need to remind ourselves that roughly half the humans who have ever lived are alive at the moment….In any case, if we take seriously the promise of new heavens and new earth, none of this is a problem. God is the creator, and his new world will be exactly what we need and want, with the love and beauty of this present world taken up and transformed’
‘All we can surmise from the picture of Jesus’s resurrection is that just as his wounds were still visible, not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as are appropriate, not least where that has involved suffering
In particular, this new body will be immortal. That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense (that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event) but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay and death itself’
‘At this point we must notice that once again our language gets us into trouble. The word immortality is often used to mean “disembodied immortality,” and it is sometimes then used in a sharp contrast with resurrection. As a result, we easily forget Paul’s point about the resurrection body. It will be a body, but it will not be subject to mortality. An “immortal body” is something most people find so strange that they don’t even pause to wonder if that’s what Paul and the other early Christians were talking about. But it is.
There is a world of difference between this belief and a belief in an “immortal soul”. Platonist believe that all humans have an immortal element within them, normally referred to so “soul”…In the NT however, immortality is something that only God possesses by nature and that he then shares, as a gift of grace rather than an innate possession, with his people.
Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have out to God’s service in this present life- and perhaps to the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with out vocation- will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory. This is perhaps the most mysterious, and lest explored, aspect of the resurrection life’
‘If, as we have already seen, the biblical view of God’s future is of the renewal of the entire cosmos, there will be plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake. In terms of the vision of original creation in Genesis 1 and 2, the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed. These are only images, of course, but like all other future-orientated language they serve as true signposts to a larger reality- a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought’
‘The Resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in it glory and power, will be the model for out own’
‘Who will be raised from the dead? All people, according to John and perhaps Paul, but for Paul at least there is a special sense of resurrection that clearly applies to those who are in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit…
Where will the resurrection take place? On the new earth, joined as it will then be to the new heaven…in this new world there will be no problem of overcrowding (as some, at the risk of bathos, have ventured to suggest). Apart from the question of whether every human will be raised or some, we need to remind ourselves that roughly half the humans who have ever lived are alive at the moment….In any case, if we take seriously the promise of new heavens and new earth, none of this is a problem. God is the creator, and his new world will be exactly what we need and want, with the love and beauty of this present world taken up and transformed’
‘All we can surmise from the picture of Jesus’s resurrection is that just as his wounds were still visible, not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as are appropriate, not least where that has involved suffering
In particular, this new body will be immortal. That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense (that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event) but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay and death itself’
‘At this point we must notice that once again our language gets us into trouble. The word immortality is often used to mean “disembodied immortality,” and it is sometimes then used in a sharp contrast with resurrection. As a result, we easily forget Paul’s point about the resurrection body. It will be a body, but it will not be subject to mortality. An “immortal body” is something most people find so strange that they don’t even pause to wonder if that’s what Paul and the other early Christians were talking about. But it is.
There is a world of difference between this belief and a belief in an “immortal soul”. Platonist believe that all humans have an immortal element within them, normally referred to so “soul”…In the NT however, immortality is something that only God possesses by nature and that he then shares, as a gift of grace rather than an innate possession, with his people.
Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have out to God’s service in this present life- and perhaps to the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with out vocation- will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory. This is perhaps the most mysterious, and lest explored, aspect of the resurrection life’
‘If, as we have already seen, the biblical view of God’s future is of the renewal of the entire cosmos, there will be plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake. In terms of the vision of original creation in Genesis 1 and 2, the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed. These are only images, of course, but like all other future-orientated language they serve as true signposts to a larger reality- a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought’
Judgement- who gets f'd and who doesn't?
One of the chapters in the book is called ‘Jesus, the Coming Judge’. This chapter too was helpful to me. The idea of judgment is one I’ve struggled with greatly- especially when it’s used in a vindictive subtle F you to those who the teacher/preacher looks down upon…or to scare us into a guilt laden ‘Oh my God is going to smite me’ lifestyle. I’ve also had difficulty with statements such as ‘God MUST be _________’. Surely God is bigger than the words we choose to define him?! (I hope my masters will center around that idea):
‘We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned for. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world of rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment. ’
‘The main point to notice, once more, is that all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them…’
‘In particular, the present rule of the ascended Jesus Christ and the assurance of his final appearing in judgment should give us- which goodness knows we need today- some clarity and realism in our political discourse. Far too often Christians slide into a vaguely spiritualised version of one or other major political system or party. What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?
You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues- or indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover. But to think in either of those ways would show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitutes a radical challenge to the entire structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear.
I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only.
They aren’t.
People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t’.
‘I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment I find it quite impossible, reading the NT on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S Lewis put it, God will eventually say “Thy will be done”.
I wish it were otherwise,
but one cannot forever whistle “There’s a kindeness in God’s mercy” in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas, bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for’.
While I think I agree with what he’s saying above, I am aware that it’s not helpful to stop with the quote here (as many justice/hell/fire and brimstone/let them burn they deserve it frameworks would cry out for [Wright refers to them, perhaps more lovingly, as overenthusiastic preachers and teachers]) but to continue…
‘But if there is indeed final condemnation for those who, by their idolatry, dehumanize themselves and drag others down with them, the account I have suggested of how this works in practice provides a somewhat different picture from those normally imagined.
The traditional view is that those who spurn God’s salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness, are held forever in conscious torment. Sometimes this is
sharpened up by overenthusiastic preachers and teachers who claim to know precisely which sorts of behavior are bound to lead to hell and which, thought reprehensible, are still forgivable.' (Ricky Gervais deals with this humorously in his latest audio books- all of which everyone should buy)
‘The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 (of Rev) is quite clear that some categories of people are ‘outside’: the dogs the fornicators, those who speak and make lies.
But then,
just when we have in out minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories,
the insiders and the outsiders,
we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many ; and that ‘the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations’.
There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God’s eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who resolutely worshiped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God’s world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises.’
He also talks of different problems which can arise when we’re childish with our understanding of hell and judgment:
‘Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a thing they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of torture chamber at the center of God’s castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped beleving in hell.
The first group decided that because they couldn't believe in childish image of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.
There are of course better reasons for becoming an atheist and better reasons for becoming a universailst…but , at least at a popular level, it is not the serious early Christian doctrine of final judgment that has been rejected but rather one or other gross caricature’
‘We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned for. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world of rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment. ’
‘The main point to notice, once more, is that all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them…’
‘In particular, the present rule of the ascended Jesus Christ and the assurance of his final appearing in judgment should give us- which goodness knows we need today- some clarity and realism in our political discourse. Far too often Christians slide into a vaguely spiritualised version of one or other major political system or party. What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?
You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues- or indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover. But to think in either of those ways would show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitutes a radical challenge to the entire structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear.
I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only.
They aren’t.
People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t’.
‘I believe we can today restate the doctrine of final judgment I find it quite impossible, reading the NT on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S Lewis put it, God will eventually say “Thy will be done”.
I wish it were otherwise,
but one cannot forever whistle “There’s a kindeness in God’s mercy” in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas, bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful universalism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for’.
While I think I agree with what he’s saying above, I am aware that it’s not helpful to stop with the quote here (as many justice/hell/fire and brimstone/let them burn they deserve it frameworks would cry out for [Wright refers to them, perhaps more lovingly, as overenthusiastic preachers and teachers]) but to continue…
‘But if there is indeed final condemnation for those who, by their idolatry, dehumanize themselves and drag others down with them, the account I have suggested of how this works in practice provides a somewhat different picture from those normally imagined.
The traditional view is that those who spurn God’s salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness, are held forever in conscious torment. Sometimes this is
sharpened up by overenthusiastic preachers and teachers who claim to know precisely which sorts of behavior are bound to lead to hell and which, thought reprehensible, are still forgivable.' (Ricky Gervais deals with this humorously in his latest audio books- all of which everyone should buy)
‘The description of the New Jerusalem in chapters 21 and 22 (of Rev) is quite clear that some categories of people are ‘outside’: the dogs the fornicators, those who speak and make lies.
But then,
just when we have in out minds a picture of two nice, tidy categories,
the insiders and the outsiders,
we find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many ; and that ‘the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations’.
There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God’s eventual future must make room for it. This is not at all to cast doubt on the reality of final judgment for those who resolutely worshiped and served the idols that dehumanize us and deface God’s world. It is to say that God is always the God of surprises.’
He also talks of different problems which can arise when we’re childish with our understanding of hell and judgment:
‘Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a thing they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of torture chamber at the center of God’s castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped beleving in hell.
The first group decided that because they couldn't believe in childish image of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn’t believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.
There are of course better reasons for becoming an atheist and better reasons for becoming a universailst…but , at least at a popular level, it is not the serious early Christian doctrine of final judgment that has been rejected but rather one or other gross caricature’
Heaven ON EARTH, escaping from evil, left behind and a whole lot of other nonsense
Another key to Wright’s thoughts is found in response to the once again, all too frequent thinking that the world is evil and one day we will simply escape it. This is one of those ideas which for years has rubbed me the wrong way, often leaving me frustrated, as I wasn’t sure why I thought this beyond the obvious objection of people becoming lazy and treating the world as if it wasn’t a gift from God and as if one of the first things god asked us wasn’t to look after it all:
‘The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam- or even under the steady influence of God. They know God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.
But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.
Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something as a surprise to discover that the early Christians held quite a different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter. This is such a surprising belief, and so little reflected on even in Christian circles, still less outside the church,that we must set it out step by step and show how the different early writers developed different images that together add up to a stunning picture of a future for which, so they insisted, the whole world was waiting on tiptoe.’
‘The world is created good but incomplete. One day, when all forces of rebellion have been defeated and the creation responds freely and gladly to the love of its Creator, God will fill it with himself so that it will both remain an independent being, other than God, and also be flooded with Gods own life. This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole’
‘At no point in the gospels of Acts does anyone say anything remotely like “Jesus has gone into heaven, so let’s be sure we can follow him.” They say, rather, Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete“’
‘The second coming of Jesus Christ has become the favourite topic of a large swath of North American Christianity, particularly but not exclusively in the fundamentalist and dispensationalist segment. Growing out of some millennium movements of the 19th century, particularly those associated with J.N darby and the Plymouth Brethren, a belief has arisen, and taken hold of millions of minds and hearts, that we are living in the end times, in which all the great prophecies are to be fulfilled at last. Central to these prophecies, it is believed, is the promise that Jesus will return in person, snatching the true believers away from this wicked world to be with him and then, after an interval of ungodliness, returning to reign over the world forever. The attempt to correlate these prophecies with the geopolitical events of the 1960s and 1970s, which echoed a height in Hal Lindseay’s bestselling book, The Late Great Planet Earth, has somewhat palled, but its place has been taken by the fictional scenarios offered by a series of books …called Left Behind…
So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians. More of that anon. For many millions of believing Christians in today’s world, the second coming is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction while the chosen few are snatched up to heaven
‘The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam- or even under the steady influence of God. They know God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.
But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.
Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something as a surprise to discover that the early Christians held quite a different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter. This is such a surprising belief, and so little reflected on even in Christian circles, still less outside the church,that we must set it out step by step and show how the different early writers developed different images that together add up to a stunning picture of a future for which, so they insisted, the whole world was waiting on tiptoe.’
‘The world is created good but incomplete. One day, when all forces of rebellion have been defeated and the creation responds freely and gladly to the love of its Creator, God will fill it with himself so that it will both remain an independent being, other than God, and also be flooded with Gods own life. This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole’
‘At no point in the gospels of Acts does anyone say anything remotely like “Jesus has gone into heaven, so let’s be sure we can follow him.” They say, rather, Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete“’
‘The second coming of Jesus Christ has become the favourite topic of a large swath of North American Christianity, particularly but not exclusively in the fundamentalist and dispensationalist segment. Growing out of some millennium movements of the 19th century, particularly those associated with J.N darby and the Plymouth Brethren, a belief has arisen, and taken hold of millions of minds and hearts, that we are living in the end times, in which all the great prophecies are to be fulfilled at last. Central to these prophecies, it is believed, is the promise that Jesus will return in person, snatching the true believers away from this wicked world to be with him and then, after an interval of ungodliness, returning to reign over the world forever. The attempt to correlate these prophecies with the geopolitical events of the 1960s and 1970s, which echoed a height in Hal Lindseay’s bestselling book, The Late Great Planet Earth, has somewhat palled, but its place has been taken by the fictional scenarios offered by a series of books …called Left Behind…
So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians. More of that anon. For many millions of believing Christians in today’s world, the second coming is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction while the chosen few are snatched up to heaven
Life after life after death
Wright presents an idea which so many people ascribe to today when it comes to heaven- that when we die we go straight to our final destination with Jesus and everything’s just great. He goes to great lengths throughout the book to dispel this- frequently talking of how our ‘final destination’ is actually life after life after death. (He would also probably have problems with the semantics of ‘final destination’)
‘When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day, paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke’s next chapter makes clear. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection. When Jesus declares that there are many dwelling places in his father’s house, the word for dwelling place is mno, which denotes a temporary lodging…in terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world’
‘My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey (with or without the option of some kind of purgatory or continuing journey as an intermediate stage) represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope’
‘Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death’
‘When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day, paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke’s next chapter makes clear. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection. When Jesus declares that there are many dwelling places in his father’s house, the word for dwelling place is mno, which denotes a temporary lodging…in terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world’
‘My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey (with or without the option of some kind of purgatory or continuing journey as an intermediate stage) represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope’
‘Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death’
Surprised by Hope
So I’m coming to the end of a fantastic book- Surprised by Hope by N.T Wright and wanted to ‘blog the shit out of it’. There is so much in the book that I think it’ll take a while to get through here- I’ll probably come back to a lot of my/his thoughts as I post and re-post…
This book concerns itself mainly with Heaven- what it is (and what it isn’t) and how what we believe about it and what we learn from Scripture affects us in the here and now. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Up to now I have never really been concerned with Heaven- not really excited about it and not truly yearning or even looking forward to it. To me it was all mystery. God was big enough for me to be ok with knowing nothing about it. I had mainly come to this position because of the ludicrous nonsense I have heard from others about what Heaven definitely is (somewhere else where we have no bodies, where we just sing songs all the time and forget about people we loved who we mysteriously can’t locate there!?!?) It was one of those things, like so much else for me, where I knew what I was hearing had to be untrue, but I couldn’t articulate why and perhaps more importantly, couldn’t begin to work out what I did believe about it. Since reading this book, I am beginning to understand where a lot of the Eschatological BS comes from and why it is inaccurate and dangerous. Mainly though, I have come to see that actually, while a lot of talk about Heaven is a mystery, the Bible does actually have some things to say about Heaven that doesn’t come from the ridiculously unhelpful book that is Revelation!!
I find that when it comes to writing books on Theology, it is very easy to write against something- what is wrong with a certain set of beliefs. It is much more difficult to articulate what you then think is more accurate. Wright does both beautifully. Not only that, but he also asks and begins to answer the only really important question- so what?
I think I’m just going to quote him a lot and throw in some of my own thoughts if I have any (it’s cold, so we’ll see)
‘Frankly, what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, the “the sure and certain Hope of the resurrection of the dead” but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end’
‘What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and colour to everything else. If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth’
‘The mystery of the ascensions is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (thought this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. We post-Enlightenment Westerners are such wretched flatlanders. Although New Age thinkers, and indeed quite a lot of contemporary novelists, are quite capable of taking us into other parallel worlds, spaces, and times, we retreat into our rationalistic closed-system universe as we think about Jesus. C.S. Lewis of course did a great job in the Narnia stories and elsewhere of imagining how two worlds could relate and interlock. But the generations that grew up knowing its way around Narnia does not usually know how to make the transition from a children’s story to the real world of grown-up Christian devotion and theology’
‘despite widespread opinion to the contrary, during his early ministry Jesus said nothing about his return. I have argued this position at length and in detail in my various books about Jesus and don’t have space to substantiate it here…the fact that Jesus didn’t teach it doesn’t mean it isn’t true…so if the gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching do not refer to the second coming, where does the idea come from? Quite simply, from the rest of the NT’
‘What we have here, with minor variations, is a remarkably unanimous view spread throughout the early Christinaity known to us. There will come a time, which might indeed come at any time, when, in the great renewal of the world that Easter itself foreshadowed, Jesus himself will be personally present and will be the agent and model of the transformation that will happen both to the whole world and also to believers. This expectation and hope, expressed so clearly in the NT, continues undiminished in the second and subsequent centuries. Mainstream Christians throughout the early period were not worried by the fact that the event had not happened within a generation. The idea that the problem of ‘delay’ set out in 2 Peter 3 was widespread in second-generation Christianity is a modern scholars’ myth rather than a historical reality. Nor was the idea of Jesus’s ‘appearing’ or ‘coming’ simply part of a tradition that was passed on uncritically without later generations really tuning in to what it was saying. As with the ascension, so with Jesus’s appearing: it was seen as a vital part of a full presentation of the Jesus who was and is and is to come. Without it the church’s proclamation makes no sense. take it away, and all sorts of things tart to unravel. The early Christians saw this as clearly as anyone since, and we would do well to learn form them’
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