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’