John Updike on Resurrection

I’m still crawling through NTW’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It continues to get better the farther I read. The fragment of Updike’s poem is from the epigraph of the last section of Wright’s book.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages;
let us walk through the door.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

from ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter’ by John Updike, 1964

What I Aspire To: Redux (Repaired Link)

Tongue planted in cheek? Maybe so, but there was a time.

What I Aspire To

I do not know what car Jesus would drive but I do think that God likes coffee. Just maybe…

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Easter Oratorio

My largest Lenten reading project has been to complete The Resurrection of the Son of God by Bishop N.T. Wright. I am on pg. 401 of 738 pages of text. (There is another 100+ pgs. of bibliography and indices.) It has been a good experience and enjoyable, mostly. Some days the reading has been a bit daunting as I have found my mind wandering or my eyes closing.

Most scholars consider Wright’s book to be the most up to date and definitive defense of the resurrection of Christ ever undertaken. He is one of the premier scholars of the New Testament alive today. It is unthinkable that any thorough study of the Apostle Paul or the supposed “Quest of the Historical Jesus” be accomplished without his contributions.

Even with his enormous scholarly output Wright took time, several years ago, to write the libretto to Paul Spicer’s Easter Oratorio. Not content to write only academic material Bishop Wright plunges into the beautiful as well with these following words, just in time for Easter.

Into that strange, unmapped new land,
Round the forbidden corner, through
The locked and bolted door, we grope,
Prisoners released upon a larger world.

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Resurrection

I am an avid reader of N.T. Wright both for his clarity of thought and his willingness to challenge both the liberal theological establishment and conventional, 21st Century evangelicalism. Here is a quote from his latest book Surpised by Hope which is a distillation of his study on the Resurrection of Jesus, Christian hope after death, and the proclamation of the Christian Gospel.

Recently, I shared with some friends that preaching on Easter is tough. That being said, it remains important that Christians regularly reevaluate their understanding of the resurrection. It is more than simply a question of whether or not it happened but also what its happening means.

Wright is of the opinion, and I agree with him, that it means everything.

“What is more… because of the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah, we find the development  of the very early belief that Jesus is Lord and that Caesar is not…

But already in Paul the resurrection, both of Jesus and then in the future of his people, is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not a redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it. Despite the sneers and slurs of some contemporary scholars, it was those who believed in the bodily resurrection who were burned at the stake and thrown to the lions. Resurrection was never a way of settling down and becoming respectable; the Pharisees could have told you that.  It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas? Resurrection was always bound to get you into trouble, and it regularly did.”

-NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

Check out Bob Hyatt’s entire article here: BobBlog

HT: Bob Hyatt