” … love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton. It is the resurrection life, and the resurrected Jesus calls us to begin living it with him and for him right now. Love is at the very heart of the surprise of hope: people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way. Conversely, people who are living by this rule of love will be people who are learning more deeply how to hope.” ~ N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, pg. 288
Category Archives: Wright
Speaking in God’s World
“Love is the language they speak in God’s world, and we are summoned to learn it against the day when God’s world and ours will be brought together forever. It is the music they make in God’s courts, and we are invited to learn it and practice it in advance. Love is not a duty, even our highest duty, it is our destiny.” – N.T. Wright, After You Believe, pg. 188
Saint Tom Wright on “Literal”
This is a great, and brief, description of how we often (mis)use the word “literal” when referring to studies in Scripture. Enjoy!
From the Biologos Forum site. It’s worth checking out.
Love, Forgiveness, and God’s New Language
During this Easter season I have quoted from N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope nearly every week. Perhaps I should break down and just do a series on his book? Throughout the book Wright reminds us of the historical support for the resurrection, its theological purpose, and, in the book’s latter parts, why it matters for us today.
Always reminding us that the Kingdom of God is where heaven and earth meet, Wright brings into focus the practicality, and absolute necessity, of love and forgiveness:
… love is not our duty; it is our destiny. It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire a taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his Continue reading
“What happens in the eucharist…” (communion for us Protestants)
“What happens in the Eucharist is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, this future dimension is brought sharply into play. We break this bread to share in the body of Christ; we do it in remembrance of him; we become for a moment the disciples sitting around the table at the Last Supper. Yet if we stop there we’ve only said the half of it. To make any headway in understanding the Eucharist, we must see it as the arrival of God’s future in the present, not just the extension of God’s past (or of Jesus’s past) into our present. We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord. And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself its prototype. The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God’s new world. At communion we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land. It is the future coming to meet us in the present.” – N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
The “point” of the Resurrection of Christ
From N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope. “Christ is risen. Now what?”, is not such a bad question. Take a look at the question from this angle:
Jesus is risen, therefore God’s new world has begun. Jesus is risen, therefore Israel and the world have been redeemed. Jesus is risen, therefore his followers have a new job to do.
And what is that new job? To bring the life of heaven to birth in actual, physical, earthly reality. … The bodily resurrection of Jesus is more than a proof that God performs miracles or that the Bible is true. It is more than the Christians’ knowing of Jesus in our own experience (that is the truth of Pentecost, not of Easter). It is much, much more than the assurance of heaven after death (Paul speaks of “going away and being with Christ,” but his main emphasis is on coming back again in a risen body, to live in God’s newborn creation). Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.
Last Wright’s: The “Love Chapter”
“The point of I Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny It is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to spead it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God’s new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now.” pg. 288, Surprised by Hope
N.T. Wright vs. Stephen Colbert
I am a big fan of Stephen Colbert. I find N.T. Wright to be one of the most inspiring and insightful Christian writers of all time. Imagine my surprise to find these two going head to head discussing Wright’s new book, Surprised by Hope.
It is exciting to see the resurrection defended both rationally, by one of the church’s greatest apologists, and sarcastically, by one of the world’s greatest purveyors of “fake news”. At moments awkward but very refreshing. Here you go: Tom Wright/Stephen Colbert “SmackDown”
The Resurrection of the Son of God … wrap up
I mentioned earlier that it would be impossible to do this book justice in a few blog posts so I want to wrap up this up by pointing any interested readers to some links where Wright speaks about the resurrection and where others interact with his book.
The Resurrection of the Son of God enjoys a lot of applause from the evangelical world because he clearly makes his case and does so by appealing to the plausible historicity of the Christ’s resurrection. He doesn’t approach the subject as a detective or journalist, as some others do (rightly so), but as an historian. In do doing he reminds his reader that the work of history is not the study of events that can be repeated in a lab but the study of events that are, by nature, unrepeatable.
It goes without saying that everyone would benefit from reading this book. It also goes without saying that you need stamina and dogged determination to get through it. Of course it is well worth the read.
Also, check out one of his more recent books that deals with a lot of the practical implications of Resurrection, Surprised by Hope.
Tim Keller comments on The Resurrection of the Son of God along with his new book, The Reason for God. The article is here: First Things. You can find the quote by itself in Rustin’s blog: TK on NTW.
James Hamilton has a fair minded review in the Trinity Journal.
Here is what can only be described as a hostile review by Robert Price. Now a non-theist (atheist) Price’s review is scathing and almost humorous in its invective. He call’s Wright the “the grinning spin-doctor of the Grand Inquisitor”. Ouch! One needs a running start for an insult of that magnitude. Not for the faint of heart.
Finally, there is the N.T. Wright page which includes many different articles on numerous subjects, including the The Resurrection of the Son of God, along with other reviews, video/audio of Wright speaking in numerous settings and so forth. It is worth spending a little time there.
Forgive my link-happiness.
The Resurrection of the Son of God … #2
It is impossible to do justice to Wright’s book with only a few posts. It is not an overstatement to describe it as magisterial. He covers in 800+ pages everything from the attitudes and beliefs about bodily resurrection in the ancient world to the challenges of those who seek to redefine it in the present. In a later post I will include some links to some notable reviews of the book.
The resurrection of Christ as a literal, physical event is not a universally held belief. This is easy to understand when considering those who claim no connection with the Christian movement. What some might find surprising, however, is the fact that there are those within Christianity who have sought to redefine the resurrection as a different kind of event. Many have redefined it as being symbolic or figurative only and not something that is a proper subject of history.
One of the many strengths of the The Resurrection of the Son of God is Wright’s insistence upon examining the resurrection from an historical perspective. (He covers the various meanings of “historical” on pg. 13. That page is worth a post in and of itself.) He does this by asking the important question: “what did the early Christians believe about the god of whom they spoke?” (pg. 6) From this beginning point Wright carefully examines the literature. He begins by exploring the beliefs and attitudes that the various ancient peoples held toward the concept of resurrection. This includes the Jewish community from which Christianity was born.
Outside of Judaism most of the ancient world believed resurrection to be a falsehood. “Proposing that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead was just as controversial nineteen hundred years ago as it is today.” (pg. 10) Within Judaism itself there was a diversity of belief regarding resurrection and these beliefs seemed to evolve over time until the centuries just before the birth of Jesus when the two primary constituencies of Judaism, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, formally expressed their views on the subject. The conservative and aristocratic Sadducees rejected the notion of resurrection. The Pharisees on the other hand believed in the ultimate resurrection of the righteous.It was from this mix of worldviews that belief in Jesus being bodily brought back to life, along with the righteous at a later time, arose. The fact that virtually no one in the ancient world, outside the relatively small Jewish sect of the Pharisees, believed that the dead would rise again speaks to the timeliness of the event. Jesus’ resurrection both reflected and reinterpreted this Jewish belief in resurrection by applying it to God’s prototype of this ultimate resurrection, Jesus.
From an historical perspective Wright makes the case that the claims of early Christians stating that Jesus’ had risen from the dead could only mean what traditional Christianity has understood it to mean. That is, after Christ’s death on the cross he was placed in a tomb and after three days came back to life in a physical, corporeal and transformed sense. He was not a phantom nor a collective hallucination. There were words in the language used to describe such things. Resurrection was not one of them.
The notion of Christ’s resurrection being merely symbolic doesn’t pass muster either. A Jesus who was only symbolically or figuratively raised could hardly garner the following he did after his core group of followers and closest friends were scattered in fear and despair. The multiple records of Christ’s empty tomb and numerous appearances together form a narrative that immediately dismisses the symbolic explanation as without support. This does not mean that the resurrection of Christ does not have symbolic implications. Of course it does. But, all of the symbolic implications of Christ’s resurrection point back to and rely upon the event of the resurrection itself.
There are those who have claimed that it is illegitimate to write about the resurrection as if it were history and even crazier to attempt to prove it so. Wright eschews both of these very modern tendencies and begins the process of validating the resurrection, not in a mathematical or scientific sense, but in an historical one. When he does this he presents the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as not only a plausible event but one that best explains all the available evidence.
