Category: Wright
Three from NT on the Kingdom
“Heaven and earth, I repeat, are made for each other, and at certain points they intersect and interlock. Jesus is the ultimate such point. We as Christians are meant to be such points, derived from him. The spirit, the sacraments, and the scriptures are given so that the double life of Jesus, both heavenly and earthly, can become our s as well, already in the present.”- pg. 252
“Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism.”- pg. 253
“What you do in the present–by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself–will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the huymn so mistaekenly puts it, “Until the day when all the blest to endless rest are called away”). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” - N.T. Wright, in “Surprised by Hope”, pg.193
Saint Tom on “Love as the Name of the Game”
N.T. Wright has said something much like this before:
“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
This is a great video featuring N.T. (Tom) Wright commenting on the centrality of love in the Christian life. Thanks to Scot McKnight for posting this on Jesus Creed.
Love and Resurrection
” … 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
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”
