March 25, 2009 • 6:16 pm 0
“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
Filed under: Wright
June 20, 2008 • 9:17 am 2
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”
Filed under: Wright, books, from the profane to the sublime, resurrection , N.T. Wright, resurrection, stephen colbert, surprised by hope
May 27, 2008 • 10:37 am 2
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.
Filed under: Wright, resurrection , N.T. Wright, resurrection, The Resurrection of the Son of God
April 14, 2008 • 4:20 am 0
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.
Filed under: Wright, books, from the sublime to the profane, resurrection , Add new tag, N.T. Wright, resurrection
April 10, 2008 • 4:08 am 6
Warning: Long Introductory Post Alert!
A couple of years ago I stayed up late to watch Charlie Rose. His program is very basic. One interviewer, one wooden table and a black background make the conversations especially engaging. On this particular night he was interviewing the novelist Anne Rice, famous for writing her vampire chronicles.
Not long before this I had read that Rice had some kind of spiritual awakening. Naturally dubious, I didn’t pay attention to the details of what turned out to be her return to her Roman Catholic faith. It’s not uncommon to hear about faith commitments among the rich and famous. Unfortunately, it is less common to see solid reasons to believe such commitments.
I was interested in the conversation that she was having with Charlie and more than a bit interested in the discussion of the novel she had just finished, Christ the Lord. It was her latest, a biographical sketch of the childhood of Jesus. Not expecting her depiction of Jesus to be recognizable I listened to the interview looking for things I could disagree with. I was hunting for misleading statements about Christ, endorsements of pseudo-scholarship, and for what I assumed would be confused and conflated beliefs. I was pleasantly surprised to find her conversation with Charlie Rose sincerely engaging as she described her experience of leaving her faith as a young woman and then returning to the faith of her childhood.
In an almost repentant tone Rice said that she was done with the writing that had made her wealthy and famous and claimed that the rest of her work would be writing about the person of Jesus Christ. In researching this work she reported having read virtually all of the modern scholarship on the historical Jesus. I had a hard time believing this knowing that there was a spate of books on the subject of the historical Jesus published in the last decade, not to mention all of them from earlier in the 20th century.
Charlie Rose, after hearing this claim, asked Rice the simple question: “What is the best book of modern Jesus scholarship available today?” She unflinchingly replied, The Resurrection of the Son of God by Bishop N.T. Wright. With this endorsement she joined in with the majority of evangelical Christians who consider Wright’s book to be the best historical defense of Christ’s resurrection. It is a big book, approximately 800 well footnoted pages, scholarly but readable.
When I saw this interview I had already planned on reading Wright’s book. I figured that, if the writer of the Vampire Chronicles cared enough to read this book then I could care enough too. Maybe I could. Maybe I should. I am glad that I did.
I want to spend a few upcoming posts to share some thoughts on Wright’s book. It has prompted me to get a copy of his latest book, Surprised by Hope which includes a lot of the material in The Resurrection…, plus much more, on a more pastoral level.
You can watch Rice’s conversation with Charlie Rose below.
The video begins at min. 29:35… (right after the Jamie Foxx preview)
Filed under: Wright, books, resurrection , Add new tag, N.T. Wright, resurrection
April 6, 2008 • 11:42 pm 6
This is just a taste of what Tom Wright promotes as a more biblical view of life after “life after death”. You can pick up his book Surprised by Hope to get the full picture of what he is talking about. After spending some time studying I Cor 15, with a little help from some other of Wright’s work, I must admit I think he has it right.
The differences between the viewpoint of Wright and American evangelicals (whoever they are) are a bit overdrawn for the sake of TV journalism.
The video did not embed correctly. (Thanks for the heads up Brad.) Click here to view: NT Wright on Heaven
Filed under: Wright, books, resurrection , Add new tag, N.T. Wright, resurrection
March 26, 2008 • 11:44 pm 2
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.
Filed under: Wright, resurrection
March 21, 2008 • 3:45 am 2
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.
Filed under: Wright
March 18, 2008 • 6:03 pm 1
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
Filed under: Wright, resurrection
February 9, 2008 • 5:30 pm 2
In my previous post I described a little bit of the book The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright. The article that I have linked below is an interview with Wright in TIME Magazine. It is brief and it gives a picture of what Wright thinks of both the resurrection and the afterlife.
What do you think of Wright’s comments about Heaven/the Resurrection? Does that square with what you have been taught about life after death?
Filed under: Wright, resurrection
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