Gen-X Missional Wesleyan

Alright, sorry for the delay in finishing chapter 3 of NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, “Early Christian Hope in its Historical Setting.”. The last section is “The Surprising Character of Early Christian Hope.” Let’s take a look…

Wright continues to press us outside of our “eternal” comfort zones as he talks about what it means to say that “the early Christian future hope centered firmly on resurrection” (p. 41). He asserts, “the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world.” And adds, “There is nothing remotely like this is paganism. This belief is as Jewish as you can get.”

But, he says, there are seven modifications made by the early Christians to this Jewish understanding of resurrection (noting that I didn’t say “the” Jewish understanding). I’ll try to share them in a brief form here.  

1. “Within early Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of belief about life beyond death.” According to Wright, bodily resurrection was THE uniform belief of the early Christian Church until the late second century, a good 150 years after Jesus, when the first instances of people using the word “resurrection” to mean something else–”a spiritual experience in the present leading to a disembodied hope in the future”–crops up.

2. Resurrection is central to early Christian theology, unlike in second-Temple Judaism in which resurrection is “important but not that important” (p. 42). Consider how much text of the gospels we would lose by removing the portions about Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection. The relative time spent in the gospels on this subject is evidence of its place in the thought and life of the church.

3. In contrast to Judaism’s vagueness about the sort of body those who are resurrected will recieve, early Christianity is remarkably specific, referring to a new body that is physical but transformed and thus has “new properties.” We often read Paul’s words about a “spiritual” body to mean disembodiment. But he instead means to cast the two, the physical body and the spiritual body as differently “animated,” the new spiritual body being animated by the Spirit.

4. Resurrection morphed from being understood as one-time huge event in which all would be raised to being understood as a two-stage process in which one was resurrected before the rest (as a kind of “first fruits” of the whole resurrection event). Thinking about how Jesus’ resurrection was understood as a part of God’s plan for the “end times.” In that vein, Wright says, “we never find outside Christianity what becomes a central feature within it: the belief that the mode of this inauguration [the beginning point for God's new creation breaking into the old creation] consisted in the resurrection itself happening to one person in the middle of history in advance of its great, final occurrence, anticipating and guaranteeing the final resurrection of God’s people at the end of history.” (p. 45)

5. There is also a missional shift that happens with the early Christian view of resurrection. “Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.” (p. 46)

6. Also, the metaphorical use of the term “resurrection” changes for Christians. This historical shift is not hard to recreate logically: “So when resurrection is used metaphorically in Judiasm, it refers to the restoration of Israel.” In early Christianity, the metaphor shifts over to baptism as our initiation, leading us into a life that progresses in Christ-like character.

7. Finally, another significant shift concerns the association of resurrection and messiahship. While his sufferings and disgrace would seem to suggest that Jesus was not the promised Messiah. However, Paul and other NT writers affirmed Jesus’ Messiahship “precisely because of his resurrection.”

Having shared these with us, Wright emphasizes again that “resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow, and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it.”

Alright, let’s pick up the first part of chapter three in NT Wright’s recent book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, “Early Christian Hope in its Historical Setting.”

Wright begins with an illustration to present the point that while eyewitnesses commonly disagree, it doesn’t mean the thing didn’t happen. Further, it doesn’t mean that the thing didn’t happen. So, we begin talking about resurrection generally and the resurrection of Jesus in particular:

Wright begins with some questions:

He states that his “question now is clear: What sort of an event was it? Just how empty was the tomb on Easter morning?” (p. 33)

And again, “What should we believe about Jesus’ resurrection, and why?” (p. 33)

Finally, “What precisely was it that the early Christians believed? Why did they use the language of resurrection to express that belief?” (p. 34)

First, Wright addresses what persons in the ancient world would have believed “about life beyond the grave.”

“As far as the ancient pagan world was concerned, the road to the underworld ran only one way… Everybody know there was in fact no answer to death. The ancient pagan world then divided broadly into those who…might have wanted a new body but knew they couldn’t have one and those who, like Plato’s philosophers, didn’t want one because being a disembodied soul was far better.” (p. 35-36) In this milieu, “resurrection” referred to a new bodily life after an interim period of death but did not refer to existence in another realm/dimension immediately after death. Virtually everyone in the ancient world knew about and believed in spirits, visions, etc and did not refer to these when speaking of resurrection. Whether affirmed, as some Jewish groups did, or denied, as other Jewish groups and most if not all pagan groups did, the concept of resurrection was clear and consistent: “Resurrection meant bodies.” (p. 36) \

So, when reports surfaced and proclamation began to circulate about Jesus being resurrected, this was thoroughly unique to him and “quite unexpected.”  Indeed, “most Jews of the day believed in an eventual resurrection–that is, tha tGod would look after the soul after death until, at the last day, God would give his people new bodies when he judged and remade the whole world.” (p. 37) This makes sense of Martha’s comments to Jesus on resurrection concerning Lazarus in chapter 11 of John’s Gospel: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” But the resurrection of Jesus was a unique proclamation because it meant that one had been resurrected in advance of that last day. While Jesus redefined key concepts like “kingdom” and “messiah,” he did not do so with “resurrection.” The only change, a major one though, was that one was resurrected prior to the last day and before the general resurrection of all persons.

So, Jesus’ crucifixion devestated the disciples’ hopes. Nobody said, “Well, at least he’s now in heaven with God.” (p. 40)

“What they said–and again this has the ring of first-century truth–was, ‘We had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel’ (Luke 24:21), with the implication, ‘but they crucified him, so he can’t have been.’ …When Jesus was crucified, every single disciple knew what it meant: we backed the wrong horse.” (p. 40)

Within this world, Christianity came proclaiming something that rested on that Jewish foundation while paving radically new ground as well. The last section of chapter three (”The Surprising Character of Early Christian Hope”) in the next post.

NT Wright has become a favorite theologian of mine for several reasons ever since I was first exposed to him in seminary. His theological work is tightly related to his scholarship in biblical studies, which he taught for many years. This makes him helpful as a teacher for the Church because teaching in the Church is generally the ministry of the Word. Wright refuses to turn biblical stories into either Christian Aesop’s fables on the one hand whose true value is in the moral or principle rather than their place in the overarching narrative, or into mere examinations of the relative likelihood of their historical veracity on the other hand, treating them as textual relics to be studied rather than a Divine Word to be heard and done. Instead, he works rigorously to read them on their own terms from their own setting, while at the same time listening for and reflecting on the theological importance for them in the life of the Church.

So, I am excited to be reading and blogging his recent work Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I’ll do my best to present his views in each chapter clearly and succinctly, interact with them some myself, then get out of the way. I hope you’ll enjoy this as much as I think I will.

To begin, Wright asserts in the preface that many people, Christians included, do not know “what the ultimate Christian hope really is.” Therefore, “hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once.”

1. “At the first level, the book is obviously about death and about what can be said from a Christian perspective about what lies beyond it.”

2. “At the second level, then, the book is about the groundwork of practical and even political theology–of, that is, Christian reflection on the nature of the task we face as we seek to bring God’s kingdom to bear on the real and painful world in which we live.”

Then, in chapter 1, “All dressed up and no place to go?”, he begins with a series of snapshots to set the stage: public grief at Princess Diana’s death in 1997, controversial statements about the afterlife from a famous soccer coach that sounded defaming of persons with disabilities, a small group of people gathered for a funeral in which the body has been cremated, public uncertainty and questions in the wake of large scale disasters–9/11, the 2004 Asian tsunami, the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005, etc, and an all but abandoned community once rich with natural resources, now a desolate sign of “postindustrial blight.” The common thread in these snapshots is the implicit question of where hope may be found, if at all.

Wright wants to address two questions “tightly together” that have otherwise been addressed apart: “First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?” (p. 5)

In this book, I anticipate him developing a common theme in his lectures and other work, that Christian hope is less about escaping from the world and up to heaven and more about “God’s new creation, for ‘new heavens and new earth.’”

To set the stage just a little further, Wright points out as evidence of widespread confusion in the wider world, that there is a great diversity of belief regarding ultimate hope among the world’s religions and belief systems. Further, “the main beliefs that emerge in the present climate seem to [Wright] of three types, none of which corresponds to Christian orthodoxy.” (p. 9)

1. “Some believe in complete annihilation; that is at least clean and tidy, however unsatisfying it may be as an account of human destiny.” (p. 9)

2. “The funeral practices that have grown up, or reappeared, in our own day exhibit the same kind of confusion.” (p. 11) What does “gifts for the dead” in the form of pictures, stuffed animals, spare glassess, and/or false teeth being placed in the coffin, reflect in terms of belief, if anything?

3. “Finally, at the popular level, belief in ghosts and the possibility of spiritualistic contact with the dead has resisted all the inroads of a century of secularism.” (p. 12)

Unfortunately, confusion and ignorance are not only indicative of culture at large, but of the Church as well. A little more unpacking our confusion in the next chapter and we’ll be ready to start our study of hope in the Christian Scriptures.

I’ve meant to start another book since finishing Seized by Truth by Joel B. Green, but for one reason or another haven’t done so. After Easter, however, I plan to start Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, by NT Wright. I’ll continue to blog A Long Obedience, by Eugene Peterson, while my church men’s groups are studying it for a couple more weeks and will likely blog the next book/s they do as well. So I may have a couple going here, but that’s all good.

If anyone would like to read along with me and participate in the comments, I would welcome interaction as always. I aim to start blogging it sometime next week. Post-Easter seems like a good time to work through this book.