Surprised by Wright: Reflections on Final(Something or Other)

This week is finals week at my institution and in many other places. So, what better to write and read about than final things? Since I finished N. T. Wright's rather addictive book Surprised by Hope last Thursday, which book addresses the Christian's hope of bodily resurrection after resting in heaven ("life after life after death"), I wanted to share some of the most impactful quotes from each chapter, along with my commentary as applicable. All italics in the quotes are in the original.

Wright's Key Questions

"What are we waiting for? And what are we going to do about it in the meantime?" (p. xi) That is, what lies beyond the "finality" of death?

Part I: Setting the Scene

Chapter 1: All Dressed Up and no Place to Go?

• p. 5 "As long as we see Christian hope in terms of 'going to heaven,' of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated." This quote ties directly to the first quote I posted, above.
• p. 6 "I am convinced that most people, including most practicing Christians, are muddled and misguided on this topic and that this muddle produces quite serious mistakes in our thinking, our praying, our liturgies, our practice, and perhaps particularly our mission to the world." As a cradle Anglican, Wright has been trained in the habit of speaking enthusiastically and kindly.

Chapter 2: Puzzled about Paradise?

• p. 18 "Many Christians grow up assuming that whenever the New Testament speaks of heaven it refers to the place to which the saved will go after death. . . . But the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn't work that way. 'God's kingdom' in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God's sovereign rule coming 'on earth as it is in heaven.' The roots of the misunderstanding go very deep, not least into the residual Platonism that has infected whole swaths of Christian thinking."
• Platonist hymns include Abide with Me, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, How Great Thou Art, I'm But a Stranger Here, and others. These express the basic message of "world = bad or fading away, heaven = good place for the disembodied soul."
• Great hymns: For All the Saints, Jerusalem the Golden, and others.
• p. 26 "Why try to improve the present prison if release is at hand? Why oil the wheels of a machine that will soon plunge over a cliff?" This question could be applied especially to environmental concerns--what is our proper role in relation to the physical world?

Chapter 3: Early Christian Hope in its Historical Setting

• p. 33 "It is a commonplace among lawyers that eyewitnesses disagree but that this doesn't mean nothing happened." Keep this in mind in YouTube comment section arguments . . .
• p. 36 "In content, resurrection referred specifically to something that happened to the body; hence the later debates about how God would do this . . . much modern writing continues, most misleadingly, to use the word resurrection as a virtual synonym for life after death in the popular sense."
• p. 41 "The early Christian future hope centered firmly on resurrection. The first Christians did not simply believe in life after death; they virtually never spoke simply of going to heaven when they died." (The next section of the book notes that Paradise = temporary lodging, and describes 7 modifications from Judaism's belief about this.)
• pp. 46-47 "We have a new [compared to Judaism] metaphorical meaning of resurrection . . . baptism (a dying and rising with Christ), and resurrection as referring to the new life of strenuous ethical obedience, enabled by the Holy Spirit, to which the believer is committed." Note the sacramental nature of baptism and resurrection. On a side note, the church fathers note that (1) baptism causes regeneration and (2) infants are regenerate. Put those two together, and you get efficacious infant baptism.

Chapter 4: The Strange Story of Easter

• p. 55 "Yet the [Gospel] stories also contain--and this marks them out as among the most mysterious stories ever written--definite signs that this body has been transformed. It is clearly physical: it uses up (so to speak) the matter of the crucified body; hence the empty tomb. But, equally, it comes and goes through locked doors; it is not always recognized; and in the end it disappears into God's space, that is, 'heaven,' through the thin curtain that in much Jewish thought separates God's space from human space."
• p. 65 "The problem with analogy is that it never quite gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial." This is one of the easiest things to point out about those who use the fallacy of comparing one-time history to pattern-type analogy.

Part II:  God's Future Plan

Chapter 5: Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?

• p. 79 "This isn't a matter of ancient people being credulous and modern people being skeptical. There is a great deal of credulity in our present world, and there was a great deal of skepticism in the ancient world." C. S. Lewis also made this point in God in the Dock.
• pp. 81-88 "A the risk of gross oversimplification, we suggest that there are two quite different ways of looking at the future of the world. . . . The first position is the myth of progress . . . This utopian dream is in fact a parody of the Christian vision . . . The real problem with the myth of progress is, as I just hinted, that it cannot deal with evil . . . [The second position is that] the way you get rid of morality within this [Platonic/Gnostic] worldview is to get rid of the thing that can decay and die, namely our mortal selves."

Chapter 6: What the Whole World's Waiting For

• p. 93 "The early Christians did not believe in progress . . . but neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether." Christianity, orthodox at least, tends to be in a middle or third position between polar-opposite stereotypes that people think it teaches or should teach.
• p. 95 "Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them."
• p. 97 "Redemption is . . . the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it." This is a subtly different phrasing than what I and many fellow Christians were taught. It is a key point to help reframe and refocus doctrines of salvation.
• p. 100 "Not all residents of Philippi [in Paul's time] were Roman citizens, but all knew what citizenship meant . . . so when Paul says, 'We are citizens of heaven,' he doesn't at all mean that when we're done with this life we'll be going off to live in heaven." I think he develops this thought elsewhere--inhabitants of Philippi tended to stay there for the rest of their lives rather than move back to Rome.
• p. 103 "The very metaphor [birth] Paul chooses . . . shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old."

Chapter 7: Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation

• p. 111 "The idea of the human Jesus now being in heaven, in his thoroughly embodied risen state, comes as a shock to many people, including many Christians." This, I think, should be part of the "sniff test" when you are visiting a new church.
• p. 112 "What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer is that the church expands to fill the vacuum." Wright then points out that the church (the bridge of Christ) is not the same as Christ, so this expansion causes heretical or otherwise problematic teaching.
• p. 115 "The early Christians, and their fellow first-century Jews, were not, as many moderns suppose, locked into thinking of a three-decker universe with heaven up in the sky and hell down beneath their feet . . . As some recent writers have pointed out, when a pupil at school moves 'up' a grade . . . it is unlikely that this means relocating to a classroom on the floor above."
• p. 115 "The mystery of the ascension . . . demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time." This is a hard point to think about the first time, but it may help to remember that since God the Father doesn't have a body, "at the right hand of God" doesn't denote a physical place.

Chapter 8: When He Appears

• p. 125 "The first thing to get clear is that, despite widespread opinion to the contrary, during his earthly ministry Jesus said nothing about his return." (Wright argued this in detail elsewhere.)
• p. 128-9 "The Greek word parousia . . . is usually translated 'coming,' but literally it means 'presence'--that is, presence as opposed to absence . . . In neither setting, we note, obviously but importantly, is there the slightest suggestion of anybody flying around on a cloud. Nor is there any hint of the imminent collapse or destruction of the space-time universe."

Chapter 9: Jesus, the Coming Judge

• p. 137 "Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment."
• pp. 139-140 "In particular (though there isn't space to develop this here) this picture of future judgment according to works is actually the basis of Paul's theology of justification by faith. The point of justification by faith isn't that God suddenly ceases to care about good behavior or morality. . . . justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world." This allows "judgment by works" to not conflict with "justification by faith."
• p. 144 "Far too often Christians slide into a vaguely spiritualized version of one or other major political system or party. What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?" Think of the phrase "Christian Right." Not a good idea to combine the two!

Chapter 10: The Redemption of our Bodies

• p. 147 "There is no room for doubt as to what [Paul] means [in Romans 8:23]: God's people are promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life. The rest of the early Christian writings, where they address the subject, are completely in tune with this."
• p. 148 "The traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey . . . represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope."
• p. 149 "This new life [in Colossians 3:1-4], which the Christian possesses secretly, invisible to the world, will burst forth into full bodily reality and visibility. The clearest and strongest passage, often ignored, is Romans 8:9-11."
• p. 150 "What does Jesus mean when he declares that there are 'many dwelling places' in his father's house? . . . The word for 'dwelling places' here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run." (Note that the Lutheran Study Bible note on John 14:2 directly contradicts this without a supporting reference. LCMS Cyclopedia, describing official beliefs, collapses heaven/paradise and eternal life, making no mention of the future resurrection in that document; resurrection is dealt with separately, as a last-thing. But why is eternal life separated doctrinally from being raised bodily?)
• pp. 151-2 "For a start, heaven is actually a reverent way of speaking about God so that 'riches in heaven' simply means 'riches in God's presence' . . . If I say to a friend, 'I've kept some beer in the fridge for you,' that doesn't mean that he has to climb into the fridge in order to drink the beer." Again, this makes much more sense when you think through the implications of God the Father not having a body.
• p. 153 "We've been buying our mental furniture for so long in Plato's factory that we have come to take for granted a basic ontological [nature-of-being] contrast between 'spirit' in the sense of something immaterial and 'matter' in the sense of something material, solid, physical."
• pp. 154-5 "What Paul is asking us to imagine [in 2 Corinthians 4 and 5] is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost . . . [regarding the phrases about physical/spiritual bodies] Greek adjectives ending in -ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them."
• p. 161 "Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God's new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps." Whew!

Chapter 11: Purgatory, Paradise, Hell

• p. 169 "In the early Christian writings all Christians are 'saints,' including the muddled and sinful Corinthians."
• p. 174 "The two appropriate places for remembering the Christian dead, and for doing so in a way that expresses genuine Christian hope, are Easter and All Saints."
• p. 179 "In the justly famous phrase of Miroslav Volf, there must be 'exclusion' before there can be 'embrace': evil must be identified, named, and dealt with before there can be reconciliation." In conversations about what Christians (should) mean by "love," this is particularly important to remember and bring up.
• p. 184 "We find that the river of the water of life flows out of the city; that growing on either bank is the tree of life, not a single tree but a great many; and that 'the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.' There is a great mystery here, and all our speaking about God's eventual future must make room for it."

Part III: Hope in Practice

Chapter 12: Rethinking Salvation: Heaven, Earth, and the Kingdom of God

• p. 191 "Jesus' bodily resurrection marks a watershed . . . And, to put it kindly but bluntly, if you go in the other direction, away from the bodily resurrection, you may be left with something that looks a bit like Christianity, but it won't be what the New Testament writers were talking about." (i.e., it is a core Christian doctrine, 1st-rank)
• p. 193 "What you do in the present--by painting, preaching, singing . . . loving your neighbor as yourself--will last into God's future . . . They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom."
• p. 198 "Salvation, then, is not 'going to heaven' but 'being raised to life in God's new heaven and new earth.'" Another repetition or version of the key point that snaps things into focus! Our goal is not escape but renewed stewardship and praise.
• p. 203 "Part of the difficulty people still have in coming to terms with the gospels, read in this way [Wright proposes], is that kingdom of God has been a flag of convenience under which all sorts of ships have sailed."

Chapter 13: Building for the Kingdom

• pp. 209-10 "The image I often use in trying to explain this strange but important idea [that our work will last but we don't yet know how] is that of the stonemason working on part of a great cathedral. The architect already drew up the plans . . . When they're finished with their stones and their statues, they hand them over without necessarily knowing very much about where in the eventual building their work will find its home . . . But they trust the architect that the work they have done in following instructions will not be wasted."
• p. 214 "Within the first-century world of Jesus, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, the doctrine of resurrection was a revolutionary doctrine." That is, they wouldn't have thought of it unless it actually happened
• p. 216 "We must therefore avoid the arrogance or triumphalism of the first [social justice] view, imagining that we can build the kingdom by our own efforts without the need for a further great divine act of new creation. But we must agree with the first view that doing justice in the world is part of the Christian task, and we must therefore reject the defeatism of the second [do-nothing] view, which says there's no point in even trying."
• p. 227 "The power of the gospel lies not in the offer of a new spirituality or religious experience, not in the threat of hellfire (certainly not in the threat of being 'left behind') . . . but in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God's new world has begun."
• p. 229 "Seeing evangelism and any resulting conversions in terms of new creation means that the new convert knows from the start that he or she is part of God's kingdom project, which stretches out beyond 'me and my salvation' to embrace, or rather to be embraced by, God's worldwide purposes." (Other benefits include differentiation by new converts between the good world and the bad corruptions of sin, and new converts always viewing Christian behavior as integral to their new way of life.)

Chapter 14: Reshaping the Church for Mission (1): Biblical Roots

• p. 234 "The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom."
• p. 241 "Those who find the risen Jesus going to the roots of their rebellion, denial, and sin and offering them love and forgiveness may well also find themselves sent off to be shepherds instead. Let those with ears listen." The bishop of our ACNA diocese recently came to the church to perform confirmations and receptions into the denomination, with specific words for each of us.
• p. 245 "Even the striking occasional miracles that the early apostles performed didn't convince everybody at the time. This isn't just a cop-out. The difference between the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of God lies exactly in this, that the kingdom of God comes through the death and resurrection of his Son, not through naked displays of brute force or wealth."
• pp. 250-1 "But in the Bible heaven and earth are made for each other. They are the twin interlocking spheres of God's single created reality. You really understand earth only when you are equally familiar with heaven."

Chapter 15: Reshaping the Church for Mission (2): Living the Future

• p. 256 "Interestingly, most of the good Easter hymns turn out to be from the early church and most of the bad ones from the nineteenth century." I love older hymns; Wright prefers hymns all from different decades (i.e., no two from the 1870s) within a single service.
• pp. 256-7 "This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don't have a New Testament; you don't have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins . . . This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out."
• p. 260 "But many are rediscovering in our day that there are indeed such things as places sanctified by long usage for prayer and worship, places where, often without being able to explain it, people of all sorts find that prayer is more natural, that God can be felt and known more readily."
• pp. 262-3 "Abuse of the sacrament does not nullify the proper use. Successive Christian generations have struggled to find language to do justice to the reality of what happens in baptism and of what happens in the Eucharist."
• p. 272 "Somehow the sacraments are not just signs of the reality of new creation but actually part of it. Thus the event of baptism - the action, the water, the going down and the coming up again, the new clothes - is not just a signpost to the reality of the new birth, the membership (as all birth gives membership) in the new family. It really is the gateway to that membership."
• p. 272 "Baptism is not magic, a conjuring trick with water. But neither is it simply a visual aid."
• p. 275 Similarly, "It [the Eucharist] is the breaking in of God's future, the Advent future, into our present time. Every Eucharist is a little Christmas as well as a little Easter."
• p. 282 "The Bible as a whole thus does what it does best when read from the perspective of new creation . . . The Bible is not, in other words, simply a list of true doctrines or a collection of proper moral commands - though it includes plenty of both."
• p. 288 "The point of 1 Corinthians 13 is that love is not our duty; it is our destiny."

Husband, as you've probably noticed from past posts, is a big fan of Wright because his scholarly perspective on New Testament and biblical doctrines in general helps everything snap into better focus, so that reason can be the proper servant of theology, not tossed out the window nor made to force all biblical doctrine into logical categories.

What do you think?