Surprised by Hope Class Updates

The Sunday after Labor Day, Husband and I started a class at church on Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright. I had read this back in May to prepare. Since then, we have facilitated 7 sessions. Where are we now?

The Pick

We chose Surprised by Hope because its topic was a natural progression from the development of the modern self that we had led during the previous academic year. Thomas Schreiner (Southern Baptist by affiliation) of 9Marks has a fairly balanced summary and critique of the book, most of which I agree with. Based on this summary, are you curious to read the book?

What is heaven after all? Wright contends that too many Christians have a Platonic idea of heaven. They conceive of it in ethereal terms, as if we float in a bodiless state in some transcendent realm. Indeed, most Christians think of heaven as “up there,” and as separated from the earth. What the Scriptures teach, however, is that heaven will come to earth. The Scriptures do not say, according to Wright, that we will “go to heaven when we die,” but that heaven will come to earth, that the earth upon which we live will be transformed, and that we will enjoy the new creation.

The Plan

As I understand it, the class was planned to span at least one full semester, potentially the entire school year (our church does not hold Sunday school in summer/4th quarter). The book has 15 chapters, although chapters 3 and 4 hold the most "meat" by far. We deliberately avoided making a syllabus right away because we didn't know how much time the attendees would want to take grappling with the deeper content.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Part 1 - Setting the Scene

1. All Dressed Up and No Place to Go? (confusion about what Christianity means by the Resurrection)
2. Puzzled About Paradise? (confusion about heaven and the afterlife)
3. Early Christian Hope in its Historical Setting
4. The Strange Story of Easter (chapters 3 and 4 are a condensation of one of Wright's 800-page books)

Part 2 - God's Future Plan

        5. Cosmic Future: Progress or Despair?

        6. What the Whole World's Waiting For

        7. Jesus, Heaven, and New Creation

        8. When He Appears

        9. Jesus the Coming Judge

        10. The Redemption of our Bodies

        11. Purgatory, Paradise, Hell

Part 3 - Hope in Practice: Resurrection and the Mission of the Church

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

        13. Building for the Kingdom

        14. Reshaping the Church for Mission: Biblical Roots

        15. Reshaping the Church for Mission: Living the Future

Based on past experiences facilitating a discussion-based class on Carl Trueman's Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, we anticipated a mix of perspectives and easily whetted appetites. So, the entire book likely will take the full 3 quarters, which we are happy about.

The People

Our church is fairly small (~80 members, ~110 regular attendees), and out of those we had 10-15 people sign up for the class, which is being offered at the same time as a differently-themed class. Each has one of the priests in semi-regular attendance as a participant.

Anglicanism, specifically the ACNA, is truly a melting pot (tossed salad?) of people who have grown up or spent time in other Christian traditions, and combining that with the three-streams aspect of the larger Anglican tradition, the result is extreme diversity within a unifying mindset. In the group, so far we have seen a range of perspectives on topics such as

• What the fact of inspiration of Scripture really means (simple to complex)
• Willingness to engage in the historical context behind the text
• (Mathematical/Christian) Platonism and Aristotelianism
• Pietism and implications for practice of one's faith and witness

The first and second Sundays on which we engaged in chapter 3 had an unexpectedly high number of asides. Neither of us were prepared for a comment on inspiration which sparked an animated discussion lasting about a third of class time--I was glad to be able to gently correct one or two false dichotomies.

The Progress

As expected, there has been a lot of robust discussion, varied reaction, and between-session thought about the topics! Next week, we may take a deliberate aside to engage with some of the core Scripture passages that Wright has referenced and will reference in the following chapters (including John 14:2 and 1 Corinthians 15), to ensure that (1) we all know where he's coming from, (2) we're exposed to the Greek text with key terms, and (3) we're all looking at the text roughly the same way (even if we disagree with what it's saying, we should still know what it meant for its original intended audience). Additionally, we might take a closer look at 2 Maccabees 7 which may have been what the Sadducees were thinking of when they challenged Jesus.

Major Topics

I didn't take notes on chapter 1, but as far as major topics go I think the summary excerpt from 9Marks nicely captures it. Otherwise . . .

• Hymns do teach theology.
• People's lack of attention to the words they sing does not invalidate this general point.
• Yes, hymns are expressed as poetry, and should be interpreted as such.
• No, not all lyrics are the same.
• Two hymns that express resurrection theology very closely to the Scriptural view are For All the Saints and Jerusalem the Golden.
• Bodily resurrection is a core belief of Christianity.
• Only Jews, Christians, and (after 800s AD) Zoroastrians believed in a post-death body.
• We've gotten through 3 of 7 mutations that Christians made to the Jewish doctrine of life-after-death.
• Mutation #1: early Christianity, unlike Judaism, had a single view of life after death
• Mutation #2: early Christianity, unlike Judaism, treated bodily resurrection as a central belief on which other beliefs hang
• Mutation #3: early Christianity explained the resurrection body clearly and emphaticaly as both physical, and transformed, and Spirit-powered (against a common mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 15:44)
• Irenaeus articulated this view in AD 180.
• Physical bodies of resurrected people mean that this creation matters (2 Corinthians 6:14)
• Political implications of this can be explored in (among other places) Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, followed by One Faith No Longer.
• Eyewitness accounts are important to the Gospels' texts.
• If multiple people witnessed an event, their accounts are expected to diverge, potentially in many details.
• At the same time, core details' agreement across accounts roughly reflect the degree of certainty we can take in knowing what happened.
• These accounts typically undergirded ancient biography as a genre, which took a very different approach from contemporary biography (which resolves many of the apparent differences in the Gospels). Around the same time, Thucidydes described how he "recorded" speeches based on interviews.

Interesting Asides

Some unanticipated side topics have included

• Inspiration of Scripture
• How do we know about it? Do we just "feel" that the whole corpus of Scripture is inspired?
• What does this mean? Did God dictate the words to all biblical writers (closer to Islam's view) or did He more so inspire the thoughts that the human writers put their best-at-the-time words to? (Check out Paul's side note in 1 Corinthians 1:16.)
• Is it more important to believe in the inspiration of Scripture before or after one believes in Jesus Christ as Savior?
• John 1 and 19 were likely written especially to combat docetism (proto-Gnosticism)
• Jesus' divinity
• Not the same as messiahship!
• At least to the peoples at the time, not shown by His resurrection necessarily, but by other evidence
• Hermeneutical methods
• One way is rectilinear--i.e., that for each Old Testament prophecy there is exactly one fulfillment of that prophecy (either "now" or "not yet" but not both). This was embraced by many of the Reformers because it was opposite of what the Roman Catholic church taught at that time.
• Another way is typological--i.e., for a given OT prophecy there are multiple possible fulfillments (both "now" and "not yet").

Stay tuned for further integration of the content in the posts ahead!