Long plane rides have given me time to work through N.T. Wright’s Suprised By Hope. The Bishop of Durham is a voice considered by liberals, conservatives, scholars and popular media to be one of the greatest experts on the New Testament. Hope reexamines the Bible’s teaching on the afterlife and how that impacts our lives today.
The basic thesis of the book is this: The Bible promises a literal physical resurrection, like Jesus’s. This has serious implications for how we view life, death and the mission of the Church.
The book reexamines basic principles taught by evangelicalism, and western Christianity in general. Unlike greek dualism, which separates the physical from the spiritual, and condemns all things physical, he shows how the Bible teaches that creation is good and our bodies are good. Jesus resurrection is not an odd one time occurence, it is the first act of new creation. God plans to give us all resurrected bodies, and unleash the same power on the universe itself.
Having dismantled greek infused ideas about a disembodied heaven and fundamentalist teachings about escaping the world before it all burns away, Wright gets to his main point: how does impending resurrection and new creation shape the mission of the Church?
If God loves his creation, and plans to affirm that in resurrected bodies and a new heaven and new earth, then the mission of the Church is to anticipate God’s new creation.
Chew on that for now, and I’ll share some quotes at another time.
For my traditional conservative friends, don’t worry: I have every intention on reading John Piper’s rebuttal.
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