Archives For NT Wright
To pastors and seminarians he is N.T. Wright, the theologian a generation turns to for everything from resurrection apologetics to the New Perspective on Paul. But behind that academic density is the heart of a shepherd. This is best seen in his “For Everyone” set of New Testament commentaries. Here, Wright eschews his academic initials for the nickname Tom.
“The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.”
“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”
— N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
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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