Throughout Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright's purpose has been to heal a "long-term schizophrenia" in the church, and I suppose that one reason I find the book so appealing is that I struggle with a form of the disorder. The "schizophrenia" takes the form of a "split between saving souls and doing good in the world," which, as Wright has demonstrated reapeatedly from varying angles, "is a product not of the Bible or the gospel but the cultural captivity of both within the Western world" (265).
It should not be a product of Adventism, either, but rather the reverse, given our "medical missionary" heritage. Yet because evangelism, as generally understood and practiced in
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2009 Readings in Christian Social Thought Discussion Series, Week 9 Reading: N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Chapter 14
The disciples go fishing but catch nothing. Jesus then helps them to an enormous catch but proceeds to commission Peter to be a shepherd rather than a fisherman. There are many things going on simultaneously here, but at the center is the challenge to a new way of life, a new forgiveness, a new fruitfulness, a new following of Jesus, which will be wider and more dangerous than what has gone before. This is a million miles from the hymns that speak of Jesus's resurrection in terms of our own assurance of a safe and happy rest in heaven. Quite the contrary. Jesus's resurrection summons us to dangerous and difficult tasks on earth (241).
Wright makes these comments on John 21 in the course of showing that the thrust of the resurrection narratives in the four gospels is not that believers may therefore one day too have eternal life. Rather...
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"Sex matters enormously, but global justice matters far, far more. The present system of global debt is the real immoral scandal, the dirty little secret - or rather the dirty enormous secret - of glitzy, glossy Western capitalism. Whatever it takes, we must change this situation or stand condemned by subsequent history alongside those who supported slavery two centuries ago and those who supported the Nazis seventy years ago" (217).
N.T. Wright makes this striking assertion in illustrating the acts of justice to which those who have been incorporated into the new creation inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus are called. It is through such actions, along with creation of beauty and evangelistic witness, says Wright in Chapter 13, that we build for the Kingdom of God.
Not build, but build for. Wright makes the importance of this distinction more explicit here than anywhere else in the book...
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2009 Readings in Christian Social Thought Discussion Series, Week 7
Reading: N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Chapter 12.
One of the most powerful ways that N.T. Wright helps us as Adventists see more deeply into the riches of our heritage is through a re-framing of the questions guiding inquiry about the Christian hope. Among the most valuable elements of our heritage has been recovery of a biblically-based understanding of “conditional immortality” and rejection of the popular Platonic doctrine of the immortal soul, detachable from the body, a concept foreign to the Bible that has underwritten the abuse of power in the Christian church for many centuries. Salvation as the individual soul’s entry into heaven at death fit much more comfortably with Roman imperialism than an imminent return of Christ, resurrection, and judgment sweeping away all earthly powers.
Yet, in our preoccupation with salvation as a vertical transaction between the divine and the individual soul, we remain subject to some of the problems Wright attributes to those who conceive of salvation as the disembodied soul’s entrance into heaven at death. As Wright points out at the conclusion of Chapter 11, the matter boils down to which questions receive priority. The focus, he proposes, should not be on “the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it.” Rather, it should be on the questions, “How will God’s new creation come? and then, How will we human beings contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator will launch in his new world?” (185).
This re-framing encourages us to think about salvation in the context of a long story, a controlling narrative – the story of redemption, and as involving ongoing human cooperation with divine power, rather than as mainly a matter of getting our individual debts of sin cleared from the books of heaven....
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2009 Readings in Christian Social Thought Discussion Series, Week 6
Reading: N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Chapters 10-11.
Why is it, I have sometimes wondered, that, as Adventists understand it, the unrighteous must be roused from their graves at the end of the millennium, only to meet an already-decided fate of execution? Wouldn't it be punishment enough to leave them in non-existence? I don't yet have an explanation that neatly conforms to the narrow confines of my understanding, though the Gospel of John makes clear that it has something to do with the righteous judgment to be meted out by the Son of Man (5:24-30).
It is to such punitive aspects of the "last things" that N.T. Wright turns in this week's reading (Chapter 11), following a chapter on the redemption of our bodies (10). There is much fodder here for a good old-fashioned doctrinal discussion over such matters as purgatory (denied), intercession of saints (denied), the intermediate state ("sleep" regarded as a conscious state of blissful rest -- the "paradise" of Luke 23, and "dwelling place" of John 14), hell as a place of unceasing fiery torment (denied), and eternal punishment (affirmed with a novel, admittedly speculative theory about sub-human existence "beyond hope and pity").
However, it is once again in the central theme of final judgment that underlies all of these matters that Wright's work holds it greatest significance as a text informing Christian social thought. In it, I propose, we find one remedy for the "lifeboat" eschatology that has helped debilitate Adventist action for peace and justice in the present evil age....
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