Chapter Five
1. Wright begins with
the suggestion “that there are two quite different ways of looking at the
future of the world. The first
option is the myth of progress. Many
people, particularly politicians and secular commentators in the press and
elsewhere, still live by this myth, appeal to it,
and encourage us to believe it.”
and encourage us to believe it.”
According to Wright,
why is progress a myth? Give examples of
his & yours.
2. Charles Darwin and Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin each contributed to this myth of progress in very unique
ways. (Please take a few minutes to
review each.) Wright then goes on to
note, “the real problem with the myth of progress is, as I just hinted, that it
cannot deal with evil. And when I say, “deal with,” I don’t just mean intellectually,
though that is true as well; I mean in practice. It can’t develop a strategy
that actually addresses the severe problems of evil in the world.”
Why is this so?
3. “The myth, then,
cannot deal with evil, for three reasons. First,
it can’t stop it: if evolution gave us Hiroshima and the Gulag, it can’t be all
good. Second, even if
‘progress’ brought us to utopia after all, that wouldn’t address the moral
problem of all the evil that’s happened to date in the world. Finally,
the myth of progress fails because it doesn’t in fact work; because it would
never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and
power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross,
God’s no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation.”
How do these three
reasons re-route our understanding of progress?
4. The second option for looking at the future
of the world is “souls in transit.” As Wright
notes, “Here worldviews diverge radically. The optimist, the evolutionist, the
myth-of-progress school all say that these are just the growing pains of
something bigger and better. The Platonist, the Hindu, and, following Plato,
the Gnostic, the Manichaean, and countless others within variants of the
Christian and Jewish traditions all say that these are the signs that we are
made for something quite different, a world not made of space,
time, and matter, a world of pure spiritual existence where we shall happily
have got rid of the shackles of mortality once and for all. And the way you get
rid of mortality within this worldview is to get rid of the thing that can
decay and die, namely our material selves.”
What is the appeal and
the danger with this myth?
5. “Most Western
Christians—and most Western non-Christians, for that matter—in fact suppose
that Christianity was committed to at least a soft version of Plato’s position.
A good many Christian hymns and poems wander off unthinkingly in the direction
of Gnosticism. A massive assumption has been made in Western
Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least
mainly, to “go to heaven when you die,” and texts that don’t say that but that
mention heaven are read as if they did say it, and texts that say the opposite,
like Romans 8:18–25 and Revelation 21–22, are simply screened out as if they
didn’t exist.
Can you cite examples
of this?
6. “My point for now is
to notice that in many parts of the world an appeal to a Christian view of the
future is taken to mean an appeal to the eventual demise of the created order and
to a destiny that is purely ‘spiritual’ in the sense of being completely
nonmaterial. That remains the popular perception, both from inside and outside
the church, of what we Christians are supposed to believe when we speak of
heaven and when we talk of the hope that is ours in Christ. Over against both
these popular and mistaken views, the central Christian affirmation is that
what the creator God has done in Jesus Christ, and supremely in his resurrection,
is what he intends to do for the whole world—meaning, by world, the entire
cosmos with all its history.”
Why is this this
clarification so crucial to the meaning of Easter and the future of the Church –
the Body of Christ?
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