Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Seven

1.  Wright sets out to distinguish between two notable events: that Jesus was “resurrected from the dead,” and that some time later Jesus “ascended into heaven.”  He asks, “Why has the ascension been such a difficult and unpopular doctrine in the modern Western church?”  He answers, “It is that the ascension demands that we think differently about how the whole cosmos is, so to speak, put together and that we also think differently about the church and about salvation.  Basically, heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.”

How do you understand this distinction?  How does Jesus operate freely from both dimensions?

2.  These issues matter because they are at the heart of our perception and understanding of Jesus’ involvement (ruling) in the world even now.  “You could sum all this up by saying that the doctrine of the Trinity, which is making quite a comeback in current theology, is essential if we are to tell the truth not only about God, and more particularly about Jesus, but also about ourselves. The Trinity is precisely a way of recognizing and celebrating the fact of the human being Jesus of Nazareth as distinct from while still identified with God the Father, on the one hand (he didn’t just “go back to being God again” after his earthly life), and the Spirit, on the other hand (the Jesus who is near us and with us by the Spirit remains the Jesus who is other than us).  To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.”

How does this explanation help us to understand Jesus’ role in the Trinity and his role in creation, both present and future?

3.  But the ascension is not the end of it.  “One day, in other words, the Jesus who is right now the central figure of God’s space—the human Jesus, still wearing (as Wesley put it) “those dear tokens of his passion” on his “dazzling body”—will be present to us, and we to him, in a radically different way than what we currently know. The other half of the truth of the ascension is that Jesus will return, as the angels said in Acts 1:11.”

Wright concludes, “But what is this second coming all about?  Isn’t that too a strange, outlandish idea that we should abandon in our own day?”

4.  “What then can we say about the second coming of Jesus?  When God renews the whole cosmos, the New Testament insists, Jesus himself will be personally present as the center and focus of the new world that will result. What does the Christian faith teach at this point? What is its sharp edge for us today? How can we make it our own?” 

“We are therefore faced, as we look at today’s large-scale picture, with two polar opposites. At one end, some have made the second coming so central that they can see little else. At the other, some have so marginalized or weakened it that it ceases to mean anything at all. Both positions need to be challenged.”

Where do you find yourself on this theological continuum?

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