Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Nine

1.  “The picture of Jesus as the coming judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and nonnegotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all. The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and post-liberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over.”

How have you typically perceived “judgment?”  How does Wright’s explanation of Jesus in the role of judge further shape your perception and expectations surrounding his return?

2.  “What happens when this is transposed to the New Testament? Answer: we find Jesus himself taking on the role of the son of man, suffering then vindicated. Then, as in Daniel, he receives from the Supreme Judge the task of bringing this judgment to bear on the world. This accords with many biblical and postbiblical passages in which Israel’s Messiah, the one who represents Israel in person, is given the task of judgment.”

What do you understand this “task of judgment” to be?
How does it affect you and me?

3.  “Justification by faith cannot be collapsed, as so many in the last two centuries tried to do, either into a generalized liberal view of a laissez-faire morality or into the romantic view that what we do outwardly doesn’t matter at all since the only thing that matters is what we’re like inwardly.”  “No: justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world. It is God’s advance declaration that when someone believes the gospel, that person is already a member of his family no matter who their parents were, that their sins are forgiven because of Jesus’s death, and that on the future day, as Paul says, “there is now no condemnation” (Rom. 8:1).”

Given this understanding, how does this affect the ways you think and act today?

4.  Review and discuss each of these three “points of relevance.”

First, the appearing or coming of Jesus offers the complete answer to both the literalist fundamentalists and to the proponents of that cosmic Christ idea I outlined in chapter 5. In his appearing we find neither a dualist rejection of the present world nor simply his arrival like a spaceman into the present world but rather the transformation of the present world, and ourselves within it, so that it will at last be put to rights and we with it. Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all.”

“This means, second, that a proper shape and balance are given to the Christian worldview. Like the Jewish worldview, but radically opposed to the Stoic, the Platonic, the Hindu, and the Buddhist worldviews, the Christian worldview is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”  “Because we live between ascension and appearing, joined to Jesus Christ by the Spirit but still awaiting his final coming and presence, we can be both properly humble and properly confident.”

Third, following directly from this, the task of the church between ascension and parousia is therefore set free both from the self-driven energy that imagines it has to build God’s kingdom all by itself and from the despair that supposes it can’t do anything until Jesus comes again. We do not ‘build the kingdom’ all by ourselves, but
we do build for the kingdom. All that we do in faith, hope, and love in the present, in obedience to our ascended Lord and in the power of his Spirit, will be enhanced and transformed at his appearing.13 This too brings a note of judgment, of course, as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 3:10–17. The ‘day’ will disclose what sort of work each builder has done.”

5.  Finally, Wright asks, “What would happen if we were to take seriously our stated belief that Jesus Christ is already the Lord of the world and that at his name, one day, every knee would bow?” 

Your response?

No comments:

Post a Comment