Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

Chapter Fifteen

1.  Wright has a beef with the way Easter is typically observed.  His corrective:  The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving. You may be able to do it only for six weeks, just as you may be able to go without beer or tobacco only for the six weeks of Lent. But if you really make a start on it, it might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life. It might help you wake up in a whole new way. And that’s what Easter is all about.

What might this new Easter expression be for you…for us?

2.  The mission of the church must therefore include, at a structural level, the recognition that our present space, time, and matter are all subject not to rejection but to redemption. Despite the tendency in some parts of the emerging church to marginalize space, time, and matter, I remain convinced that the way forward is to rediscover a true eschatology, to rediscover a true mission rooted in anticipating that eschatology, and to rediscover forms of church that embody that anticipation.

What value do we give to space, time, and matter in our context?

3.  What I am saying is, think through the hope that is ours in the gospel; recognize the renewal of creation as both the goal of all things in Christ and the achievement that has already been accomplished in the resurrection; and go to the work of justice, beauty, evangelism, the renewal of space, time, and matter as the anticipation of the eventual goal and the implementation of what Jesus achieved in his death and resurrection. That is the way both to the genuine mission of God and to the shaping of the church by and for that mission.

How does this statement mirror the Apostles’ & Nicene Creeds?

4.  Wright provides a brief outline of six central aspects of Christian spirituality that arise in the light of our Easter hope.  They include: New Birth & Baptism; Eucharist; Prayer; Scripture; Holiness & Love.

Discuss the role that each of these plays in directing our lives.

Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

Chapter Fourteen

1.  The resurrection isn’t just a surprise happy ending for one person; it is instead the turning point for everything else. It is the point at which all the old promises come true at last: the promises of David’s unshakable kingdom; the promises of Israel’s return from the greatest exile of them all; and behind that again, quite explicit in Matthew, Luke, and John, the promise that all the nations will now be blessed through the seed of Abraham.

What are the promises of these individual periods and people?  How do they coalesce to form a unified promise for all people of all times?

2.  In this story, fishing seems to stand for what the disciples, like the rest of the world, were doing anyway whereas shepherding seems to stand for the new tasks within the new creation. To develop that as a metaphor, it seems to me that a good deal of the church’s work at the moment is concentrating on fishing, and helping others to fish, rather than on shepherding.  Those who find the risen Jesus going to the roots of their rebellion, denial, and sin and offering them love and forgiveness may well also find themselves sent off to be shepherds instead.

How do we characterize “fishing” and “shepherding” today in the context of the Church’s mission?  Which do you feel called to do?

3.  Paul declares that the speculations and puzzles of pagan theology and philosophy can now all be put on a different footing because the one true God has unveiled himself and his plan for the whole world by appointing a man to be judge of the whole world and has certified this by raising him from the dead. This is what the resurrection does: it opens the new world, in which, under the saving and judging lordship of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, everything else is to be seen in a new light.

How has your understanding of Jesus resurrection shed new light on your life and the lives of others?  How has it shed new light on God’s work in the world today?

4.  We can sum this up in the following way. The revolutionary new world, which began in the resurrection of Jesus—the world where Jesus reigns as Lord, having won the victory over sin and death—has its frontline outposts in those who in baptism have shared his death and resurrection. The intermediate stage between the resurrection of Jesus and the renewal of the whole world is the renewal of human beings—you and me!—in our own lives of obedience here and now.

What does this require of us today, as baptized followers of Jesus?

5.  But at the start of Colossians 3 he focuses on what it actually means to share, here and now, in the resurrection of the Messiah. Paul insists that if you are already raised with Christ—in other words, if you through baptism and faith are a resurrection person, living in the new world begun at Easter, energized by the power that raised Jesus from the dead—then you have a responsibility to share in the present risen life of Jesus. “If, then, you are risen with the Messiah, seek the things that are above; set your thoughts on things above, not on things of the earth.” It is no use simply saying, “I’ve been baptized; therefore God is happy with me the way I am.” Paul’s logic is: “You have been baptized; therefore God is challenging you to die to sin and live the resurrection life.”

What does this mean for us?  What does this resurrection life look like?

6.  Part of getting used to living in the post-Easter world—part of getting used to letting Easter change your life, your attitudes, your thinking, your behavior—is getting used to the cosmology that is now unveiled. Heaven and earth, I repeat, are made for each other, and at certain points they intersect and interlock. Jesus is the ultimate such point. We as Christians are meant to be such points, derived from him. The Spirit, the sacraments, and the scriptures are given so that the double life of Jesus, both heavenly and earthly, can become ours as well, already in the present.

In Jesus, you and I become points where heaven and earth intersect and interlock.  When and where do you acknowledge and experience this?

7.  Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good, but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can’t do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us calls “myself.” Personal holiness and global holiness belong together. Those who wake up to the one may well find themselves called to wake up to the other as well.

Where is the wisdom and challenge in this powerful statement?

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Thirteen

1.  That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world. In fact, it will be enhanced there.

So what are the possibilities ahead for us?

2.  But if God really does intend to redeem rather than reject his created world of space, time, and matter, we are faced with the question: what might it look like to celebrate that redemption, that healing and transformation, in the present, and thereby appropriately to anticipate God’s final intention?

3.  As far as I can see, the major task that faces us in our generation, corresponding to the issue of slavery two centuries ago, is that of the massive economic imbalance of the world, whose major symptom is the ridiculous and unpayable Third World debt.  We must learn, therefore, to recognize the complex arguments against debt remission as what they are. People tell you it’s a tricky and many-sided subject. Yes, it is; so was slavery. So are all major moral problems. The fact remains that what is now going on amounts to theft by the strong from the weak, by the rich from the poor.

What is our Christian response to this?

4.  This is the point where a genuine biblical theology can come out of the forest and startle both those who thought that the Bible was irrelevant or dangerous for political ethics and those who thought that taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically. The truth is very different.  His resurrection, and the promise of God’s new world that comes with it, creates a program for change and offers to empower it. Those who believe the gospel have no choice but to follow.

Why is this so, and how to we follow?

5.  How do you answer someone who says, rightly, that the world will not be completely just and right until the new creation and who deduces, wrongly, that there is no point trying to bring justice to the world (or for that matter ecological health, another topic for which there is no space here) until that time? Answer, from everything I have said so far: insist on inaugurated eschatology, on a radical transformation of the way we behave as a worldwide community, anticipating the eventual time when God will be all in all even though we all agree things won’t be complete until then. There is the challenge. The resurrection of Jesus points us to it and gives us the energy for it. Let us overcome our surprise that such a hope should be set before us and go to the task with prayer and wisdom. 

What is the connection between spiritual energy and prayer/wisdom?

6.  This will take serious imagination, imagination fueled by reflection and prayer at the foot of the cross and before the empty tomb, imagination that will discern the mysteries of God’s judgment on evil and God’s reaffirmation, through resurrection, of his beautiful creation. Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are but also to the way things will be, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. That remains a surprising hope, and perhaps it will be the artists who are best at conveying both the hope and the surprise.

Give examples where this has occurred for you.

7.  But how can the church announce that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil, corruption, and death itself have been defeated, and that God’s new world has begun? Doesn’t this seem laughable? Well, it would be if it wasn’t happening. But if a church is working on the issues we’ve already looked at—if it’s actively involved in seeking justice in the world, both globally and locally, and if it’s cheerfully celebrating God’s good creation and its rescue from corruption in art and music, and if, in addition, its own internal life gives every sign that new creation is indeed happening, generating a new type of community—then suddenly the announcement makes a lot of sense.

Why?

8.  The mission of the church must therefore reflect, and be shaped by, the future hope as the New Testament presents it. I believe that if we take these three areas—justice,
beauty, and evangelism—in terms of the anticipation of God’s eventual setting to rights of the whole world, we will find that they dovetail together and in fact that they are all part of the same larger whole, which is the message of hope and new life that comes with the good news of Jesus’s resurrection. This is the foundation, I believe, for the work of hope in the day-to-day life of the church.
 This is the good news—of justice, beauty, and above all Jesus—that the church is called upon to live and to speak, to bring into reality, in each place and each generation.

What might the life of the church look like if it was shaped, in turn, by this hope-shaped mission?

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Twelve

1.  Wright asks, “How does believing in the future resurrection lead to getting on with the work in the present? The point of the resurrection, as Paul has been arguing…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die. God will raise it to new life. 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. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”

How does this crucial connection between the present and the future provide encouragement and hope for the mission of the church in the world?  How does this perspective shape the value God places in you and the value you place in yourself?

2.  “The truly exciting, surprising, and perhaps frightening thing about where we have now got to in this book is that we are now forced to rethink the very meaning of salvation
itself.”

Prior to reading this book, how did you define salvation…both on a Biblical and on a personal basis?  How do you define both levels of salvation now?

3.  “In other words—to sum up where we’ve got so far—the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us. If we can get this straight, we will rediscover the historic basis for the full-orbed mission of the church.”

Briefly review each of these three points and explore their implications for understanding our greater purpose as Christians.

4.  “This, as we have seen, is what the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit are all about. They are designed not to take us away from this earth but rather to make us agents of the transformation of this earth, anticipating the day when, as we are promised, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” When the risen Jesus appears to his followers at the end of Matthew’s gospel, he declares that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. And the point of the gospels—of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together with Acts—is that this has already begun. The question of how it has begun—in what sense it is inaugurated, anticipated, or whatever—has been the stuff of debate for a long time. But part of the problem with that debate is that those taking part in it do not usually clarify the question of what precisely it is that is begun, launched, or initiated.”

As God’s “agents of the transformation of this earth,” we are not helplessly un-equipped for this kingdom work.  We have been baptized into this kingdom, nurtured in the holy meal by his body and blood, and buoyed by a grace-filled faith as we hear and receive the living Word.  How do these “Means of Grace” continue to sustain you for such transformation of life around you?

5.  Wright concludes, “Heaven’s rule, God’s rule, is thus to be put into practice in the world, resulting in salvation in both the present and the future, a salvation that is both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church.”

Got it?  God’s rule is to be put into practice in the world, resulting in salvation across the board.  How do we comprehend this rule, equip the saints, and send the church (that’s us) for such mission?

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Eleven

1.  Wright notes, “Purgatory is basically a Roman Catholic doctrine…decisively rejected [outside of Catholicism], on biblical and theological grounds and not merely because of antipathy to particular abuses, at the Reformation.”  Even several notable representatives of Catholicism have rejected it. 

He then makes four points: 

1. The resurrection is still in the future.
2. There is no reason in the New Testament to suppose that there are any category distinctions between different Christians in heaven as they await the resurrection.
   
3. I do not believe in purgatory as a place, a time, or a state.
   
4. That all the Christian departed are in
   substantially the same state, that of restful happiness. 

Take time to review and unpack the complexities of each of these four points.  How does Wright help clarify or confuse your understanding of these points?

2.  Even N. T. Wright finds it difficult to discuss the topic of hell!  He does offer a generous and broad range of reactions to it over the centuries, from both theological and practical viewpoints.  He then identifies three common approaches to hell:

1.  The traditional view is that those who spurn God’s      

     salvation, who refuse to turn from idolatry and wickedness,  

     are held forever in conscious torment.

2.  This account is then opposed by the universalists.

     Sometimes they suggest…that God will be merciful even to

     the utterly abhorrent, to mass murderers and child rapists.

3.  A middle way is offered by the so-called conditionalists.

     They propose “conditional immortality”: those who

     persistently refuse God’s love and his way of life in the

     present world will simply cease to exist.

“Over against these three options, I propose a view that combines what seem to me the strong points of the first and third.”

How does Wright reconcile these?  What view does he propose and how does he support it theologically?

3.  Finally, Wright points this delicate discussion in a different direction…that of human goals and new creation.  “But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major,central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos.

“The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context—not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being “fellow workers with God”) within that larger picture and purpose.

“The choice before humans would then be framed differently: are you going to worship the creator God and discover thereby what it means to become fully and gloriously human, reflecting his powerful, healing, transformative love into the world? Or are you going to worship the world as it is, boosting your corruptible humanness by gaining power or pleasure from forces within the world but merely contributing thereby to your own dehumanization and the further corruption of the world itself?

What surprises you about Wright’s scope of resurrection here?

How do you understand our common purpose at the resurrection in the renewal of God’s creation?

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Ten

1.   I love this chapter.  Here, Wright addresses straightforward questions with straightforward answers…at least as much as we can expect.  Right out of the gate, Wright addresses a host of misconceptions involving being “citizens of heaven,” the possessing of new bodies at the resurrection, the timing of the resurrection, as well as other biblical quotes and phrases that are commonly misinterpreted to refer to heaven as our immediate and final destination.

Wright sums up his introduction this way:  “Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death.”

“God’s future inheritance, the incorruptible new world and the new bodies that are to inhabit that world, are already kept safe, waiting for us, not so that we can go to heaven and put them on there but so that they can be brought to birth in this world or rather in the new heavens and new earth, the renewed world of which I spoke earlier.”

How do these initial discussions provide the foundation of our Easter hope as Christians?  How do they further define God’s plan for the redemption and salvation of all creation…including us?

2.  Wright notes, “All discussions of the future resurrection must sooner or later do business with Paul and particularly with his two letters to Corinth.”  “What Paul is asking us to imagine is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body as our present body is more substantial, more touchable, than a disembodied spirit.”

“We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.”

Pause and imagine this new life, with remarkable new bodies.  What do you imagine such life to entail?

3.  “There were of course all kinds of debates and further discussions about the bodily resurrection in the second century and beyond. What is remarkable is that apart from the small corpus of Gnostic and semi-Gnostic writings, the early church fathers at least as far as Origen insisted on this doctrine, though the pressures on them to abandon it must have been very great. Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian—all of them stress bodily resurrection.”

Why is this ancient collective witnessing to a bodily resurrection crucial to our present dialogue?

4.  Wright concludes by addressing these “nut & bolts” questions:

- Who will be raised from the dead?

- Where will the resurrection take place?

- What precisely will the resurrection body be?

- Why will we be given new bodies?

- When will the resurrection happen?

- How will it happen?

Briefly review and discuss each of Wright’s responses, along with your own reactions.

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?