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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment