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?

Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Eight

1.  Where does Jesus Christ meet us now?  “At the moment, by the Spirit, the word, the sacraments and prayer, and in those in need whom we are called to serve for his sake, the absent Jesus is present to us; but one day he will be there with us, face-to-face.” 

How does each of these encounters with Jesus “at the moment” strengthen our faith in the risen Lord?  What do you anticipate will change when we see him “fact-to-face?”

2.  “The first thing to get clear is that, despite widespread opinion to the contrary, during his earthly ministry Jesus said nothing about his return.”  The early church and the rest of the New Testament, he says, can take credit for that.

Did Wright’s statement here surprise you?  Why is this important?

3.  Wright goes to great lengths to expound on the meaning of the word, “parousia.” 

How does he define it and why is it important to this discussion?

4.  “So why does Paul speak in this peculiar way in 1 Thessalonians about the Lord descending and the living saints being snatched up in the air? I suggest that he is finding richly metaphorical ways of alluding to three other stories that he is deliberately bringing together.”  These include, “the story of Moses coming down the mountain; the story of Daniel 7, in which the persecuted people of God are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up on the clouds to sit with God in glory.”  “Putting these two stories together, in a typically outrageous mix of metaphors, enables Paul to bring in the third story, to which we have already alluded.” “The reality to which it refers is this: Jesus will be personally present, the dead will be raised, and the living Christians will be transformed.”

How does this shape your expectation of the parousia?

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?

Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

Chapter Six

*Please plan to use your book for this discussion.

1.  The clearest statements of the large-scale Christian hope are found in Paul’s letters and in the book of Revelation.  Here, we find three emergent themes:

1.) The goodness of creation

2.) The nature of evil

3.) The plan of redemption

What does Wright tell us about each of these themes?

2.  Next, Wright sets out to explore the key New Testament texts that speak of the cosmic dimension of Christian hope.  These include:

- Seedtime and harvest (Jesus is the firstfruits)

- The victorious battle (Jesus as king)

- Citizens of heaven, colonizing the earth (bodily transformation)

- God will be all in all (with his own presence and love)

- New birth (from the womb of the old)

- The marriage of heaven and earth (both made new)

Again, what does Wright tell us about each of these dimensions?

How does each of these point us toward genuine hope?

Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

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.”

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?

Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

Chapter Four

1.  Wright begins with four observations concerning the Easter stories in the four gospels.  First, we note the strange silence of the Bible in the stories; second, the presence of the women as the principal witnesses; third, the portrait of Jesus himself; and fourth, the fact that they never mention the future Christian hope.  He proposes, “It is far, far easier to believe that the stories are essentially very early, pre-Pauline, and have not been substantially altered except for light personal polishing, in subsequent transmission or editing.” 

Why are these four observations and Wright’s conclusion critical to the credibility of the resurrection narratives?  What impact do they have upon the future of the Christian church as we know it in today’s culture?

2.  “The only way we can explain the phenomena we have been examining is by proposing a two-pronged hypothesis: first, Jesus’s tomb really was empty; second, the disciples really did encounter him in ways that convinced them that he was not simply a ghost or hallucination.  Both the meetings and the empty tomb are therefore necessary if we are to explain the rise of the belief and the writing of the stories as we have them. Neither by itself was sufficient; put them together, though, and they provide a complete and coherent explanation for the rise of the early Christian belief.” 

How do you interpret Wright’s explanation here?  Why is this two-prong hypothesis necessary to the validity of the resurrection accounts?

                                                                

3.  “Far and away the best historical explanation is that Jesus of Nazareth, having been thoroughly dead and buried, really was raised to life on the third day with a renewed body (not a mere “resuscitated corpse,” as people sometimes dismissively say), a new kind of physical body, which left an empty tomb behind it because it had used up the material of Jesus’s original body and which possessed new properties that nobody had expected or imagined but that generated significant mutations in the thinking of those who encountered it. If something like this happened, it would perfectly explain why Christianity began and why it took the shape it did.”

How does this statement/position align itself with both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds?  Why do the Creeds matter to us?

4.  Wright goes on to discuss the various implications of epistemology, “not only of what we know but also of how we know it.”  This discussion illustrates the difficult distinctions between scientific disciplines and those outside of science.  In other words, epistemologies vary.  “What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief, which rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply—which would be much safer!—a belief that inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which like all modes of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who promised to put all things to rights at the last, the God who (as the sharp point where those two come together) raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving evidence that demands an explanation from the scientist as well as anybody else. Insofar as I understand scientific method, when something turns up that doesn’t fit the paradigm you’re working with, one option at least, perhaps when all others have failed, is to change the paradigm—not to exclude everything you’ve known to that point but to include it within a larger whole. That is, if you like, the Thomas challenge.”

How do you experience and confront the Thomas challenge?

5.  “That is why, though the historical arguments for Jesus’s bodily resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more than bring people to the questions faced by Thomas, Paul, and Peter, the questions of faith, hope, and love. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.”

How does this Easter worldview shift allow you to navigate life’s journey with hope?

Surprised by Hope, by N. T. Wright

Chapter Three

1.  Wright begins with the famous encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper.  Various accounts emerged describing the details of their encounter.  How does this event and the subsequent recollections of it allow us to better grasp the complexities of piecing together the actual events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection?

2.  As Wright puts it, “What should we believe about Jesus’s resurrection, and why?”  How do you respond?

                                                                

3.  Next, Wright provides a masterful description of the historical context of Jewish theology as it pertains to their belief in resurrection.  What was unique about it at the time?  How did it differ from other comparative beliefs of that broader culture?

4.  “In terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. There is nothing remotely like this in paganism. This belief is as Jewish as you can get. But within this Jewish belief, early Christians made seven modifications…” This is highly significant because what people believe about life beyond death tends to be very conservative. Faced with bereavement, people lurch back to the safety of what they heard or learned before. But the early Christians all articulate a belief that is in these seven ways quite new, and the historian has to ask, why?   Here’s a summary of each for review & discussion:

1. The first of these modifications is that within early Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of belief about life beyond death.

2. In second-Temple Judaism, resurrection is important but not that important. But in early Christianity resurrection moved from the circumference to the center. You can’t imagine Paul’s thought without it.
These first two mutations have to do with the new position that resurrection assumed within early Christianity, as opposed to the place it held within its native
Judaism.” 

3.In Judaism it is almost always left quite vague as to what sort of a body the resurrected will possess. But from the start within early Christianity it was built in as part of the belief in resurrection that the new body, though it will certainly be a body in the sense of a physical object occupying space and time, will be a transformed body, a body whose material, created from the old material, will have new properties. There has been a dramatic sharpening up of what resurrection itself actually entailed.

4. The fourth surprising mutation evidenced by the early Christian resurrection belief is that the resurrection, as an event, has split into two. Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

5. Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be
 completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.

6. The sixth remarkable mutation within the Jewish belief is the quite different metaphorical use of resurrection. This, then, is the sixth modification of the Jewish belief: resurrection, while still being embraced as literal language about a future embodied existence, has shed its powerful earlier meaning as a metaphor for the renewal of ethnic Israel and has acquired a new one, about the renewal of human beings in general.

7. The seventh and last mutation of the Jewish resurrection belief was its association with messiahship. Nobody in Judaism had expected the Messiah to die, and therefore naturally nobody had imagined the Messiah rising from the dead. This leads to a remarkable modification not just of resurrection belief but of messianic belief itself.

“Why did the early Christians modify the Jewish resurrection language in these seven ways, and do it with such consistency?”