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Resurrection-Shaped Stories from the Emmaus Road.

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"A remarkable book. Raffi's is a dramatic and powerful story and I am privileged to have been part of it."
- N.T. Wright

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Top 10 (+3) Excerpts from N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope": The Pirate Review, Epilogue



Epilogue

Top 10 (+3) Excepts from
"Surprised by Hope"

I thought long and hard about a tailpiece to the Pirate Review Series. My initial thought was to do a piece about what I've learned from the book, how its changed my perspective, etc. But inasmuch as the book is a compilation of so much other material by Wright (lectures, sermons, articles) that has been around for a few years now, and inasmuch as I've devoured all of it, and inasmuch as trying to describe how it has all changed my perspective would be like trying to describe how Einstein's work changed the perspective of the scientific community in the early 20th century, I figured that may be too grand a task. The short answer to how Wright's work, as summarized in this book, changed my perspective would be this: "I was blind but now I see."

So I opted instead for a somewhat more easily digestible final post, a list of my top 10 favorite quotes/excerpts from the book. I've tried to structure it in a way that would allow it collectively sum up the major themes, but that's not necessarily the intent. These are simply the lines that resonated the most vibrantly with me. So here they are:

13. Nor is this a matter simply of sorting out what to believe about someone who has died, or about one's own probable post-mortem destiny, important though both of those are. It's a matter of thinking straight about God and his purposes for the cosmos, and about what God is doing right now, already as part of those purposes.
12. The classic Christian doctrine, therefore, is actually far more powerful and revolutionary than the Platonized one. It was people who believed robustly in the resurrection, not people who compromised and went in for a more spiritualized survival, who stood up against Caesar in the first centuries of the Christian era. A piety which sees death as the moment of 'going home at last,' a time when we are 'called to God's eternal peace,' has no quarrel with those who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends. Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice, and of God as the good creator. Those twin beliefs give rise, not to a meek acquiescence in injustice in the world, but to a robust determination to oppose it. It is telling that English evangelicals gave up believing in the urgent imperative to improve society (such as we find with Wilberforce in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) at the same time that they gave up believing robustly in resurrection and settled for a disembodied heaven instead.
11. In A.D. 70, the Romans conquered Jerusalem, and they led thousands of Jews captive back to Rome, including the man they regarded as the leader of the Jewish revolt, 'the king of the Jews,' a man called Simon bar Giora. He was led into Rome at the back of the triumphal procession, and the end of the spectacle was Simon being flogged and killed.
Now: suppose we imagine a few Jewish revolutionaries, three days or three weeks later. The first one says, 'You know, I think Simon really was the Messiah--and he still is!'
The others would be puzzled. Of course he isn't; the Romans got him, as they always do. If you want a Messiah, you'd better find another one.
'Ah,' says the first, 'but I believe he's been raised from the dead.'
'What d'you mean?' his friends ask. 'He's dead and buried.'
'Oh, no,' replies the first, 'I believe he's been exalted to heaven.'
The others look puzzled. All the righteous martyrs are with God, everybody knows that; their souls are in God's hand; that doesn't mean they've already been raised from the dead. Anyway, the resurrection will happen to us all at the end of time, not to one person in the middle of history.
'No,' replies the first, 'you don't understand. I've had a strong sense of God's love surrounding me. I have felt God forgiving me--forgiving us all. I've had my heart strangely warmed. What's more, last night, I saw Simon; he was there with me...'
The others interrupt, now angry. We can all have visions. Plenty of people dream about recently dead friends. Sometimes it's very vivid. That doesn't mean they've been raised from the dead. It certainly doesn't mean that one of them is the Messiah. And if your heart has been warmed, then sing a psalm, don't make wild claims about Simon.
That is what they would have said to anyone offering the kind of statement which, according to the revisionists, someone must have come up with as the beginning of the idea of Jesus' resurrection. But this solution isn't just incredible; it's impossible. Had anyone said what the revisionists suggest some such conversation as the above would have ensued. A little bit of disciplined historical imagination is all it takes to blow away enormous piles of so-called historical criticism.
10. That is why...we cannot use a supposedly 'objective' historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun has risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn't look like it did last night, and that would-be 'normal' explanations for this won't do. Maybe, we think after the historical argument have done their work, maybe morning has come and the whole world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won't rely on the candles any more, not because we don't believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home.
9. We could cope--the world could cope--with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right within the middle of the old one.
8. There is a sign here of the future project that awaits the redeemed, in God's eventual new world. So far from sitting on clouds playing harps, as people often imagine, the redeemed people of God in the new world will be the agents of his love going out in new ways, to accomplish new creative tasks, to celebrate and extend the glory of his love.
7. And now we see at last why the Enlightenment world was determined to make the ascension appear ridiculous, using the weapons of rationalism and scepticism to do so: if the ascension is true, then the whole project of human self-aggrandizement represented by eighteenth-century European and American thought is rebuked and brought to heel. 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 of our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures none the less.
6. We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist. Signposts don't normally provide you with advance photographs of what you'll find at the end of the road, but that doesn't mean they aren't pointing in the right direction.
5. When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance and worship to that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what's more, you reflect what you worship, not only back to the object itself but outwards to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it, and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories), and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sexual objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it, and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch. My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings to continue down this road, so to refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of the true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. With the death of that body in which they inhabited God's good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out, they pass simultaneously not only beyond hope but also beyond pity. There is no concentration camp in the beautiful countryside, no torture chamber in the palace of delight. Those creatures that still exist in an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense, can no longer excite, in themselves or others, the natural sympathy some feel even for the hardened criminal.
4. To speak of Jesus' lordship, and of the new creation which results from his victory on Calvary and at Easter, implies at once that to confess him as Lord and to believe that God raised him from the dead is to allow one's entire life to be reshaped by him, knowing that, though this will be painful from time to time, it will be the way, not to a diminished or cramped human existence, but to genuine human life in the present, and complete, glorious, resurrected human life in the future.
3. 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 which we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world that we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, which we can do something about, and that is the creature we call '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.
2. This is where the 'surprise' of hope catches people unawares. And they react by telling us Christians what they think our 'hope' ought to be--a hope that will cut the nerve of, and the need for, any attempt to make things better in the present world of space, time and matter. It is at this point that the church must learn the arts of collaboration without compromise, and of opposition without dualism. There are good things going on in the wider world, and we must join in, while always remaining on the lookout for the point where we will be asked to do something which goes against the grain of the gospel. There are wicked things going on in the wider world, and we must stand out against them, while always remaining on the lookout for the point where we become mere dualists, retreating from the world which is already charged with the grandeur of God.
1. Love is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God's new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton. It is the resurrection life, and the resurrected Jesus calls us to begin living it with him and for him right now. Love is at the very heart of the surprise of hope: people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way.

Thank you to all my readers who bore with me over these last few weeks. I hope and pray that the series, but especially the book, challenged and changed some misguided notions out there. It certainly did in here.

Wow! Any suggestions for a non-"Surprised by Hope" topic?

Grace and Peace,
Raffi



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2 Comments:

  1. Beyond Words said...
     

    Wow, what is there to say, beyond God being all in all? I'm with you, Raffi, since I learned what Scripture tels us God is really doing, thanks to Bishop Wright, I'm utterly consumed with hope. Thanks for all these posts.

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