N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope": The Pirate Review, Day 6
Chapter 7
Jesus, Heaven and New Creation
PREAMBLE: You can read a new Time Magazine interview with Wright about "Surprised by Hope" here.
Before directly tackling the subject of the resurrection, Wright begins here to clear away some of the brush regarding some related issues, the aim being, I assume, that when we do get to resurrection, a complete and unmuddled picture will emerge. Chapter 7 deals primarily with the doctrine of the ascension, and is a preamble to a fuller discussion of the "second coming," which will be more fully treated in Chapter 8.
He begins with the ascension, primarily because of the prevailing but erroneous notion that the phrases "Jesus is raised from the dead" and "Jesus is ascended into heaven" are two ways of saying essentially the same thing. Wright disputes both the somewhat childish view that, at the ascension, Jesus did somthing of a vertical take-off (and the Christian art which often leads to this image), as well as the view that Jesus' ascension means that he is now spiritually present everywhere.
These misconceptions are as much errors about biblical cosmology as they are about the specific doctrine of the ascension:
"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."
In light of this cosmolgy, Wright insists that the biblical consequence of the ascension is that since Jesus the human being is now 'in heaven," he is accessible, as he was to his disciples after the resurrection, to us all, not spiritually, but in the same post-resurrection body as the one he invited Thomas to touch, that left footprints in the sand, but that also walked through locked doors and left burial garments behind in an otherwise empty tomb.
The consequence of this true, biblical vision is exactly the statement that is as true today as it was 2,000 years ago, namely, that Jesus is Lord. He is Lord because he sits at the healms of the control room for earth. Wright insists, though, that this Lordship, expressly to be exercised through the Church, is not a matter of the Church taking over political power in a kind of theocracy, nor does it mean staying out of the public sphere and worshiping Jesus in a private sphere:
"There is a third option...We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always--as Paul puts it in one of his letters--bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed."
Failure to grasp the ascension in these terms has as its consequence the church seeing itself as identical with Jesus, rather than Jesus standing over against it as Lord, which then leads to triumphalism, what Shakespeare calls "the insolence of office," for the church, and despair for the world (seeing as it does that church, in fact, does not equal Jesus).
The proper view of the ascension, on the other hand, "places a full stop against all human arrogance, including Christian arrogance." And then, this hugely important point:
"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 ascention 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 ascention 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."
Having said that, Wright then turns to how we can imagine and speak about something as mysterious as a human being absent from this present world but tangentially in contact with it. He emphasizes that heaven and earth are not distinguished by location, nor by a physical/non-physical dicotomy. They represent "two different kinds of what we call 'space,' two different kinds of what we call 'matter,' and also, quite possibly two different kinds of what we call 'time.'" He mentions C.S. Lewis' Narnia stories as wonderful examples of imagining how two worlds could relate and interlock.
The climax of this vision, of course, is the Biblical insistence that Jesus will one day return. Wright emphasizes that no one in the Bible says that Jesus is in heaven so lets do our best to follow him there. They say, rather, that Jesus is in heaven as Lord and he will one day return to complete that Lordship.
And it is to that theme, the "second coming," that Wright then turns. As I said, Wright simply introduces the theme at the end of this chapter, discussing primarily the modern misconceptions about the doctrine and their real-world consequences. He will get into the meat of the issue in Chapter 8, as will I in my next post.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
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