paint it purple

N.T. Wright  Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Harper One, NY NY, 2008

I have been waiting for this book for quite a while.  Actually I am still waiting for a much smaller book.  Tom Wright finally condensed his massive tome on the resurrection (some 800 plus pages) down to just over 300 pages.  I am so convinced Wright’s message of “resurrection as new creation” is so sorely needed within  those called “evangelicals” or biblical-minded people.  We cannot engage culture without a strong understanding to the classic concept of resurrection, disengaged from modernity’s thinning of the gospel/kingdom message into “eternal life, life after death, escaping the material world” and base morality as the goal of the Christian experience. 

Wright begins with his usual historical realism as his hermeneutic key, where “exile” is the lens through which the New Testament Gospels must be viewed.  Then he moves quickly into his analysis and critique of our current philosophical milieu, pushing through it with a postmodern epistemology, dismissing the “two options” of “the myth of progress” purported by secularism’s evolutionary gentle upgrade (and it’s lack of true progress and void of an answer for evil), and  evangelicalism’s “dualism/gnosticism” mistake that pictures believers whisked away on judgment day, leaving the evil material world to vaporize (just souls a passin’ through mentality). 

Wright makes the case for reasserting the classic definition of resurrection (life after life after death as he calls it - which I don’t think really clears things up easily), and then he redefines/re-describes “your kingdom come, your will be done — on earth as in heaven” — and not the usual mistake of evangelicals, who say “we all go to your kingdom in heaven, and to hell with the earth,” skipping the last 2,000 years (and still counting) of human history and the church. 

He finally gets to the business end of things by pointing out what the kingdom of heaven looks like during our lifetime. 

What I deeply embrace about Wright’s viewpoint expounded in this latest work is the overt economic and political dimensions of his sound classic biblical understanding of the life, death and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus — and thus the resurrection of all creation, inaugurated NOW but consummated in the future (continuity and discontinuity).  It drives me forward to change the world.  I disagree with those within the IMN who tend towards a missionality of “subversiveness.”  We are not a secret society.  Christ’s resurrection and the new age is not a defeated secret for a few under-grounders.  No, it is the power of change.  It is the mandate for change.  And let me state not like the religious right’s power politics, but rather like Jesus’ politics of humility and sacrifice and death - but not shy or “attempting to hold back the tide of secularity” with its necessary defeatism and final cry of “Jesus, get us off this crazy thing called earth!”  No, Jesus returns.  The kingdom is here and now, in our midst.  And it is up to us followers to spread the good news - not just about atonement and forgiveness of sins but also victory over injustice, poverty, oppression, slavery, false identity/self-hood… in other words, what Wright brings to the table is a reassertion of the new day, the new people, a new society, a new hope, and a new way of knowing what we know. 

This book is not accessible to the “one book a year person.”  But it is a necessary read for those who separate “the gospel” as solely forgiveness of sins and “the gospel” as social justice — or rather those who separate justification and sanctification.  Wright brings both together brilliantly.  In my opinion, every single evangelical must read this book and get this paradigm down if we say we a people of the gospel of Jesus. 

Now Tom if you can get this thought down to a 90-pager the common person might be actually hear what you have to offer.  Please.