Brian McLaren on Resurrection

I know I said I was done writing about this, but I am finishing the book. I found McLaren's eschatology to confusing and saddening, so I am looking for someone to correct me here if I am mistaken in my understanding.

As I read through McLaren's chapter on eschatology, I found one concept curiously absent--resurrection. So, I did some digging, scouring the pages for any reference to resurrection or any discussion of it in the footnotes, and the best I came up with was a link to a deleted chapter called "Making Echatology Personal." McLaren says that the article was written in response to the question, "What happens to me when I die?"

Here is the article. Is this resurrection? Note especially the italicized portions on pages 12–14.

It seems to me that McLaren's "resurrection" is that the good deeds that we did are swallowed up into the memory of God, so that they live on, but our bad deeds are consumed by the judgment so that they are forgotten. Curiously, his descriptions of Jesus' resurrection are starting to look like that to me, too--the resurrection shouldn't be interpreted as a bodily resurrection, but as rememberance by Jesus' people. Jesus is "resurrected" in the sense that the church is his body and memory of him lives on.

If this is the role resurrection (especially Jesus' resurrection) plays in the new kind of Christianity, then I don't think it can be called Christianity in any meaningful sense. That saddens me.

I hope I am mistaken about this. If anyone can correct me, please do. I would appreciate it.

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 10)

In chapter 10 of Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright begins to draw the discussions of heaven and the resurrection to a close before he starts to talk about the mission of the church. (There is one more chapter on God's future plan.)

Wright answers the question, "What will the redemption of our bodies look like?" He writes:

"Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn't a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 151. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211477244&sr=8-1.)

In other words, when we die, we may go to some kind of intermediary state (or, we might just sleep; Wright doesn't commit). We could call this intermediary state "life after death." But some day, when Christ returns, we will be resurrected to new bodily life after life after death.

To this point, N.T. Wright has argued that resurrection does not mean "going to heaven when you die"; it means "life after life after death." This is what the ancients believed and this what happened to Jesus. God's plan in history is not about a slow improvement of the already good or a radical destruction of the hopelessly bad, but a drastic renewal of the corrupted. The world, in a sense, is waiting for heaven to break into earth. The process began with Jesus, who ascended to heaven (not like a space man) and will one day return. When he does, the world will be redeemed and those who have fallen asleep will be resurrected to life after life after death.

(I came up with the name for this blog after reading Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God. I like the idea that we are awaiting redemption.)

Thoughts on Wright's construction of the Christian hope? His main texts are 1 Cor 15, Romans 8, 2 Cor 5, and Col 1:15–20. (He uses a ton of others, but he often returns to these.)

Surpised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 7)

Having refuted the idea that history is about a radical redemption of the already existent, N.T. Wright moves on in chapter 7 of Surprised by Hope to talk about the meanings of the Ascension and Second Coming of Christ. As he did in chapters 5 and 6, in chapters 7 and 8 Wright first describes what is not true, and then moves on to what is true.

Wright refutes two extreme positions with regard to the Ascension and Second Coming of Jesus. The first view is that Jesus flew up into the clouds like a space man into another dimension called heaven and that He will one day return in the same way, riding the clouds like a space ship. Wright says that this is a "category mistake" based on a Platonic view of the cosmos, not a biblical one. The second view that Wright refutes is that the Ascension is just a metaphor for Jesus' spiritual filling of all believers, so that Jesus is more or less present now in the form of His church. The problem with this view, according to Wright, is that it more or less makes the church into God. he writes:

"If Jesus is more or less identical with the church--if, that is, talk about Jesus can be reduced to talk about his presence within his people rather than his standing over against them and addressing them from elsewhere as their Lord, then we have created the high road to the worst kind of triumphalism." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, The Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 112. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211224174&sr=8-1.)

Wright concludes:
"The mystery of the ascension is of course, just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time." (115)

Further:
"What we are encouraged to grasp precisely through the ascension itself is that God's space and ours--heaven and earth, in other words--are, though very different, not far away from one another." (116)

Therefore, to Wright, the Second Coming is not about Jesus returning in his pimped out cloud spaceship, but about his healing of the current world--making it more like heaven.

I like Wright's theology, but I do question his abandonment of the cloud language. I have seen him ridicule that kind of thinking in several of his works, but I don't think you can escape the language that when Christ ascended, He went up into the sky. Acts 1:10 says that after he ascended, the disciples were looking into the sky. Now, I am willing to grant that such an exit was more for the disciples than it was an illustration of the reality of the cosmos. I don't think you can escape the idea that heaven is somehow this world in the sky where God lives.

Perhaps Wright wrestles with the question of how the human Jesus can exist in another dimension, but I think the same mystery is true of the whole trinity--God is somehow distinct from His creation and yet eminently present within it. How does that work? I don't know, but it does.

I love the point behind Wright's theology, though. We need to move the beyond the Left Behind escapist mentality. This is our world. This is where we will live for eternity. Yes, it will be renewed, but it will be the same world nonetheless.

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 6)

Having explained the two ways in which the early Christians did not view history in chapter 5 of Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright moves on in chapter 6 to describe how he thinks the New Testament does describe history.

I am going to interact with Wright a bit here before I ask for comments because I am not sure that I understand where he is going.

Wright starts by affirming the goodness of creation and the reality of evil. Wright says that evil is not "created things," "things other than God," "physical things," or "things prone to decaying." Wright says that evil "consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 95. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211064818&sr=8-1.) Wright adds that the result of evil is "spiritual death," the dominant metaphor for which is "exile."

Thus, to Wright, "redemption doesn't mean scrapping what's there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved." (96) He adds, "Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimist evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it." (97) In other words, redemption is not about improving what's already there and it's not about starting over--it's about recreating or transforming what is already there.

Having explained redemption, Wright goes on to show from some key New Testament passages that redemption applies to all of creation, not just "those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter." (97)

The key passages Wright explains are 1 Corinthians 15, Colossians 1:15–20, Philippians 3:3:20–21, Romans 8, and Revelation 21–22. I think the two most significant are Colossians 1:15–20 and Romans 8:20–23.

Romans 8:20–23 (NIV) reads:
"For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."

Not that Paul says that creation is awaiting its redemption and we, too, are awaiting our redemption.

Colossians 1:15–20 (NIV) reads:
"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross."

Notice that Paul says "all things" were created through Christ and "all things" were/will be reconciled through him.

I might add Colossians 1:13–14 to show that the context of the above is redemption:
"For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins."

I like what Wright gets at here that the effects of the cross transcend just humans--that all of creation is being redeemed. However, I have questions about Wright's views on evil, death, and the effects of redemption on those who do not believe.

Wright says that death in the sense of transience (i.e. "physical" death) was part of the original creation (94–95). He says that transience points to God as the eternal. The "death" that was brought into the world as a result of sin is "spiritual" death (95). Wright does not define "spiritual" death, but he says that it is most often illustrated as exile. Thus, when God tells Adam and Eve that they will "die" when they eat the fruit, they are exiled from the garden (95).

What, then, does it mean to be "exiled" or "dead"? Is it just an existential feeling that God is distant? That would imply to me that a key part of redemption is the reversal of that feeling, i.e. the warm fuzzies that God is with me. Obviously, Wright believes that redemption means more than that. I have always read Romans 5:17 to mean that whatever "death" Adam brought on humanity, Christ brought the opposite, "life." Thus if the only "death" that Adam brought upon humanity was spiritual exile, then the only "life" that Christ would bring would be spiritual redemption. Since Wright argues that Christ is bringing eternal life in the sense of freedom from "decay and death" (107), that would imply to me that the introduction of "decay and death" were a part of what we traditionally call "the Fall."

Further, I wonder where Wright is going to go with the extent of the effects of redemption. He says that redemption affects more than just "those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter." (97) And in Colossians 1:15–20, the "all things" that will be redeemed are the same "all things" that were created. Does this mean that "all things," including those who do not believe, will be redeemed? If so, what will that look like for those who do not believe? We'll see where he goes.

Any thoughts on Colossians 1:15–20 and the extent of the effects of "redemption"?

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 3)

In chapter 3 of Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright describes the ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian beliefs about life, death, and resurrection. First, Wright shows that both the Jews and the pagans believed that death was a one-way street. Once you died, you were dead and there was no coming back. Second, he shows that they both believed that the term "resurrection" meant "dead people coming back to life," not, "disembodied spirits going to heaven." Although pagans and Jews agreed about the meaning of the term "resurrection," the pagans denied any kind of a resurrection, while the Jews anticipated a future resurrection. Wright argues these points at length in his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Having established the meaning of the term "resurrection," Wright explain seven ways in which the Christian notion of the resurrection differed from the Jewish notion. (I found points 5 and 6 most interesting. My first exposure to N.T. Wright was watching him debate John Dominic Crossan in 2005 after he published The Resurrection of the Son of God. Crossan argued that "resurrection" was a metaphor for "God's moral clean-up of the universe," modeled after the idea of resurrection in Ezekiel 16. Wright argued that "resurrection" meant "Jesus died, and then He came back to life." It seems that Wright has now adopted some of Crossan's ideas, although I am sure he would say "the metaphorical use of 'resurrection' is grounded in the literal use, and most New Testament usages of 'resurrection' refer to the literal use.") The seven ways in which the Christian notion of resurrection differed from the Jewish were:

1. Christians were remarkably united in their view of the resurrection.
2. Although resurrection was peripheral in Jewish theology, it was central to Christian belief.
3. Resurrection involves a transformed (i.e. "glorified") body.
4. The resurrection has been split into two events--the resurrection of Jesus and then of everyone else.
5. Resurrection is a metaphor for the moral clean-up of society.
6. Resurrection is a metaphor for individual ethical transformation.
7. Resurrection is vindication of Jesus as the Son of God.

Rather than arguing about points that Wright has spent his life forming, I thought it would be interesting to compare his thoughts on resurrection to 1 Corinthians 15. It's a lot of text, so I am not going to paste it (for both readability and copyright reasons). How do Wright's 7 point about resurrection compare to what you read in 1 Cor 15?