Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 13)

Having warmed the reader up with history and theology, Wright decides to call down the thunder and start preaching in chapter 13 of Surprised by Hope. Given that resurrection is about "life after life after death" and not "going to heaven when you die," what should the mission of the church be? According to Wright, the church is to build for the kingdom of God.

Wright starts chapter 13 with a clarification of what he means by building for the kingdom. He criticizes those who would say, "We can't bring in the kingdom, only God can," saying that while this might sound pious, it is little better than "keeping one's head well down when the boss is looking for volunteers." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 207.)

Wright grants that only God can bring in the kingdom. That is why he says the church doesn't "build the kingdom of God," it "builds for the kingdom of God." (208) Ultimately, God will bring the kingdom to consummation, but what we do here and now will have some continuity in eternity. Wright then explores the implication of this in the areas of justice, beauty, and evangelism.

Wright argues that the church should be working for social justice. He points out that the church has typically erred in two extremes on this issue. The first extreme is the social gospel, which sees Jesus as primarily a revolutionary and tries to build the kingdom through social, political, and cultural revolution. (215) He says that these folks are "fighting with one arm tied behind their back" because they neglect the theology of resurrection. (213) The other extreme is to say that nothing can be done until the Lord returns. (215) Wright compares this to the view that trying to live like Christ is pointless since we will never be fully sanctified until Christ returns. (221)

Having addressed the church's responsibility to work for justice, Wright moves to talk about beauty. He points out that humanity's first job was to create, or at least procreate. (223) He applauds the progress that the church has made in the arts in recent years.

Having addressed justice and beauty, Wright concludes chapter 13 by talking about evangelism. He writes, "Much evangelism has, of course, consisted of taking the traditional framework of heaven-and-hell expectation and persuading people that it's time they consider the heaven option and grab it while they still have a chance." (226) While Wright doesn't fully condemn this approach, he does say that it is less-than-perfect because it doesn't accurately communicate the gospel. According to Wright, the gospel is "the good news that God (the world's creator) is at last becoming king and that Jesus, whom this God raised from the dead, is the world's true lord." (227)

Finally, I love what Wright says about the effect that preaching this gospel would have on evangelism. He writes:

"Putting evangelism and conversion within the context of new creation means that the convert, who has heard the message in terms of the sovereign and saving lordship of Jesus himself, will never be inclined to think that Christian behavior--saying no to the things that diminish human flourishing and God's glory and saying yes to the things that enhance them--is an optional extra or simply a matter of wrapping your head around some rather strange rules and regulations. Some kinds of evangelism in the past implied that the main thing is to sign on, to pray a particular prayer, which results in the assurance that one is safely on the way to heaven--and failed to mention, to the frustration of pastors and teachers who then tried to look after such converts, the fact that following Jesus means just that, following Jesus, not just checking a box that says 'Jesus' and then sitting back as though it's all done. To speak, rather, of Jesus's 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 to complete, glorious, resurrected human life in the future. As with every other aspect of new creation, there will be surprises on the way. But Christian ethics will only gain from being understood as one expression of Christian hope." (229–30)

I love that. Wright gets to the heart of what it means to have "faith." It's not just about checking a box, it's about following Jesus. If we were to do a better job at remembering this, the world would look much different than it looks.

What do you think about Wright's version of "the gospel"? What about his views on "faith"? Do you think most churches in America do a good or poor job at "preaching the gospel"?

Psalm 13

Psalm 13 is a typical prayer to the Lord for deliverance. The NET Bible renders it:

1For the music director; a psalm of David.
How long, LORD, will you continue to ignore me?
How long will you pay no attention to me?

2 How long must I worry,
and suffer in broad daylight?
How long will my enemy gloat over me?

3 Look at me! Answer me, O LORD my God!
Revive me, or else I will die!

4 Then my enemy will say, "I have defeated him!"
Then my foes will rejoice because I am upended.

5 But I trust in your faithfulness.
May I rejoice because of your deliverance!

6 I will sing praises to the LORD when he vindicates me.

I just noticed another translation difference between the NET and the NIV that reminds me why I like the NET Bible so much. The NIV renders verse 6, "I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me." The tense of the verb in the clause "when he vindicates"/"for he has been good" makes a subtle but HUGE difference. In the NIV, the tone of the entire psalm changes at the end. At the beginning, the psalmist is lamenting about all of the trouble in his life, but then at the end he changes his mind and says, "Well, I guess the Lord has been good to me." In the NET, the psalmist is saying "When the Lord comes through for me, THEN I will praise him." Huge difference.

I remember when I was in high school, someone at church told me that he loved the psalms because David often started so angry at God but then by the end of the psalm he realized that he was out of line. This may the case in the NIV's rendering of this psalm. However, I don't really like that kind of theology. I don't think we should use pious language about God to mask our real emotions. If you're mad at God, tell Him! He's not intimidated. (Just be prepared to repent in dust and ashes if He calls you out like He did to Job.)

"Father I thank you for being good to me. I thank You for caring about me--for listening to my grumbling and complaints. I confess that more often than not I am out of line, but I thank You for caring about what is on my heart. Amen."

JesusCreed and Christ and Culture

Scot McKnight is blogging about one of my favorite topics (see posts below), H. Richard Niebuhr's book Christ and Culture. See the discussion here.

Psalm 12

I love the first two words of this Psalm. "Help, LORD." I also love verse 7, " O LORD, you will keep us safe and protect us from such people forever." (NIV)

One of the reasons that I love reading the Psalms is the raw humanity expressed in them. Sometimes I feel like there is an unexpressed competition in the church over who can be the most pious when they pray. We like to use high and lofty languge and express solid theological truth for everyone else to hear. The psalmist just prayed, "Help me!" I love prayers like that.

"Father, I ask that you would calm my anxiety about unfinished projects. Help me to finish and finish well. Amen."

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 12)

Have I expounded on the greatness of N.T. Wright on this blog before? If not, let me say it. N.T. Wright is great. I loved chapter 12 of Surprised by Hope.

Part I of Surprised by Hope (chapters 1–4) addresses misconceptions about heaven, the resurrection, and the mission of the church. In Part II (chapters 4–11), Wright outlines his view of what is going on in history as it relates to the resurrection. In Part III (chapters 12–15), he is going to talk about how this affects the mission of the church. Chapter 12 is about salvation and the kingdom of God.

Wright introduces Part III of Surprised by Hope with a quote by John Dominic Crossan, which he calls the "moral objection" to the belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Write paraphrases Crossan:

"Even if Jesus did rise from the dead, so what? Very nice for him, but what's that got to do with anything else? Why should he be so heavily favored? If God can pull off a stunt like that, why can't he intervene and do a lot more useful things like stopping genocide or earthquakes?" (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 189. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211910062&sr=8-1. Wright cites Robert B. Stewart, ed., The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006].)

Crossan's critique is legitimate and demands an answer. Fortunately, Wright has one, "Precisely because the resurrection has happened an an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now." (191) Setting the world to right is not an extra thing to be tacked on to the end of the Gospel, it is integral to the Gospel itself.

Wright shows how a faulty view of resurrection contributes to a faulty mission of the church. He writes, "As long as we see salvation in terms of going to heaven when we die, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for that future." (197) Fleshing out the slogan of Christian Aid, Wright says, "Life before death is what is threatened, called into question, by the idea that salvation is merely life after death." (197)

In contrast to the Gospel being merely about life after death, Wright sees it as encompassing the redemption of all of creation. He writes:

"[The story of the gospels] isn't just a story of some splendid and exciting social work with an unhappy conclusion. Nor is it just a story of an atoning death with an extended introduction. It is something much bigger than the sum of those two diminished perspectives. It is the story of God's kingdom being launched on earth as it is in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus' followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice. Atonement, redemption, and salvation are what happen on the way because engaging in this work demands that people themselves be rescued from the powers that enslave the world in order that they can in turn be rescuers. To put it another way, if you want to help inaugurate God's kingdom, you must follow the way of the cross, and if you want to benefit from Jesus' saving death, you must become a part of his kingdom project." (204–205.)

Awesome.

I have been throwing this idea around in my head for the last couple of months, and it is refreshing to see N.T. Wright flesh it out in such an eloquent way. We typically think of the Gospel in terms of preaching the message of subsitutionary atonement so that people might make a confession and then be "saved." Should we rather think of the confession of Christ as the beginning of salvation? Salvation is about the "making right of the world," and the clean-up process begins in an individual with professing faith in Christ. Thoughts?

Some Helpful Rules for the ID/Evolution Debate

Over at the Conservative Reformed Mafia, Nate Gilmour posted some philosophical category mistakes made by proponents of Evolution and Intelligent Design. If you like philosophy and/or you care about this discussion, Nate's thoughts are very helpful.

Essentially he says to the evolutionists, the question is not "What is good science?" but "How do we know what we know?" He says to ID supporters, stop using the arguments, "Evolution requires faith" and "Evolution is just a theory"; these are category mistakes.

Psalm 11

I usually read the Psalms in the NIV, but today I decided also to read the NET. I came across a very interesting prayer. The NIV renders Psalm 11:6, "On the wicked he will rain fiery coals and burning sulfur; a scorching wind will be their lot." The NET interprets the verbs as jussives, not indicatives, rendering 11:6, "May the LORD rain down burning coals and brimstone on the wicked! A whirlwind is what they deserve!"

Wow. Subtle, but huge diffference. In the NIV, the psalmist is describing (in general) what happens to the wicked. In the NET, the same verse is a prayer that God will bring down fiery coals on the wicked. Yikes! What a conclusion to the Psalm.

Ultimately, this Psalm is about confidence in the Lord's ability to protect "the righteous." The psalmist is under attack, and his advisors are telling him that he needs to flee to the mountains. The psalmist asks, "Why would I want to do that? God is righteous. He will protect me." Then, he calls down the thunder.

As I have written before, I don't think these kinds of prayers are appropriate today. I think the Old Testament was written by a people with a worldview that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked in this life. I think theology developed so that by the time of Jesus, folks were looking to the eschaton for justice. (See discussion of N.T. Wright's book.)

But I do think that this Psalm has relevance to us today. I like Psalm 11:4, "The LORD is in his holy temple; the LORD's throne is in heaven. His eyes watch; his eyes examine all people." (NET) Perhaps here you have a twofold expression of God's reign. On the one hand, the Lord's throne is in heaven, so He can see the whole earth. On the other hand, He lives in His holy temple, i.e. He is present with His people.

God is indeed the cosmic ruler. He is completely distinct from His creation and He is able to do with it what He pleases. At the same time, He is very present in His creation. He sees injustice. He sees pain. He hurts with us. I think this Psalm is also a call to us to be on the look out for injustice. I don't think we should be calling down the thunder when we see it (although, perhaps we should), but we should certainly be hurting with those who hurt.

"Father, I confess that while my eyes are often on the lookout for injustice, too infrequently am I willing to enter into the lives of others and hurt with them. I pray that Your Spirit would change this about me. I confess that too often I worry about schedules, about deadlines, and about expectations; and I don't worry enough about people, about loving my neighbor, about hurting with those who hurt. I pray that I would judge the 'success' of my life not on what I accomplish, but on who I love. I thank You for caring for me. I thank You for looking out for me. I thank You for hurting with me. Amen."

Missional Street Cred

The Internet Monk has a great post on the missional/emerging church, and who has the credibility to talk about appropriate methods. For instance, just becuase "Pastor Joe" has a church of 50,000, is he an authority on the missional church? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he's just an authority on being a rock star.

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 11)

Abandon all hope all ye who enter here.

'Cause N.T. Wright is going to talk about hell.

In chapter 11 of Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright addresses the questions of purgatory, paradise, and hell. Needless to say, he is not drawing a lot of his conclusions from Dante's The Divine Comedy.

First, Wright addresses purgatory and rejects it on three (or perhaps four) grounds. First, resurrection is still in the future, so there is no "church expectant" purging itself of sin to be allowed into heaven. Second, in no place does the New Testament suggest that there are various gategories of believers--some to go straight to heaven and some to go to purgatory. Third, Romans 8 says that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. (He also implies a fourth reason--the leading Roman Catholic scholars, including Pope Benedict XVI, are abandoning, or at least significantly modifying, their views on purgatory.)

Second, Wright briefly addresses paradise. Whatever can be said about paradise, it is not the ultimate destination of believers. Perhaps Philippians 1:23 implies that the dead "depart to be with Christ," but at most that can be interpreted to be a temporary state of bliss while we await resurrection.

Finally, the moment we've all been waiting for, Wright addresses hell. Honestly, I didn't know where he was going to go. Originally, I thought that he would go the traditional rout, but from some of his statements in Surprised by Hope about the extent of redemption, I thought he might go the rout of the universalist. As I should have expected, Wright opts for C:) none of the above.

Wright writes:

"Part of the difficulty of the topic, as with the others we have been studying, is that the word hell conjures up an image gained more from medieval imagery than from the earliest Christian writings. Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a being they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of titure chamber at the center of God's castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped believing in hell." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 175. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211661261&sr=8-1.)

But Wright reminds us that we cannot escape the language of judgment that is in the New Testament. He writes:

"God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end. Thsi doctrine, like that of resurrection itself, is held firmly in place by the belief in God as creator, on the one side, and the belief in his goodness, on the other. And that setting right must necessarily involve the elimination of all that distorts God's good and lovely creation and in particular of all that defaces his image-bearing human creatures. Not to put too fine a point on it, there will be no barbed wire in the kingdom of God. And those whose whole being has become dependant upon barbed wire will have no place there either.

For 'barbed wire,' of course, read whichever catalog of awfulnewsses you prefer: genocide, nuclear bombs, child prostitution, the arrogance of empire, the commodification of souls, the idolization of race. The New Testament has several such categories, functioning as red flashing lights to warn against going down a road that leads stright to a fenceless cliff." (179)

He adds:

"I find it quite impossible, reading the New Testament on the one hand and the newspaper on the other, to suppose that there will be no ultimate condemnation, no final loss, no human beings to whom, as C.S. Lewis put it, God will eventually say, 'Thy will be done.' I wish it were otherwise, but one cannot forever whistle 'There's a wilderness in God's mercy' in the darkness of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the murder of children and the careless greed that enslaves millions with debts not their own. Humankind cannot, alas, bear very much reality, and the massive denial of reality by the cheap and cheerful univeralism of Western liberalism has a lot to answer for." (180)

So, what is hell, if not a subterranean world of worms and fire? Wright says that the primary root of sin is worship of the created rather than the Creator (Romans 1). This, in turn, causes people to behave "sub-humanly," in behaviors we would typically label "sinful." Wright says that people become what they worship, so that over time it is possible for someone to so worship the created and live sub-humanly that "after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that were once human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all." (182) Their final destination is death.

Wright's view certainly has a lot going for it, and I have pondered along these lines before. After all, Paul says that the wages of sin is "death," not "hell." If the reward of the righteous is resurrection, then the "punishment" of the wicked would be denial of resurrection. However, his view is not without it's difficulties. I think 2 Cor 5:10 is one--everyone, including the unjust, must stand before the judgment seat of Christ. Revelation 20:13–15 implies a resurrection to judgment of the wicked.

So, where do I stand on hell? I agree with Wright, you can't escape the language of judgment in the New Testament. I think universalism is a product of a Western culture that has been the source of oppression and injustice in history more often than it has been the victim of it. But every now and then, something like Auschwitz or Hiroshima comes along and reminds us that there really are evil people in the world. On the other hand, most of the language about hell occurs in parables and apocalyptic language. It's tough to take any of it literally. That doesn't mean that there isn't a concreate reality behind the figurative langauge, it just means that I am not sure hell involves worms.

All I think I can say now is that hell is real and that it is bad.

What do you think about N.T. Wright's idea that people can lose the image of God through a life of sin? Keep in mind that Colossians 3:10 implies that this image has been marred in all people but is being renewed in Christians.

Thoughts on Blogging

From Thomas Friedman:

"It is impossible to imagine what it is going to be like in ten years when virtually everyone you know has a blog. But that is where we are heading. If you look at the Facebook.com phenomenon, an online social directory spreading virally in high schools and colleges, millions of young people now have a platform for telling their own stories." (Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Release 3.0 [New York: Picador, 2007], 118.)

From Michael Frost:

"What all blogs have in common is the host's/author's basic belief that his or her life or thoughts about life are worth sharing with anyone who will log on. It's either the most astonishing universal display of narcissism or the most liberating opportunity for the ordinary and the everyday to be celebrated. On one level, it looks like the liberation of the ordinary, but at another level it's an expression of hyper-reality: it looks like we are meeting people via the Web, but really we're meeting only the acceptable persona that they want displayed to the world." (Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Chritian Culture [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006], 88.)

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.)

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 9)

I was impressed when N.T. Wright compressed all 738 pages of The Resurrection of the Son of God into chapters 3 and 4 of Surprised by Hope. However, he outdid himself by compressing the New Perspective on Paul into the 9 pages of chapter 9.

Chapter 9 of Surprised by Hope is about Jesus the coming judge and the meaning of the term "justification." Wright rightly writes:

"The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal 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. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might be a day when the wicked are firmly put in their right place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world of rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 137. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211389421&sr=8-1.)

This judgment, according to Wright, will be on the basis of works (Rom 14:9–10, 2 Cor 5:10). The idea of justification by faith does not negate this future judgment by works, as Wright notes:

"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 advanced 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' death, and that on the future day, as Paul says, 'there is now no condemnation' (Romans 8:1)." (140)

What does all of this mean for us, who are anticipating our future justification? Don't be too quick to grab the spacesuit.

"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 least be put to rights and we with it. Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all." (143)

I really like Wright's view of justification. I don't know that I have bought in completely to the New Perspective, but Ed, Tom and Jimmy make some good points. I especially like the idea that our "justification" is justification in the already/not yet sense. We anticipate a future justification, but in some way are "as good as justified" based on what Jesus did and our faith in Him.

How do you like this statement: "God is making the world right, and He is starting with us (the church)"?

Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright (Chapter 8)

So, I am starting to get a little frustrated with N.T. Wright. I love his work on the historical Jesus. He stuff on Paul is really good, too. But his eschatology is a bit squirrelly. He has a major axe to grind against the idea that Jesus might literally descend from the sky. He compares the view that Jesus will return in the clouds to "a primitive form of space travel." It was funny the first time I read it, but it's getting old. I think I might have an idea for a new drinking game--read a book by N.T. Wright on eschatology and take a drink every time he says "flying cloud," "space," "spaceship," "spaceman," or "space travel." Seriously--he says it that much.

At the same time, I have been thinking long and hard about where I disagree with Wright, and I do not think we are too far off. (I tell you what, though, if the "trumpet" spoken of in 1Thess 4 and Mat 24 plays the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey, I will remind Wright of his demeaning comments.)

In chapter 8 of Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright harps on the meaning of the Greek word parousia and how it has been misused in American eschatology. The word is most famously used in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18:

"But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, and remain until the coming (parousia) of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend (katabaino) from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up (harpadzo) together with them in the clouds to meet (apantesis) the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words." (NIV)

Wright notes that the Greek word parousia does not mean "coming" as in the NIV, but "presence." Wright writes, "The second meaning emerges when a person of high rank makes a visit to a subject state, particularly when a king or emperor visits a colony or province. The word for such a visit is a royal presence: in Greek, parousia. In neither setting, we note, obviously but importantly, is there the slightest suggestion of anybody flying around on a cloud [take a drink]. Nor is there any hint of the imminent collapse or destruction of the space-time [take a drink] universe." (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York: HarperOne, 2008], 129. http://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Hope-Rethinking-Resurrection-Mission/dp/0061551821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211305732&sr=8-1.) A quick glance at a lexicon validates Wright's claim, that the primary meaning of the term parousia is "presence," not "coming."

Thus, to Wright, the "Second Coming" of Jesus is not about cloud spaceships, but about God being present on earth. He writes, "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." (133)

However, while the word parousia can mean "presence," it can also mean "arrival." This is the sense that Paul uses it in 2 Cor 7:6, "But God, who comforts the depressed, comforted us by the coming of Titus." BDAG classifies the usage in 1 Thess 4 in this second sense, "arrival," and even under a technical use of the term referring to the "arrival" of Christ. I think that there is good reason for this. Specifically, the use of the term apantesis, "a going out to meet," in verse 17. Wright even mentions in his book that this word is used of people going out to greet a royal dignitary at his arrival. Note also that it says that the Lord will "descend" and that believers will be "caught up." There is a lot of language of movement in this verse for parousia just to mean "presence." It more likely means "arrival."

I can't wait to see the cloud spaceship. I hope its piloted by something that looks like a cross between an angel, an oompa loompa, and a klingon.

However, I am willing to grant that whatever the "Second Coming" language means, the point is this--God will be present with His people and we will be transformed. On this, Wright and I agree.

Thoughts on the cloud langauge? Do you think Jesus will literally descend from the sky, or is this just metaphor for "heaven breaking in to earth."

RJS on Science and Faith

RJS has been blogging about Tim Keller's book, The Reason for God, on Scot McKnight's blog, Jesuscreed.org. The current chapter of discussion is about the relationship between faith and science. RJS is a chemistry professor (at University of Michigan??), so her thoughts on the subject are especially relevant. The last time they had this discussion over there, I chimed in lot, but I started feeling like a fundamentalist. I think I'll stay out of this one.

New Picture Blog

My friend, John Pleau, started a new blog of pictures he has taken in his neighborhood. He is a great photographer. If you've never been to Washtington, you need to check out his blog here.