N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope": The Pirate Review, Day 2
Last night I heard muffled footsteps outside my window, and faint whispering. I caught an accent. I couldn't quite make it out, some mix of Irish/Swedish. I knew they'd come, but so soon?! But like I promised, I will press on...
Chapter 2: Puzzled about Paradise?
In this Chapter, Wright attempts to chronicle much of the sloppy thinking of most Christians in relation to the historical Christian hope, identifies the effects of such sloppy thinking in three areas where it is exemplified and reinforced (in many hymns, in the Church's year, and in funderal services), explores the wider implications of such "muddled" thinking, and concludes by using all this as a springboard for the detailed discussion to come in the rest of the book.
The theme of the Chapter, in relation to chronicling muddled Christian eschatological thinking, can be summarized in the following excerpt:
"A remarkable example arrived in the mail not long ago; a book, apparently a best-seller, by Maria Shriver...called What's Heaven? The book is aimed at children, and has lots of large pictures of fluffy clouds in blue skies. Each page of text has one sentence in extra large type, making the basic message of the book crystal clear. Heaven, says Shriver,
'is somewhere you believe in...its a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clounds and talk to other people who are there. At night you can sit next to the stars, which are the brightest of anywhere in the universe...If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven...when your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you up to Heaven to be with him...[And Grandma is] alive in me...most important, she taught me to believe in myself...she's in a safe place, with the stars, with God and the angels...she is watching over us from up there...
I want you to know [says the heroine to her great-grandma] that even though you are no longer here, your spirit will always be alive in me.'
This is undoubtedly more or less exactly what millions of people in the western world have come to believe, to accept as truth and to teach their children. The book was sent to me by a friend who works with grieving children, and who described this as 'one of the worst books for children' and said, 'I hope you find this awful book helpful in what not to say'! It is indeed a prime example of that genre. The truth of what the Bible teaches is very, very different at several levels."
The implications of such Platonized, dualistic beliefs are, says Wright, much more important than simply possessing a wrong picture of the afterlife. They have direct and dire consequences to Christian discipleship, and thus to the Church's mission and relevance in the world, in the present:
"The classic Christian doctrine 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. We shall come back to this crucial theme toward the end of the book."
Wright ends the Chapter powerfully with a summarized picture of the proper biblical perspecitve of the Christian hope, the details of which will be worked out in the chapters to follow. It is the "big picture" of Wright's theology in general and of the book in particular:
"The whole book thus attempts to reflect the Lord's Prayer itself when it says, 'thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.' That remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say. As I see it, the prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter, and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined in the new Jerusalem. Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly because we don't know when it will arrive, and partly because at present we only have images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess that the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still. And the intermediate hope--the things which happen in the present time which implement Easter and anticipate the final day--is always surprising, because, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present---of which this book, God willing, may form part--is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second."
I treasure the day when this vision was first brought to my attention. I treasure Dr. Wright for bringing it to my attention, though it had been there all along in the Book I had been reading (through my Enlightenment/Modernist lens). And I treasure the Spirit of Truth for screaming out within me, "Yes! That's it!! Pay attention!!! And read more stuff from this guy!"
Prior to that day, and in line with the many examples cited by Wright in the chapter, I once gave my wife a gift (I forget the occasion). I had named a star after us in the International Star Registry (corny, I know), and I framed the certificate, which contained a telescopic photograph of the star and its GPS coordinates (or the interstellar equivalent thereof), and engraved the frame with the following:
"If we ever get lost in Heaven, I'll meet you here."
Like I said, thank you, good Bishop.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
0 Comments:
Post a Comment