N.T. Wright's "Surprised by Hope": The Pirate Review, Day 14 -- The Final Chapter (Part II)
Chapter 15
Reshaping the Church for Mission (2):
Living the Future -- Part II
OK, OK! This will be the final post of the series; well, the review series, anyway. I might do one or two more riffs over the next few days, maybe a Top 10 excepts from the book, or a parable to put it all in perspective (Wright has one after the final chapter, what he calls a "Tailpiece" where he examines two imaginary Easter sermons, but I'll leave that for everyone to read for themselves inasmuch as its not conducive to summary, but is itself one).
So in the final section of this concluding chapter, Wright sets off to summarize six areas of Christian spirituality when reviewed in light of "[God's] Easter call to us to wake up and come alive within His new world."
New Birth and Baptism
Wright here seeks to provide a greatly condensed theology of baptism, and the new birth, the "born againness" that stems from it. His summary is based on his view of sacramental theology in general, which itself stems from his overall ontological and eschatological vision of creation and new creation, and of the overlapping of heaven and earth. In the resurrection of Jesus, God's future burst into the present, into the middle of history. And this is basically what Wright believes is happening with all the sacraments (and, incidentally, is the basic underpinning of his controversial interpretation of Justification by Faith).
"Baptism is not magic, a conjuring trick with water. But nor is it simply a visual aid. It is one of the points, established by Jesus himself, where heaven and earth interlock, where new creation, resurrection life, appears within the midst of the old."
Actually, I was somewhat surprised to see that Wright had omitted an argument that he uses frequently, and which I believe to be focal in understanding this vision. Paul, in 2 Cor. 5:17, says what has often been translated as "If anyone is in Christ, then he is a new creation." But Paul's actual words in the original Greek are much more condensed than that; what he actually says is "If anyone in Christ, new creation." Paul doesn't seem to want to limited his words to mean "that person is a new creation," but that what is happening when someone becomes "in Christ" is that a little bit of the ultimate, future new creation is bursting forth onto the scene. In other words, the "new creation" refers both to the newly created person and to the world that they enter.
Eucharist
Much of the same theoretical understanding holds true for the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, or whatever you call it in your own tradition. But unlike baptism, where the future is coming forth to the present, in the Eucharist both the past and the future are coming to meet us in the present. As with the Jewish Passover, the partakers of the meal are not simply remembering the old stories, they are becoming participants within them. "This is the night," the Jewish people say, "when God brought us out of Egypt."
At the same time, however, we take the bread and wine not simply to be one with Jesus and his disciples in the past, but to celebrate and be one with the Living Jesus, who has gone on ahead into the new creation and who is now itself its prototype. We take the bread and the wine because it is the symbol that Jesus himself gave us of the one part of the old creation that has already been transformed, that is already freed from the bondage to decay--the body of Christ.
Prayer
Wright outlines three common sub-understandings of prayer in order to explain "how an authentically Christian view retains the strong point of each while going beyond, called by the God of the future who has burst into the present.
Some think of prayer as a sort of nature mysticism, reveling in the beauty of the creation. It is the sort of "religious experience" that happens naturally in times of awe and wonderment. Others think of prayer as shouting petitions through a void to a distant God, always seeking to get the "magic words" right to please this distant, harsh god. In between those two, Wright examines the prayer life of ancient Israel, most evident in the Psalms where the creation is not celebrated in itself but as the things and events where the creator is make known. And while there are times when the Psalmists feel that God has become distant, even turned against them, they refuse to believe that the boss has gone fishing; they are eventually if sorrowfully content to leave the dire situation in front of God's door.
"Transcendence; intimacy; celebration; covenant. Those are the roots of biblical prayer."
All this moves forward in the NT in light of Jesus. The intimacy is amplified, as Jesus tells Mary Magdalene to "go and say to my brothers," "I am going up to my father and your father, to my God and your God." The celebration of the creation, as well as the covenant, is amplified and transformed, and the danger of nature mysticism dealt with when we pray to Jesus, inasmuch as we are not colluding with the death and decay that have infected our world, even the beautiful portions of it, but celebrating the new creation, of which Jesus is the inaugurator and most clear example, and of which the beauty of this world is a faint sign.
And at last we are left with the answer of what Christian prayer should now be, in light of all this. As we have been given the privilege to share God's intimacy because of Jesus and by the Spirit, we are thereby called, to live in prayer at the places where the world is in pain. And the reason we are so called is that God the Holy Spirit may Himself be present at the places where the world is in pain, so that the most important line of our most important prayer may have a chance of coming true: thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven.
Scripture
The proper view of scripture, according to Wright, is that it is, at its most basic level, the story of creation and new creation. And we ourselves live within that single, overarching story, somewhere in between Acts and Revelation, and we read Scripture in order to understand and be transformed by the story so far and how it is supposed to end. But it does not end there:
"...just as the proclamation that Jesus is Lord results in men, women and children coming to trust and obey him in the power of the Spirit, and to find their lives transformed by his saving lordship, so the telling of the story of creation and new creation, of covenant and new covenant, doesn't just inform the hearers about this narrative. It invites them into it, enfolds them within it, assures them of their membership in it, and equips them for their tasks in pursuit of its goal."
Holiness
More so than any other aspect of Christian spirituality (at the individual level), holiness can only be understood within resurrection and new creation. What you do with your self matters, because God will one day glorify it. Paul describes the nuances of this best in Romans, which Wright goes through step-by-step, concluding with:
"For Paul, holiness is never a matter of simply finding out the way you seem to be made and trusting that that's the way God intends you to remain. Nor is it a matter of blind obedience to arbitrary and out-of-date rules. It's a matter of transformation, starting with the mind."
And again, this is based firmly on the resurrection and what that event means.
"The resurrection was the full bursting into this world of the life of God's new creation; 'Christian ethics' is the lifestyle that celebrates and embodies that new creation."
Love
Wright begins the climactic section of this climactic chapter by making a point that is of utmost importance but often overlooked, causing much despair that I've witnessed among Christians who begin to doubt their faith precisely because of their own failings ("If all this is true, why do I still struggle? Maybe its not true after all"). As Paul says in 1 Cor. 13:9-12, just before declaring that love is the most excellent way of all, the way we are now is only partly the way it is meant to be and partly not what it is meant to be.
"But Paul is urging that we should live in the present as people who are to be made complete in the future. And the sign of that completeness, that future wholeness, the bridge from one reality to the other, is love."
What Paul is saying is that love is not primarily our duty, it is primarily our destiny. Remember that the whole point of 1 Corinthians was to address the myriad of problems that church there was experiencing within itself, and it is in Ch. 13 where Paul addresses the three fundamental things that will not necessarily change all that, but will put them on the right track for the day when God will change all that: faith, hope and love (or, as the old King James version calls it, and properly in my opinion, "charity"), declaring famously that the greatest of these is charity, love.
While Wright goes on with a few more paragraph explaining how the notion of forgiveness plays into that of love, I think I'll end my post, and my review series as a whole, with this, the most poignant and beautiful description of love, and why we as Christians are to strive toward it, I have read in a long, long time:
"[Love] is the language Jesus spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with him. It is the food they eat in God's new world, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. It is the music God has written for all his creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the conductor brings down his baton. It is the resurrection life, and the resurrected Jesus calls us to begin living it with him and for him right now. Love is at the very heart of the surprise of hope: people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way."
Grace and Peace (and Hope),
Raffi
