N T Wright on the Resurrection

Here's a brief two minutes from Tom Wright on the Resurrection - he manages to convey a great deal in the short time.



And there are some intriguing visuals in the background...

Clean-up

The Sunday after Easter, around 1500 people gathered in the Dunedin Town Hall for a Resurrection service. There were plenty of young people, but also a large number of oldies, and the enthusiasm was full on.
During that service, Bruce Elder, from Dunedin City Baptist, called for volunteers to help with a number of 'service projects' around the town. The aim was to get around 800 Christian people going out into the community to pick up on jobs that needed doing, but wouldn't get done otherwise. These varied from street cleaning, to painting playgrounds at schools to restoring the Wakari Hospital's duck ponds.
The project had been advertised at various churches around the city already, but another bunch of people signed up for it at the Resurrection service.
In the end the number who went and worked was about half the number called for, but most of the projects that had been set up got done - and the weather stayed fine for the afternoon...

N T Wright

This is the point where a genuine biblical theology can come out of the forest and startle both those who thought that the Bible was irrelevant or dangerous for political ethics and those who thought taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically. The truth is very different--as we should have guessed from Jesus' own preaching of the kingdom, not to mention his death as a would-be rebel king. His resurrection, and the promise of God's new world that comes with it, creates a program for change and offers to empower it. Those who believe in the gospel have no choice but to follow.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

Review: Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright

Tom Wright has several things he wants to put across in this book, but there are two particular ones that stand out for me. Firstly he wants to encourage the church to change its view of what happens to us after death, and secondly, and even more important, he wants us to realise the extent to which we're affected, in every aspect of our lives, by Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and our own future resurrection in the new heavens/new earth.

I must confess I'm a person who likes to read books that speculate as far as possible on where (and what) we'll be in the post-death future. I sometimes feel a little alone in this, as, to my surprise, many Christians don't appear to care overly much. For them vague thoughts of 'heaven' are enough. However, Wright isn't prepared to let us away with any kind of vagueness. He spends a good amount of time dealing to the usual idea of 'heaven,' which he says is not only inaccurate, it's not even Scriptural.

For him the resurrection of Jesus is of utter importance in relation to our future. The resurrection will sweep up everything in this world and recreate it in the new. For Wright, everything that's of value here will have value eternally, and he's not just talking about 'spiritual' things, but about creative things, about work and love and kindness and relationships and all manner of other aspects of our everyday lives. The 'first' resurrection happened here, in this world, and it will ultimately affect everything in this world. The new creation will incorporate the old, making all the old of immense value.

But this is just part of the message in the book. Wright presents a wide-ranging and accessible theology of the resurrection, of Easter itself, of the Christian's hope as it was understood in the early church, of what Jesus' judgment of this world means, of whether Purgatory and Paradise have any relevance to us.

And in his final section, where some of the best material lies (in a book full of good material), he writes of hope in practice: how the resurrection affects the mission of the church.

If you've ever felt that we've lost the point of Easter, that the resurrection was a one-off and rather odd event, and that our deaths are fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things, read this book. Even if you don't agree with all Wright's theology – as some (plainly misguided critics) don't – I'll be surprised if you're not inspired by at least some of what he has to say.

reviewed by Mike Crowl

Our job on earth

The idea that the gospel has something to say about the eternal destinies of people has been drummed into them for a long time. But they don't see that we are equally concerned about what Jesus taught us to pray: "May your kingdom come, and your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
Tim Keel, in An Efficient Gospel?

It's worth pointing out that noted English writer, N T Wright, has recently published a book called Surprised by Hope, which deals with a similar idea, as well as looking at what resurrection means for people, where we go when we die - and whether heaven really 'exists'.