Quotes

The Importance of Beauty

Published on August 20th, 2009.

I believe that taking creation and new creation seriously is the way to understand and revitalize aesthetic awareness and perhaps even creativity among Christians today. Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice. Of course, if you have to choose between beautiful slavery and an ugly Exodus, you must go for the Exodus, but, as William Temple said in a different (though related) context, fortunately we don’t have to make that choice.

Romans 8, with its rich theology of new creation, offers us a way of appreciating natural beauty. Paul speaks of the creation groaning in travail, waiting to give birth to God’s new world. The beauty of the present world…has something about it of the beauty of a chalice, beautiful in itself but more hauntingly beautiful in what we know it’s meant to be filled with; or that of the violin, beautiful in itself but particularly because we know the music it’s capable of. Another example might be the engagement ring, which is meant as it is to delight the eye but which is meant even more to delight the heart because of what it promises. I want now to develop this further in terms of the new creativity to which I believe Christians are called as we find ourselves poised between creation and new creation…..

To make sense of and celebrate a beautiful world through the production of artifacts that are themselves beautiful is part of the call to be stewards of creation, as was Adam’s naming of the animals. Genuine art is thus itself a response to the beauty of creation, which itself is a pointer to the beauty of God.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 222.

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Beauty and Hope

Published on August 19th, 2009.

The second feature of many communities both in the postindustrial West and in many of the poorer parts of the world is ugliness. True, some communities manage to sustain levels of art and music, often rooted in folk culture, which bring a richness even to the most poverty-stricken areas. But the shoulder-shrugging functionalism of postwar architecture, coupled with the passivity born of decades of television, has meant that for many people the world appears to offer little but bleak urban landscapes, on the one hand, and tawdry entertainment, on the other. And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope. They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the message that whispers that they are no worth very much, that they are in effect less than fully human.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 231.

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The Joy of Judgment

Published on August 18th, 2009.

The picture of Jesus as the coming judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and nonnegotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all. 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 come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a  world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.

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The main point to notice [from John 5], once more, is that all the future judgment is highlighted basically as good news, not bad. Why so? It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them; the Messiah who took the world’s judgment upon himself on the cross. Of course, this also means that he is uniquely placed to judge the systems and rulers that have carved up the world between them, and the New Testament points this out here and there.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 141.

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The Solidity of Heaven

Published on August 17th, 2009.

What Paul is asking us to imagine is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body as our present body is more substantial, more touchable, than a disembodied spirit. We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one–or over the self that will still exist after bodily death. This is where one of the great Easter hymns gets it exactly right:

O how glorious and resplendent

Fragile body, shalt thou be,

When endued with so much  beauty,

Full of health, and strong, and free!

Full of vigour, full of pleasure,

That shall last eternally.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 154.

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Prayer and the Departed

Published on August 16th, 2009.

Since both the departed saints and we ourselves are in Christ, we share with them in the “communion of saints.” They are still our brothers and sisters in Christ. When we celebrate the Eucharist they are there with us, along with the angels and archangels. Why then should we not pray for and with them? The reason the Reformers and their successors did their best to outlaw praying for the dead was because that had been so bound up with the notion of purgatory and the need to get people out of it as soon as possible. Once we rule out purgatory, I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should–not that they will get out of purgatory but that they will be refreshed and filled with God’s joy and peace. Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 172.

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On the Use of the Term: “Authority of Scripture”

Published on August 15th, 2009.

One more introductory remark on the way in which the phrase “authority of scripture” has functioned and developed in recent centuries. It is my impression that it has emerged in situations of protest, whether that of Martin Luther against the pope, of the great free church movements against Anglicanism (I think of the nineteenth-century Baptist Charles H. Spurgeon appealing to scripture to explain why he opposed so much in the established church), or, within various denominations, of a would-be “biblical” minority against a supposed “liberal” leadership. In other words, the phrase is invoked when something is proposed or done in the church to which others object: “you can’t do that, because the bible says…” Of course, there is a positive use as well, exemplified in the teaching and preaching of scripture. But it has often been observed that when people who insist on the authority of scripture have things all to themselves–perhaps by leaving a supposedly unbiblical denomination and setting up on their own–they quickly subdivide into those who read the Bible this way against those who read it that way. This itself suggests that an over-hasty appeal to scripture all by itself does not in fact work. We need to set scripture within the larger context which the biblical writers themselves insist upon: that of the authority of God himself.

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N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God–Getting Beyond the Bible Wars (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005), 27-8.

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Christ’s Presence in the Eucharist

Published on August 14th, 2009.

What happens in the Eucharist is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, this future dimension is brought sharply into play. We break bread to share in the body of Christ; we do it in remembrance of him; we become for a moment the disciples sitting around the table at the Last Supper. Yet if we stop there we’ve only said the half of it. To make any headway in understanding the Eucharist, we must see it as the arrival of God’s future in the present, not just the extension of God’s past (or of Jesus’s past) into our present. We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord, And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself its prototype. The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God’s new world. At communion we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land. It is the future coming to meet us in the present.

This perspective is a far more helpful way to talk about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist than trying to redefine the old language of transubstantiation. The problem with the old language was not that it was the wrong answer but that it was the right answer to the wrong question. It was right to insist on the true presence of Christ but wrong to explain that presence in terms of the philosophies of the time, the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, and the supposed power of the priest to alter the “substance” (the inner, invisible reality of an object like a piece of bread) while leaving the “accidents” (its outward properties like weight, color, chemical makeup) apparently untouched. That was one way of saying what needed to be said in language that some people in the Middle Ages could understand, but it has produced all kinds of misunderstandings and abuses.

A far better way is provided by the New Testament’s language about new creation. Take Romans 8 as a good starting point: creation is groaning in travail as it waits for redemption. But one part of the old creation has already been transformed, is already liberated from bondage to decay, namely, the body of Christ, the body that died on the cross and is now alive with a life that death can’t touch. Jesus has gone ahead into God’s new creation, and as we look back to his death through the lens he himself provided–that is, the meal he shared on the night he was betrayed–we find that he comes to meet us in tand through the symbols of creation, the bread and the wine, which are thus taken up into the Christ story, the event of new creation itself, and become vessels, carriers, of God’s new world and the saving events that enable us to share it.

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This is not magic. Magic seeks to gain by cunning, and for personal power or pleasure, what God gives by race, to faith, to promote holiness and love. The resurrection of Jesus and the promise of a world made new provide the ontological, epistemological, and above all eschatological framework within which we can understand the Eucharist afresh. Let us not rob ourselves of the hope that comes forward from God’s future to sustain us in the present. God’s new world has begun. If we don’t see it breaking into the present world, we are denying the energizing foundation of Christian life.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 274-6.

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N. T. Wright on Baptism

Published on August 14th, 2009.

The important thing, then , is that in the simple but powerful action of plunging someone into the water in the name of the triune God, there is a real dying to the old creation and a real rising into the new–with all the dangerous privileges and responsibilities that then accompany the new life as it sets out in the as-yet-unredeemed world. Baptism is not magic, a conjuring trick with water. But neither 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. The idea of associating baptism with Easter always was, and still is, a proper Christian instinct. Just as for many Christians the truth of Easter is something they glimpse occasionally rather than grasp and act on, so, for many, baptism remains in the background, out of sight, whereas it should be the foundational event for all serious Christian living, all dying to sin and coming alive with Christ.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 272-3.

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How the Resurrection Transforms Matter

Published on August 14th, 2009.

The most contentious of the space-time-matter trio is of course matter itself, the stuff of which (as Protestant tradition has always rightly warned) idols are made. yet again, however, if we are not to collapse into Platonism, denying the goodness of creation itself, it is crucial to recapture both the bodily incarnation and resurrection of Jesus and the promise that creation itself will be renewed, liberated from death and decay (and therefore presumably, as in C. S. Lewis’s remarkable imaginative world in The Great Divorce, more solid, more real, than the present one). It is within this framework of thought that the classic Christian sacraments of baptism and Eucharist make sense.

Of course, the sacraments can degenerate into mere superstition and idolatry. But we should never forget what happened when the Israelites allowed that to happen with the Ark of the Covenant, treating it simply as a magic talisman to be taken note of only when they were doing badly in battle (I Samuel 4-5). The ark was captured, and Israelites lost the battle. But when the Philistines put the ark into the temple of Dagon their god, Dagon fell flat on his face before it. Abuse of the sacrament does not nullify the proper use. Successive Christian generations have struggled to find language to do justice to the reality of what happens in baptism and of what happens in the Eucharist. It is perhaps not surprising that they have largely failed because in fact the sacraments are designed to be their own language, ultimately untranslatable, even though we can describe what is going on from various angles, themselves all inadequate. (Remember the ballerina who, asked to say what a particular dance meant, replied, “If I could have said it, I wouldn’t have needed to dance it.”) But to reject, marginalize, trivialize, or be suspicious of the sacraments (and quasi-sacramental acts such as lighting a candle, bowing, washing feet, raising hands in the air, crossing oneself, and so forth) on the ground that such things can be superstitious or idolatrous or that some people might suppose that by doing them they are putting God in their debt, is like rejecting sexual relations in marriage on the grounds that it’s the same act that in other circumstances constitutes immorality….

Try looking at it like this (shortening, for the moment, a much longer case that could be argued). In the Eucharist, the bread and the wine come to us as part of God’s new creation, the creation in whose reality Jesus already participates through the resurrection. They speak powerfully, as only encoded actions can speak (whethere a handshake, a kiss, the tearing up of a contract, or whatever), both of the death he suffered, through which idolatry and sin have been defeated, and of his future arrival in which creation is to be renewed (I Corinthians 11:26). We feed on that reality even though we may find it difficult to conceptualize what sort of reality it is.

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N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 263.

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On Doctrinal Summary Labels

Published on August 14th, 2009.

The familiar phrase “the authority of scripture” thus turns out to be more complicated than it might at first sight appear. This hidden complication may perhaps be the reason why some current debates remain so sterile.

This kind of problem, though, is endemic in many disciplines, and we ought to be grown-up enough to cope with it. Slogans and cliches are often shorthand ways of making more complex statements. In Christian theology, such phrases regularly act as “portable stories”–that is, ways of packing up longer narratives about God, Jesus, the church and the world, folding them away into convenient suitcases, and then carrying them about with us. (A good example is the phrase “the atonement.” This phrase is rare in the Bible itself; instead we find things like “The Messiah died for our sins according to the scriptures”; “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” and so on. But if we are to discuss the atonement, it is easier to do so with a single phrase, assumed to “contain” all these sentence, than by repeating one or more of them each time.) Shorthands, in other words, are useful in the same way that suitcases are. They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together. But we should never forget that the point of doing so, like the point of carrying belongings in a suitcase, is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location. Too much debate about scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases. It is time to unpack our shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. Long years in a suitcase may have made some of the contents go moldy. They will benefit from fresh air, and perhaps a hot iron.

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N. T. Wright, The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God–Getting Beyond the Bible Wars (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005), 24-5.

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