I spent yesterday working through “The Resurrection of the Son of God.” By “working through,” I don’t mean that I read every word on every page, but I did acquaint myself with the overall shape of Wright’s argument until I felt I had a sufficient understanding of it. Today I’ll dive back into some specific sections that I want to flesh out. If you know how to read a book, you can get at the heart of an argument without reading everything. This is especially helpful when you’re not sure you want to invest a huge amount of time into a book. Before I give a book detailed attention, I try to find out where it is going, then I know whether or not I want to spend extra time with it.
“The Resurrection of the Son of God” is worth the time. N. T. Wright’s work always bolsters my faith and stretches my mind.
Here is a great quote from the final page:
No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent. But it is the real world, in Jewish thinking, that the real God made, and still grieves over. It is the real world that, in the earliest stories of Jesus? resurrection, was decisively and for ever reclaimed by that event, an event which demanded to be understood, not as a bizarre miracle, but as the beginning of the new creation. It is the real world that, however complex this may become, historians are committed to studying. And, however dangerous this may turn out to be, it is the real world in and for which Christians are committed to living and, where necessary, dying. Nothing less is demanded by the God of creation, the God of justice, the God revealed in and as the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth.
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
The Bishop of Durham gives several examples of pagans denying the resurrection of the flesh.
How can you deny the resurrection of the flesh any better than by saying ‘The last Adam became a life-giving spirit’, or ‘All flesh is grass’ (1 Peter 1:24)
Why did the author of 1 Peter think that flesh was the very best metaphor he could find for something transient, perishable and mortal , when his world had supposedly been turned upside down by the resurrection of the flesh?
You can scour Wright’s writings for ever and never find a place where he discusses that. Even in his 700 plus page book, he can find no space to once quote in full ‘the last Adam became a life-giving spirit’.
The Christian churches in Thessalonica and Corinth denied the resurrection of the flesh and thought that the dead were lost.
How could they have converted to worshippers of Jesus and never heard how Jesus proved the resurrection in Matthew 23, and why is Paul silent about how his Lord and Saviour proved the resurrection?
The best Paul can come up with is ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God’. What would the Christians in Corinth have made of that statement?