N. T. Wright Nightline Interview

N. T. Wright talks with Martin Bashir about the biblical portrait of believers' eternal destiny and how it compares with popular notions of heaven (HT: Steve Bishop).

N. T. Wright on the Wrong View of Heaven

I know, I know. It's been like forever since I posted. This morning, however, a friend sent me a link to a Time Magazine interview with N. T. Wright that was enough to wake me from my blogging slumber. My friend wanted to know what I think of Wright's position. I wholeheartedly agree with his take on the restoration of creation as redemption's ultimate end. I do wish, though, that he had been more clear about faith in Christ as a condition for participating in the renewal about which he so enthusiastically speaks.

Concerning the common conception of heaven as an eternal, ethereal existence, Wright says:

There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.

Wright comments that almost invariably, his explanation of what the Bible teaches about the eternal state is met with a sense of excitement and a sense of "Why haven't we been told this before?" Good question.

Tom Wright Talks

N. T. Wright was the guest speaker for the West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies' 21st birthday celebration. The two talks he gave at the event ("Thinking about God in Tomorrow's World" and "Whatever did St. Paul do with the Kingdom of God?") are now available on the Reformational UK site. (HT: Steve Bishop)

Challenges to the Gospel

That's the theme of the new 9Marks newsletter (available in a PDF version) which contains the following articles:

The Therapeutic Gospel by David Powlison
The therapeutic gospel limits itself to giving people what they want, instead of calling for a change of what they ultimately want.

Brian McLaren and the Gospel of Here & Now by Greg Gilbert
This emerging leader is alright on the “already,” but neglects the “not yet.”

Satanism, Starbucks, and Other Gospel Challenges an interview with David Wells
The medium is the message, and theologian David Wells says the gospel message is increasingly compromised by “relevant” methods.

Leaving Home, Returning Home by Michael Lawrence
This biblical theology of the Fall identifies precisely why a gospel is necessary.

The Devil’s Favorite Domino—the Penal in Penal Substitution by Jonathan Leeman
Here’s why the penal in penal substitution is all precious, and why the devil always topples it first.

Gospel Coalition Travelogue by Michael McKinley
A report from the frontline of Carson and Keller’s Gospel Coalition Conference.

There is also a roundtable discussion on explaining the gospel to unbelievers and reviews of the following books: N. T. Wright's Simply Christian, Leonard Sweet's The Gospel According to Starbucks, and Erwin McManus' Soul Cravings.

Death and Resurrection

Having recently performed the funeral of a dear friend and now watching another suffer with inoperable cancer, the subject of death has been frequently on my mind. The current issue of Christianity Today has an article by Dennis Ngien called "Picture Christ" that I found especially helpful. Ngien interacts with Martin Luther's "A Sermon on Preparing to Die" in which Luther identifies three ways in which the devil tries to use death to undermine a believer's faith. One way is to remind us that death is ultimately a sign of God's wrath toward sinners. Luther wrote:

In that way, [the devil] fills our foolish human nature with the dread of death while cultivating a love and concern for life, so that burdened with such thoughts man forgets God, flees and abhors death, and thus, in the end, is and remains disobedient to God.

Ngien explains:

Luther's remedy for this first temptation is to contemplate death all the more, but to do so at the right time—which is not the time of death. Instead, he exhorts us to "invite death into our presence when it is still at a distance and not on the move"—that is, in our daily lives long before death threatens us. Conversely, Luther counsels Christians to banish thoughts of death at the final hour and to use that time to meditate on life.

Luther's advice brought to mind a gathering of high school students I attended years ago in which the youth pastor asked how many of them had never attended a funeral. I was stunned by the number of hands raised. By the time I was their age I had been to a number of funerals and wakes. And, if my memory serves me correctly, at least one visitation service took place in a home! I'm sure many parents think they're doing their children a service by shielding them from the reality and pain of death but regardless of our good intentions we should consider whether what we're really doing is depriving them (not to mention ourselves) of opportunities to gain wisdom. "It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting," the Preacher wrote, "for this is the end of mankind, and the living will lay it to heart" (Ecclesiastes 7:2).

Of course, the Christian contemplates death in light of Christ's resurrection and the resurrection of the righteous upon His return. This doctrine has taken on greater significance and become brighter to my mind's eye as I miss one brother and will soon be missing another. My yearning for the redemption of our bodies was recently stirred by two messages given by N. T. Wright last month at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Roanoke, Virginia. A friend to whom I had recommended Michael Wittmer's book Heaven is a Place on Earth, thought I might enjoy hearing Wright's talks and sent me the links. I listened and loved what I heard! One line I found particularly memorable is, "Heaven is a wonderful place but it's not the end of the world." Wright's point is that the end of Christ's redemptive work is the restoration and renewal of creation, not liberation from it. I think he's correct in claiming that this biblical emphasis often escapes our thinking and consequently does not impact our individual and corporate life as it should. For those who'd like to listen, here are the links:

Resurrection and the Future World
Resurrection and the Task of the Church

"A Creation-Affirming Doctrine"

Christianity Today "resurrects" a four-year-old interview with N. T. Wright about the Christian doctrine of resurrection and its implications. It's a necessary corrective to "evangeli-gnosticism" according to which escape from physicality, as opposed to the restoration of creation, is redemption's end:

I grew up with the view that in the early Old Testament period, there was no interest in life after death. In a middle period, represented by some of the Psalms, there were the beginnings of an interest in life after death. And then finally, with Daniel, you get resurrection, as though that's a progression away from the early period.

The view that I came to is that the main thing the whole Old Testament is concerned with is the God of Israel, as the Creator God who has made a good creation, and that what matters about human life really is that it's meant to be lived within God's good, lovely, created world. That is equally emphatic in the early period, where you get agricultural festivals that celebrate Yahweh as king over the crops and the land. It's equally emphatic there and in the doctrine of resurrection. From that point of view, the idea of a disembodied, nonspacio-temporal life after death appears as a rather odd blip in between these two strong affirmations of the goodness of the created order and the wonderful God-givenness of human bodily life within that created order.

So, instead of resurrection being a step away from the early period, it is a way of reaffirming what the early period was trying to get at: the goodness of creation.

Evil and the Justice of God

R. C. Sproul reviews N. T. Wright's book by that title at Reformation 21.

Mere Mission

I hope the following excerpt from Tim Stafford's interview of N. T. Wright prompts you to read the rest:

For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery.

The longer that I've gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it's been borne in on me that that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with working for God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That has always been at the heart of the Lord's Prayer, and how we've managed for years to say the Lord's Prayer without realizing that Jesus really meant it is very curious. Our Western culture since the 18th century has made a virtue of separating out religion from real life, or faith from politics.When I lecture about this, people will pop up and say, "Surely Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world." And the answer is no, what Jesus said in John 18 is, "My kingdom is not from this world." That's ek tou kosmoutoutou. It's quite clear in the text that Jesus' kingdom doesn't start with this world. It isn't a worldly kingdom, but it is for this world. It's from somewhere else, but it's for this world.

Wright also addresses evangelism in a post-Christian age, the contemporary appeal of Gnosticism, and why our ideas about God must be shaped by New Testament Christology.

Sire on Simply Christian

James Sire briefly reviews N. T. Wright's Simply Christian calling it "simply outstanding."