Clearer Vision Through Tear-Filled Eyes

Mark Lauterbach on how the recent loss of loved ones has aided him in gaining clarity on the meaning of the resurrection:

You see, many people, knowing that my Mom and my wife's Dad died, offered prayer and comfort and words of hope. Most often we heard, "they are in a better place." But as I listened I thought, "that is not the last word on this." Jesus did not die and rise again so when we die we go to a better place. He died and rose again so that death will be swallowed up, this mortal shall be clothed in immortality, and our parents (and all who fall asleep in Christ) will be re-embodied.

It is surprising how very little the New Testament talks about life after death -- and how much it talks about (to borrow a phrase) "life after life after death."  I have changed my words now -- when people ask me about Mom, I tell them that she has died and is waiting the resurrection of her body. I want to point to the real hope we have -- death swallowed up, being re-embodied and without sin, forever.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

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.

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

He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!

O Sing Hallelujah!

Our Lord Christ hath risen!
The tempter is foiled;
His legions are scattered,
His strongholds are spoiled.
O sing Hallelujah! O sing Hallelujah!
O sing Hallelujah, be joyful and sing,
Our great foe is baffled - Christ Jesus is King!

O sin, thou art vanquished,
Thy long reign is o'er;
Though still thou dost vex us,
We dread thee no more.
O sing Hallelujah! O sing Hallelujah!
O sing Hallelujah, be joyful and sing,
Who now can condemn us? Christ Jesus is King!

O death we defy thee!
A stronger than thou
Hath entered thy palace;
We fear thee not now!
O sing Hallelujah! O sing Hallelujah!
O sing Hallelujah, be joyful and sing,
The grave cannot scare us - Christ Jesus is King!

Our Lord Christ hath risen!
Day breaketh at last;
The long night of weeping
Is now well-nigh past.
O sing Hallelujah! O sing Hallelujah!
O sing Hallelujah, be joyful and sing,
Our foes are all conquered - Christ Jesus is King!
- Lord Plunket - Bishop of Meath, 1629-1681

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3)

Technorati Tags: Easter, resurrection, Jesus

"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.

The New Choc'late Cross

In an attempt to reach Christian consumers who might balk at celebrating Easter with chocolate bunnies, Russell Stover Candies Inc. is marketing a chocolate cross. Unfortunately for them, however, members of the targeted audience object to the idea. Today's Chicago Tribune reports Rev. John Vakulskas, a Catholic priest in Alton, Iowa as describing the cross as being "in poor taste."


Anyway, happy Resurrection Day, all! He is risen indeed!

The Resurrection: Real but not Historical

Something happened that first Easter morning that was powerful enough to embolden Jesus' band of followers and lead them to change the weekly day of worship from the Jewish Sabbath to the first day of the week. But whatever it was, it wasn't Jesus being raised from the dead. In fact, the resurrection doesn't have anything at all to do with Jesus' body. That's the position Bishop John Shelby Spong sought to defend against evangelical apologist, Dr. William Lane Craig in The Great Resurrection Debate , an event broadcast live last night by the Church Communication Network.

According to Spong, who described himself as not being a "biblical literalist," it's not possible to be a Christian and deny the "reality of the resurrection." But, says Spong, this reality should not be understood as a physical return from death. What appear to be historical narratives are more properly understood as symbolism employed by Jesus' followers to convey their powerful and ineffable "God experience." A God-experience, says Spong, must be put into human words and our language is not big enough to envelop that inbreaking of eternity.

Granted, our language is not capable of capturing God's totality. But that's not to say that language is incapable of communicating any truths about God. As Francis Schaeffer noted, God has not given us exhaustive truth, but He has given us true (though partial) Truth.

Once I heard Bishop Spong's take on the inadequacy of language to describe God, I patiently waited for him to refute himself by ascribing some attributes to God. I wasn't disappointed. In his closing statements, just a few moments after saying "I cannot tell you who God is or what God is," the bishop proceeded to affirm that God is the source of love and the ground of all being.

It was evident to me that what really motivates Spong is the desire to make the Bible and Christianity plausible to the modern mind. This means adopting a hermeneutic that takes all references to miraculous events as poetic symbolism. If we fail to open the Scriptures to scholarship (by which Bishop Spong means the naturalistic rationalism assumed by the so-called biblical scholars of the Jesus Seminar of which he is a member) we will end up twisting twenty-first century minds into first century pretzels. 


As I watched and listened to the exchange, the words of C. S. Lewis in the first chapter of Miracles, kept coming to mind:

...the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our sense, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our sense are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

Another Lewis quote, this one from"Learning in War-Time," is likewise appropriate. "Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered." Those interested in learning how to answer the bad philosophy of the Jesus Seminar will find this article by Dr. Craig of interest.