Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church | N. T. Wright | Good job on Darwin

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Surprised by Hope:...

	Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church N. T. Wright HarperOne, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

For years Christians have been asking, "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?" It turns out that many believers have been giving the wrong answer. It is not heaven.

Award-winning author N. T. Wright outlines the present confusion about a Christian's future hope and shows how it is deeply intertwined with how we live today. Wright, who is one of today's premier Bible scholars, asserts that Christianity's most distinctive idea is bodily resurrection. He provides a magisterial defense for a literal resurrection of Jesus and shows how this became the cornerstone for the Christian community's hope in the bodily resurrection of all people at the end of the age. Wright then explores our expectation of "new heavens and a new earth," revealing what happens to the dead until then and what will happen with the "second coming" of Jesus. For many, including many Christians, all this will come as a great surprise.

Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation?and if this has already begun in Jesus's resurrection?the church cannot stop at "saving souls" but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God's kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.

Lively and accessible, this book will surprise and excite all who are interested in the meaning of life, not only after death but before it.

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Surprised by Hope

I loved N.T. Wright's newest book, Surprised by Hope. He explores the meat of the Christian hope, what he calls the after-afterlife.

Wright addresses the misconceptions (a.k.a. bad theology) that's infiltrated not just the world (i.e. reincarnation), but also Christianity (i.e. when we all get to heaven).

The belief in Jesus' physical resurrection is on the line here, folks. If you believe in Jesus' physical resurrection, if you believe that he is the firstfruits, than you have to believe that we do will experience that physical resurrection. The whole earth (which now groans) will experience it.

Wright turns the gospel message upside-down. No, he turns how we talk about the gospel message upside-down. It begins with an overarching story--God's plan of redemption for all of creation. Within that, individual salvation fits.

He then talks about why it's important in the here and now, in areas such as justice, art, and evangelism (are you getting a feel for why I'm passionate about this?). He's hard on all sides. Somehow Wright is one of the few people who can point out the faults of everyone specifically (moderns, you're doing this; postmoderns, you're doing this; liberals, you're doing this; conservatives, you're doing this) and still be liked by all parties. Personally, I'm a dispensationalist (which means, in my view, that Wright and I may disagree on some middle stuff, but we absolutely agree on the end, we absolutely agree that this end is the important part, and we absolutely agree on our present course of action). Wright's hard on dispensationalist (and for good reason). I will say that he has a generalized and limited view on dispensationalist. Maybe he understands more but for simplicity's sake boils it down. Maybe he only hear's the loudest dispensationalist (with whom I probably don't agree). But that's beside the point to me.

The point is, Jesus' resurrection leads to the resurrection (redemption) of the world, and somehow our participation in God's kingdom work in the present contributes to that (although it doesn't bring it about--God brings it about).

I recommend this book for a solid look at eschatology and its integral part to our daily theology.

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Good job on Darwin

N.T. Wright is a professor at Oxford and Cambridge and a highly respected New Testament scholar. This is one reason I picked up this book. Another reason is I wanted to read his views on Darwin. I was pleasantly surprised to find his coverage excellent. Wright notes that Darwin was not a so much a great new thinker but "rather the exact product of his times" (p. 83). He adds that evolution was in Darwin's day "already widely believed; it was a deeply convenient philosophy for those who wanted to justify ... everything from eugenics to war." He adds that "many Christian thinkers went along for the ride on this apparent incoming tide of progress." Even worse, many clergy "embraced Darwin's ideas as a way of solving... some of the problems they felt about the Old Testament. Many eagerly expounded social Darwinism as the way forward for the world, with some even encouraging the pursuit of war as the proper way to test who in the human species were the fittest and hence the most deserving of survival." p. 83. Clergy today condemn this behavior yet how many have climbed on the bandwagon to condemn those who correctly recognize that Darwinism does not explain how life got here nor does it explain the Origin of Species as Darwin claimed (actually we are often looking at genus level, since putative species crossing is now common, such as the Liger, a hybrid cross between a male lion and a female tiger). I predict that fifty years from now when Darwinism has gone the way of Freud and Marx, the church will also be condemned for getting in bed with the Darwinism pseudoscientific idea.

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Needed work from the right Theologian.

This excellent work from N. T. Wright is a more popular treatment of his message that started with his book "The Resurrection of the Son of God." In this work Wright emphasizes the hope of new creation through resurrection. There is currently a move away from the orthodox view of the bodily resurrection toward a more Platonic view that says that we die, our bodies stay in the grave, and we go to heaven and stay there in disembodied bliss. Wright, who is a great exegete, theologian, and historian sets the record straight about the resurrection of Jesus as well as the resurrection of all those in Christ. Wright shows how that new creation began at the resurrection of Jesus and how that we are to live in light of the resurrection, looking forward to new creation. I strongly recommend this work.

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Surprised by Surprised by Hope

"Surprised by Hope" is a briliant study, it challenged me to rethink some important issues like Heaven, Resurrection and Life after Death. Bible speaks clearlly about NEW heaven and NEW Earth, and the topic that we will have NEW bodies is often negelected issue influenced by our dualistic Greeak heritage. Understood rightly those concepts (Heaven, Bodily Resurrection, Ascension, New Creation) are challenging the mission of the Church today. N.T. Wright brings NEW hope into the understanding and interpretation of the Hope! You might be surprised!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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