On this episode, we want to do another deep-dive into the issue of “resurrection.” I recently uncovered a rare-TV episode by N.T. Wright where he talks at length about resurrection.
Resurrection Special
I play an edited version of this show in the podcast. You can also watch the entire show in the links below.
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The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam—or even under the steady influence of God. They knew God had to do something fresh to put it to rights. But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.
New Creation
Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that the early Christians held a quite different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter. This is such a surprising belief, and so little reflected on even in Christian circles, still less outside the church, that we must set it out step by step and show how the different early writers developed different images that together add up to a stunning picture of a future for which, so they insisted, the whole world was waiting on tiptoe.
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When we look at the contemporary world and church, we discover great confusion about future hope but that when we look at the early Christians, we find not just faith but a very precise and specific faith, both about Jesus and his resurrection and about the future life that God had promised to all his people.
Optimism and Negativity
This isn’t a matter of ancient people being credulous and modern people being skeptical. There is a great deal of credulity in our present world, and there was a great deal of skepticism in the ancient world. It is rather something to do with the very specific worldview that was generated by the events concerning Jesus, and supremely the event of Easter itself.
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If the disciples simply saw, or thought they saw, someone they took to be Jesus, that would not by itself have generated the stories we have. Everyone in the ancient world took it for granted that people sometimes had strange experiences involving encounters with the dead, particularly the recently dead. They knew at least as much as we do about such visions, about ghosts and dreams—and the fact that such things often occurred within the context of bereavement or grief. They had language for this, and it wasn’t resurrection.
Resurrection
However many such visions they’d had, they wouldn’t have said Jesus was raised from the dead; they weren’t expecting such a resurrection.
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The ancient world—with the exception of the Jews—was adamant that dead people did not rise again; and the Jews did not believe that anyone had done so or that anyone would do so all by themselves in advance of the general resurrection. But the early church had a much different message.
Early Christian Hope
But even when we’ve cleared away those misunderstandings, deep questions remain. What precisely was it that the early Christians believed? Why did they use the language of resurrection to express that belief?
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Not only is the world at large confused about death, but most in the Christian world as well. There are many people “puzzled about Paradise.” What is “heaven” and isn’t the “kingdom of heaven” just another way of saying the same thing? What is this thing called “Paradise” and how has the Church so radically gotten away from the earliest Christian view of the afterlife?
Puzzled About Paradise
In this lesson, we talk about some of the things that has confused the church on this issue … from not understanding a Jewish mindset, down to the very music we listen to in church.
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What are we waiting for? And what are we going to do about it in the meantime? What is the “blessed hope” for a Christian? What is “heaven” all about, and is our hope simply a matter of “going to heaven when we die”? Or is there something more than some of us have been taught in most churches?
Surprised by Hope
We begin a new series where we dig deep into “Surprised by Hope” by N.T. Wright. “Surprised by Hope” is a great resource, and I would highly encourage you to pick up the book as we study it.
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It is the covenant that fulfills the longing of God, granting men and women the gift of His life so that in this present time they live the life of the age to come. This gift makes them His children, giving them the unspeakable privilege of enjoying intimate friendship with Him.
Friend of God
If the heart of the covenant is to be united as one to Him by the Spirit, the goal of the covenant is to know Him.
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The New Testament knows nothing of an isolated believer living in a private relationship to God. Each individual believer is joined to Christ and therefore to His body, the people of God.
People of the Spirit
The covenant is not with us as individuals but with the “people” who are in Christ, with whom the covenant is made. We have an intensely personal relationship with God in Christ, but we do not have an individual relationship; it is a corporate one.
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But how does this actually work out in life? How do we live from Christ our lives day by day? We have seen that the believer stepping out of the baptismal waters is in a new world in Christ, with new potential that he or she has never known before. Limitations known in the old life have gone in the resurrection of Jesus; signposts that directed us in life have been removed and new ones erected. We can never think about life in the same way again.
Walk in the Spirit
We look at our world that has been our comfortable home since we can remember, all we took for granted as part of life— the selfishness, greed, anger, and envy—and see now that it is finished and passing away to give way to the real in Christ. We are coming alive to the new creation built on the infinite, unconditional love of God, in which all the expressions of love—the kindness and compassion, the forgiveness of our enemies—are the normal behavior. In baptism, we have been joined to this world in Christ; in the covenant meal, we are embraced and participate in Him who is the life of this new world.
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