Easter Eve and the Other Wright

Our Easter Eve dinner was a success: very enjoyable and relaxing. We had 26 people total.

However, I was not able to make it through Wright's The Resurrection and the Son of God in time for Easter. I made the mistake of trying to underline the important parts. That slowed me down way too much. So, I set it aside to read his new book Surprised by Hope instead, thinking that would be a quick read. It's not.

Surprised is shorter than Resurrection, and it helpfully summarizes many of that book's arguments. However, it's also very important, articulating the implications of Wright's program. Many of Wright's assertions are challenging to the typical evangelical; for example, Wright believes the most important ethical issue facing Christians today is forgiving Third World debt rather than the sex-related issues we often fixate on.


The basic thesis of the book is that a Platonic dualism has infested the Christian church to a degree not recognized by most Christians. Dualism is assumed in evangelism, in our definitions of the pursuit of holiness and justice, in identifying the basic aim of our lives and the mission of the Church, and so on. The resurrection of Christ upends all of that. The resurrection, by definition, emphasizes physicality and wholeness. To become a disembodied soul in heaven is not the ultimate aim of the human; living in a transformed world with a transformed body doing meaningful work is. Because the resurrection of Jesus has already occurred, long before the general resurrection, the new creation, also future, has invaded the present. Christians can begin now building for the new creation, confident that the product of their present work will be transformed and persist into the eternal future.

It's a very interesting book, one I will read a second time, trying somehow to make notes on it. I disagree with Wright at many points (he often forces false choices, committing the fallacy of the excluded middle, and generally has a bit of a smug tone), but, as I said, it's an important and challenging book, well worth reading carefully.


As a result of reading the book, I bought a compendium of essays on Third World debt to better understand that issue. N.T. Wright's anti-capitalism gets in the way of his argument. He understates the problem of personal, individual corruption; for example, the greed and corruption by individuals at the IMF. Instead he faults structural sins; i.e., capitalism. He claims that no counterargument is valid on this issue, since he is making a moral argument. Offering a capitalist counterargument is equivalent to the Sadducees' denial of the resurrection of the dead; they neither knew the scriptures nor the power of God. However, despite the weakness of his argument, I have to agree that alleviating world poverty has to be a higher priority for evangelicals.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Reading Wright can sometimes be very frustrating because he many asides. He says, for example, that many of the models of the atonement are valid and necessary for a full picture of what occurred on the cross. Therefore, if one were to criticize him for neglecting penal substitution, he'd point to this one almost parenthetical statement to counter the criticism. However, the whole book assumes Christus Victor as the foundational model of atonement.