Surprised by Hope

I've been reading N.T. Wright's new book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I have thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it. Early in the book he comments on the historicity of the resurrection and I thought his comments were excellent and worth posting (perhaps to entice you to read the book).

I am convinced that the climate of skepticism, which for the last two hundred years has made it unfashionable and even embarrassing to suggest that Jesus's resurrection really happened, was never and is not now itself a neutral thing, sociologically or politically. The intellectual coup d'etat by which the Enlightenment convinced so many that "we now know that dead people don't rise," as though this was a modern discovery rather than simply the reaffirmation of what Homer and Aeschylus had taken for granted, goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment's other proposals, not least that we have now come of age, that God can be kicked upstairs, that we can get on with running the world however we want to, carving it up to our advantage without outside interference. To that extent, the totalitarianisms of the last century were simply among the varied manifestations of a larger totalitarianism of thought and culture against which postmodernity has now, and rightly in my view, rebelled. Who, after all, was it who didn't want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant's last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

Technorati Tags: n.t. wright, resurrection

Comments

[Steve Mac]

Hi mate

Will have to read it. Had a hard drive crash so not been online for a while. Talk soon to you via skype

[Steve Mac]

Hi mate

Will have to read it. Had a hard drive crash so not been online for a while. Talk soon to you via skype

[LLB]

It looks like someone else has been reading the Nietzsche, although if I were to place money on it, I'd say we're slipping into the wrong direction, whether it be Wright or Nietzsche doing the judging. Never underestimate the collective spirit of humanity to choose everything else before stumbling upon (or being smacked up side the head by) the truth.

Thanks for the excerpt