[Hello all. I'm really sorry to have missed church Sunday, especially since it meant an emergency panicked email at 2:45 a.m. to Bryan saying "help, we're all sick and I can't possibly make it." Here's what we would have talked about, if the germs hadn't decided to try their best to take us all out.]

Wright’s Surprised by Hope Study Series, Part 6

The Resurrection: So What?

Wright says, “the resurrection completes the inauguration of God’s kingdom on earth” (234). The point is not that “if you behave yourselves you’ll be able to join me in heaven someday”–rather, “he commands the disciples to go and make it [the kingdom] happen” (235). In other words, resurrection does not signal a guarantee of our eventual escape from the world, it means mission to the world—to bring the kingdom Jesus proclaimed into actuality here and now.

This is the “so-what” of resurrection, and why it matters that Christian belief is in a material, bodily resurrection and not just a “spiritual event” (docetism) or “new sense of faith and hope in our minds/hearts” (Bultmannian demythologizing). These interpretations of resurrection lead only to private, individual spirituality unconcerned with the here and now, with material reality, with the bodily welfare of ourselves and others,–in other words, a lack of concern for all matters of social justice. Or, in Johnny Cash’s words, a bunch of Christians “so heavenly minded, you’re no earthly good.”

Instead, our baptisms–the way in which we share in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus–signal our initiation into the ongoing work of God in the world. Wright’s summary: the revolutionary new world, which began in the resurrection of Jesus—the world where Jesus reigns as Lord, having won the victory over sin and death—has its frontline outposts in those who in baptism have shared his death and resurrection (249). My version (without the hierarchical, martial metaphors, because I dislike hierarchy and war): the transformation of reality from brokenness and sin into the healing of God’s intent for creation has begun—in you, those who have been initiated into this healing reality through baptism which is the sharing of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Descriptions of baptism as sharing Jesus’ death/resurrection can be found in Romans 6, and Colossians 2-3. Wright concludes: “if you through baptism and faith are a resurrection person, living in the new world begun at Easter, energized by the power that raised Jesus from the dead—then you have a responsibility to share in the present risen life of Jesus.” Here, the metaphor of baptism as new life, new birth, actually makes sense—new birth is a way of articulating what it means to be on the other side of resurrection from the dead. And, of course, this undoes the spiritual/material dichotomy of heaven/earth—it means that Christian living is about recognizing that our current physical reality is shot through with the life of heaven (251). Further, the points at which “heaven” and “earth” overlap are…us. And we must recover from our self-induced schizophrenia between the missions of “saving souls” and “doing good”(265). (This is one the things I admire most about the work of Mission Lazarus in Honduras–the doing of good for people’s embodied lives is mission, and my sis and bro-in-law get that right.)

Wright ends with some specific comments about churches so earthly-minded they’re all about heavenly good:

If space, time, and matter are renewed by God and not abandoned, then:

1) the church that takes sacred space seriously will go straight from worship in the sanctuary to debating in the council chamber—discussing matters of twon planning, harmonizing and humanizing beauty in architecture, green spaces, road traffic schemes, environmental work, sustainable farming, proper use of resources.(266)

2) the church that takes sacred time seriously will not split life into worship and work, but seek to bring wisdom and humanizing order to the rhythms of work in offices and shops. (Wright is less specific here but my interpretation of this is not that we should “Christianize” the rhythms of our public life but that we should order our collective cultural timekeeping in ways that honor the sacredness of time, which, I would suggest, includes ideas of Sabbath rest, family responsbilities, as well as, from the other end, a sense of time in which one’s work, one’s vocation, is an expression of worship in that it is part of one’s way of bringing God’s kingdom into existence.)

3) churches that take sacred matter seriously will not just apply this liturgically to “sacraments” but by paying attention to the material needs that must be met in the lives of people: housing, safety, poverty, illness, education.(267)

Well, friends, I have sad, sad news. Due to unforseen circumstances, we need to cancel this week’s edition of our What Does the Bible Say About Gay? Bible study. Those of you who had already planned to come on Thursday night will have to find another way to fill your evening.

Watch a movie. Read a book. Hold hands with someone. Or, if you really want to impress the teacher, you can review the notes from our last two sessions. That way you’ll be extra-prepared when we resume the study on Nov 12 and talk about Romans 1:18-32.

Session 1 Notes: Sodom and Gomorrah
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21020722/Sodom-Study-Notes

Session 2 Notes: The Law
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21370188/Leviticus-Study-Notes

Hi everyone! If you’re on the CCfB email list, then you should have gotten Casey’s email notice that this Sunday, tomorrow, October 25, we are convening at Tom & Regina’s instead of the cafeteria at PS 261. (If you need their address, email them or me or Casey and we will get you some directions.) The school is doing some renovating at the moment, and because (as we are continuing to discuss this week in our Wright series!) we value our bodies and do not wish to endanger them unduly, we are not going to get in the way!

Tom and Regina are always great hosts and I am anticipating a comfy cozy and informal discussion of Wright’s chapter 10-11 tomorrow, on bodily resurrection and notions of afterlife. I am planning on bringing some Dunkin’ Donuts and possibly there is some other CCfBer out there who’s now taken on our usual bagel gig…And really, if hanging out together with donuts and bagels and coffee in comfy chairs is not a preliminary experience of heaven, than what on earth is???

If you were off somewhere living the good life on this holiday weekend Sunday, you missed a great time. It turns out that, regardless of what anyone else may think, the person taking charge in the wake of Joe and Laura’s departure? Clare Bates, age 3.

Thanks to BC’s intervention, however, we did manage to have some discussion Sunday on theology and N.T. Wright. (By the way, Clare keeps saying, “the park was closed. That’s just rude!” which has got to be her quoting BC.)

Since we knew a bunch of people were OOT, I didn’t want to cover new material. So I thought it might be good to pause and talk about what we’ve covered so far. But it’s also been a couple weeks since our last Wright class, so I knew we would need some other way to get back into it. I figured it might work to talk a bit about systematic theology, what I like about what I do, and what that has to do with N.T. Wright. It was maybe a good idea, but we didn’t really get to the Wright stuff. (I had a hard time focusing on what I was doing with all the toddlerish whining and shrieking and everything.)

So here’s a quick sketch of what we did cover in our brief discussion:

definitions for theology: theos=God, ology=study of; God-talk (a sort of literal definition, one of my favorites); and the classic St. Anselm, “faith seeking understanding.”

But what is “systematic theology?” Systematic theology focuses on the connections between doctrines–looks at Christian faith as a “system” in which everything is interconnected.

JTB's quick and dirty systematic theology chart

What you see above is a little sketch I made of the seven traditional loci of theological reflection. The -ologies translate into God, Christ, Holy Spirit, Humanity, Church, Salvation, and “end-times” (in quotes because I hate this phrase, hijacked as it is by the Left Behinders). What’s important about the chart are the connections between the loci–although, I’d like to point out, there are more connections to be made, and your lines of connection might be different than mine. It might be fun to make your own (and if you want to use the nifty bubble chart like I did, you can go to bubble.us for a free online concept mapping tool).

So the point is, what we believe about, say, the church (ecclesiology), connects to our notions of salvation (soteriology) and to our beliefs about Christ (Christology). And what we say about Christ–at the core of the Christian faith–has implications for everything else: our ideas about who God is, how the Spirit works, what human beings are/should be, what/how salvation does, what the church is and what the church should be doing, and what God intends as the end (in both senses, end of time and end-as-purpose) of the world.

So this is what I do all day. Contemplate how these ideas interact, and how changing our God-talk on one point impacts our faith on some other point, or possibly all other points. (Specifically, what happens when “cyborg” becomes part of our God-talk? But I’ll not pursue this now…:) If it sounds lonely, well, it kindof is. If it sounds boring, well, I don’t think so, but then again, this is my own weird vocation, and I prefer concepts to people anyhow. (Except for CCfB people. Of course.)

As I said yesterday, we’re a curious bunch so I don’t have to make a case for using our brains in church or thinking about faith or the value of asking hard questions. We’re sort of all about that. And because that’s true we also know that you can never stop with just one hard question. Instead that first hard question—if you’re really serious about it—is like your brain’s gateway drug into the hard core addiction of systematic theology. And it doesn’t matter what exactly that first question is, whether it’s “does God really exist” or “why do bad things happen” or “are they just BSing me with this Intelligent Design thing because evolution actually seems sort of reasonable” or whatever. All questions lead to all other questions.

So how does this lead back to our discussion of  N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope? Well, the subtitle of the book is: “Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.” What Wright is doing, at least in part, is following the lines of connection between specific doctrines that give us this peculiar Christian notion of hope. What is heaven? That’s an eschatological question, but it’s answered best, in Wright’s opinion, but going to soteriology–the doctrine of resurrection. So Wright follows the systematic connections from this after-life, end-times question to a question about what does it mean to be saved, to be resurrected? And there, he talks about the importance of bodily resurrection–following the lines of connection further, to theological anthropology, arguing that part of what it means to be human is to be embodied. So there is a connection between heaven/hell and our ideas of afterlife and endtimes to our notions of salvation and resurrection, and these notions also tell us what it means to have been created human by God. (This is about where we’re at in our study.) And finally, Wright will move to what I like to call the “so-what” question: what does this mean for us right now, for how we live our lives individually and communally, as the church? So a final connection is made, to a doctrine of the church’s mission (ecclesiology).

If you’re feeling a little dizzy…that’s quite a lot of ground to cover, really. And skipping from one doctrine to another can be disconcerting, if the lines of connection aren’t clear pathways to follow. So my hope was that if we could map some of this out, we could more easily follow along with Wright as he moves from a consideration of resurrection, to what it means to be human, to Christ’s person and work, to a re-worked notion of heaven and afterlife, to a so-what notion of the nature and mission of the church in this world.