Lecture - NT Wright: Resurrection and the Renewal of Creation co-sponsored Baylor’s Truett Seminary

[Music] so how do you introduce Tom right most of you know him at least know of his writings or you wouldn't have filled up the registration within 30 minutes of it opening online so I thought well I could talk about who he is you know this is a gentleman who's been in academia he's been a bishop and a pastor he's preached he's counseled he's gone back into academia he's done so many things he's not in one singular aspect of of a Christian vocation he's in all of them so I thought I could introduce him as being all right would you join me in welcoming NT Tom right thank you very much very much for that extraordinary welcome and thanks to Mark and his family and his colleagues and thanks to Todd still and all the good folks from Truett as well and it's a great privilege to be able to do this lecture to celebrate this new venture which is going forward and I've been delighted to hear about it as it's been mooted and now the reality is upon us and you will appreciate I normally start a lecture with something a bit funny humorous whatever you've just had that bit already so I can pass on that and yeah my theme is resurrection and the renewal of creation a nice little Christian theme you know thought I attended a funeral not long ago was actually very poignant for me because it was a God son of mine a bright young man with a lovely family cruel his truck down with cancer in his mid-30s and the funeral sent me thinking about whether the Western Church had really got it right it was a wonderful service in many ways it was in Cambridge in England where the family lived there was vibrant singing as big church and it was packed lots of people knew this splendid young man there was wise and consoling teaching not least a brave and funny and poignant tribute from the young widow herself that took some doing and there were hundreds of people there from many different walks of life because this young man my beloved godson his life had touched many many people and it was in all sorts of ways a deeply Christian funeral and I was glad and proud to be there but there was one note missing resurrection the word resurrection itself came in the liturgy right at the start because in the Anglican Church one of the things you do is there are sentences from Scripture which you read as the coffin is being brought into the church I am the resurrection and the life says the Lord those who believe in me though they die yet shall they live and so on it's actually a very moving moment and that same sentence was repeated an hour and some later near the end of the service with no explanation but the whole of the rest of the service could have been summarized in the following passage which I take from a well-known first century writer quote all of us are sojourners here and strangers and exiles the soul is an exile and a wanderer which has left heaven for earth and life on earth as on an island buffeted by the seas imprisoned within the body I can i stir in its shell end of quote and the writer the same writer goes on to speak of those like Socrates who are happy to depart this life for the heaven from which they had come many of the hymns and prayers and readings that the funeral expressed something like this our late friend my godson had gone home at last nobody seemed to notice that they were expressing not first century Christian faith but first century platonism that quotation came from one of the great philosophers and essayists of the late first century Plutarch a pagan priest at the shrine at Delphi a much traveled and widely read man of letters it is astonishing to me that so many people in today's Western Church would recognize his view as their own without realizing for a moment just how different they are from what all the early Christians believed you see the same problem from another angle if you consider the way that Christians talk about and celebrate Easter day we and the Western churches again maybe it not in your traditions but in many that I'm familiar with we are good at commemorating Lent Oh forty days we've gotta batten down the hatches and maybe give something up and be a bit Solomon's on and in my tradition we know how to keep Palm Sunday we go into Holy Week we journey with Jesus through Maundy Thursday and all the way to the foot of the cross on Good Friday itself and then a couple of days later we have glorious Easter morning celebrations but that's about it we all go off on holiday and many of the sermons certainly in my tradition but many of the sermons you will hear on East today are not about resurrection but about our hope of going to heaven and having life after death with Jesus and we don't keep a 40-day feast to match the forty day fast of Lent I think we should is it any wonder that people in the wider world don't realize that we Christians supposed to be about joy you know Lovejoy P choice of fruit of the Spirit come on how'd you do that well we maybe need to kick-start stuff I'll come back to that because Easter day is not simply the happy ending after the sad and dark story of Holy Week Easter is the start of something it isn't the ending the four Gospels and they're very interesting literary creations the four Gospels tell the story of Easter day as the beginning of something because it comes at the end of their books we think that it's rounding off the story that's it end of conversation Jesus been raised from the dead he's gone to heaven and that's it no the way they tell the story has a sort of dot-dot-dot to it that something new has happened and where is it going we have thus in effect fitted Jesus and even his resurrection into the story that our Western churches have had all along of the present world as the preparation for the various options of life after death in the traditional scheme heaven or hell and in the case of traditional Catholic teaching for purgatory just in case as anyone who's interested in there let me add in square brackets a rather curious little note here because people if you know anything about theology you know that medieval Catholicism was big on purgatory that if you're ain't gonna end up in heaven you're gonna have to be cleaned up and sorted out and possibly punished a bit as well for all the things that you've gone on doing and so you go through a long very unpleasant thing called purgatory before finally you're allowed into heaven that's the the simple way of looking at how it works Dante in his famous poem you have the three paths the Paradise the purgatory and of course the hell but many Catholic theologians today have radically revised that Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict have radically modified purgatory and have spoken of what for Paul says in 1st Corinthians 3 a moment of burning of fire through which all that remains sinful in us will be burned up in a moment or they have said well after death we will all be given a glimpse of the way in which the multiple evils that we have done have brought evil into the world and have harmed other people and that will be a terrible moment through which we have to pass to take responsibility for who we are the point is not to debate those ideas the point is that there's a two leading 20th century Catholic 20 and 21st century Catholic theologians who have rejected the traditional idea of a chronological period of punishment and purgation going on unfortunately their ideas have not spread yet through the rest of the Roman Church but that's the square brackets but I think the part of our problem in the Western churches has been that in the 16th century the Reformers had the urgent need to reject purgatory to say no we don't believe in that Jesus has died for our sins we do not need to be punished for them again and the death itself finishes off everything in us that is still not as it should be that's that the normal Reformation line but the Reformers and their successors having done that few kept the traditional heaven and hell' scheme from Dante from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel etc as Carl Bart said the Reformers never really sorted out their eschatology I didn't actually think Bart himself did either and perhaps we can do better my point is this in the New Testament we have a very different picture we don't find a life after death in heaven we find what I've called in a very simple phrase where people find it hard to get hold of life after life after death a newly embodied life in a newly reconstituted creation first you die then there is whatever you gonna call it life after death and then there is new creation and with it bodily resurrection life after life after death and we see in the New Testament Jesus resurrection not as the happy ending after the crucifixion no to be sure - trivial level it functions like that but as the launching of nothing less than new creation itself so what I want to do in the next at a while building on some of my earlier works and tracking with a theme from my recent Gifford lectures in Aberdeen which by the way I think last time I was here I did a single attempt at a summary in a lecture of what I was going to say in the Gifford so thank you that I had the chance to run some ideas here before an intelligent audience before I then put them before a British university and and so III want to track some of this and trace out how that works and apply it to some aspects of our present life and the challenges that now faces in our confused and dangerous world and not apologizing for repeating and building on some of the things that I've said in earlier books particularly as Mark said surprised by hope it's clear to me that even the among those who've understood what I've been saying intellectually they're still often a gap with how it works out in practice I was saying to mark before we're all familiar if your teachers with the student who says while I was in class for a moment it all made sense and then when I walked out the door my brain flicked back into default mode and I couldn't even remember quite what it was that you'd said okay we go through it again but that's what I'm doing so resurrection in the first century what did what's the word mean the Greek word for resurrection is an ass status which is literally an up standing and here's the key point in the world of the first century Anastasis never referred to what we think of as life after death or to put it the other way around when people talked as they often did about life after death life immediately after death or what will happen to us when we die they never used the word Anastasis resurrection was not something that happened to you immediately after you died unless like Lazarus three or four days later you were brought back to life even in Jesus case though as in Lazarus's case there was a short period of being dead Jesus did not get raised from the dead immediately after he died where is he in between good question the early church worried about that Jesus was dead and was then raised on Easter day two new bodily life life after life after death and the whole New Testament and all the great Christian teachers for centuries after that taught the same thing that what God did for Jesus on Easter day we'll do for all his people at the end raising them to new bodily life to share in the new bodily life of his new world but as the gospel moved away from its Jewish roots and into the Greek world of people like Plutarch this was harder and harder to cling on to most of the early fathers did cling on to it for some centuries it's striking in fact that the New Testament isn't terribly interested in what happens to people immediately after they die that that's what we are all interested you go to a funeral and preach at a funeral lawyer counseling people who've been bereaved they want where is she now where is he now it's a natural question the New Testament doesn't give you much help there are a few hints Luke 23 Jesus says to the brigand on the cross next to him that he will be with him in paradise but that's today he says and paradise is not the ultimate destination it is the temporary blissful dwelling while you await the ultimate destination and for Jesus that destination came three days later the brigand like all others is still waiting just to make that clear Paul says in first Corinthians that the Messiah rises as the firstfruits you know what the firstfruits is it's the sign that there's a great harvest yet to come and at his coming at his parasya those who belong to him will rise as he has been raised Paul makes no mention of any others who already share there is in life all others come later at the parousia okay Jesus tells the disciples in the upper room john 14 a passage i've often used in counseling people who are facing death that he is going to prepare a place for them and he will return to take them to himself yes but of course this is the same jesus who a few chapters earlier had said that on the last day the Dead will hear the voice of the Son of Man and will be raised bodily to new life these two fit together Jesus will take his people to be with him for the moment and then when the time comes he will give them new bodily life in his new world this is like what Paul says in Philippians chapter 1 my desire is to depart and be with the Messiah which is far better we want to say hang on port just stop right there well what do you mean where will that be what sort of a creature will you be because you won't be embodied or will you be or how does that work it doesn't say the New Testament has an extraordinary silence and that and when the early Christians do refer to people who have already died but have not been raised it's only the book of Revelation in chapter 6 and chapter 20 that speaks to them as Souls and it's clear that they don't mean that in a platonic sense it's the souls under the altar who are saying how long O Lord how long they're waiting the early Christian view is that we humans are whole creatures body included and that after death we are in that sense naked awaiting the further clothing of the Resurrection not heading off as a disembodied soul to a non spatio-temporal heaven and in that interim period the Holy Spirit who has indwelt Christians will continue to hold their real self in the close presence of Jesus until the spirit then gives new life to their physical bodies this by the way I think complete aside but it's kind of curious one this I think is is part of why we humans wear clothes we know we are made for something more than what we presently are isn't that interesting there's an entire fashion industry waiting for that theology to sustain it now all this is rooted in the view of Resurrection which is held by many Jews though not all in the first century period the Sadducees don't believe in resurrection that's partly because resurrection is a political doctrine if God is going to renew this world and you can trust him to do that then whatever you need to do in the present in the service of the kingdom of God even if it results in your death that's okay because God is gonna sort it out the Sadducees of the aristocracy don't like that one little bit I used to think when I was a kid hearing about Sadducees and Pharisees the Sadducees didn't believe the resurrection the Pharisees did I used to think that because the people I knew who didn't believe in the resurrection of the Liberals that that meant that the Sadducees were the Liberals and the Pharisees with the concept is no the Sadducees were the Conservatives resurrection they said was a new fangled and dangerous doctrine people like those funny jumped up Pharisees they believed that sort of thing we need to get I mean you know conservative and liberal if these excuse me if there's a hopelessly inadequate labels to do any job actually those who have ears can hear and so in in the period we're talking about ever since the book of Daniel and then the book we call second Maccabees if you haven't got a Bible with an Apocrypha in it get hold of an Apocrypha from somewhere and read second Maccabees the hints and guesses from earlier texts have become explicit under two constraints now these are vital if were to understand why resurrection matters and what it means today the two constraints theological constraints deep within Israel scriptures and agonized over in the Second Temple period the two constraints are the goodness of creation on the one hand and God's commitment to justice on the other goodness of creation God is the good creator and God is committed to putting things right you see this in the stories of the Maccabean martyrs in second Maccabees when in the 160s BC they are being tortured to death by the Syrian pagan King for their refusal to compromise their ancestral way of life and they say again and again that they worship and serve the God who made heaven and earth the creator of all they are not worshiping a local or tribal God or one who doesn't care about the way the world is they belong to the one who made it all in the first place and along with creation goes justice as the Psalms and prophets insist Israel's God cares passionately about putting right that which is wrong in the world doesn't say forget the world and escape you can go somewhere else no we in the West have often reduced this putting right to the notion of judgment in a negative sense seeing that in terms of punishment from his deeds but in the Hebrew Scriptures Psalms like 96 and 98 those glorious passages many other places to judgment is a joyous thing a cause for celebration because it means that Israel's God is gonna come back and sort out the mess he's coming to put things right to right wrongs to straighten what has become crooked to repair and rebuild what has been torn down justice means making things right at last getting the original creational project back on track so put creation and justice side-by-side with in the present world of sorrow and suffering and sin what do we have certainly not the Platonic for picture where the present world can go to hell while human souls are some of them anyway allowed to escape what use is that that simply ignores the goodness of the original creation certainly not the Epicurean or stoic positions where the world is either going just rumbling on doing its own thing Epicureanism or is going round and round in a great cycle of being stoicism without anything ever really changing what uses that that ignores the original goodness of creation and of the creator's intention and the divine longing to put it all right at last this is the biblical hope that the God who made the world will put it right now quite obviously that hasn't happened yet blance that the newspapers television will confirm that that's why I reject by the way the idea put about by some according to which when we die we get as it were fast-tracked straight into God's ultimate future we leap over the time in between no the new creation will not be a crear Co ex nihilo a creation out of nothing God won't forget this world and make a total new one it will be a crayon Co X of Ettore a creation out of the old that's what Paul says in Romans 8 the creation itself will be set free from its bondage it's slavery to decay into the freedom that comes when God's children live Laura fide it will be the rescue and redemption and reestablishment of the present creation that hasn't happened yet the resurrection of all God's people is therefore not happen either footnote I'm sure somebody is scribbling right now what about those corpses that come out of the tomb at the end of Matthew's Gospel good question if anyone has got a good answer for it I like to know it is but the biblical messages that the project has begun in a sense it began when God called Abraham but that in the next two thousand years is best seen as preparation in a truer sense it began began when through Jesus God overthrew the dark powers that have spoiled and corrupted his beautiful world and particularly the beautiful lives of precious image bearing human beings who were made to be the crown of creation the agents through whom God would bring his beauty and justice into the world the project happened through Jesus kingdom work which reached its climax on the cross and because the power of death was defeated on the cross that opened the way for creation to be set free from its slavery to decay from its corruption and death starting with Jesus own physical body Easter is the beginning that's why the bodily resurrection of Jesus matters so much generations of liberal theologians have tried to play it down or deny it altogether as though it was just a kind of an accretion an early superstition which we can now do without that represents by the way a radical D Judaizing as well as D historicizing move and it involves undoing one or both of the pillar themes if God is the good creator and if at the last he will put everything right resurrection is going to be the result nobody saw Jesus resurrection coming ahead of time despite the fact that he'd been trying to explain it to his followers despite the fact that when the disciples thought about it they did see all kinds of biblical texts which had pointed that way but which they had never read like that before some of the key texts in the early church which when they look back they saw resurrection had God says to David in 2nd samuel 7 when you've lined down laying down with your father's i will raise up your seed after you who will sit on your throne I will be his father and he will be my son as far as I know no Jewish texts known to us prior to Christianity saw in that I will raise up a prediction that great David's greater son will be raised from the dead the early Christians said oh my goodness look at that it was there all along so that is the real message of Easter morning as is perhaps clearest in John's Gospel in John the resurrection chapter chapter 20 twice tells us emphatically that this was the first day of the week he says it right at the start of the of the chapter it doesn't always emerge in the English translations but that it is that the first words of chapter 20 and john are on the first day of the week very early Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and she found the tomb empty and met the Risen Jesus and supposed that he was the gardener which was the right mistake to make this is a new Genesis we've got here first day of the week and then John says it again in the evening verse 19 of chapter 20 and on the first day of the week in the evening where the doors were locked for fear of the Judeans Jesus came to breathe peace and power and his own spirit upon them john has framed these scenes within his gospel which begins by evoking Genesis 1 itself in such a way as to say this is the launching of the new creation in which the divine intention for the whole creation from the beginning is at last fulfilled and that's why in one of the greatest Christian poems of all time and by the way I think Christian theology started with poetry as poetry like music enables you to say two or three things at once ordinary prose you can't you have to say a then B then C and then you say by the way these all belong together poetry can do that by matching and rhyming and so on Paul writes to the Colossians Jesus is the beginning the firstborn from the dead so that in everything he might be preeminent he is the image of the invisible God the firstborn of all creation in him and through him and for him all things were created study Colossians 1 1 to 15 it says it all really we will never understand the gospel unless we see it as a great narrative the narrative which finds its way through the dark night of the long years of Israel's desolation and then bursts out with new life on Easter morning and of course it doesn't end there it only makes sense if having been launched the new creation is then put to work in the world that is the primary task of the Holy Spirit in the great Creed's we say I believe in the Holy Spirit the Lord and giver of life there's new life and if the Holy Spirit is given it so that we can not only have life ourselves but be life bring us into the world and we can get a firm handle on what that means if we remember those two key points creation and justice a good world spoiled by hostile and destructive forces but now to be remade a world to be brought through death and hope the other side into a new kind of life which death can no longer touch and though the Spirit the Holy Spirit can and does work in a thousand different ways of which we only hear the rustle of the passing wind one of the primary ways the Spirit works is of course through the humble prayerful servants of Jesus whose hearts have been renewed whose minds have been enlightened by the powerful gospel so that they not only believe in Jesus resurrection and hence in his victory over the dark powers on the cross but that they become resurrection people both signs and agents of the new life which will one day flood the whole creation and the key areas for their work will be creation and justice beauty and justice imitating and drawing from God the lavish Creator anticipating God's final putting right of all things I'll come back to that but before we can say more about this we need to look at the biblical witness to the ultimate divine design what will this creation actually B so where is the gospel narrative ultimately going to start again as it were if we were to take our cue from much modern Western Christianity whether Catholic or Protestant whether charismatic or evangelical whether liberal or conservative you might well imagine that the ultimate goal would be to have a great many saved souls living in heaven with Jesus with the Trinity in fact and the biblical language about ruling that Jesus people will somehow share his reign or his rule is often passed over not in all traditions some have really highlighted that but this like resurrection itself is a non-negotiable part of the package from Genesis 1 onwards humans were made to rule in God's creation to rule of course not bullying or brashley but with gentle stewardship reflecting the creator's lavish and generous and careful love to enable creation to be fruitful to flourish not to squash it or trample it or exploit it and this is reaffirmed in Psalm 8 and it's powerfully fulfilled in the stories of Jesus in the Gospels when his mighty works speak just as much about his true humanity as they do about his divinity though that's a subject for another day and it's what we see particularly in the various approaches to Jesus ascension for which we need to allow the resurrection itself to reconstruct our entire cosmology because with Jesus we realize that what we call heaven God's space and what we call Earth our space are not a million miles apart that's epicureanism that's where Western culture has been for the last three or four hundred years we've been fooled by that we've just drunk it in and not questioned it know heaven and earth are designed to overlap and interlock they work together they were always meant to we humans are created for the specific purpose of standing at the threshold between the two summing up creations praises before the creator and exercising responsible delegated authority on his behalf over such bits of the world as may be entrusted to us starting by the way with our own bodies anyway the goal of the narrative is then summed up gloriously in Ephesians 1 if he's is 1/10 God's desire and design was to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on earth if only the churches of the Reformation had taken Ephesians instead of Galatians as their primary text in Galatians would agree with that but it was possible to read Galatians in a way which fitted into the Western medieval soteriology Ephesians is very clear the point is that heaven and earth belong together you don't have to leave one to go to the other God want and in Jesus they are already together Jesus holds them together he is the ultimate heaven and earth person the truly human being who is simultaneously and gloriously the living embodiment of Israel's God and to realize that that's not even a paradox that was the intention all along this is one of the reasons I think why liberal Protestant scholars haven't wanted Ephesians to be written by some Paul it doesn't fit the dualist paradigm that has dominated those traditions so much the worse for those traditions it belongs very well with the larger Paul I envisioned for instance in Galatians where Paul speaks of new creation the new world that has come about because God has Galatians 1:4 rescued us from the present evil age because Paul picks up from his Jewish world not only the idea of heaven and earth overlapping but of a present evil age which is going on and of an age to come which God has long promised which will put right everything that is wrong in present age of sin and sorrow and sickness and death and in the gospel Paul believes in this second overlap as well just as in some quite a lot of Jewish thought every Sabbath is a genuine anticipation of the age to come it's God's future suddenly emerging mysteriously in the present so in the Gospel as with Jesus own teaching the age to come has been launched confusingly within the present evil age so that though the present age rumbles on and we still sin and die the power of God's age to come has already been let loose by the Spirit in the present time so the goal which was articulated briefly in Ephesians 1 is then spelled out much more fully and to pore line passages and to Johannine ones I'll just refer to them briefly you can always go and read them pray them through more fully in Paul the famous passages of Romans 8 and first Corinthians 15 and the Johanna in passages John 20 and 21 I've already mentioned that and Revelation 21 and 22 the vision of the New Jerusalem and just say a word about each of those Romans 8 is one of the glories of the Christian faith one of the most astonishing pieces of writing when I was Bishop of Durham I used to interview candidates for parish jobs and one of my standard questions was to say if you could just take one or two chapters of the Bible to a desert island with you what would they be I say to make it a little more significant you've already got Romans 8 and John 20 for our purposes the passage which matters most in Romans 80s verses 18 through 30 they are of course rooted in the earlier parts of the chapter and the whole letter but what we note above all I've already quoted it is that they have to do not with the abandonment of creation but with its rescue and renewal God made this world Anna's people often say he didn't make junk we have messed up this world and there are dark forces behind that as well as not just human agency but God is the righteous judge who will ultimately put it all straight that's the great message of Romans isn't it the righteousness of God God's justice his sovereign saving covenant leaf a covenant Allah faithful justice God is apparently challenged beyond hope by the failure of the human race Israel included you know God called humans to be his wise agents in taking forward his purposes for creation and when humans messed up and worshipped idols he didn't say oh well we'll forget that then actually he nearly did with Noah but the point about Noah is that he didn't actually say that and likewise then God calls Abraham to take forward his purposes for rescuing the world and when Abraham's people fail as well because they were in Adam as well as the promise bearing people God doesn't say as most Christian traditions have imagined he said oh well we'll forget that into it differently I'll just send Jesus that's the narrative that many many people have in their heads marson-knight basically know the central message is that God has fulfilled his purposes for Israel in Jesus the representative Messiah and God has thereby fulfills his purposes for the human race the one who was totally open to God totally devoted to God and was able to carry forward God's saving purposes and God's human purposes God has come in the person of Jesus to take the force of human ruin and Israel's disaster on to himself and to carve out a way through and on to rescue and renewal and the central message romans 8 is that God will do for the whole creation at last what he did for Jesus at Easter taking the physical reality that had been broken and smashed beyond belief and rescuing it and restoring it so that it wasn't just even in the same state as before but was actually renewed having gone out beyond the reach of corruption and decay altogether of course we find it so difficult to get our minds around we are used to all physical reality up to and even including rock hard things like diamonds being ultimately subject to decay you can split and smash them and human bodies of course far more so for us physical reality always seems vulnerable destructible corruptible but we are promised in God's new world is a non corruptible physicality we are promised that for our own very bodies read Romans 6 and see it's very explicit in Romans 8 we are promised it for the entire new creation hard to get your head around yeah the only way I know is to keep reading the stories of Jesus resurrection and if they reduce you to wandering Grateful silence fine first Corinthians 15 verses 20 to 28 they're in an astonishing passage built up from multiple scriptural references Paul unfolds the promise contained in Jesus resurrection as we saw Jesus is the firstfruits and at his second coming all his people will be raised to share his new kind of life after a time of resting and patient waiting there Paul doesn't stress that here and then Paul explains the present time is the overlap the time when the age to come has broken in while the present evil age is still going on why is there this overlap why doesn't God finish the job right away because as Paul and others explain God's rescue operation is an act of love and God is unwilling to foreclose on the many who are presently being wooed and won by the gospel as in the Sermon on the Mount I've said this many many times I think it bears repetition as in the Sermon on the Mount when God wants to rescue and transform the world to establish his sovereign and saving rule over it for which the short hand is the kingdom of God he doesn't send in the tanks and smash the opposition on the spot he sends in the poor and the meek and the mourners and the hungry for justice people in the poor in art and the world is changed that's how Jesus presents sovereignty on earth is implemented it really as slaves are free the public conscience is actually transformed there's a long way to go but there are real signs of hope in the real world so Paul describes the present time then in terms of the ongoing battle in which the Messiah will implement the victory he won on the cross he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet he says now two things are important here first this is the debate Judy Gondry and I were having very briefly this afternoon in here the Messiah is already reigning as in Matthew 28 Jesus possesses all authority in heaven and on earth it has been given to him the church has been quite content to think of Jesus possessing all authority in heaven I think we've hardly begun to figure out what it might mean that he has all authority on earth it means what it means in the Sermon on the Mount actually but the point is that the reign of Jesus is active it's got a goal in view that hasn't yet been reached but one day will be and the goal in question is the utter destruction of all the enemies which are the dark spiritual forces that destroy creation the last enemy to be destroyed is death and that can only mean the creation of a new world in which death itself has been swallowed up in victory now this vision is so unlike the normal Western vision of going to heaven the perhaps it isn't surprising that it's often not even glimpsed let alone grasped and if you say as many people do that the body is cast aside and the soul goes to heaven that is not the defeat of death that is merely the description of death that's in fact the straightforward Platonic theory about what death is it's not the Jewish or Christian theory about how death is overthrown beware of colluding with death Paul says that death will be abolished and this will mean a new creation no longer subject to decay and corruption so that at last first Corinthians 15 28 God will be all-in-all yes I think this works God has made a world that is other than himself why would a good God do that the answer in Scripture is that God in the mystery of his own complex inner life is the god of utter self giving love and his intention is that he will in the end embrace the whole creation within that love without squashing it so that it ceases to be itself says it ceases to be his beautiful creation which is other than him that's how love works God will be both other than the world and filling it with his presence what we presently know in the church and as individual Christians that the Spirit dwells within us so that God is both utterly different from us and dangerously worryingly intimately present within us that's God's desire and design for the whole creation there is a world of good theology waiting to be unpacked there but not today the vision of the new creation in the johanan literature is even more evocative I've already spoken of the first day in John 20 which shows that for John the Evangelist the resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the new creation and works out for John through those vivid scenes in which Jesus comforts Mary and dries her tears Jesus challenges Thomas and puts an end to his doubts reach your hand out and put it into my hand and Jesus then 21 confronts Simon Peter and gives him forgiveness and fresh commission all those a part of what resurrection means and when we then turn to the revelation of John we see this in its ultimate form please note the last despite the medieval Mystery Plays which regularly gloriously get it wrong the last scene in the Bible is not saved souls going up to heaven somewhere in the sky it's the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth so that the dwelling of God is with humans the ultimate denial of all Gnosticism which rejects the goodness of the present order I once saw a staged performance of Verdi's Requiem in the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden it was beautifully done with the chorus quietly acting out what the music was saying and in the libera made a morte aeterna save me O God from eternal death the choir one by one were lighting candles down at the bottom on the stage level and then slowly making their way up still singing up staircases either side until they were all upstairs there were other twists of that as well but I sat there thinking this is brilliant theatre and it's lousy theology we have spoken so often about salvation about God's purpose in terms of us getting to be with God and we've forgotten that the way that Genesis and Exodus work is that the great narrative art from Genesis 1 to Exodus 40 is about how can there be a rescued people in whose midst God can come and live that's the story and when John says that the first heaven and the first earth had passed away together with the sea what he means is that the first heaven on earth our corruptible and corrupted and that the corruptible state has been done away says a radical transformation in order that the reality of God's good creation will remain and in John's apocalyptic imagery the sea as in much Jewish thought is the dark untamed source of evil and chaos and John says there is no more sea because if the sea has gone in the symbolic world of what he's saying there is no chance of evil and corruption entering once more producing a second horrible cycle of sin and death needing a further Redemption no there is no snake in the Garden City the new creation is for keeps it's guaranteed by Jesus resurrection from the dead the point to grasp and I've been told by many people that our Western traditions are still so strong that even if they glimpse it they can't quite hang on to it is that the new creation is not a matter of us being taken away to a different sort of place but by Jesus coming back to transform the present world into the place he wants it to be and to transform us into being the people he wants us to be and the classic text for this much misunderstood is Philippians 3 verses 20 and 21 Paul again drawing on the Psalms says we are citizens of heaven and from heaven we await the Savior now what does that mean I've heard well reputed theologians including at least one who has lectured in this place I have words with about that after his park actually saying that the citizens of heaven thing means that like Roman citizens and Philip I they would one day go back home to Rome so we are citizens of heaven this is Plutarch it's not Paul and it's not how Roman citizenship work the reason that Philip I was a Roman colony was precisely that Rome didn't want all those demobilized soldiers back in Rome Rome was overcrowded and had a food shortage they certainly didn't want those soldiers all coming back so they made colonies then said you must be agents of Roman culture there in northern Greece where you live that's house the citizens language we are citizens of heaven so that we can be agents of heavens culture and colonizing here on this earth until the day when Jesus comes and written and completes that whole process and restores us us to our glorious bodies and gives us our glorious new bodies in the process now all of this points to our present life and calling in quite dramatic ways once we realize and celebrate the fact that Jesus is already raining and remember that in the Gospels one of the things that's going on throughout is the redefinition of power Jesus has to James and John the rulers of this world do it one way they bully and Harry and beat people up to get their way we're gonna do it the other way anyone who wants to be great must be your servant miss Peters that's real power Paul explores that in 2 corinthians so what does it mean to say Jesus is already ruling on earth it means the Sermon on the Mount it means 2 Corinthians it means power through weakness because once we realize and celebrate the fact that Jesus is already raining we can start to learn in prayer and liturgy to celebrate his victory in new ways and to invoke it in praise and prayer bringing genuine new signs of life of new creation to birth in the present world so many Western Christians have fixed their eyes on a distant and escapist heaven that though they may still sense a calling to make a difference in the present world thank God a lot of people with that going to have in theology still know in their bones that they're supposed to be working in the present world they have no larger theological framework within which to understand that vocation in fact the resurrection of Jesus supplies exactly that when I was Bishop of Durham I was aware of something that pursues me some parishes in the diocese which concentrated on saving souls and thought that any attempt to make the world a better place was social workers social work which we should leave to the politicians and I was aware of other parishes which were determined to follow Jesus in feeding the hungry and looking after the poor and the weak but then had no idea what Jesus death and resurrection were all about and part of my job as bishop I think was to interpret them to one another and to show them the larger whole within which the whole thing makes sense for a start we could note the way in which ephesians follows through on that statement in the first chapter that god's plan was to sum up and unite all things in heaven on earth in the messiah for paul that has all kinds of spin-offs for the church's life and work in the present as well as the future the churches to model the new creation in the power of the Spirit which means for a start chapter 2 Jew and Gentile coming together in the single new temple the church in which God lives by the spirit that's the exodus 40 moment and this startling and unprecedented new reality will shock the rulers of the world chapter 3 they had tried for centuries to unite people under their rule Alexander the Great tried it Julius Caesar was trying it etc etc they couldn't do it the only person who's been able to unite totally disparate people under his rule is Jesus and as the church lives like there's still a major challenge for us today it's a sign to the world that Jesus is already it's true Lord and then in the second half of the letter I was talking about this afternoon Paul expands the twin themes of unity and holiness these are still massively challenging for churches and felish of all kinds and I suspect it's partly because we've just given up trying that we then find resurrection being shrunk to being just an odd word for life after death or the mere happy ending after the cross but in particular in chapter 5 Paul sketches one of the points where unity and holiness are most striking in the Christian vision of marriage seen as a sign and potent symbol a sacrament no less of the original creation now renewed in Jesus the Messiah John hints at this too in his second chapter the wedding at Cana in Galilee so those are some pointers to the poor line vision of restored creation the way in which the resurrection of Jesus is to work out through the spirit in the present renewal of creation which will always be partial but is a genuine anticipation of the final renewal still to come and hidden in Ephesians 3 we find that blueprint for the present renewal through social and political life that the church in its unity and holiness is called to be the sign that Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't of course Caesar comes in many forms in the gods that are worshiped today as always the gods of money and power and sex the gods of a self-centered self fulfillment and self-realization major religion of our time of course the body of Christ as a whole with every Christian called to play his or her part and to face our own personal battles and struggles as we do so is to show the world and its rulers that there is a different way to be human the way of the Sermon on the Mount the way of following Jesus in the power of the Spirit thank God that the church has been doing this throughout history and still is it never makes the news headlines but it's going on in towns and villages near you it's going on around the corner in the wrong bits of town often enough where Saints and heroes and heroines are actually doing new creation in the places that need it I worry again though that in many Western churches both Catholic and Protestant the emphasis is still on how I get to heaven with witness to the world as just an incidental afterthought rather than on new creation being launched and now being put to work this has obvious implications in the political sphere which will vary widely from place to place I did a different version of this lecture a few weeks ago for a theological conference in Poland sadly I wasn't able to go there but I recorded it and played it to the most very much aware in thinking about what I was going to say to you and think about what you can say to them the two situations are very very different and that it's up to people in their own situations to say prayerfully Lord please show us what new creation would mean in our own context in countries like mine the churches are still in theory free to live their lives and bear witness they're doing that with mixed success the chief opposition tends to come from the media because the media of a wants to be the ones who hold up the mirror to power who tell the powerful what they shouldn't shouldn't be doing and they don't like the church is trying to do it instead and the churches have gone along for the ride shame on us this will vary but the point is that the church is to demonstrate the signs of new life which are the genuine anticipations of the new-age breaking in already and ever since the Enlightenment the social cultural political forces of the Western world have stolen the church's clothes now we're going to do health care we're going to do education you church you used to do that well we're doing it now and in particular we're going to run the world we're going to do power and we don't want you telling us about it and the judge said that's all right we will teach people how to say their prayers and go to heaven and please will you just run the world no excuse me and in particular the fact that God has renewed creation in Jesus and intends to renew it from top to bottom in the end should have immediate implications for our care of the planet if someone gave you a wonderful painting to decorate your home it wouldn't be very respectful respectful if you used it as a dartboard or the chalkboard for the kids to draw on and if someone said oh that didn't matter because the original artist will come one day and he'll amend it and clean it all up you might think that was missing the point but that's how we've often treated God's good creation the more we know about how our planet works the more we see just how badly we its present caretakers have been looking after it there are of course many faddish and silliest solutions there we all know that I expect just as there are in every walk of life but that doesn't mean that the church can go slow on its responsibilities to understand our human vocation as stewards of creation and to lead the way in responsible living ourselves and in encouraging and lobbying for policies which will bring a measure of God's order to his wonderful but wounded world now the mysterious heart of all this is the church's life of prayer and sacrament if we start with a view of God in the world in which they're miles apart from each other then prayer becomes shouting up into the sky sacrament becomes a strange ritual with possible benefit as a visual aid to faith but not much more but we shouldn't start with that view if we begin with the resurrection we should start with the cosmology that says heaven and earth are meant to overlap and interlock and we humans are supposed to be standing at the dangerous place where that happens we should start with the eschatology that says that the present age has somehow been invaded is that the right word by the long-promised age to come and that we humans are once more called to live and work at the very place where those tectonic plates are grinding against one another it's why it's so dangerous that's why we need to pray for one others we do it and this takes us back to Romans 8 when we stand up those two points of overlap heaven and earth present and future we find ourselves groaning in prayer often without knowing exactly what it is we ought to be praying for I suspect that some of you feel exactly like that with your present political situation and then realizing with Paul to remind us that exactly there and then the Spirit is groaning within us and the father is listening and that in that process we are being shaped according to the pattern of the beloved son so that the Christian life of prayer and sacrament draws together all other obligations and vocations and gives them new depth and focus and at the same time that rhythm of life of standing where heaven and earth overlap where present and future bump into one another flows out into the world of service service to the poor and desolate for whom the whole scripture from the Torah and Psalms to Jesus and revelation has special consent Matthew 25 learning to meet Jesus himself in the faces of the poor is one lesson among many which belong exactly here to conclude could say much more let me just react to things from creation and justice I've said this here and there but I'm just gonna say it briefly if we believe that at the end God will put all things right we'll do justice in that positive creative healing restorative sense and if we believe that when God raised Jesus from the dead he did exactly that close up and personal in the one human being who represented and stood in for everyone else then we cannot hold back from the imperative to do justice in this full sense at every opportunity you know we must in the power of the Spirit we must name and shame the injustice --is that are still rampant and we must work for their abolition we must take care that in our personal lives particularly in the lives of our churches injustice is rooted out only if we are doing this will it make any sense to preach and teach about God's new creation about the way in which Jesus resurrection resonates out into the renewal the putting right of creation justice and then creation itself God making a beautiful world well beauty if we believe that God made a beautiful world which has been spoiled in so many ways but which still resonates with his love and power and if we believe that in Jesus God has done the most beautiful thing imaginable why else would so many artists and musicians devote their best efforts to setting it forth for our or and contemplation then we must make sure as far as we can in our churches in our personal lives and in the wider communities where we have influence we are working to foster and celebrate art and music and dance and drama and poetry sculpture whatever else we can because if the church is colluding with ugliness don't talk to me about modern hymns if the church is not recognizing and celebrating and giving opportunities for the many artistic gifts of its many members then we shouldn't be surprised if people find it hard to believe us when we say that Jesus resurrection has launched a new world in which creation is being renewed until the earth is filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea that's the goal justice and beauty resurrection point the way by the power of the Spirit our calling is to be resurrection people looking back to Jesus himself in his victory and under his guidance and commission bringing true signs of renewal into his creation today and every day thank you in the new creation where God has righted the wrongs and fixed what is broken and where we will be resurrected could you history repeat itself and humans choose a life of sin again your answer was my answer was that in the book of Revelation it's made very clear that the source of evil the dark chaotic sea will not be there anymore and actually the rather strange bits in Revelation 18 19 and 20 about Satan being loosed in order then to be finally and fully put away forever I think that's a way of saying exactly that which raises the follow-up question why didn't God just do this from the beginning did he make a mistake with the first creation yeah we tend to think in our modern Western world of God as the celestial CEO who's been as Woody Allen said being rather incompetent and because we we just think God's making this sort of machine and it should be working there's a mystery about creation which is that when you look at it from the Christian point of view certainly looking back from John and Colossians and so on God makes this heaven and earth reality we call creation which is a temple and humans are the image bearers within that temple and I think that corresponds many theologians have said this to something deep within God himself that God makes humans to be the image bearers so that he can himself become the image bearer and it's to do with creative love the generous love which says God God isn't making a world full of puppets that's part of the plan this is a version of the so-called free world offense but in philosophical theology that tends to degenerate into rationalism and that miss it and this is one of the major problems in our culture as with the Faust myth as with Alberici in Wagner's Rheingold and we've given up love in order to have certain knowledge and power we've got to embrace an epistemology of love and recognize with that that God creates out of generous love and that generous love works like like we've seen and with Jesus at the focus having an earth center lap into look interlocked overlap overlap into inter laps a good word and you just invented it then do we have a new dictionary makers in the house please get this down there you heard it first here it will be in the OED fourth edition but God is outside creation is he that's the question God is other than creation but from the beginning is breathing with the life of creation he breathes his own breath into human nostrils right from the beginning God's wind or spirit is brew breed from brooding and breathing but that's after Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created yes yes but the idea of outside is something that we then import um this is what theologians talk about terms are transcendent and imminent though the fact this really gets it but that's why one of the reasons why I said that the narrative art from Genesis one runs among other places to Exodus 40 the point of it all is that God wants to be present with and in his creation while simultaneously being other than and again the only model that will work is love but within the framework of this are you saying in in a the sense of Israel's neighbors that God is part of this creation as opposed to opening transcendence that's as well as imminent that is always the danger that pantheism of various sorts or paganism zuv various sorts are trying to get in advance and by a different route the goal which Paul describes in first Corinthians 15 that God will be all in all God will still be in that sense other than creation but will be all in all and pantheism just wants to grab that in advance and say well God in the world of the same thing and yeah well yeah but but it doesn't have to be a pantheism with multiple gods it could simply be you know the end of the words I would argue so now I'm arguing with you maybe that's fine I would argue this time yes god that's not the first time that God yes we have an inter lapping overlooking or overlocking but within the framework of that there is the the the the purpose of Genesis what a purpose of Genesis one is to explain that there is a God beyond this creation not the that he's locked into it the way that Israel's neighbors believe oh sure no that's that's fine but one can't use that as a way then of of taking a big step towards some sort of Epicureanism in which God is outside the process you're not doing that I agree but so I mean that's transcendence and eminence yeah but those two are simply labels which we use loosely they don't actually name very precisely what needs to be said if if we can name it precisely well maybe becomes okay that's so within the framework of this by the way that's why we have to talk about Jesus because those stories actually do name it amen but but he is somewhere Jesus is present in his spirit here but the resurrected bodily Jesus I have not seen him no you might I mean it does happen from time to time but I know somebody doesn't live too far from here who has actually very scarily and worryingly seen gee that's a whole other story I don't I'll move on because because we tend to think of heaven still we flick back into default mode we think heaven is along we think Jesus is now in heaven and whatever that is it's not around here and that's not how it works according to Colossians 3 according to first John 3 we're not talking about him coming back from a long way away we're talking about him appearing Jesus is present behind the curtain which we don't see but which is right here separating heaven on earth but in acts 1 doesn't he make it clear that he ascends and he will leave but in the same way he will come so he has gone somewhere to come back yes but the place where he's gone is all questions too a place where he's gone to his precisely the heaven which is not a long way away but as in the Old Testament as an apocalyptic literature heaven is the CEOs office heaven is where earth is run from yeah yeah yeah yeah we got that okay so this is a new creation will there be death in the new creation yes of any kind no so spiders will not catch flies I have no idea about that read read Isaiah 11 it's very interesting because the rabbi's say that this is why you shouldn't kill even a fly on the Sabbath because in the in the age to come which is anticipated in the Sabbath all species will live at peace so the lion lays with the lay on lie down with the lamb and the spider makes a bed for the fire or something yes yes okay there's a resurrection time same time you've got the real problems on the on the table now does oh by the way new heaven and new earth just one are you talking planet earth are you talking universe universes other planets do you believe in extraterrestrials I'll move on does the resurrection of Jesus create a type for all mankind in the form that ascended to heaven which will then come down to fulfill that type or form in Man Paul says in Philippians 3 that Jesus will change our presently humiliated body to be like his glorious body John says the same in 1st John 3 we know that when he appears we will be like him for we will see him as he is I think that's as much signpost as we're giving ok Moses and Elijah appeared with the still-living Jesus in Matthew 17 living deceased life life after life life after life after life I some I sometimes suspect that Moses and Elijah were as confused about that scene as Peter was what about the witch at Endor who calls back Samuel well quite quite yeah it's a good thing to do okay sorry I got to move on we in the West are struggling to understand the biblical idea is there a part of the global church doing this better than us well that's a good lesson we can learn I suspect that there are places in parts of Christian Africa and parts of Christian Asia and also particularly in some perhaps not all Eastern Orthodox circles anything the Eastern Orthodox have always done eschatology better than the West has they have their own other problems but I mean it is a defining moment from you I was in curiously in the Sistine Chapel in Rome for a big service once and I was sitting next to an Orthodox archimandrite who I mean if you've been to the Sistine Chapel you know there's pictures of scenes from the life of Moses down one side scenes the life of Jesus down the other side and that the far end is the great judgement scene there's extraordinary thing Christ in majesty of what have you got no no that's not as well no no that's let's let's not try and interpret your chapel while we're doing Rome and and my archimandrite friend said this I understand pointing emojis that I understand pointing at Jesus and then he said that I do not understand that's not how we do eschatology in Greece frustratingly at that moment the procession came in with the Pope and the count Cardinals and the ecumenical patriarch and we couldn't continue the conversation but I just want to say I'm aware that many Eastern Orthodox theologians do see a greater all creation renewal even though they then have worked it out in various different ways but you would like mine yes do hey scan a tooth do mettaton on Stefan and the dwelling of God is with men and a future tense he will dwell with them yes yes absolutely which is as revelation 21 which is the ultimate fulfillment to say it again of exodus 40 of first Kings 8 where the glory comes to dwell in the temple and that's what as I was talking about in 52 that the the watch is painted right there yeah thank you out the light the lights too bright I can't see it which is a parable by the way and the are you planning any more volumes in the Christian origin series I think my publisher thinks I am yes does a mention of the angelic conflict have a place in your explanation of God's preparation of the fallen world and mankind's force Christ's second coming sorry I don't quite understand that there's two things going on there I think the Angie I mean the Bible says a lot about and Jay were not a lot but quite a bit about angelic conflicts and there's war in heaven in Revelation etc I'm not sure that any of us really understand what that language means and it's dangerous to try to cash it out to obviously either in terms of imagining angelic activity which leaves us as mere spectators or to go the other way thinking that we can recognize who are embodying angels or demons in our own world I think both of those would be dangerous I think what the safe place to go if there is any safe place to go with that is to say we are part of a larger continuum than that of which we are normally aware and that in our prayer and particularly in our worship we do somehow join with I mean in the Eucharistic liturgy we say therefore with angels and archangels and so on we are worshiping with them and that's idea goes back into the Jewish world Qumran etc as two battles Paul says we are wrestling not with flesh and blood but with principalities and powers and I think anyone who seriously tries to live the Christian life and tries to advance the cause of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven will run into that and that's why we need to be praying for one another and you know hanging in there so what will be the condition of our bodies at resurrection keeping in mind Christ's wounds yes it seems to come is very very interesting isn't it G the Risen Jesus being recognized by the mark of the nails is very very profound they're they're the marks of love that they they are the signs of his of his utterly generous self giving love and it seems to me that whatever the signs of our utterly generous self giving love have been in the the spirit will be worn no longer as painful but as glorious badges of honor as it were I'm gonna modify this question a little bit you knowing some of my views in this world you'll probably recognize why you would agree that platonism has played a significant detrimental role in some ways in Christian theology right do you believe in the industry indestructibility of the soul I don't know what the word soul would mean I know in the biblical sense of the entire human being oh okay that's very different I wouldn't say indestructibility because that would raise all sorts of other questions about what happens at death etc I believe that God creates us as whole human beings and as you know as well as I do the the Hebrew word nephesh it doesn't mean what Plato meant by soul though it is often translated as tsuke in the Septuagint but I believe that God intends having made us as human beings that yeah we are to be whole gloriously more than we are at present I'm thinking more in terms of Jesus's statement don't fear a man who can kill your body but feel God fear God who can destroy both body and soul you have misquoted he says don't fear the one who can but rather fear the one who and there's a debate among scholars as you sure you know between those who think that he's talking about fearing God and those who think he's talking about fearing the Satan who would destroy body and soul so you're in the camp that believes he's talking about the the the the Satan because what I think he's saying is I think he's redefining yet this is a really important point by the way not that the others weren't you understand but this is and this is really important because he's saying to a bunch of Jews who are frightened of Roman soldiers and imperial forces etc they are not the real enemy there is a real enemy there is a dark force who is trying to crush the whole thing and I don't think he's then saying that God is going to destroy body in the very next verse he says don't be afraid because your father that there has if you had a role numbered which is easier for him in my case than yours by the way [Music]

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Keywords: Lecture - NT Wright: Resurrection and the Renewal of Creation co-sponsored Baylor’s Truett Seminary, fleetwd1, Lecture - N.T. Wright: Resurrection and the Renewal of Creation, Truett Seminary, the Lanier Theological Library, Lanier Theological Library Lecture Series, Resurrection and the Renewal of Creation, Lecture, N.T. Wright, Tom Wright, Mark Lanier, Surprised by Hope, Questions About Death and Resurrection, Baylor University’s Truett Seminary

Id: GenlGUkZ-6Q

Length: 79min 57sec (4797 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018