OK - this reminds me of “Evidence That Demands a Verdict” and “The Case for Christ”. I assumed NTW would have to cover this territory at some point, and since I’m a history guy I must confess that my first frustration is his lack of notes to back up some assumptions. I’d like to trust his synopsis of what the ancients believed about death and resurrection on page 36, for instance, but I’d be more sanguine about it if he had properly annotated it.
(By the way, Dustin, you forgot to cite me when you made your comment yesterday morning about “if the name of your country has the word ‘Democratic’ in it...”) :)
The material about 1st century Jewish beliefs doesn’t bug me so much, because I’ve done more personal study about it and his conclusions are in line with what I’ve come to accept. The focus starts to shift on page 41, and NTW’s brief examples are starting to soften me to the idea of a blissful and aware intermediate state prior to resurrection. The author’s focus on the seven mutations of the meaning of resurrection is particularly gratifying to me. (As my friend Sonja would say, “It rings true in my soul” - or at least in my historian’s brain.)
“Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament and most of the second century fathers as well” (43). I wish we were presently so united in orthodoxy - not to mention displaying “remarkable sexual restraint” (ibid.). One of the things that led me to choosing the Christian Church (or the Undenomination, as I like to call it) is our devotion to the idea of doing things like the early church. Now, we certainly fail at this in most ways, but I’m in favor of the principle. I expect that we’d be as effective and transformed as the early church if we started believing the same things that they did.
The idea of New Life and resurrection as a metaphor - what NTW refers to as the “sixth remarkable mutation” - displayed in baptism and the “strenuous ethical obedience” of the Spirit-empowered believer is something that I’ve been trying to examine and emphasize lately. I think Wright does a succinct job of contextualizing it in its original Christian setting: “no pagan ever dreamed of anything like this; but until Christianity no Jew either had come this route.”
Finally, I liked the hypothetical conversation (NTW call it a “thought experiment”) that begins on page 49. I’m not sure that someone couldn’t shoot this argument full of holes, though.
So, what did the rest of you think of chapter 3?
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Overall, let me just say if you liked chapter 3, you'll like chapter 4 as well. But I don't want to run too far ahead of us...
ReplyDeleteI have ordered Wright's trilogy (NT & the POG, Jesus & the VOG, and RSG), and am intrigued to see how he fleshes out his arguments more fully. I tried to read the chapter as I thought a relatively intelligent seeking agnostic or even curious atheist (since this seems to be, as Bill so correctly put it, Wright's equivalent of Evidence that Demands a Resurrection. I found his thought experiment to be a bit confusing, and I'm not sure it has the weight he says it does. What makes the idea of the disciples saying that they've had a warm feeling and a sense of God's grace any more ridiculous than a person rising from the dead before the general resurrection? How does this help his point any?
As an aside, I've always wanted to study the evolution of Jewish thought regarding death and after through the different ages (patristic, conquest, kingdom, exile, post-exilic). The idea of resurrection does not really enter into the literature until very late in the game (I think Daniel), and the more "conservative" wings of the Jewish leadership denied the existence of the resurrection altogether.