Undaunted, I sally forth into chapter 7

This chapter consists of 2 final aspects of the Christ Event, the Ascension and the 2nd coming.

The ascension is important because you have the question, "If Jesus has been bodily raised, then what are we to make of it now?" Obviously you have not physically seen him in your particular congregation, nor has he been going around healing the blind or feeding the hungry. So he, at least physically, is no longer here. So we have two options. We can deny that he actually rose from the dead (I think that is the point Bishop Wright is arguing against) or we can say that he... left. That is what the ascension says. It makes sense, and seems to encapsulate the teaching of the writers of the New Testament Scriptures.

I also appreciate Bishop Wright's keen observation that if Jesus is more or less identical with the church (and I wonder how much of our ecclesiology comes dangerously close to that), then the church is no longer the servant of Christ, but the Master. Our structures, hierarchies, programs, evangelistic methods, worship styles, etc. are to be catered to, not sacrificially subserviant to the Head.

I will admit, I was a bit puzzled by the writer's percieved need to de-emphasize (indeed, deny at some points) that the ascension was a vertically oriented happening. Yes, I understand that Heaven is not a physical place located exactly outside of our atmosphere. Yet, his "putting too fine a point on it" seems to do real violence to the text itself of Acts 1, at least. Let us compare:
When they [the early Christians and first-century Jews] spoke of up and down
like that [describing the ascencion] they, like the Greeks in their different ways,
were using metaphors that were so obvious they didn't need spelling out....

Acts 1:9-11:

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid
him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going,
when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,”
they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has
been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen
him go into heaven.” (italics mine)

Now the word "heaven" (οὐρανόν) is used here both of "sky" and "heaven," so there is some wrangling that needs to be done. However, why would an angel ask the disciples why they were looking "up into heaven" if they indeed were not looking up at all? It makes no sense.

However, that is a big to do over a very small quarrell I have with the chapter.

The 2nd part of the chapter deals with the 2nd coming. I felt a little offended as Wright seems to lump all of us Americans (fundamentalist, right-wing, anyway) together. However, I understand that amongst many of our stripe, being an amillennialist is a pretty rare thing, and dispensational premil is very common in our circles. Having graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary (and I think the ONLY amillennial arminian to have graduated from there!), I am sympathetic to the exegesis and indeed the entire dispensational theology. I think all too often (as Wright seems to be doing) we who disagree simply write off the adherents of other viable options as misguided or as having a poor understanding of the text, which can be a straw man argument. I doubt that in this tome Wright will have a detailed exegetical analysis of 1 Thess.
Even though I disagree with his methods, I still arrive at the same conclusion he does. I appreciated his broadening (rescuing?) the word "eschatology" and his exposition of it. We are not to abandon the world but rather be a part in it's radical healing.