You knew it was coming, and here it is, Tyndale House scholars examine the resurrection of the Lord Jesus ...
Showing posts with label Resurrection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Resurrection. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 April 2011
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
NT Wright on Evil and the Justice of God
Beginning as a set of five lectures and then finding their place in a tv programme, this extended examination of this subject is well worth reading.
The challenge of evil is to be faced by our Christian living, our prayer and holy living in a world troubled by evil. Wright challenges Christians to imagine the Kingdom in which evil is no more and then to live as though it were already so. This is a creative use of imagination which I think will stretch many, but is worth the effort.
The chapter on forgiveness is very challenging, forgiveness set us free to live without the burden of evil and removes the bitterness of evil from our communities. Wright expands forgiveness beyond the inter-personal to our forgiveness as a nation of the unpayable debts of other nations, or the forgiveness of terrorists.
Two interesting points in passing.
"Within the larger cannonical context it ought to be clear that re-emphasizing the doctrine of creation is indeed the foundation of all biblical answers to questions about who God is and what he is doing." (page 41)
Whether in response to the strident atheism of Dawkins and others, or for some other reason, I sense that there is a lack of confidence in our confession of God as Creator. We must stand firm here, not least for the reason given by Wright. The constant refernecing of God as Creator in Scripture is not insignificant. Having created and declared it to be good, God is now at work renewing and redeeming creation for his own glory. Our salvation in Christ is connected to God being creator in ways that those trying to be Christian but denying creation do not yet appreciate.
"Indeed, we might even say that the gospel writers were telling their whole story so as to explain why the resurrection happened to make it clear that this was not simply an odd, isolated bizarre miracle, but rather the proper and appropriate result of Jesus' entire, and successful, confrontation with evil." (pages 55-56)
If we read the gospels with the question, 'Why did the resurrection happen?' at the front of our thinking, what difference does this make to the story we read? Is this God ushering in new creation (2 Cor 5:17) after judgment had fallen upon the old creation and the evil that rampaged through it?
As I say, a really good book and well worth reading.
Sunday, 4 April 2010
Easter Day
He is risen, as he said. Come, let us offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving to Almight God and pay him our vows.
Mark 16:1-8
Sorry, I don't have any good images for the resurrection, having said that I'm not apologising for the Gruenwald.
His body is not in the tomb,
is not now and has not been since he rose from the dead.
The resurrection has begun, Christ is raised.
All things are made new at Easter time,
new creation, re-creation,
and we in union with Christ are made new.
A new life to live,
New creation to live it in,
New hope to fill our lives,
New joy to strengthen our lives,
New peace to secure our lives.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
Monday, 10 August 2009
Alpha, The Guardian, NT Wright and the Resurrection
I've copied below the post from Friday Night Theology from the Evangelical Alliance (7/8/09).
It appears that Adam Rutherford who writes for The Guardian is attending an Alpha course and writing of his thoughts on this. In his recent article he strongly questions the historicity of Christianity in general and the resurrection of the body of the Lord Jesus in particular. Bishop Wright offers a brief response to this and points to his two wonderful books - 'The Resurrection of the Son of God' and 'Surprised by Hope'.
I hope you find this helpful, and please do check out the EA site for Friday Night Theology.
Wright on the Resurrection
This week’s ‘special’ FNT first appeared on the Guardian's commentisfree site. It is reproduced here with the permission of Bishop Tom Wright.
Various things could be said of Adam Rutherford's take on the resurrection (apart from the fact that the criticism doesn't seem to be engaging with the central issues, so it's hard to tell whether he's really heard the point or not).
1. The historical basis of Christianity is vital precisely because Christianity isn't just a moral philosophy or a pathway of spirituality, however much many in late western culture (including in the church) have tried to belittle it by treating it as such. Of course sceptics want Christianity to be "simply a moral philosophy". That's not nearly so challenging as what it actually is.
2. The reason many of us refer to the New Testament in dealing with early Christianity is not just that it's "The Bible", but that it's the close-up, often first-hand evidence both for what happened and for what Jesus' first followers made of it all.
3. The historical evidence for Jesus himself is extraordinarily good. I have no idea whether the Alpha teachers have gone into the detail of how we know about things in Palestine in the first century, but the evidence dovetails together with remarkable consistency, as I and many others have shown in works of very detailed historical scholarship. From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did, and most agree that he did and said a significant amount at least of what the four gospels say he did and said.
4. Just as Christian faith is far more than a moral philosophy or spiritual pathway (though it includes both as it were en passant), so it is more than a "how to get saved" teaching backed up by a dodgy "miracle". Christian faith declares that, in and through Jesus, the creator of the world launched his plan to rescue the world from the decaying and corrupting force of evil itself. This was (if it was anything at all) an event which brought about a new state of affairs, albeit often in a hidden and paradoxical way (as Jesus kept on saying): the "kingdom of God", that is, the sovereign, rescuing rule of the creator, breaking in to creation. If this stuff didn't happen then Christianity is based on a mistake. You can't rescue it by turning it into a philosophy.
5. Of course, this was nonsense in the ancient pagan world, as it is nonsense in the modern pagan world. Nothing new there. The Jewish worldview (in which there is a creator God who has promised to rescue the world, and whose people are somehow a vehicle of this rescue operation) was and is always offensive to pagan worldviews of every sort. The sceptics of today add nothing to the sceptics of the first and second century AD.
6. And, of course, we all know that dead people don't rise. Actually, the early Christians knew that too; they didn't suppose that people did rise from the dead from time to time and that Jesus just happened to be one of them. (The other "raisings" in the NT are of course what we would call "near death experiences" – people who are clinically dead and then find themselves called back.*) Rather, they claimed that Jesus had as it were gone through death and out the other side into a new form of physicality for which there was no previous example and of which there remains no subsequent example. They knew as well as we do how outrageous that was, but they found themselves compelled to say it. As one of the more sceptical of today's scholars has put it, "It seems that they were doing their best to describe an event for which they didn't have the right language."
7. You can't explain how they came to say what they said unless there were both several "sightings" of and meetings with someone they took to be Jesus, alive again, and an empty tomb where he had been. Without the first, they would have said the grave had been robbed. Without the second, they would have known it was a hallucination (they knew as much about those as we do). But if both occurred, how do we explain them? All other explanations fail to account for the reality of what they said and the change in their lives and their sense of call. (Which can't, by the way, be rubbished by likening it to Jones or Koresh; read Acts and compare and contrast with that sort of stuff.)
8. Jesus' resurrection was not, for them, a kind of odd phenomenon which validated a particular atonement theology (though of course all these things are joined up). It isn't an extra thing, bolted on to the outside of a moral philosophy. It is the launching-pad for God's new creation. "Christian spirituality" is learning to live in that new creation. "Christian ethics" is learning to let the power of that new creation shape your life. A Christian political theology is discovering what it means that, through the resurrection, Jesus is the world's true Lord.
9. Ridiculous? Of course. It was in AD 35 and it is today. But actually it makes sense – historically, culturally, philosophically and even dare I say politically. We've tried all sorts of other stuff recently and got fairly stuck, haven't we? But actually that shoulder-shrugging pragmatism, though it might alert people to the fact that normal western scepticism may not have the last word, isn't enough. It is possible to argue historically for the truth of Jesus' resurrection. I and others have done so and the case is remarkably good. But I'm not sure, to be honest, that the writer attending the Alpha course is really interested in the historical argument. If he is, he might look at Surprised by Hope, especially chapters 3 and 4. And if he wants a fuller account, he could tackle The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham
*For more details on what Tom Wright means by this, please see his Surprised by Hope (Chapters 3,4) and The Resurrection of the Son of God (pp440ff).
It appears that Adam Rutherford who writes for The Guardian is attending an Alpha course and writing of his thoughts on this. In his recent article he strongly questions the historicity of Christianity in general and the resurrection of the body of the Lord Jesus in particular. Bishop Wright offers a brief response to this and points to his two wonderful books - 'The Resurrection of the Son of God' and 'Surprised by Hope'.
I hope you find this helpful, and please do check out the EA site for Friday Night Theology.
Wright on the Resurrection
This week’s ‘special’ FNT first appeared on the Guardian's commentisfree site. It is reproduced here with the permission of Bishop Tom Wright.
Various things could be said of Adam Rutherford's take on the resurrection (apart from the fact that the criticism doesn't seem to be engaging with the central issues, so it's hard to tell whether he's really heard the point or not).
1. The historical basis of Christianity is vital precisely because Christianity isn't just a moral philosophy or a pathway of spirituality, however much many in late western culture (including in the church) have tried to belittle it by treating it as such. Of course sceptics want Christianity to be "simply a moral philosophy". That's not nearly so challenging as what it actually is.
2. The reason many of us refer to the New Testament in dealing with early Christianity is not just that it's "The Bible", but that it's the close-up, often first-hand evidence both for what happened and for what Jesus' first followers made of it all.
3. The historical evidence for Jesus himself is extraordinarily good. I have no idea whether the Alpha teachers have gone into the detail of how we know about things in Palestine in the first century, but the evidence dovetails together with remarkable consistency, as I and many others have shown in works of very detailed historical scholarship. From time to time people try to suggest that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, but virtually all historians of whatever background now agree that he did, and most agree that he did and said a significant amount at least of what the four gospels say he did and said.
4. Just as Christian faith is far more than a moral philosophy or spiritual pathway (though it includes both as it were en passant), so it is more than a "how to get saved" teaching backed up by a dodgy "miracle". Christian faith declares that, in and through Jesus, the creator of the world launched his plan to rescue the world from the decaying and corrupting force of evil itself. This was (if it was anything at all) an event which brought about a new state of affairs, albeit often in a hidden and paradoxical way (as Jesus kept on saying): the "kingdom of God", that is, the sovereign, rescuing rule of the creator, breaking in to creation. If this stuff didn't happen then Christianity is based on a mistake. You can't rescue it by turning it into a philosophy.
5. Of course, this was nonsense in the ancient pagan world, as it is nonsense in the modern pagan world. Nothing new there. The Jewish worldview (in which there is a creator God who has promised to rescue the world, and whose people are somehow a vehicle of this rescue operation) was and is always offensive to pagan worldviews of every sort. The sceptics of today add nothing to the sceptics of the first and second century AD.
6. And, of course, we all know that dead people don't rise. Actually, the early Christians knew that too; they didn't suppose that people did rise from the dead from time to time and that Jesus just happened to be one of them. (The other "raisings" in the NT are of course what we would call "near death experiences" – people who are clinically dead and then find themselves called back.*) Rather, they claimed that Jesus had as it were gone through death and out the other side into a new form of physicality for which there was no previous example and of which there remains no subsequent example. They knew as well as we do how outrageous that was, but they found themselves compelled to say it. As one of the more sceptical of today's scholars has put it, "It seems that they were doing their best to describe an event for which they didn't have the right language."
7. You can't explain how they came to say what they said unless there were both several "sightings" of and meetings with someone they took to be Jesus, alive again, and an empty tomb where he had been. Without the first, they would have said the grave had been robbed. Without the second, they would have known it was a hallucination (they knew as much about those as we do). But if both occurred, how do we explain them? All other explanations fail to account for the reality of what they said and the change in their lives and their sense of call. (Which can't, by the way, be rubbished by likening it to Jones or Koresh; read Acts and compare and contrast with that sort of stuff.)
8. Jesus' resurrection was not, for them, a kind of odd phenomenon which validated a particular atonement theology (though of course all these things are joined up). It isn't an extra thing, bolted on to the outside of a moral philosophy. It is the launching-pad for God's new creation. "Christian spirituality" is learning to live in that new creation. "Christian ethics" is learning to let the power of that new creation shape your life. A Christian political theology is discovering what it means that, through the resurrection, Jesus is the world's true Lord.
9. Ridiculous? Of course. It was in AD 35 and it is today. But actually it makes sense – historically, culturally, philosophically and even dare I say politically. We've tried all sorts of other stuff recently and got fairly stuck, haven't we? But actually that shoulder-shrugging pragmatism, though it might alert people to the fact that normal western scepticism may not have the last word, isn't enough. It is possible to argue historically for the truth of Jesus' resurrection. I and others have done so and the case is remarkably good. But I'm not sure, to be honest, that the writer attending the Alpha course is really interested in the historical argument. If he is, he might look at Surprised by Hope, especially chapters 3 and 4. And if he wants a fuller account, he could tackle The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham
*For more details on what Tom Wright means by this, please see his Surprised by Hope (Chapters 3,4) and The Resurrection of the Son of God (pp440ff).
Sunday, 19 April 2009
An Easter Message - from Bono
Jumping from Stewart Cutler's blog, I found a link to an Easter message published in the New York Times by Bono, it is well worth reading.
I find it challenging to see how seamlessly Bono has moved from thoughts on Christian festivals, Carnivals, and the celebration of Easter to care for the poor and most needy in our world.
How many, or how few, of our Easter services got anywhere near such a plea for justice, compassion, mercy - and if these are not at the heart of the resurrection and the new life of the God's Kingdom, I'm not sure what is.
I find it challenging to see how seamlessly Bono has moved from thoughts on Christian festivals, Carnivals, and the celebration of Easter to care for the poor and most needy in our world.
How many, or how few, of our Easter services got anywhere near such a plea for justice, compassion, mercy - and if these are not at the heart of the resurrection and the new life of the God's Kingdom, I'm not sure what is.
Sunday, 12 April 2009
N T Wright - An Easter Message
Mike Bird at Euaggelion, has a link to an article by N T Wright at The Times.
The Bishop makes a good case that the Church has colluded with the world in trivialising Easter and so missing the wonderful good news of the Resurrection. It is well worth reading.
The Bishop makes a good case that the Church has colluded with the world in trivialising Easter and so missing the wonderful good news of the Resurrection. It is well worth reading.
Thursday, 9 April 2009
All Things Made New
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
These famous words of Neil Armstrong when stepping onto the surface of the moon work just as well if we imagine them being spoken by the Lord Jesus as he steps across the threshold of the now empty tomb.
The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ makes all things new.
Death is made new in life
They went to the tomb on that Sunday morning looking for a dead man, a body now three days in the tomb. But they didn’t find him. Not because they went to the wrong tomb, no, they knew very well where to go. They didn’t find him because death has been overcome by life. “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.” (Luke 24:5, 6)
Now that one man has risen again from the dead the resurrection has started, the new life of God’s Kingdom is breaking out among us.
Weeping is made new in witness
After a while we find Mary weeping outside the empty tomb (John 20:11). Her tears are wiped away when she meets the now risen Lord who absence has caused her tears. Then Mary “went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’”. Her tears bear witness to her love for her Lord, her devotion to him. The absence of her tears bear witness to her joy at his resurrection, no more tears, Jesus lives!
The good news of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is just too good to keep to yourself, it is just made for sharing, for telling everyone.
Doubt is made new in faith
It took a whole week, but Thomas found his doubts replaced with faith. When offered the chance to touch his Lord and feel his glorified wounds Thomas simply falls before him, “My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28)
With his eyes cleared of doubt Thomas can see that this risen Jesus is both Lord and God. His nature, shared with God, is now revealed. That he is King in God’s Kingdom is now declared. Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not (nor is any other human ruler).
One small step – just over this threshold.
A giant leap – God’s King is revealed as God’s Kingdom comes, all things are made new.
These famous words of Neil Armstrong when stepping onto the surface of the moon work just as well if we imagine them being spoken by the Lord Jesus as he steps across the threshold of the now empty tomb.
The resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ makes all things new.
Death is made new in life
They went to the tomb on that Sunday morning looking for a dead man, a body now three days in the tomb. But they didn’t find him. Not because they went to the wrong tomb, no, they knew very well where to go. They didn’t find him because death has been overcome by life. “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.” (Luke 24:5, 6)
Now that one man has risen again from the dead the resurrection has started, the new life of God’s Kingdom is breaking out among us.
Weeping is made new in witness
After a while we find Mary weeping outside the empty tomb (John 20:11). Her tears are wiped away when she meets the now risen Lord who absence has caused her tears. Then Mary “went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’”. Her tears bear witness to her love for her Lord, her devotion to him. The absence of her tears bear witness to her joy at his resurrection, no more tears, Jesus lives!
The good news of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is just too good to keep to yourself, it is just made for sharing, for telling everyone.
Doubt is made new in faith
It took a whole week, but Thomas found his doubts replaced with faith. When offered the chance to touch his Lord and feel his glorified wounds Thomas simply falls before him, “My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28)
With his eyes cleared of doubt Thomas can see that this risen Jesus is both Lord and God. His nature, shared with God, is now revealed. That he is King in God’s Kingdom is now declared. Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not (nor is any other human ruler).
One small step – just over this threshold.
A giant leap – God’s King is revealed as God’s Kingdom comes, all things are made new.
Remember - you can visit other resurrection posts:
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
EA Slipstream - the Resurrection
Tomorrow there is to be a synchronsied blog on the theme of the Resurrection. This has been organised by the Slipstream team at the Evangelical Alliance UK, visit their homepage here for more information.
I'll be posting on this theme tomorrow, as will the following other blogs, why not have a visit and read what is being posted on the theme of the Resurrection.
http://mikeaddis.blogspot.com
http://blogdyfedwynroberts.blogspot.com/
http://theurbanpastor.wordpress.com/
http://lifefaithetc.blogspot.com
www.meetalancraig.com
www.knightswoodcongregational.org.uk/blog/
www.markmeynell.wordpress.com
www.deeperwaters.wordpress.com
www.bibleandmission.wordpress.com
www.bigcircumstance.com
www.adrianwarnock.com
http://andybeingachristian.wordpress.com
http://thesimplepastor.blogspot.com/
Friday, 3 April 2009
Resurrection Blogging
The EA Slipstream team are inviting bloggers to take part in what is called synchronised blogging on Thursday next week, the 9th of April, Maundy Thursday.
I've copied their email below, the idea is to blog on the theme of the resurrection.
I'll be joining in, why don't you take part also? If you are joining in leave a comment and email the Slipstream team.
Synchronised Blogging Day
Attention all bloggers: in light of our special Easter Slipstream edition, we're asking you to blog about Jesus' resurrection as part of a synchronised blogging day on April the 9th, which is Maundy Thursday. There are no perameters, but if you decide to participate please email us with your blog address at slipstream@eauk.org.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Why bother about a dead man?
All day today at Stranraer Academy with the Chaplaincy team. A series of Easter services for the whole school on the theme, Why bother about a dead man?
It was good to be in the school and sharing the Easter story of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with the staff and pupils.
It was good to be in the school and sharing the Easter story of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus with the staff and pupils.
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