Read this book, please do! N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope is a must read.
My first experience reading Wright (though I’ve gifted his books before), it was also my first experience reading a book electronically (on Amazon’s Kindle App for iPod Touch). And I expect, on both fronts, it won’t be my last.
The book was very timely for me, especially as I’ve been deeply into work on the forthcoming Disappointed by Hope: Migrants and Refugees in Search of A Better Country, which at times has been gut-wrenching.
Wright examines what the Christian hope is (the Redemption of all things, including matter and the human body, foreshadowed in the real space-time resurrection of Christ), what the Resurrection promises (God is surely making all things new), how the Kingdom comes (perpetually, violently, until, well, Kingdom come…) and what all of the above implies for the current life of the believer (a life of meaning, pursuing beauty, justice, and announcing the good news).
Wright hammers at the evangelical, post-Enlightenment eschatology that seems to pervade the Church in the West, the idea that we await a disembodied reality, somewhere “out there,” definitely far far away from this cursed and wretched earth. His emphasis on life before death and his proclamation of the hope in life after life after death should cause Christians to take pause, question what they think of the whole gist of the gospel, and ask, “Where and what, really, is my hope?”
One passage the stood out to me in particular (among the many I highlighted):
The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it. And precisely because the resurrection was and is bodily, albeit with a transformed body, the power of Easter to transform and heal the present world must be put into effect both at the macro level, in applying the gospel to the major problems of the world – and if Soviet Communism and apartheid don’t count on that scale I don’t know what does – and to the intimate details of our daily lives. Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can’t do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us calls “myself.” Personal holiness and global holiness belong together.
Historian and theologian, Wright’s writing is readable and accessible. He has the ability to explain complex doctrine and philosophical positions in their historical and current contexts with ease, and in a matter of sentences.
All reasons to pick up the book in print or digitally and to discover the many other reasons therein.
