I was recently invited to join a Facebook group named ’Initiative For Every Pastor To Read "Surprised By Hope" Before Easter 2009’, whose laudable objectives are defined as follows:
This group is for those who commit to doing everything in their power to encourage/force/entice/trick every pastor they know to read Surprised By Hope by N.T. Wright before Easter 2009.
This group is for all who can not sit through another Easter sermon by Pastor Frank Gospelman or Reverend Jeremy Smoothtongue....
This group is for everyone tired of sermons and Easter songs that have reduced Jesus’ resurrection to the fact that it proves God’s power to work miracles, the existence of life after death, and encourages us to hope for it - which ultimately results in the view that salvation is simply about "my relationship with God" in the present and about "going home to God and finding peace" in the future. And while these statements are true, the Christian hope is so much greater and so much more profound!
This group is for everyone who is not willing to settle for Jesus’s resurrection simply representing our own assurance of a safe and happy rest in heaven, but accept Jesus’s dangerous and difficult summons to the tasks on earth (John 21).
I cannot decide whether I should join or not, but while I dither over the decision, I would like to address some secondary points of disagreement with N.T. Wright’s argument in Surprised by Hope. The first has to do with the way in which he conflates Paul’s parousia idea with the final renewal of creation as described, for example, in Revelation 21-22. Let’s begin with this paragraph:
Nor will it do to say, as some have said who have grasped part of the point but not worked it through, that the events of AD 70 were themselves the ’second coming’ of Jesus, so that ever since then we have been living in God’s new age, and there is no further ’coming’ to await. This may seem to many readers, as indeed it seems to me, a bizarre position to hold, but there are some who not only hold it but eagerly propagate it, and use some of my arguments to support it. This results from a confusion: if the texts which speak of ’the son of man coming on the clouds’ refer to AD 70, as I have argued that (in part) they do, this doesn’t mean that AD 70 was the ’second coming’ — because the ’son of man’ texts aren’t ’second coming’ texts at all, despite their frequent misreading that way. They are about Jesus’ vindication. And Jesus’ vindication — in his resurrection, ascension and judgment on Jerusalem — requires a still further event for everything to be complete. Let me say it quite emphatically for the sake of those who have been confused on the point (and to the amusement, no doubt, of those who haven’t been): the ’second coming’ has not yet occurred. (Surprised by Hope, 139)
My response to this is that Wright is correct in reading the ’coming’ texts as being about Jesus’ vindication, correct in seeing that this must apply ’in part’ to AD 70, correct in interpreting the parables of return with reference to the judgment and salvation of Israel (138), correct in stating that Jesus does not speak of a ’coming’ apart from these events (138-139), and correct in insisting that some New Testament passages have in view a vindication beyond the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. But his concern to defend himself against attack - ’particularly from American readers’ - with regard to belief in a ’second coming’, constitutes, I would say, a failure of nerve, a failure of historical imagination. In reading New Testament eschatology we have to take into account an intermediate horizon between the destruction of Jerusalem and the final transformation of all things, defined by the victory of the church over pagan Rome.
The parousia motif in the New Testament has, roughly speaking, two aspects to it. First, it conveys the expectation that the suffering community of the early church would be delivered by God from persecution by its enemies - not ’once and for all’ in the absolute sense that Wright appears to mean it (142), but ’once and for all’ within the limited historical narrative of conflict defined by Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of a monstrous pagan power which makes war against the faithful saints of the Most High. If Jesus is understood to ’come’ from heaven at all, it is a coming in the manner of Old Testament theophanies to defeat the oppressor and to rescue the oppressed believers (1 Thess. 4:16-17; 2 Thess. 1:5-2:10).
Secondly, there will be a ’coming’ on the clouds of heaven to receive ’dominion and glory and a kingdom’ from the throne of God in accordance with the vision described in Daniel 7. This is the vindication theme, which is also the climax to the ’kingdom’ expectation. Neither of these threads, however, leads directly to an ultimate renewal of creation: Daniel envisages merely a historical restoration of Israel following a crisis of judgment and persecution.
Wright also argues emphatically that the word parousia would have suggested to the minds of Paul’s readers the custom of escorting a visiting ruler back into the city: ’The point is that, having gone out to meet their returning Lord, they will escort him royally into his domain, that is, back to the place they have come from’ - and if necessary he will ’subdue local enemies and put everything to rights’ (145). He also recognizes that this forms part of Paul’s ’political theology of Jesus as Lord’, the confession that ’Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t’ (143), and that Paul applies the Daniel 7 story ’to the Christians who are presently suffering persecution’ (145). But he then argues with regard to Colossians 3:1-4, which he says is ’clearly in the same ballpark’ as 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; 1 Corinthians 15:23-27, 51-54; and Philippians 3:20-21, that the ’coming’ or ’appearing’ or parousia of Jesus will occur at the end of history:
The promise is not that Jesus will simply reappear within the present world order, but that, when heaven and earth are joined together in the new way God has promised, then he will appear to us - and we will appear to him, and to one another, in our own true identity. (147)
In other words, in Wright’s view the parousia as Paul conceives it coincides with the final renewal of heaven and earth as it is imagined in Revelation 21-22. I have a couple of broad objections to this. First, if the world is so radically transformed at this juncture (’earth and heaven fled away and there was found no place for them’: Rev. 20:11), the political dimensions of the parousia motif become irrelevant: the contest for ultimate loyalty has been brought to an end, there is no more Caesar, there are no more local enemies to subdue, no more local communities over which to rule. Both Daniel’s vision of one like a Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and the imagery of the royal parousia presuppose a context of historical conflict in which a community suffers because it chooses to remain faithful to the covenant in defiance of pagan opposition.
Secondly, the descent of the holy city is not presented as a parousia event. Wright argues that parousia in passages such as 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 and 1 Corinthians 15:23 refers to the final coming of Jesus to be with his people. It is true that John, in his climactic vision, sees the Lamb in the midst of the new Jerusalem - that is, at the heart of the place of God’s presence in the new creation. But the narrative of the vindication of Jesus and his persecuted ’brothers’ against a pagan enemy that is naturally associated with the parousia motif is missing from this account. The image instead is of the glory that Jesus shares at the heart of the divine identity because he overcame the nations way back before the first resurrection of the martyrs and the symbolic thousand year reign (Rev. 19:11-16). It is because the suffering community of the Son of man triumphed over Roman imperial paganism that Jesus and those in him receive ’dominion and glory and a kingdom’ from the Ancient of Days (cf. Dan. 7:14) and come to reign throughout the coming ages. John’s final vision of the Lamb who is the ’lamp’ shining at the centre of the New Jerusalem puts Jesus at the heart of the renewal of creation, but this moment is narratively distinct from the vindication of the Son of man.
What Paul foresees, I think, is a moment in history when the churches in Thessalonika, Corinth, Philippi, and so on, will be vindicated for their steadfastness - when it will finally be publicly demonstrated that their faith has not been in vain (cf. 1 Cor. 15:12-19). This is not quite the same vindication which Jesus has in mind when he makes the vision of the Son of man the climax to the conflict between Rome and Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem would justify his claim that the wrath of God was terminally directed against Israel and that an alternative path leading to life had to be found. Paul looked for a similar vindication of the faith of the early church but at the climax of a wider apocalyptic narrative about the wrath of God against Greek-Roman paganism - above all in its overweening imperial form.
In the first place this is a vindication of the whole community. But what about those who have lost their lives because of their loyalty to Christ? The answer developed as a direct response to this concern in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 is that those who have died in Christ will participate in the whole story of the Son of man: they suffer, they die, they are raised, they reign with Jesus at the right hand of God throughout the coming ages (cf. Rev. 20:4). They are not excluded from the victory of the church over its enemies: on the contrary, they are rewarded for their faithfulness by their inclusion in vindication of Jesus. They have no less a share than the living in the victory over paganism, in the vindication of their faithfulness - in the parousia moment, when Jesus will come as King of kings and Lord of lords to deliver the persecuted communities from their local enemies.
This leads to a further point of disagreement to consider briefly. Wright, if I have understood him correctly, reconciles the ’cosmic redemption’ eschatology with a ’going to heaven’ eschatology by arguing that heaven constitutes an ’interim state’ for Christians between death and ’life after life after death’. In my view, resurrection in the New Testament is principally an exceptional prospect held out to those who suffer and are killed on account of their allegiance to Jesus as Lord. What about the rest of us? Here the normal Jewish prospect applies: we must wait until the final resurrection, when all the dead will be judged according to what we have done (Rev. 20:12-13).
The problem with the view that Christians go to heaven when they die and there ’await the resurrection’ (181) is that the only means envisaged by the New Testament for the Christian dead to get to heaven is to be resurrected - just as Jesus is raised from the dead and the martyrs are raised from the dead to reign with him in heaven. That would appear to mean that Christians are raised twice - once to get to heaven and then secondly to participate in the final resurrection of the dead which accompanies the renewal of creation. That is certainly not what John means by his distinction between a first and second resurrection: it is those who have been ’beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God’ who participate in the first resurrection (Rev. 20:4-5). My argument would be that this suffering community which shares in the story of the Son of man is raised at the parousia to reign with their victorious Lord and then, in John’s vision, descends with the holy city from heaven. They do not need to be raised again.
