By Steve

"Surprised By Hope," by N.T Wright



I am really enjoying this book (although its quite rare that I ever dislike a book). It continues to challenge, and change, and shape, and help and inspire my faith.


The subtitle is, Rethinking heaven, the resurrection and the mission of the church. Not really big or important topics, but they interest me. Ha. As I have worked through the first 100 pages, mostly about the resurrection, I have realized how hard it is going to be to re-trace the pages I have read...so I am going to tease with a few quotes and maybe add a few thoughts of my own. I still believe this is a book worth reading, and if you're an N.T. Wright fan, it is one of his best (and I feel the same even if you're not a fan). So...here we go:

"surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened. Indeed, they are a reasonable indicator that something remarkable happened." This is a reference to Easter and the resurrection.

"Jesus ushers in not simply a new religious possiblity, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation." Without exploring what this means (the book does), what are the implications. What does it mean to be a new creation? That can be troublesome. You may like the current you. You may think you're beyond repair. You may be intrigued by the concept, but don't know the way forward. You may think new creation is more than you're interested in. At this juncture, "we are the Israelites standing on the shore of the Red Sea. Behind are the forces of skepticism: Pharoahs gang, mocking and shouting that they're coming after us. Ahead is the sea, representing chaos and death, forces that nobody else has ever claimed were beaten." We cannot go back, but how do we move forward? Forward in the way of Jesus, in new creation, Kingdom living...embracing the fullness of what these things mean?

This brings us back to the book title, Surprised by hope. What is our hope? "Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different world view is possible." "In the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment." I wonder if we have presented a good, something to live for, kind of hope when we speak of Jesus, and faith and the gospel? And I'm not talking about hope in going to heaven. But something more. I think there is a lot to chew on this paragraphs quote...is there really a different worldview to see things from (we will wrestle with this a bit in our next teaching series, "what are you talking about)? And if that worldview is not realized (meaning absence of real hope), then Jesus and faith and Christianity are things that we will not persuade people into...and we may just resort to entertaining people religiously. Think about all the "Christian" entertainment, from rock concert worship services and big events to TV and radio...we Christians are becoming good at offering entertainment...but are we giving hope?

"there is a clash between a worldview that allows for a God of creation and justice and worldviews that don't." "When something doesn't fit within the paradigm you're working with (this is analagous to the scientific method), one option at least, perhaps when all else is failed, is to change your paradigm." This is where we may be surprised by hope. A change in paradigms. A change in worldview. Moving past a bad or incomplete faith and entertainment to a life giving hope. And this is not a hope of progress, or the hope that Obama speaks of, or the hope that all your dreams will come true. But more on this later.

Something remarkable did happen on that Sunday of resurrection. It changed things. Maybe we don't understand it in all of its entirety. Maybe there are some discrepancies in the story, things we find hard to reconcile. And maybe we need to allow that to be okay, and pause for just a moment and consider our worldview. Because that remarkable happening way back when is able to do something remarkable still today. And I don't want you to miss it.

To be continued...