Surprised by Hope review

I recently wrote a mini-paper about a book I read called Surprised by Hope. I decided to post it here and share it with you all. It's related to doctrine so if you're not into that sort of thing you may find the rest of this very boring:

If N.T. Wright is correct, then for the past few hundred, if not thousands, of years Christian theological development has been wrong concerning the doctrine of heaven, hell, the resurrection and how it relates to our lives and the implications it holds in sway between doctrine, belief, and practice. During a sermon preparation and preaching course at the bible college I attended a student delivered his sermon on the resurrection in the vein of how N. T. Wright presented it and it was one off the more memorable messages delivered in the course because of the discussions it sparked after the sermon was over. That event stuck in my mind, not just because of the discussions, but because it was very theologically sound and the more I thought about it the less fault I could discover with it. That reaction was very close to what I experienced while reading this book: it was well thought out, he presented his ideas clearly and gave a lot of, what should be most important when hammering out doctrine: scriptural evidence balanced out with supporting historical evidence. I agreed with his central thesis but rather than rehash what I liked about the book in the rest of this paper I am going to address several concerns, disagreements, and observations about his thesis and the way it plays out in the local church and in our lives. Before I get into my thoughts on the book and it’s ideology I will recap his thesis. He asserts that the modern church’s theology on the afterlife is incorrect since they teach a disembodied afterlife with God in heaven as a means of leaving behind the world. He says the early church adopted the Jewish belief in the resurrection of the body and that the resurrection of Jesus was historical and efficacious. Historical in the fact it actually happened and efficacious because as Jesus resurrected we will also resurrect at the last day after a period of rest with God. Also as a result of his resurrection and his promise to redeem our own bodies we work to further his kingdom until the fullness of time when God descends and recreates the heavens and the Earth and gives us new resurrected bodies.

The first area of concern is with the church falling into the trap Western liberalism and secular humanism falls into: enacting means of social justice or reform by believing in the inherent goodness of humanity and that humanity will, as technology, our standard of living, and education improve, better themselves and achieve a sort of societal perfection and unity. This, of course, is patently unrealistic, politically naïve, and scripturally untenable as humanity is fallen and in need of redemption and no social justice program or acts of works can cure the condition of our souls. Wright mentions the shortcomings of Western progressive culture wherein science or God would cause all things to work together towards becoming good and whole and rightly points out it’s failures but we must be careful because defining salvation as working on Earth for the good of the kingdom coming can lead to the kind of misguided idealism he has spent previous chapters rejecting. To his credit he does address that issue later in the book but caution must be taken to where we work for the advancement of the kingdom here and know, doing the work of Christ, feeding the hungry, clothing and serving the poor, aiding the widows and orphans and ministering to the spiritual needs of people but neglect the redemption of the soul. John Piper said once in a sermon and his words ring true here, “Works are not the roots of justification, they are the fruit of justification.”

The other concept I have trouble agreeing with is his de-emphasis on hell and inability to succinctly clarify his view of what awaits unrighteous sinners. He did a masterful job describing what awaits those of us that enter into his kingdom upon resurrection and paints a beautiful picture of Gods people aiding in the healing of the world, but has no answers about hell. He rejects the picture of hell, rightly so, that reigns in modern churches as medieval and based on Greek myth and not on scripture. I can see his point but if after we die we are joined with Christ and God the Father in restful bliss awaiting our resurrection then it is not a stretch of the imagination to say that the unsaved dead are in a state of unrest and possible terror awaiting their final judgment. This would also make sense doctrinally given how resurrection works and how life after life after death works. However he also talks about how our resurrection fully humanizes us because it restores us to what we were before the fall. One has to be careful here that salvation and redemption do not get reduced into a sort of super self-actualization where we become our true human selves. This is close to the liberal evolutionary belief in the inherent goodness and development of man. In his view, as I understood it, hell is a separation from God during which the unsaved become further and further dehumanized until they have no knowledge of themselves, lost forever. The problem is that if we are going to take the New Jerusalem descending from heaven as a true and literal event, that the coming of God and heaven to the Earth to redeem and recreate the Earth as a true event then we cannot take away the picture of eternal punishment in the lake of fire as a true and literal event. I find it problematic to explain away the New Jerusalem as something that is going to happen and the lake of fire as just a picture. We need to be consistent in our interpretations and not pick and choose what we want to believe as fact and what we want to be imagery just because it may or may not sit well with our modern sensibilities. We will all be judged, some to death, some to life but Christ will judge us all.

Wright also mentions in the book that if churches believe in a disembodied spirit floating in an ethereal afterlife then they will tend to not be focused on doing the work of the kingdom because if the world is going to be destroyed and God will rapture the church away then why bother with doing anything other than saving souls? In my experience he makes a valid point but there are many churches that hold on to that theology that still do the work of the kingdom. In South Africa I was involved with a large church with a focus on winning souls. They had a very large charitable ministry and worked with drug addicts, AIDS sufferers, the homeless, orphans, and the disenfranchised. At the end of the day many churches will continue to reach ouch to the poor and needy because it is the right thing to do, and because Jesus told us to help those people. However I do agree with his point because for every church that reaches out there are many that only looks inward.

This book has been very challenging to me as I had taken for granted the doctrine of the afterlife I had been taught and saw no need to analyze it in light of scripture mistakenly thinking I had it down correctly. I do believe that right belief produces right action but as a caveat I would add that will only happen through the power of the Holy Spirit moving in our hearts. I believe that Wright has hit on something that needs to be examined and he makes a very compelling case. Where do we go from here then? If modern western Christianity has been mistaken how can we address and redress this? How can we begin to stem the tide of incorrect doctrine that comes from Greek and medieval philosophers and not from scripture? I do not have the answers for this but for groups of Christians that believe in, and pride themselves on, Sola Scriptura we may need to reevaluate this doctrine in order to be faithful to the credo of the great reformers and the Holy Spirit of God.