Tom Wright, one of the world’s most influential
Scripture scholars, made his first trip to Australia
at the invitation of Archbishop John Bathersby
to lead this year’s Brisbane Archdiocesan Mission. It
was a truly ecumenical occasion on April 1st. Roman
Catholics were almost outnumbered by Anglicans
and in question time a Baptist pastor stood up to
recommend the benefits of life in the Spirit. Here is
a précis of some of the Anglican Bishop of Durham’s
lectures on that day.
“It is as though, with Jesus, a great door
in the cosmos, which had been locked
forever until that point, had swung open
— and we hear a voice inviting us to go through
and discover the true meaning of being human,
the true meaning of life as a whole, and the way to
what we loosely call salvation.”
Billed as ‘Jesus’ Mission’ and ‘Christian Mission
in a Post Modern World’ the two-day seminar
tackled the Resurrection, postmodernism, and the
problem of evil.
Resurrection was not, Tom Wright said, the
most bizarre miracle within the old world, but the
prototypical event within the new world, brought
about through the mission of Jesus. Resurrection is
all about the beginning of new creation.
“The Church finds itself poised between
the resurrection of Jesus and God’s promise of
ultimately renewing all things in Jesus and by the
power of the Spirit.”
“We can only understand Christian mission in
the world as a whole when we understand our task
as framed between the launch of new creation in
Jesus and the completion of new creation in the
future.”
Resurrection is not life after death, it is life after
life after death, he said.
Addressing the spectrum of churchmanship
which focuses on salvation as other-worldy, Tom
Wright said that the idea of rescuing human souls
from this space, time and matter universe, to enjoy
a disembodied state, was a rather thin and etiolated
version of the doctrine of salvation.
Jesus is seen in Scripture healing people’s
bodies, he is transforming their social and cultural
situations.
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temporal, non-material place called heaven. If the
world is not our hope, if Armageddon is coming,
who cares about acid rain?
But when God makes the new world it will be
recognisably the offspring and product of the world
we know at the moment.
We find it very difficult to think of human
bodies and indeed the universe as anything other
than decaying and dying.
But the promise of God in the New Testament is
that what God has done for Jesus at Easter God is
going to do for the whole cosmos. God is going to
deal with precisely the problem of decay and death.
New creation starts with Jesus’ resurrection.
The Promised Land was the first instalment,
now the whole world is God’s holy land. It is the
foundation of Christian mission in the world.
The material of the old world will be taken
up, healed, transformed, immortalised in the new
world.
The word “heaven” ought to be treated by us
today as a question mark until we have thought
through the cosmology of the Resurrection and
the Ascension.
Heaven is God’s space, God’s sphere. God made
the world to be bi-partite – heaven and earth are
meant to overlap and interlock.
We are imbued with the Platonic idea. The idea of
Jesus as an embodied human being going to heaven
strikes us as deeply counter-intuitive because for us
heaven is a place where bodies cannot be. We have
to rethink our biblical cosmology.
The curtain between heaven and earth runs
down between every room and every country
and every continent. It is a thin curtain and there
are some places and some times where you can
see through it. That is why in the Celtic tradition
they talk about “thin places” – where the curtain
between heaven and earth is thin and the light can
shine through.
Central to Christian political theology is that
Jesus is the real emperor and Caesar is not (“though
you’d never know it from the writings of many
Christians over the last twenty years”).
Jesus comes to heal the world, not to save people
from it – of course, to rescue us from corruption
and decay and death and all that dehumanises and
despoils God’s world and God’s people.
The resurrection of the body is a very precise
way of saying that when God renews heaven and
earth and brings them together we will be given
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Because in the power of the Risen Jesus,
God has given the Spirit, in the present. We
have got to start work on it now.
Paul has given us in Romans 8 this amazing
vision of a world renewed, of a cosmos rescued
from decay and death and set free to enjoy the
glorious liberty of the children of God. How
can we say that is fine for the future and go on
treating the world as a cross between a gold
mine and an ashtray in the present?
We need a more biblical way of looking at
heaven and earth, at time, and at the material
universe.
Heaven and earth are designed to overlap
and interlock – as something that already
exists and will one day be consummated. We
get flashes of it, we get intimations of it, we get
little bits of it. I believe that this is central for
Christian sacramental theology.
Addressing the topic of postmodernism Tom
Wright said that one of the things he struggled
with in his own work was finding ways of
reintegrating what had been kept apart.
With postmodernity, suddenly all the chess
pieces are back on the table and we really don’t
know how to play the game any more…we
don’t know how to put together all the
different aspects of our creative reality.
If we are followers of Jesus, our task is to
learn afresh how to speak the truth with power
in our generation.
We have a world in which war and violence
are endemic because they are good for business.
That has often been the case, it was so in the
ancient world, it is so in the modern world.
To try to banish God discourse from the
public sphere at this point of all points in our
planet’s history is not only impossible, it is
ludicrous.
A primary moment of the Church’s
proclamation is the life of the Church itself
– to generate and sustain communities living
the Jesus way. Because that impacts societies in
all kinds of ways that are unquantifiable.
St Francis said in sending out his missionaries,
preach the Gospel by every means possible
– and if it’s really necessary you could even
It is not a matter of saving souls on one hand
and ameliorating social problems on the other.
It must be both.
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The Church is called to stand at the place where
so much of our society is in desperate pain. People
are so confused and bothered and battered about
simply identity, never mind relationships.
With the Enlightenment, God became an
absentee landlord and it was decided that we would
banish evil by acts of Parliament.
The world had been in superstition and
ignorance and blindness for centuries. At last, with
the 18th Century western European and North
American culture we have enlightenment. We are
no longer in darkness and superstition. Now we
have grasped the vision of the future and it is our
task to implement it until we arrive at Utopia.
That story is an exact parody of the Christian
story – world history reached its climax when
Jesus died on the cross and rose again and it is
the Christian task to implement that achievement
and thereby anticipate the future. What the
Enlightenment did was to borrow the clothes that
many Christians had forgotten they owned.
Evil has not been banished
So we have a story of progress – the world is
getting better and better, Utopia is just round the
corner, and if only we could have more western
democracy, more western values, more science and
technology, we will get there.
We have grown up, most of us, with that as the
implicit story behind every other statement that our
politicians make: “Now that we live in the modern
age”, “Now that we live in the 21st Century”,
“Now that we live in our contemporary world”
– always with the implication that if you disagree
you are going back to darkness and superstition,
and medieval muddle.
It is the Enlightenment narrative which has been
so determinative of how we have seen the world.
The joke is of course at the moment that most of
our politicians still try to tell that story. Politicians
are not going to say we do not believe in progress
any more, there is no Utopia, we will just try to
give you wise, just government as best we can.
Within that Enlightenment package empire was
not only a possibility it was an obligation. We were
the developed ones, we were at the leading edge
of progress, we were in the vanguard and we had
a responsibility to bring that enlightenment to the
rest of the world.
Archbishop John Bathersby and Bishop Tom Wright.
On the other hand, the social activist lobby of the
churches concentrates on doing justice and loving
mercy here in the present. A great deal of good
work had been done that way, Wright said. But that
too misses the fullness of the promise which we
have in Jesus – that the bodily resurrection is the
beginning of the new creation. “Christian mission
consists of implementing the resurrection of Jesus
in the power of the Spirit and thereby anticipating
the ultimate new creation.”
God’s new creation is not a case of souls going
up to heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming
down from heaven to earth so that the dwelling of
Two world views had traditionally
been available
God will be with humans, so that heaven and earth
will be married at last.
Two world views had traditionally been available
to western Christians. The utopian view and
dualism.
There were huge problems with the utopian
view – for instance, if Utopia arrived tomorrow
what would that say to people who are being
tortured to death today? This critique also applies
to Marxism.
Many Christians assume some kind of
cosmological dualism as the ultimate goal. The aim
is to get out of this place, get away from this wicked
world and go the pure eternal timeless non spacio-
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new physical bodies to live in that new physical
world. It will of course be a transformed physicality,
because our present bodies – as we know – decay,
things drop off, change colour, and finally we die.
That is the way we currently are.
Our bodies are in a constant state of flux. It is
not just hair and fingernails and so on that drop
off. The entire atomic molecular kit that you have
is slowly changing over a period of something like
seven years.
We share our stuff around. And the stuff that
we presently use for our bodies has been used by
others before us and will be used after us, in many
different life forms. The resurrection is therefore
not entirely outside our experience.
What God did for Jesus at Easter he will do
for us all at the last. That is the doctrine of the
Resurrection of the Body.
“What on earth was that all
about?”
This has immediate and urgent ethical and
missiological implications. Because if God is going
to renew this world, and if God is going to renew
our bodies, our whole selves, what you do here
and now in that body matters. And what you do
in the world matters. What you do with your
physicality matters because God will reconstitute
your physicality.
The projects that you give your life to can
just crumble and decay and the next generation
doesn’t seem to appreciate them, and you are left
scratching your head saying, “What on earth was
that all about?”
Or just when you thought society was turning
a corner and becoming more healthy as a result of
the energetic work you and others had done, a new
political party comes to power or something else
happens in society and it all gets swept away.
Imagine all those poor people hammering away
at Christian/Muslim dialogue, and then seeing
September 11 come, seeing part of that work just
crumble into ashes.
If we think we are building the kingdom of God
by our own efforts we will be disappointed again
and again.
Equally disappointed will be those who say there
is nothing much we can do, so let’s sit back and
wait for God to do it all.
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Tom Wright’s summary of Modernism
Modernism is a west European and
North American philosophical, cultural,
social construct which appeared roughly
in the 18th Century with the rise of
science and technology.
The revolutionary philosophies of
Voltaire and Rousseau, in particular,
were a response to features of life from
the 15th and 16th centuries, including the
wars of religion following the Reformation.
Europe had torn itself apart in a variety of
ways, setting one version of Christianity
against another. That had gone on for so
long that people had started reacting by
saying that religion is a private matter. It
is nothing to do with public life.
This of course capitalises on the Deism
of much western culture – God is indeed
a long way away. We can doff our caps
at him from time to time, but really the
main thing is to get on and run the world
our own way.
Reaction to one event has haunted the
shape of the thinking of the Western
world ever since. A lot of thinkers in
that period really did believe that the
world was actually quite a benign place,
the work of a good Creator, and if you
studied it you would eventually arrive at
the main Christian beliefs.
And then came All Saints Day 1755
when a massive earthquake struck
Lisbon just when everyone was in
church, so that tens of thousands were
killed by falling church buildings.
Those who escaped in the city rushed
down to the harbour to get away from
the falling buildings, and there they saw
a second wonder, namely that the sea
had fled. They did not know what we
know – that means it is coming back
and coming back fast.
So those who had escaped from the
falling buildings were down by the
harbour when the tsunami came back,
and were drowned. The western world
was shaken to its Christian core.
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The Achilles heel of this story of progress, of
this claim to know all the facts, of this lonely
Enlightenment ego, is the continuing fact of evil
which has not been banished by progress and act
of parliament.
What we have had in the last generation has
been – under the very loose and complex title
of postmodernity – a critique and a counterproposal.
Spirituality within postmodernity is pick ‘n
mix…you can construct new identities for yourself
as you go along.
Now what has happened is that spirituality has
burst out all over the place. Everybody knows they
want spirituality and the joke is that nobody thinks
they are going to find it in church.
Postmodernity looks at the world as a much
more mysterious but now much more chaotic place
– who is this lonely post-Enlightenment ego?
Facts don’t seem so certain any more. We have
learned that everybody’s angle on truth is only one
angle on truth. Nobody has a God’s eye view of
individual facts or of the universe. Everybody who
has an angle on some subject precisely has an angle
which is likely to be self-serving. So we deconstruct
facts. “You only say that because….”
Postmodernity says there is no big story. The
Enlightment story is a lie. And we can see that
it has caused untold misery, not least to the twothirds
world.
Tom Wright said that a Christian reappropriation
of the arts was a vital and non-negotiable part of the
mission of the Church within a postmodern world.
Christian art could generate a hermeneutic space
within which Christian faith can be reimagined in
today’s and tomorrow’s culture.
So much human misery has been caused by
a failure of imagination, he said, by people who
simply cannot believe that there is a different way
to do the human project other than the present
world economic system, and the present system of
global pollution, and so on.
Our culture has shrunk our imagination and it
is the role of art to expand and open and think of
new possibilities. (See cover picture)
Tom Wright is acclaimed as one of the foremost
New Testament scholars in the world today and
has more than fifty published titles. He has written
extensively about the writings of St Paul.
www.ntwrightpage.com