That’s All, Folks

Today is my last day of blogging for awhile. Too much time, too little traffic, and even less interest from a generally disinterested Internet public, at least for the stuff I post. For those of you who have visited regularly, thank you for doing so. I trust God has used these postings to feed you in ways that you need.

There’s lots of resources here that you can peruse at your leisure and I will continue to post my sermons as I preach them. But the daily postings will stop for the most part.

God bless.

More from N.T. Wright

Today I conclude our look at this week’s featured Anglican theologian and writer, +Tom Wright. As I have done all week, in recognition of All Saints’ Day this past Monday, today’s excerpts primarily feature +Tom’s writings and theology on the New Creation. Enjoy.

On the saints of God:

I therefore arrive at this view: that all the Christian departed are in substantially the same state, that of restful happiness. This is not the final destiny for which they are bound, namely the bodily resurrection; it is a temporary resting place. As the hymn puts it:

The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest:
Sweet is the calm of Paradise the blest.
Alleluia!

Since they and we are both in Christ, we do indeed share with them in the Communion of Saints. Once we erase the false trail of purgatory from our mental map of the postmortem world, there is no reason why we shouldn’t pray for them and with them. If the great Puritan divine Richard Baxter could say this, so can we: in his hymn ‘He wants not friends that hath thy love’ he writes:

Within the fellowship of saints
Is wisdom, safety and delight;
And when my heart declines and faints,
It’s raised by their heat and light.

We still are centred all in thee,
Members, though distant, of one Head;
Within one family we be,
And by one faith and spirit led.

Before thy throne we daily meet
As joint-petitioners to thee;
In spirit each the other greet,
And shall again each other see.

For All the Saints: Remembering the Christian Departed

On our understanding of God:

The God I Want? Left to myself, the god I want is a god who will give me what I want. He–or more likely it–will be a projection of my desires. At the grosser level, this will lead me to one of the more obvious pagan gods or goddesses, who offer their devotees money, or sex, or power (as Marx, Freud and Nietzsche pointed out). All idols started out life as the god somebody wanted.

At the more sophisticated level, the god I want will be a god who lives up to my intellectual expectations: a god of whom I can approve rationally, judiciously, after due consideration and weighing up of theological probabilities. I want this god because he, or it, will underwrite my intellectual arrogance. He will boost my sense of being a refined modern thinker. The net result is that I become god; and this god I’ve made becomes my puppet. Nobody falls down on their face before the god they wanted. Nobody trembles at the word of a homemade god. Nobody goes out with fire in their belly to heal the sick, to clothe the naked, to teach the ignorant, to feed the hungry, because of the god they wanted. They are more likely to stay at home with their feet up.

But on one particular day in the year we celebrate the God whom we didn’t want–how could we have ever dreamed of it?–but who, amazingly, wanted us. In the church’s year, Trinity Sunday is [that] day. You see, the doctrine of the Trinity, properly understood, is as much a way of saying ‘we don’t know’ as of saying ‘we do know’. To say that the true God is Three and One is to recognize that if there is a God then of course we shouldn’t expect him to fit neatly into our little categories. If he did, he wouldn’t be God at all, merely a god, a god we might perhaps have wanted. The Trinity is not something that the clever theologian comes up with as a result of hours spent in the theological laboratory, after which he or she can return to announce that they’ve got God worked out now, the analysis is complete, and here is God neatly laid out on a slab. The only time they laid God out on a slab he rose again three days afterwards. On the contrary: the doctrine of the Trinity is, if you like, a signpost pointing ahead into the dark, saying: ‘Trust me; follow me; my love will keep you safe.’ Or, perhaps better, the doctrine of the Trinity is a signpost pointing into a light which gets brighter and brighter until we are dazzled and blinded, but which says: ‘Come, and I will make you children of light.’ The doctrine of the Trinity affirms the rightness, the propriety, of speaking intelligently about the true God, while at the same time affirming intelligently that the true God must always transcend our grasp of him, even our most intelligent grasp of him. As St. Paul says, what matters isn’t so much our knowledge of God as God’s knowledge of us; not, as it were, the god we want but the God who wants us. God help us, we don’t understand ourselves; how can we expect to understand that Self which stands beside our selves like Niagara beside a trickling tap?

For All God’s Worth

On the crucifixion:

You see, although there are ways of making sense of Jesus’ crucifixion, and we’ll get to them in a moment, the first thing we should recognize is that for Jesus’ followers and family at the time it made no sense at all. It was the denial of everything they’d longed for, the stupid and pointless snuffing out of the brightest light and best hope Israel had ever had. Jesus’ crucifixion must have made his followers wonder if Satan had been tricking them all along, if God had not after all been at work in Jesus, if Israel’s God was maybe not the world’s creator and judge after all, if maybe Israel’s God didn’t exist, if maybe there was no God at all… Watching Jesus get dragged off to a mockery of a trial, a brutal and degrading beating and then the worst torture and death imaginable would force all those questions on them. If we don’t recognize that, then we have domesticated the cross, turned it into a safe symbol of private faith, and forgotten what it was really all about. And then we wonder why we are left with nowhere to turn when things in our own lives, our own families, our own communities, our own civilization, seem to go not just pear-shaped–at least a pear still has a shape!–but utterly chaotic, totally random. Good Friday was chaos come again: darkness, earthquake, violence and the death of the one who had given life to so many.

But of course as soon as we call it God’s chaos we are making a statement of faith, a statement which has echoes of the Psalms and the prophets who looked at the ruin of Israel, at famine and disaster and devastation, and clung on with their fingernails to the belief that God was still God even if it really didn’t look like that. Today we heard perhaps the best-known Old Testament passage of all: the fourth Servant Song, the end of Isaiah 52 and the whole of Isaiah 53.

It might be a good idea to read that song through slowly again, asking God to help you listen to the notes that it’s playing and to think through the harmonies you need to fill in. It is a song about horrible violence, leaving the victim unrecognizable and scarcely human. It’s a song about suffering so acute that people are ashamed and embarrassed and look away. It’s a song about massive injustice, oppression doing its worst and getting away with it. Is it any wonder the first Christians saw it as a song about Jesus? But it’s also, of course, a song about astonishing vindication, about suffering bearing fruit, about the sufferer seeing fruit from all the travail of his soul, and about a new work of God which springs up just when all seemed lost in darkness and futility.

And it is all this because it is a song about the substitute. It’s about the king who stands in for his people and does for them what they can’t do for themselves. It’s about the prophet seeing and speaking God’s purpose and word for the people that couldn’t see or speak it themselves. It’s about the priest who enters the holy place alone on behalf of the people. Is it any wonder the first Christians saw it as a song about Jesus? And at its heart there is the terrifying theme which we approach with caution, because like whitewater rapids it can turn us upside down and crash us against the rocks, and yet which we can’t avoid because it stands at the heart of Jesus’ own understanding of his vocation. ‘He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment which made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53.56).

And that is why, of course, before we even get to the tune, to John’s gospel itself once more, we have to pause and whisper the alto part which is our own bit of the harmony. Faced with that bass line, the only thing we can say is, Thank you; thank you; nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling; when I survey the wondrous cross, where the young prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride. Thankfully we have poets who have said it better than we can. We share their words, and hope to grow more into them. But the only proper response to the death of Jesus, wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, is gratitude, faith and love.

And, as we look up in that gratitude, we allow ourselves to see Jesus hanging there on the first Good Friday. We see him once more with John’s eyes.

First, John says, he is the king. Pilate put up the sign saying so, and refused to alter it. But the king is the one who stands in for his people, like David fighting Goliath on behalf of Israel. Jesus is off to meet the giant, the forces of chaos and death, on our behalf.

Jesus is, second, the one in whom the suffering Psalms find their fulfillment. People gamble for his clothing, and mock his thirst with sour wine.

And he is the true Passover Lamb. His bones are not to be broken.

John is telling us all this. It would, again, be a good thing to read the whole of John 19 slowly once more. But in the middle of it, at verse 30, there stands one word which says it all. ‘Finished.’ ‘Accomplished.’ ‘Completed.’ Jesus’ last word, which sums it all up.

Christians at the Cross: Finding Hope in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus

Can a scientist believe in the Resurrection?

The audio is over an hour but you don’t have an hour to listen. So download the audio file, load it on your iPod or mp3 player, and listen to it as you exercise or are able. But listen to it.

Listen to the whole thing.

A Particular Road

Everyone has [a] particular road which leads to liberation–one the road of virtue, another the road of evil. If the road leading you to your liberation is that of disease, of lies, of dishonor, it is then your duty to plunge into disease, into lies, into dishonor, that you may conquer them. You may not otherwise be saved. If the road which leads you to your liberation is the road of virtue, of joy, of truth, it is then your duty to plunge into virtue, into joy, into truth, that you may conquer them and leave them behind you. You may not otherwise be saved.

–Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God

C.S. Lewis Muses on God’s Guidance

Some years ago I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to London, and the first letter I opened made it clear I need not go to London. So I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying, “Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut.” In the end I could stand it no longer. I went.

Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian and a man of many troubles whom my brother and I had sometimes been able to help. The moment I opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” And, in fact, if I had come a day or so later, I should have been of no use to him. It awed me; it awes me still. But, of course, one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection between the barber’s prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident.

I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses (who often know better), a few weeks. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as rock. It’s miraculous.” But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an exact science. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsification of its prophecies. You need not, unless you choose, believe in a causal connection between the prayers and the recovery.

The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?” The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous, it would not follow that the miracle had occurred because of yqur prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such as we have in the sciences can never be attained.

Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

The World’s Last Night

Henri Nouwen: What is New

The spiritual life can be lived in as many ways as there are people. What is new is that we have moved from the many things to the kingdom of God. What is new is that we are set free from the compulsions of our world and have set our hearts on the only necessary thing. What is new is that we no longer experience the many things, people, and events as endless causes for worry but begin to experience them as the rich variety of ways in which God makes his presence known to us. Indeed, living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness.

Making All Things New

Augustine: The Basis of Our Hope is Christ

Through his temptations, suffering, death and resurrection Jesus has become our hope. Now we can say to ourselves: “God surely won’t condemn us since it was for us that he sent his Son to be tempted, to be crucified, to die, and to rise again. God cannot despise us since he delivered up his own Son for our sake.” Christ gives us an example of how we should live this life of labor, temptation, suffering, and death. Through his resurrection he is the proof for the life we will live after death. If Jesus had not come as a human being all we would know about human life is that we are born and we die. Jesus took upon himself the human condition we know and gave us a proof of the eternal life we do not know.

Commentary on Psalm 60.4

Augustine on the Eternal Sabbath Rest

We ourselves shall become that seventh day [of Sabbath rest], when we have been replenished and restored by his blessing and sanctification [in the New Creation]. There we shall have leisure to be still, and we shall see that he is God, whereas we wished to be that ourselves when we fell away from him, after listening to the Seducer saying: “You will be like gods.” Then we abandoned the true God, by whose creative help we should have become gods, but by participating in him, not by deserting him. For what have we done without him? We have “fallen away in his anger.” But now restored by him and perfected by his greater grace we shall be still and at leisure for eternity, seeing that he is God, and being filled by him when he will be all in all.

After this present age God will rest, as it were, on the seventh day, and he will cause us, who are the seventh day, to find our rest in him. The important thing is that the seventh will be our Sabbath, whose end will not be an evening, but the Lord’s Day, an eighth day, as it were, which is to last for ever, a day consecrated by the resurrection of Christ, foreshadowing the eternal rest not only of the spirit but of the body also. There we shall be still and see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be, in the end, without end, For what is our end but to reach that kingdom which has no end?

City of God 22.30