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.