Book Report: Surprised by Hope
I read N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope for Sunday School earlier this year and compiled some thoughts on it.
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On Reconstruction
The “Human Colossus”[1] seems to goes through cycles of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. I am more aware, now, that even within the larger arcs of these cycles (large enough to have fancy names like “modernism”, “postmodernism”, etc.), there are phases of micro-construction, micro-deconstruction, and micro-reconstruction. I view Surprised by Hope as N.T. Wright’s attempt to reexamine and deconstruct some conceptual fallacies that the Christian community has become comfortable, and then reconstruct them. Wright reconstructs our understanding of Resurrection, Baptism, Eucharist, temple, prayer, marriage, scripture, evangelism, justice, hell, love, etc. as “signposts” pointing to new creation and the Kingdom that new creation will be subject to. I’ll comment on some of these in the following paragraphs.
The Resurrection of Christ, with emphasis on the physicality of it, is the prototype of transformation of creation to new creation. Echoing in his footsteps, Baptism, for the individual human, is rebirth as new creation. More significantly, Baptism, for the Human Colossus, represents the expanding the reach of God’s Kingdom, a redemption of the state of chaos (that came from humans defining what is “good” and what is “evil” for ourselves) to the state of order (God’s definition of what is “good”). Scripture orients our “personal experience of redemption” in the trajectory of redemption of all creation.
I am fascinated by Wright’s treatment of heaven, hell and purgatory. He suggests that the concept of “purgatory” might be more usefully thought of as the present—after all, we are presently living in the tense moments between Easter and the coming of the Kingdom, between time of separate heaven and earth and looking forward to the interlocking heaven and earth. Wright also suggests to think of “Justice” is “Thy will be one”, and conversely, “Hell” as “my will be done”. Both these concepts are very helpful to understand that “purgatory” and “hell” aren’t “places” foreign to our current existence. Instead, the vocabulary provides useful infrastructures for self-examination of my present orientation towards (or away) from God. Thankfully, this means that “heaven” is also accessible in our current existence! Pre-Easter, the temple, specifically the Holiest of Holiest, is only place where heaven and earth literally (and physically) met. Post-Easter, new creation can be accessed through Christ; prayer is the post-Easter activity of accessing the Holiest of Holiest. It amazing that we have the privilege to access new creation and I can see why being in “continuously prayer” is the most joyful way to pass our time in “purgatory”.
From both the book and the Sunday School class, I learned that the mechanics of resurrection and redemption are not as arbitrary as I thought. But we cannot help but come across so many of these terms (Resurrection, Baptism, Eucharist, temple, prayer, marriage, scripture, evangelism, justice, hell, love, etc.) and how we understand them ends up constructing what we believe. These beliefs have implications on how we live. People who believe in conspiracy theories live their daily lives far differently than those who don’t; similarly, Christians who believe the earth as we know is has no part in the Kingdom that will come live differently from the ones who don’t. I am always cautious of being distracted by the mechanics; I think it’s a more productive use of my energy to work on knowing the heart of God rather than to even entertain myself with theories about how the mind of God works. That said, I am baffled, and even a little jealous, when people claim know the mind of God enough to hurt others over conundrums I personally don’t have answers to (ie: what resurrection is like, what they end times entail, what happens when babies die, etc.)[2] Although I still have little interest the so-called “mechanics”, I now realize that I have been and will continue to adopt these beliefs about them as long as I don’t live in a vacuum. The only choice I have is whether I continue to adopt my beliefs passively or put in the effort to reconstruct them actively.
[1] I’ll using the phrase “Human Colossus” to refer to the idea that all humans cumulatively form its own identity. Much like many cells form one human; many humans form one “Human Colossus”. I’m sure this is not an original concept and there must be a more technically precise term, but for now I’ll use “Human Colossus” as a placeholder. The term itself comes from this hilariously endearing Wait But Why article.
[2] In my own fruitless attempts, I try to consider every speculation as a possibility in a probability distribution. The “possible futures” are mapped to the distribution by a complex weight function that considers previous inputs that were weighted with higher certainty. Even in physics we already know Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle…how many more “uncertainty principles” do we not know about God? How can people have such strong convictions? Sure, there might be a lot of false positives… but some of them are from God if they are so certain, right?
On Progress
I think N.T Wright’s warning against subscribing to the myth of progress is apt. In reaction to the state of creation compared to what it ought to be, the myth of progress suggests a narrative that humans progress towards God’s kingdom by our own prerogative. This reminds me of how humans tried to create the Tower of Babel to reach God. We ought to be aware of our contemporary versions of the Tower of Babel. Some things I’ve recently read (from Kentaro Toyama and Jacques Ellul) have warned me against hope in technology, or “techno-optimism”. Others (Erich Fromm and Jacques Ellul again come to mind, but there are so many others) warn against hope in politics and governance to bring about justice. I think the church needs to be aware of this destructive “progress” mindset with regards to the church as an institution (*cough*the megachurch phenomenon*cough*). My general impression about those who think long and hard for solutions to the world’s problems is that they mostly tend to conclude that it’s the condition of the Human Colossus heart that needs to be transformed rather than these periphery structures. Similarly, Wright mentions that the myth of progress fails to address the problem of evil.
What then is an alternative to narrative to “progress”? I suppose we all already believe that it’s God rather than the Human Colossus that does most of the work “bending the arc of history towards justice[3]” (aka the Gospel). In the meantime, there’s already so much work to do to fulfill our responsibility from Genesis 1 to maintain the creation that God called “good”. While technology, the church, and the state may contribute to this maintenance work, narratives they tell that focus too heavily on progress and growth as goals in of themselves are dangerous and I think moving forward, this is something the Human Colossus ought to be consistently introspective about.
I am reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope at a time where amassing hope is “trending”. There’s no longer any logical way we can rationalize that humans will be the solution to the trajectory we call “progress”[4] and finding a reason to hope is the only way we can cope. Wright reminds us the surprising hope we already know: “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done.”
[3] Especially if we read “Justice” as “God’s intention” rather than “human intention” as mentioned the previous section!
[4] This comes to mind.
Featured image from Zondervan.