Reading “Surprised By Hope” By N.T. Wright, Part 1 (I Hope)
I’m not very good at reading theology books. I’m not a big reader to start with, but theology books are even tougher to get through – very rarely have I found a book that I actually thought, after reading, “Wow! That was enlightening/useful/unexpected/good in some way!” I think I had those kind of thoughts about Mere Christianity, but that was back in like the 7th grade.
Not that there haven’t been times where I’ve longed for some wise believer to be able to make sense of things for me – the Bible is not the easiest book to grasp, and there’s lots of potential for misunderstanding and self-deception. But the “wise believer makes it easy for me” thing just doesn’t happen. Too often you get books that start by telling you how “shocking” their conclusions are and generally not leaving you to make up your mind about their arguments, or spend a lot of time trying to elevate issues that struggle to feel like they matter, or tell smarmy anecdotes, or belabor obvious points for chapters upon chapters, or hide seething judgmentalism, or any number of things that leave me going, “Is there any wisdom in the entire world of Christendom? Anywhere?”
N.T. Wright’s book What Paul Really Said was one of the rare books I really enjoyed reading, although I think I didn’t (and still don’t) really grasp his point. He spent a good deal of the book trying to elaborate on what was meant by “the gospel” and how it was larger than what we usually mean when we say “the gospel,” but his thoughts didn’t gel sufficiently. Nonetheless, he seemed to be the scholarly, wise believer I was hoping for, so I kept reading over certain passages trying to figure out what he was really getting at. I’m still not really sure.
I’m not really enjoying, however, Surprised by Hope. Nonetheless, I hope that by blogging my thoughts about it as I read (slowly), I’ll be motivated to actually finish it. Surprised by Hope is about heaven – or really, about the resurrection, and how there’s an important difference between the two ideas. Wright tells us that our beliefs about the resurrection matter because they affect our engagement with the here and now.
There’s truth in his arguments, I suppose. He elaborates for a while on how vague, syncretic, strange, and mixed-up the average Christian’s view of the afterlife really is. There’s really no arguing with this.
Where I find myself questioning his thesis is on the idea that any of this actually matters. He argues that our belief in a disembodied heaven versus a bodily resurrection coincided with, and also inspired, Christianity’s disengagement from efforts to improve society. He hasn’t convinced me – at least not yet. It seems improbable, because I don’t give a flying small mammal’s posterior about the question – either way could be right and it would affect me emotionally not the slightest. The idea that God is in control and will reward righteous behavior and show mercy to those who believe is really the big, important point. The details seem to be (a)beyond our comprehension, and (b)irrelevant.
I’ve always hated arguing about eternity – as though it were possible to stick a concept like heaven or hell or the soul or divinity in a box and reason about it in some productive, not-intrinsically-stupid way. God has revealed things to us, and we know pretty much what God told us. Arguing about the nature of hell beyond “it’s going to royally suck and you DON’T want it, whatever it is, to happen to you,” is silly. Arguing about what eternity looks like for the saved beyond “it’s going to be really awesome and, whatever it is, you DO want it to happen to you,” is silly. Arguing about whether we have “an immortal soul” is silly. Arguing about the trinity is silly. It doesn’t leave a lot of space for intellectualism, but I shed no tears for that.
So, at least, as of midway through Chapter 3, Wright hasn’t convinced me that he’s not just piddling around in silliness. He hasn’t yet offered any evidence other than a sort of vague correlation that our belief about this particular afterlife-related question is related to our view of social justice. It seems more probable to me, at least at this juncture, that if Christians disengaged from trying to improve the world, it’s because they came to feel that they owned the world – the Constantinian problem. They became a fundamentally conservative force – preserving the power they had acquired – rather than a force for change. I don’t know that evolving (or devolving) beliefs on the nature of the afterlife had anything to do with it. It would surprise me, at least.
Now, this could certainly all be premature on my part. Part of me hopes it is, and I’ll get to write a “I was wrong and stupid about N.T. Wright’s book” post. Hopefully, I’d be tough enough to own up to it. We’ll see.