The theology of NT Wright

I’ve been reading N. T. Wright’s, Surprised by Hope and I’ve found myself frustrated by N. T. Wright. As one example, in part 13 ‘Building for the Kingdom’, Wright engages rhetoric that is overly reactionary and I think it mitigates the points he wants to make. Under redemption, Jesus’ resurrection and the new creation of salvation, Wright places the work of garden keeping in the world of space, time and matter. Fair enough (carefully understood). Evidently, however, he wants to build his case for ”garden keeping” on God’s ultimate intention to redeem even creation itself (something that God will do in the end).  Because of God’s ultimate intention, he insists that we cannot picture God looking at the fallen world (and we might add, groaning world, Romans eight) and saying, “Oh, well, nice try, good while it lasted but obviously gone bad, so let’s drop it and go for a non-spatiotemporal, nonmaterial world instead.” He then argues that since God intends to redeem rather than reject His created world (would ”rejecting” be the worng word for what the apostle desribes God doing in II Peter 3), we should celebrate that redemption (what he calls healing and transformation) in the present as a means of anticipating what is to come. Along these lines, he pictures the Church as called to “implementing Jesus resurrection and thereby anticipating the final new creation.”

I had sworn off OST, vowing to myself never to return, having been consigned either to the flames or to the bottom of the sea depending on who’s talking at the moment. But habits are hard to break, and as I found myself clicking onto the site my attention was captured by the title and photo at the top of this post.

Last night my wife, daughter and I watched The Red Balloon, a French short film from 1956 about a little Parisian boy who finds a red balloon…

It appears to be a core theme of Tom Wright’s Simply Christian that the mission of God - and therefore of the people of God - is to rescue the world and put it to rights. The Bible, he says, tells the story of a ‘good creator longing to put the world back into the good order for which it was designed’; it is the story of what the ‘one creator God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and to put it to rights’ (40, 41); it is the story of how the ‘creator God is rescuing the creation from its rebellion, brokenness, corruption and death’ (159). Following the thorough-going collapse of human society depicted in Genesis 1-11, Wright argues, God calls Abraham and his descendants, ‘somehow, to be the means of God putting things to rights, the spearhead of God’s rescue operation’ (64); and what Abraham sees in his mind’s eye is this world restored to peace and justice…

I have set out here a summary of NT Wright’s exhaustive multi-volume project Christian Origins and the Question of God. The works published so far in the series are:

1. The New Testament and the People of God
2. Jesus and the Victory of God
3. The Resurrection of the Son of God