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.” …

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…