over the past few months I have been pondering the impact of our gospel message and how it relates to the reality of a resurrected Christ. my argument has been that we (the church in the west) has been preaching and proclaiming a message that is too small. Having limited the gospel to bumper-stickers, sound-bites and get-to-heaven, gospel tracts, are we surprised when the world finds Christians (by-and-large) irrelevant and/or out of touch? thus, i spent the lenten season and concluding with Easter proposing ways and means that the message of Jesus Christ must be expanded and made known. much of this hinges upon the reality of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. without that singular moment in time and space, the words, actions, and sacrifice of Christ are rendered meaningless. in my own life and in the church which i serve i have argued that Christians in the west need to embrace the expanse of the gospel and live in the reality of the resurrected Christ.
of course, i am speaking very general and that it for good reason. you see i am an amateur theologian, merely a pastor (not to say pastors and their position are not adequate or qualified to make theological statements or positions--merely talking about me personally...just wanted to clear that up). i may have interesting observations (at least in my own mind), but God has blessed the world with others that are far more credible and insightful than i. hence i want to provide an excerpt from a recently published book by NT Wright that makes some interesting statements regarding the resurrection and its impact on the life of Christians, as well as its relationships to the world. so, if anyone is reading this (and i am not just talking to myself) feel free to share your thoughts, i would be interested to get some further insight and push-back to this topic and excerpt:
"Easter was then Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, partly b/c we do not know when it will arrive and partly b/c at present we have only images and metaphors for it, leaving us to guess what the reality will be far greater, and more surprising, still. and the intermediate hope--the things that happen int he present time to implement Easter and anticipate the final day--are always surprising b/c, left to ourselves, we lapse into a kind of collusion with entropy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present--of which this book, God willing, may form part--is to live as resurrection people in b/w Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second."
(Wright, N.T., Surprised by Hope. HarperCollins: New York, 2008. p29-30.)
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2 comments:
It seems you are heading in a good direction of thought. I know this comment is sometime after the post date.
Can the power of the Christ's resurrection have transforming power in every square inch of life? As for the quote, it seems NT Wright never disappoints in any of the disciplines of biblical studies or theology.
Hoosier gone south of the river to Kentucky (on my wife's blog account)
Dan
if the resurrected Christ does not have the capacity to transform every square inch of life, then what we r doing must b found wanting? what we r doing n the sense that perhaps the body of Christ is not being a conduit for the Kingdom of God (kog) to flow and b made known. Granted the activity of fallible beings hinders the grand scope of the resurrection's transforming power, but that isn't to say that the entirety and full impact of the resurrection will b revealed some day? i wonder if the "answer" to ur ? lies in the tension of "now but not yet" or "thy kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven"
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