yeti speak…

did jesus fly like superman?

·

Superman
Started reading this N.T. Wright book, Surprised By Hope.  He is such a clear thinker and obviously knows a lot about the early Church.  I won't go into a lot of detail about what the book is about, but I like how Wright tends to artfully dismantle some of the faulty ways many (myself included) have interpreted (or misinterpreted) scripture from the lens of our post-Enlightenment paradigm.  If you are a big fan of Left Behind "theology" than you might not like what Wright has to say, but I think many of his explanations regarding the "things to come" make a lot more sense in light of scripture, cultural context, and the character of God and offer so much more HOPE than the dispensationalist view that I (and many of you) grew up with.  It certainly has had me thinking a lot.

Did Jesus really fly "up" into heaven when he ascended? 

When Paul talks about believers going "up" to meet him in the sky is this supposed to be taken literally (i.e. a direction in our earthly time/space) or is he describing an event that breaks our tired conceptual mold?

What will heaven look like?  What about our resurrected bodies?

Wright has some thought-provoking ideas about our Christian hope; and digging into the culture, worldview, and languages of the early Church has me itching to go to seminary or take some classes or something.  Maybe some day… 

If you want a little bit to chew on, consider what Wright says about metaphor and the mystery of Christ' ascension:

The early Christians, and their fellow first-century Jews, were not, as many moderns suppose, locked into thinking of a three-decker universe with heaven up in the sky and hell down beneath their feet.  When they spoke of up and down like that they, like the Greeks in their different ways, were using metaphors that were so obvious they didn't need spelling out.  As some recent writers have pointed out, when a pupil at school moves "up" a grade, from (say) the tenth grade to the eleventh, it is unlikely that this means relocated to a classroom on the floor above.  And though the move "up" from vice-chairman of the board to chairman of the board may indeed mean that at last you get an office in the penthouse suite, it would be quite wrong to think that "moving up" in this context meant merely being a few feet farther away from terra firma.

The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery.  It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time.  We post-Enlightenment Westerners are such wretched flatlanders.  Although New Age thinkers, and indeed quite a lot of contemporary novelists, are quite capable of taking us into other parallel worlds, spaces, and times, we retreat into our rationalistic closed-system universe as soon as we think about Jesus.  C.S. Lewis of course did a great job in the Narnia stories and elsewhere of imagining how two worlds could relate and interlock.  But the generation that grew up knowing its way around Narnia does not usually know how to make the transition from a children's story to the real world of grown-up Christian devotion and theology.

6 responses to “did jesus fly like superman?”

  1. Terri Crook Avatar
    Terri Crook

    Thanks Todd, my book club is reading this book this month. I’ll just copy this so I have something interesting to say! No, I’m looking forward to reading it…. Terri

  2. yeti Avatar
    yeti

    you guys are in for a treat. i’m really enjoying it. it’s definitely bending my mind a bit though (in a good way.)

  3. Ruth Lowell Avatar
    Ruth Lowell

    WOW! Very cool!
    My theory for several years now has been as follows:
    Predestination and free will can both be true because God is outside the time/space continuum.

    Maybe I should start a blog after all.

  4. yeti Avatar
    yeti

    ruth: you should definitely start a blog. especially since you’ve got that whole pre-destination / election thing figured out. 🙂

  5. Chuck Avatar
    Chuck

    N.T. Wright is great!

    Once you whet your whistle on “Surprised By Hope,” you should move on to some of his weighter books. They are absolutely wonderful. His take on theology is definitely more biblical (in my opinion, anyway) than that of the “pie-in-sky-by-and-by,” “rapture-me-outa-here” dispensationalists.

    Ruth: Your ideas about predestination and free-will might be rocked just a wee bit by N.T. if you keep reading him…especially if you read Greg Boyd, which I see the author of this blog is reading. Boyd’s “Satan and the Problem of Evil” is great (although challenging), as is “God of the Possible” (easier reading).

    P.S. I got here from a post on Facebook by Jason L.

  6. yeti Avatar
    yeti

    Chuck: thanks for the comment. I agree that NT Wright is great! I started reading his sermon/lecture, How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? but realized that I needed to spend some time with it because it was a bit “weightier” than the typical fair. Glad you found your way to the yetispeak thanks to JLo. I am excited to reading some Boyd, too. I have heard a lot about him but haven’t read any of his books yet.

Leave a comment

Subscribe