Two Anglican bishops have recently written two vastly different outlines of resurrection and Christian life after death. I approach this with some trepidation, buoyed only by a reverend friend who patiently tries to guide me if we sometimes disagree. “I’ll be interested in the response you get to this installment,” he wrote recently. “Be ready for dialogue which will probably be spirited but genuine. You’re laying on the table the struggle of many with central Christian tenets and that’s good and healthy for the church in these days.”
If you want some rainy day reading at the cottage this summer pick up N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope and John Shelby Spong’s Eternal Life: A New Vision. Wright is Bishop of Durham for the Church of England; Spong is the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark. Spong writes more fluidly than Wright, perhaps because he is tracing his personal faith journey through our secular age from childhood’s fundamentalist faith through questioning priest to radical bishop. Showing my colours early, maybe the reason he strikes a chord is that I began from fundamentalist agnosticism and somewhere our paths may have crossed. At this point, I’ve read Wright’s book three times, my copy heavily underlined, margins lined with “!’s” and “?’s”. He clearly needs an editor to catch a few grammatical errors and eliminate frustrating references to issues he has covered elsewhere and an annoying propensity to deflect provocative questions by writing “we shall come back to this crucial theme toward the end of the book.” Perhaps he’s seeking to strengthen our patience as we await the Lord’s return.
The two differ on many points. Wright notes that he is the least bereaved middle-aged person he knows. His family has lived long lives and, as an academic and administrator, he has conducted few funerals. Spong, now 80, first encountered death at the age of three when his gold fish died. He soon lost his father and other relatives and friends, and funerals were too-frequent events at the churches he served. Wright casually mentions “the cosmos” now and then and scoffs at mystics. Spong sounds like Stephen Hawking describing a 13-billion-year-old universe of billions of galaxies and is comfortable with both contemporary science and mysticism.
There is much to like and savour in Bishop Wright’s book, not the least being his recalling resurrection beliefs, both religious and pagan, of two millennia ago and his tight legal argument that even if four eye-witnesses don’t tell exactly the same story about Jesus’ emergence from the grave, that may be taken as convincing testimony that something happened. Spong, on the other hand, highlights discrepancies in the disciples’ accounts, interpreting them as attempts to describe a spiritual event for which words are inadequate.
Basing his stand largely on a few passages from John and Paul with some backward glances at Daniel, Elijah and Isaiah, Wright proposes that because Jesus died, was resurrected and ascended, he will return and transform our dead bodies as his was transformed. We will not, Wright think, rise to Heaven, a place he characterizes as sort of an extra-dimension in time-space, present but invisible to us. Wright touches on Revelation and the politics of early Christians: “Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose power depends on it,” a sentence that echoes dissenting Christian D.H. Lawrence in Apocalypse: “From being bottom dogs they were going to be top dogs: in Heaven.”
Spong categorically rejects Wright’s interpretation of a supernatural God who miraculously invades the world to save us from the reality of death. “The Easter story,” he writes, “is more than that, far more, not less than that. In fact, it is not that at all.”
Each of us has a personal understanding, faith and hope about Heaven, Eternity and the prospect of something beyond this life. The glitch is that nobody knows, including the eminent bishops. They hint at something, though, that seems to reverberate with Living Faith’s declaration that “as God raised Christ, so shall we be raised into a condition fit for life with God.”
Next time….
