In the unlikely case that anyone thinks they might find here the definitive answer to the ultimate question that religion has sought to answer since, well, since there was religion, let me first point out that this is called Wondering Wanderer for a reason. I think we’re all wandering, we’re all wondering. Some, like N.T. Wright and John Spong, are more certain than others that they have understood the message God sent us in Jesus Christ. They have spent their lives decoding the Word and seem to stand today at distant ends of the Christian spectrum.
Wright would probably rank Spong among those “pursuing psychoanalysis by other means.” Spong understands Wright’s resurrection literalism as “a toe dip into unreality.” Ah, but wait. What Wright calls “the normal Christian understanding of…[the] kingdom of heaven is simply mistaken.” That kingdom, as Wright echoes Jesus’ teaching in the Lord’s Prayer, will come on earth as it is in Heaven. We’re not going “up there.” Heaven will come to us when the way is prepared. And who’s going to do all the heavy lifting?
Well, we are, according to Wright. We are “the people through whom God can carry out his work in the world.” Harking back to Paul, he notes that we are only partly what we are meant to be, but that one day we will be complete, he thinks, and “the bridge from one reality to the other is love.”
Spong, too, understands that we are in a process of change. However, he believes that the bridge we are crossing leads from a consciousness limited by time and space to a new understanding of our unity with the entire universe. Religion, he claims, is not about preparing for the next life, “it is a call to live now, to love now.” Words, he admits in his final paragraph, fail him. Live fully, love wastefully – “that to me is the way to prepare for life after death.”
There is, obviously, much more to their books than I have summarized. These two distinguished bishops have travelled vastly different paths to arrive at pretty much the same destination that Paul recommended to those troublesome Corinthians: “The greatest of these is love.” Wrestling with the bishops’ concepts is an often uncomfortable struggle that leaves me both disappointed that even these guys don’t know what’s around the next bend and encouraged to think that they may have found the only answer there is.
I find this quote from Bishop Wright on Wikipedia (I should blush as one who carries on about questionable sources) about fellow theologians: “there are probably almost as many…positions as there are writers espousing it – and I disagree with most of them.” If all the learned theologians can’t figure it out – Wright often says “if I am right” – I’m not sure how we peons in the pews are supposed to. It’s comforting to be reminded of my minister friend quoting Martin Luther King who said sometimes grandma on her knees can get more truth than the philosopher on his tiptoes. That’s probably true of theologians on their tiptoes, too.
Whatever is supposed to happen after the end of my personal story, I can only worry about life before death and trust God’s grace and love for anything else. I like Bishop Wright’s observation that in Jesus Christ God has sent we troublesome earthlings a prototype of the kingdom of heaven, and that kingdom will be created right here. By us. With love and compassion. A fairy tale to some, perhaps, but it would no doubt be true if we’d just get off our butts and get on with it.
