I finished Surprised By Hope last week. This is the first book by Wright that I've read cover to cover and so, I am by no means an NT Wright scholar. But I have read several chapters from Simply Christian, What Saint Paul Really Said, and Resurrection of the Son of God, listened to about ten of his audio lectures, heard him lecture in person, and been part of a local church that, knowingly or not, endorses parts of Wright's system. I'm familiar with his main theses and was before I read his book. I was in fact surprised by very little.
The best chapter in the book is "The Strange Story of Easter" (4). This chapter is the safest in the book (IMHO), basically because it can stand alone, outside of Wright's tight-webbed system for understanding biblical Christianity. He does a fine job of giving evidence for the factuality of the resurrection. There are a few points where Wright's commentary shows his ideological hand and for this reason, I would say to anyone reading this chapter (as I would to anyone reading any NT Wright--a point to be discussed later), take the helpful sentences and do with them what is natural (and unavoidable)--interpret them through the lens of a clear reading of the Bible and the New Testament in particular. That being said, here are some sentences on evidence for the resurrection: (Hopefully readers of these quotations will find enough context to know what he's saying...)
"The disciples were emphatically not expecting Jesus to be raised from the dead, all by himself in the middle of history. The fact that they were second-Temple Jews and that resurrection was, as some have said, an idea that was in the air, simply won't account for the radical modifications they made in the Jewish belief or for the astonishing features of the Easter stories themselves." (60)
"There are, after all, different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable...Historians don't of course see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can't repeat them in the laboratory." (64)
"If someone declares that certain kinds of events 'don't normally happen,' that merely invites the retort, 'Who says?' And indeed, in the case in point, we should note as an obvious but often overlooked point the fact that the early Christians did not think that Jesus' resurrection was one instance of something that happened from time to time elsewhere." (65)
And my favorite paragraph in the book (Which corroborates what I've been learning about evangelism--two posts down):
"We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn't look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won't do...But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won't rely on the candles anymore, not because we don't believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home." (74)
This concludes Part I.
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