It is not often I get to criticize a magnificent book, but I am about to do so. I am currently luxuriating in N.T. Wright’s Suprised by Hope, and the book addresses so many common mistakes that Christians make about the afterlife and the resurrection that it really is quite bracing. It is a fine book. It is wonderful book. It is worth ten times the price of admission. It tears our contemporary dualisms apart, and little pieces of them fly everywhere. It is orthodox. It is robust. The lordship of Christ is exalted, and the resurrection of the dead is restored to its proper place as the blessed hope of believers everywhere.
And pages 213 through 222 are terrible.
I have noted this problem in Wright’s theology before, and I want to spend a few posts on this latest manifestation of it. Here is the problem in a nutshell.
Wright correctly shows that the lordship of Christ means, necessarily, that questions of justice in this world are an integral aspect of the gospel. He avoids the emptiness of the social gospel, showing that they have no “gospel” to make their social gospel go. He notes, also correctly, that many conservative Christians believe in the resurrection as an historical fact, but they have managed (for the sake of their dualism) to keep that resurrection power disengaged from the world that God is actually in the process of redeeming. To all this, we need to reflect for a moment. Do justice, man. Love mercy, people! Walk with humility. Why? God requires it.
But then, when he gets to his prescriptions for what we actually ought to do out there in the world, he slips a cog, and says that we need to do a bunch of crazy stuff. It is like hearing a magnificent sermon on how faith without works is dead, and the theology of the thing is handled with brilliance, and the errors of works-righteousness and mere propositionalism are clearly identified and refuted, and the preacher soars to greater and greater heights for forty minutes. And then, when he gets to the applications in the last ten minutes or so of the sermon, he urges us all make a poultice out of Oreo cookie crumbs, in order to apply it to the back of the neck to get rid of the bad juju demons that are giving us our spiritual headaches. Something of a let down, if you follow what I mean here.
Wright tells us that the “number one moral issue of the day” is the “ridiculous and unpayable Third World debt.” Now I don’t want anyone to run ahead of me here, because I actually agree with him that it is a very important issue, a very serious problem. But his particular solution for it is no solution at all, and would only make the terrible conditions far, far worse than they are, and they are already really bad. In the posts to come on this, I would like to outline exactly how this is so, but allow me just a few comments now.
Wright is painting himself into a corner. The only way Wright’s proposals (simple cancellation of all such debts) could be implemented and not end in a horrific humanitarian disaster is if they occurred in the context of a resurgent neo-colonialism. But Wright is flat out opposed to imperialism and colonialism, which means that he is insisting on the humanitarian disaster option . . . in the name of Jesus. And of course, he is doing all this inadvertently. He means well. And while Wright does well in showing how St. Paul insists that our labors in the Lord are not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58), the apostle is silent on whether our colossal blunders are perpetrated in vain or not.
This really is a tragic error, and because it occurs in the midst of so much good teaching, something has to be said about it. Lord willing, more to come.