Author N T Wright
Publisher SPCK £19.99
Format hbk
ISBN 9780281081646
This is the book version of the Gifford lectures given in 2018. The first few foundation-building chapters are hard work, but if omitted you might not appreciate the finer points of his argument. Tom Wright’s thesis is that in a world-view that sets things and people apart, and is blind to the possibility of everything being inextricably connected and part of something bigger and purposeful, the difference between time and eternity, humanity and divinity, this life, and the life to come, becomes irreconcilable. Thus the incarnation makes no sense, and history has no meaning, and God plays no part in everyday life. Such an either/or approach is what Wright is seeking to overturn. As he argues, God created the world and everything in it, and he saw that it was good – unlike the platonic view that the material world is inferior. Supremely, in the incarnation God came to be one with his creation bringing redemption and renewal – an act of love. Further, Wright argues, we can only really understand Jesus by seeing him within the religious structures of his time – ‘second temple Judaism – in which the temple functioned as a symbolic representation of the cosmos and the sabbath functioned as a foretaste of the age to come’. In the incarnation, Jesus came to live in the real world, God with us, involving himself day by day with the natural world, as we read in the gospel narratives, demonstrating his power over it as its creator. Thus there are not two distinct realms, and at the end of history, when God will be fully revealed to be all in all, his dwelling place will be with his people on this renewed earth, not in some other spiritual realm. Wright’s argument takes quite a while to reach this climax, and it is familiar ground to those who have read his other books. If you think this work will be too heavy a read you can watch the videos of the lectures by googling ‘Gifford Lectures 2018’.
MARION GRAY
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