Suprised by Hope- part Deux

This is part two of a series of posts on N.T. Wright's latest book, Surprised by Hope.

Chapters 3 and 4 are basically a summary of Wright's basic argument and apologetic for the historicity of the biblical Easter narratives. It is essentially a summary of The Resurrection of the Son of God, - a masterful, and scholarly tome of the issue.

I am not going to give you an outline of his arguments in these two chapters, but rather I want to share with you a couple of quotes that popped off the pages

The Resurrection redefined the meaning of the cross,

"The cross, we note, already had a symbolic meaning through the Roman world, long before it had a new one for the Christians. It meant: we Romans run this place, and if you get in our way we'll obliterate you - and do it pretty nastily too. Crucifixion meant that the kingdom hadn't come, not that it had. Crucifixion of a would-be Messiah meant that he wasn't the Messiah, not that he was. When Jesus was crucified, every single disciple knew what it meant: we backed the wrong horse. The game is over."

But that view of the cross changed after the resurrection.

Also, Wright asks in chapter 4 that with all the evidence to the resurrection, why is the resurrection still denied, Wright makes this salient point,

Who, after all, was it who didn't want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant's last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

Previous posts:
Surprised by Hope, Part I - a deconstruction of our view of the future.