W: LP: GRP: NTW: Surprised by Hope updated/final

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book was quite interesting and Wright's position is solidly orthodox concerning Christ's resurrection and and the renewal of the Cosmos that is the final hope.

In the course of this exposition, I came across the following passage that ties in with my recent exploration of post-modernism and it's modernist roots, check it out:

[Quote:]

The real problem with the myth of progress is, as I just hinted, that it cannot deal with evil. And when I say "deal with," I don't just mean intellectually, though that is true as well; I mean in practice. It can't develop a strategy that actually addresses the severe problems of evil in the world. This is why all the evolutionary optimism of the last two hundred years remains helpless before world war, drug crime, Auschwitz, apartheid, child pornography, and the other interesting sidelines that evolution has thrown up for our entertainment in the twentieth century. We can't explain them, given the myth of progress, and neither can we eradicate them. Marx's own agenda, not to explain the world but to change it, remains unfulfilled. Of course, the twentieth century provided a quite full answer to the myth of progress, as many people (such as Karl Barth) saw during the First World War, but it's remarkable how many others have continued to believe and propagate it nonetheless. Teilhard himself was a stretcher bearer during the Great War, and the experience was influential not in leading him away from evolution but in his attempt to factor human suffering into his equation. Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient. It reminds the politicians that there is a gap in their thinking. The world is in fact still a sad and wicked place, not a happy upward progress toward the light.

The myth, then, cannot deal with evil, for three reasons. First, it can't stop it: if evolution gave us Hiroshima and the Gulag, it can't be all good. There is no observable reason in science, philosophy, art, or anywhere else to suppose that if we simply plow ahead with the enlightenment dream these glitches will be ironed out and we'll get to utopia eventually. What's more, today's cutting-edge science is quite clear that whatever may or may not be true about specifically biological evolution, the cosmos as a whole is simply not evolving toward a golden future. The world that began with the Big Bang is heading either for the Big Cool-Down, as energy gradually runs out and the universe expands into the cold dark beyond, or for the Big Crunch, as gravity reasserts itself and everything slows down, stops, and then rushes back together again. It is quite possible that before either of these worrying possibilities takes place, a giant meteorite such as likely wiped out the dinosaurs could strike the Earth with similar devastating effects. None of these scenarios makes any sense within the myth of progress.

Second, even if "progress" brought us to utopia after all, that wouldn't address the moral problem of all the evil that's happened to date in the world. Suppose the golden age arrived tomorrow morning; what would that say to those who are being tortured to death today? How would that be a satisfactory solution to the huge and indescribable evils of the last century, let alone all of world history? If, akin to Teilhard de Chardin, we were to make God part of the process of it all, what sort of a god would it be who builds his kingdom on the bones and ashes of those who have suffered along the way? The picture reminds me of the story of the old Oxford don who, whenever the paper on his desk got quite out of control, would simply spread a copy of the Times over the lot and start again. After his death they found several layers, like an archaeologist's tell, of matters that had never been dealt with. And after the construction of the evolutionist's kingdom of God, God would be left with precisely the same problem. It was because of this that the ancient Jews began to speak of the resurrection.

The myth of progress fails because it doesn't in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it under-estimates the nature and power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross, God's no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation. Only in the Christian story itself--certainly not in the secular stories of modernity--do we find any sense that the problems of the world are solved not by a straightforward upward movement into the light but by the creator God going down into the dark to rescue humankind and the world from its plight.

[Unquote.]