Hailed as a modern version of C.S.Lewis' "Mere Christianity", NT Wright's work strikes me, not so much as an apologetic of the Christian faith (although it could indeed be that) but as a gift
to the Church to help her
be the Church. The central theme of the book is that there are four fundamental longings of the human heart, which Wright describes as "echoes of a voice": a longing of justice, a quest for spirituality, a need for relationship, and a delight in beauty. These four echoes resonate hauntingly within human hearts and are
"strange signposts pointing beyond the landscape of our contemporary culture and into the unknown" we hear these echoes, but not the voice.... we seem to grasp them... but alas they slip away! - At the end of this road we find that those signposts point us to this one speaker whose voice we heard only as faint haunting echoes.....Jesus. In Jesus we find our longing for justice fulfilled, our quest for spirituality satisfied, our need for relationship completed and our delight in beauty realized.
If these four "echoes" are its central theme, Wright addresses these within a framework of different views of Heaven (he calls them "options"). Option 1 is the pantheistic image of everything on earth carrying the divine. Option 2 is the root of the deist and gnostic image of heaven being a very beautiful place very far away and separated from this cruel and dark world - with the divine sometimes intervening in human affairs. Option 3 is the Judeo-Christian view of Heaven being different to Earth but near, indeed overlapping and intersecting it at specific times and in specific places. It is amazing how much of the first two options have inadvertently crept into Christian thought and theology, providing for very unhelpful attitudes, thoughts and positions. This Option-3 framework sets the tone and tempo for much of Wright's ensuing work. It is critical for the reader to grasp this if the book is going to make a lasting impact on him or her.
It is this big vision of Heaven being a real place that intersects and overlaps Earth, and God's ultimate purpose of joining these two together to be one, that in my opinion makes for a great work by this theological heavyweight. It is within this framework, in my opinion, that the tenets of the Christian message and mission start to make remarkable sense: God is indeed intending to put the world to rights (justice) and remarkably has already begun to do this, firstly in the resurrection of Jesus (an advance signpost and prototype of the general "Resurrection" at the end of the age), and secondly in the ongoing work and mission of the Church.
In Part-2 of this blog post we shall cover the specific instances where Heaven meets Earth in the life of the Church!
