An Indian Journey through Lent, Day 40
Ecotheology and Resurrection: A new Heavens and a new Earth or Creation Re-Newed?
Welcome to the 40th and last diary entry in this Indian Journey through Lent. Thank you for journeying with me, for all or some of the way, as I’ve ranged far and wide, prompted by what I’ve experienced over this period. This year Lent has been a little strange. There are usually 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. This year there will be 46, inclusive. I don’t understand why that is so, but no matter. I may put out some readings for each day in Holy Week.
It feels good and right to conclude this series by considering the relationship between ecotheology (my speciality) and resurrection (the climax of the Lent and Easter seasons. My father and I share much in outlook, including a pessimism about the future of the world. Neither of us can see how humanity, left to ourselves and given our selfishness, rapid increase in population and vast power over nature can actually survive, at least without great trauma. The difference between us is that I believe that there is a good God who created this world and who has been working for thousands of years not only to save it from extinction but to restore it.
There are questions that immediately challenge this stance. The first is usually cast in terms of evolutionary theory these days; I think it can be simplified to “Is what is, right, simply by virtue of being? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the way this world is that a good God is working to set right?” As a trained scientist I’ve had to think long and hard about evolutionary theory. To be honest I still don’t know how to hold it together with my Christian faith. In fact, I think it presents huge problems for any attempts to develop morals and ethics. AND VICE VERSA! Yet as a scientist I am committed to honouring truth, wherever that might lead me. So I just let them sit there, uncomfortably side by side.
The resurrection of Christ from death presents an enormous challenge to evolutionary theory, but only if we use the word in the sense that the Greek word it translates, “anastasia” actually meant. For this next section I’m indebted to N T Wright, one of the world’s greatest and most prolific church historians, theologians and bible expositors. I’ll work from his commentary on The Acts of the Apostles, titled “Acts for Everyone”, Chapter 13, vv. 44-52 because I happened to read it this morning, but Wright writes on this subject a great deal. His best academic treatment (a veritable doorstop!) is “The Resurrection of the Son of God” and the best easily readable treatment is “Surprised by Hope”.
Wright argues that at the beginning of Church history the word “anastasia” clearly and unambiguously referred to someone being bodily alive again after being bodily dead. But centuries of imprecision have meant that many people today, when they say ‘resurrection’, actually think ‘disembodied immortality’. Once again, shades of Plato’s Forms.
Something very similar to this, and for the same reason, has happened to the phrase ‘eternal life’, says Wright. What do you think of at once when you hear that phrase? Chances are, if you are part of a church within, or influenced by, the Western church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, you will think of a final state which is beyond space and time: an ‘eternity’ in which, as one hymn puts it, ‘time shall be no more’, and space and matter as well.
But the phrase which has so often been translated ‘eternal life’ actually means ‘the life of the age’. Jews of Paul’s day and many other times would know exactly what was meant. For them, there were two ‘ages’, or ‘periods of world history’, the present age and the age to come. And the ‘life’ of the ‘age to come’ is the state to which all devout Jews would aspire. Nobody, thinking within the framework of thought which this phrase reflects, imagined that this ‘age’ would be ‘eternal’ in our sense – timeless, spaceless, matterless. It will be a whole new period of history, when everything will be put right at last. It will be the ‘great restoration’. Everything will be different; but it will still be a world like ours, only much, much more so, more solid, more throbbing with life and energy, because the curse of corruption and death itself will have been banished, making it ‘eternal’ in that sense but not in our usual ones. It is our inability, in the Western thought of recent centuries, to conceive of such a world (is it actually inability? or is it unwillingness?) that has made it so hard to speak of some of the foundational beliefs of the early Christians.
When Paul and the others spoke of ‘eternal life’, they didn’t mean something (as we say) ‘purely spiritual’. **The life of the coming age had already begun when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, and will be complete when God does for the whole world what he did for Jesus that day.** And all those who share in that Easter life in the present are assured of a full share in it in the future. That is what it means to be part of ‘the life of the coming age’ now, and on that great day.
That, my friends, is what sustains my ecotheological hope. I believe that just as the resurrected Christ was radically different from but continuous with the crucified Jesus, so the re-newed heaven and earth (which, by the way, Wright understands to be the two complementary parts of God’s creation) will be continuous with, affected by but radically different from the old. That’s why every act of protest against the abuse of asylum seekers and women; every tree-planting ceremony arranged by an Indian school, every decommissioning of a coal-powered station in because of increases in efficiencies and the sheer weight of installation of solar panels, every extra dollar our government and we the citizens give in overseas aid…and so on…will not only make our current world a better place but will be reflected in ways we do not yet understand in God’s resurrected, restored world.
Have a blessed Holy Week and may the risen Christ be with you this Easter.
Ecotheology and Resurrection: A new Heavens and a new Earth or Creation Re-Newed?
Welcome to the 40th and last diary entry in this Indian Journey through Lent. Thank you for journeying with me, for all or some of the way, as I’ve ranged far and wide, prompted by what I’ve experienced over this period. This year Lent has been a little strange. There are usually 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. This year there will be 46, inclusive. I don’t understand why that is so, but no matter. I may put out some readings for each day in Holy Week.
It feels good and right to conclude this series by considering the relationship between ecotheology (my speciality) and resurrection (the climax of the Lent and Easter seasons. My father and I share much in outlook, including a pessimism about the future of the world. Neither of us can see how humanity, left to ourselves and given our selfishness, rapid increase in population and vast power over nature can actually survive, at least without great trauma. The difference between us is that I believe that there is a good God who created this world and who has been working for thousands of years not only to save it from extinction but to restore it.
There are questions that immediately challenge this stance. The first is usually cast in terms of evolutionary theory these days; I think it can be simplified to “Is what is, right, simply by virtue of being? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the way this world is that a good God is working to set right?” As a trained scientist I’ve had to think long and hard about evolutionary theory. To be honest I still don’t know how to hold it together with my Christian faith. In fact, I think it presents huge problems for any attempts to develop morals and ethics. AND VICE VERSA! Yet as a scientist I am committed to honouring truth, wherever that might lead me. So I just let them sit there, uncomfortably side by side.
The resurrection of Christ from death presents an enormous challenge to evolutionary theory, but only if we use the word in the sense that the Greek word it translates, “anastasia” actually meant. For this next section I’m indebted to N T Wright, one of the world’s greatest and most prolific church historians, theologians and bible expositors. I’ll work from his commentary on The Acts of the Apostles, titled “Acts for Everyone”, Chapter 13, vv. 44-52 because I happened to read it this morning, but Wright writes on this subject a great deal. His best academic treatment (a veritable doorstop!) is “The Resurrection of the Son of God” and the best easily readable treatment is “Surprised by Hope”.
Wright argues that at the beginning of Church history the word “anastasia” clearly and unambiguously referred to someone being bodily alive again after being bodily dead. But centuries of imprecision have meant that many people today, when they say ‘resurrection’, actually think ‘disembodied immortality’. Once again, shades of Plato’s Forms.
Something very similar to this, and for the same reason, has happened to the phrase ‘eternal life’, says Wright. What do you think of at once when you hear that phrase? Chances are, if you are part of a church within, or influenced by, the Western church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, you will think of a final state which is beyond space and time: an ‘eternity’ in which, as one hymn puts it, ‘time shall be no more’, and space and matter as well.
But the phrase which has so often been translated ‘eternal life’ actually means ‘the life of the age’. Jews of Paul’s day and many other times would know exactly what was meant. For them, there were two ‘ages’, or ‘periods of world history’, the present age and the age to come. And the ‘life’ of the ‘age to come’ is the state to which all devout Jews would aspire. Nobody, thinking within the framework of thought which this phrase reflects, imagined that this ‘age’ would be ‘eternal’ in our sense – timeless, spaceless, matterless. It will be a whole new period of history, when everything will be put right at last. It will be the ‘great restoration’. Everything will be different; but it will still be a world like ours, only much, much more so, more solid, more throbbing with life and energy, because the curse of corruption and death itself will have been banished, making it ‘eternal’ in that sense but not in our usual ones. It is our inability, in the Western thought of recent centuries, to conceive of such a world (is it actually inability? or is it unwillingness?) that has made it so hard to speak of some of the foundational beliefs of the early Christians.
When Paul and the others spoke of ‘eternal life’, they didn’t mean something (as we say) ‘purely spiritual’. **The life of the coming age had already begun when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, and will be complete when God does for the whole world what he did for Jesus that day.** And all those who share in that Easter life in the present are assured of a full share in it in the future. That is what it means to be part of ‘the life of the coming age’ now, and on that great day.
That, my friends, is what sustains my ecotheological hope. I believe that just as the resurrected Christ was radically different from but continuous with the crucified Jesus, so the re-newed heaven and earth (which, by the way, Wright understands to be the two complementary parts of God’s creation) will be continuous with, affected by but radically different from the old. That’s why every act of protest against the abuse of asylum seekers and women; every tree-planting ceremony arranged by an Indian school, every decommissioning of a coal-powered station in because of increases in efficiencies and the sheer weight of installation of solar panels, every extra dollar our government and we the citizens give in overseas aid…and so on…will not only make our current world a better place but will be reflected in ways we do not yet understand in God’s resurrected, restored world.
Have a blessed Holy Week and may the risen Christ be with you this Easter.
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