Lee’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: A Study of Christian Hope and Resurrection > Status Update

“ Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event *within our own world*, it’s implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here, and now.”

🤣“the problem is that much theology, having lived for so long on the convenience food of an easy-going tolerance of everything, an ‘inclusivit’y with as few boundaries as McWorld, has become depressingly flabby, unable to climb even the lower slopes of social and cultural judgment let alone the steep upper reaches of that judgment of which the early Christians spoke and wrote”

Fascinating discussion on paradise, purgatory and hell. ..” once we rule out purgatory, I see no reason why we should not pray for and with the dead and every reason why we should – not that they will get out of purgatory but that they will be refreshed and filled with God’s joy and peace. Love passes into prayer; we still love them; why not hold them, in that love, before God?”

Re: Matthew 6:20-21
“ if I say to a friend, ‘I’ve kept some beer in the fridge for you.’ that doesn’t mean that he has to climb into the fridge in order to drink the beer.”

“People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t”

Another great significance to theology of resurrection, ascension, 2nd coming & hope: it was born from confrontation w/political authorities & conviction Jesus is already Lord of all. Rapture theology avoids the confrontation saying Christians get removed from the wicked world making it lean gnostic and politically laissez-faire dreaming of Armageddon in ways Paul didn’t intend. (Out of room condensed a lot here)

This book is fascinating.
In this chapter he’s talking about where evil came from. He says it resulted when humans worshipped and honored the elements of the natural world instead of the God who made them. Turning away from worshipping the living God turns toward death which sets off a chain reaction of consequences.

🤯 believing in an actual resurrection (not Platonic death is “going home at last”) is consistent with a strong view of God’s Justice and God as good creator. English evangelicals gave up the urgency of improving society about the same time they traded resurrection for disembodied heaven. Did this same shift happen in the US?

Some of you will appreciate his discussion of hymns - “a glance through the average hymn book reveals that a good many references to the future life beyond death are closer to Tennyson, or even to Shelley, than they are to orthodox Christianity.”
(He goes on to list specific hymns that also include Buddhist eschatology, Gnosticism, and Platonism.