Jessica’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

evolutionary optimism - the belief that things will continue to improve to utopia

"History alone, certainly as conceived within the modern Western world and placed on the Procrustean bed of science, which (rightly) observes the world as it is, appears to leave us like the Children of Israel waiting in fear on the shore of the Red Sea."

No: in order to explain historically how all the early Christians came to the belief they held, that Jesus had been raised, we have to say this: that the tomb was empty, except for some grave clothes, and that they really did see and talk with someone who gave every appearance of being a solidly physical Jesus, though a Jesus who was strangely changed, more strangely than they were able fully to describe.

"The cross, we note, already had a symbolic meaning throughout the Roman world, long before it had a new one for Christians."

"In content, resurrection referred specifically to something that happened to the body; hence the later debates about how God would do this- whether he would start with the existing bones or make new ones or whatever."