A View From Out Back

I’ve begun reading “Surprised by Hope” by N.T. Wright. I’m sure I’ll have much to say on this book but I would like to share a small section I read where Wright is summarizing a lecture he heard by Dominic Crossan. Here is his summation on Crossan’s idea of “Collabarative Eschatology”. 

“Because the early Christian’s believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby anticapate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness. It was not merely that God had inaugurated the “end”; if Jesus, the Messiah, was the End in person, God’s-future-arrived-in-the-present, then those who belonged to Jesus and who followed him and were empowered by the Spirit were charged with transforming the present, as far as they were able, in the light of that future.”

Here is Wright’s summation of the book.

“The whole book thus attempts to reflect the Lord’s Prayer itself when it says, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven” That remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say. As I see it, the prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined in the new Jerusalem. Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.”