Don’t throw your life away on the American dream of retirement

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Throw Your Life Away by Paul Shively. Inspired by the book Rethinking Retirement by John Piper.

Getting rid of the resurrection of Jesus by kicking God upstairs

These are the word of NT Wright in his conclusion of chapter 4 of Surprised by Hope.

I am convinced that the climate of skepticism, which for the last two hundred years has made it unfashionable and even embarrassing to suggest that Jesus’ resurrection really happened, was never and is not now itself a neutral thing, sociologically or politically. The intellectual coup d’etat by which the Enlightenment convinced so many that “we now know that dead people don’t rise,” as though this was a modern discovery rather than simply the reaffirmation of what Homer and Aeschylus had taken for granted, goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment’s other proposals, not least that we have now come of age, that God can be kicked upstairs, that we can get on with running the world however we want to, carving it up to our advantage without outside interference. To that extent, the totalitarianisms of the last century were simply among the varied  manifestations of a larger totalitarianism of thought and culture against which postmodernity has now, and rightly in my view rebelled. Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, nd the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

Think of Oscar Wilde’s wonderful scene in his play Salome, when Herod hears reports that Jesus of Nazareth has been raising the dead. “I do not wish him to do that,” says Herod. “I forbid him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that I forbid him to raise the dead.”

There is a bluster of the tyrant who knows his power is threatened, and I hear the same tone of voice not just in the politicians who want to carve up the world to their advantage but also in the intellectual traditions that have gone along for the ride.

But Wilde’s next, haunting line is the real crunch, for us as for Herod: “Where is this man?” demands Herod. “He is in every place, my lord,” replies the courtier, “but it is hard to find him.”

I am surprised by Surprised by Hope

I am rereading NT Wright’s book for the second time and reflecting on how many traps into which I have fallen. My evangelical background, growing up in the 50’s and the 60’s, did not give me the mental furniture to envision a real relationship between social concern and “getting people saved.” I have always put social concern at the level of mere love which cannot bear that another person suffer without the sympathy and aid of someone who has supposedly met God. NT Wright demonstrates how much deeper we must go and suggests why without this depth we cannot impact others with the Gospel as much as we had hoped.

Now I understand why Wright is so enormously important to the missional movement and the emergent church that seek a broader engagement with culture. Upon some brief, though not thorough enough reflection, I see that evangelicalism as I have known it does not have a thoroughly biblical response to the question of what is our hope. They have a great response to the question of “how can I be made right with God?” After that things sort of tail off. From then on, most of it focuses on personal holiness and and doing right by God and people. But it does not have a keen response to the question of “what’s this all about anyway?” It doesn’t sustain a transformative energy that is society changing. Things pretty much remain the same, and people learn to see religion as merely a privately enriching experience of some sort.

I am very thankful for my pietistic background. But it kept too many looking for the next antiChrist and alienated from working toward the new creation. There are some hollow places it just couldn’t fill in. NT Wright has effectively engaged the hollow places in a way that I haven’t seen before. I probably just had my eyes closed.

Listen to iMonk on radio discuss his op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor

Click here.

A listing of state pensioners in Massachusetts

http://www.bostonherald.com/projects/pensions/

Read it and then go out and get a second job to make sure these people have a comfortable retirement.