Resuscitation vs Resurrection

Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised

OK, let’s try riffing off this quote from Jeremy Begbie (from ‘Created Beauty’, an essay in the book ‘The Beauty of God’ ed. Treier, Husbands and Lundin)

… a theological account of created beauty will return repreatedly to the Holy Spirit as the one who realizes now in our midst what has been achieved in he Son, thus anticipating the future. … A Christian account of created beauty is thus charged with promise. It is not chiefy determined by a sense of a paradise lost but of a glory still to appear, the old beauty remade and transfigured, the beauty of the future that has already been embodied in Christ … Here there is much to be said for the ancient wisdom of Basil the Great … for whom the Holy Spirit “perfects” creation, enabling it to flourish in anticipation of the final future.

The key component I want to play with is that the prime model for Christians is not reversion to a past paradise or resuscitation of what we think has been lost, but new creation and resurrection.

So, in our interaction with our surrounding culture and society, our principal goal should not be to to recover the ‘good old days’, or to stop the rot by taking it back to its roots, but to push forward to new things. The new may have continuity with the old, but we are not aiming to go back in time.

For me this meshes with Hauerwas and Willimon’s point in Resident Aliens — they suggest we should act as an alternative community because playing by the wider rules of society compromises our message. I think what I’m saying is a time-orientation equivalent — we mustn’t become so associated with our culture that we want to go back to its glory days; instead we are to looking to a alternative future — redeemed and transformed.

This doesn’t mean we dump things that are important, but that we think about them in fresh ways. So, perhaps as an example we could say that we don’t promote marriage/family because it has been the stable basis for our great society (which is sometimes the impression given), but because the freedom of commitment is true liberation, etc. and this can be an agent of liberating transformation toward a new future. (This is off the top of my head, so it’s not exactly thought out completely…)

Another application for the general theme is worldviews — typically descriptions of a Christian worldview will focus on creation. But we must be cautious that we don’t just look back. We know that the future is a transformed creation not simply a reversion. God is not acting simply to take things back to ‘how they were meant to be’, but on to ‘how He intends them to be’. (Although the past may give indications for the future.) Revelation gives a picture of new creation as something more than that described in Genesis 1-2. Our worldview must reflect this reality.

[Footnote: I am wary that this matches my personal inclination, so I could be reading what I prefer into things. But then, if you don't like it maybe you are doing the same thing?]

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Permalink | January 9th, 2008

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