Theology: N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God

The Resurrection of the Son of God
By N. T. Wright
Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003
(740 pages, $39.00, paperpack)

In his epilogue to Miracles, C. S. Lewis warns his reader, “when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves.” A good warning in his day; an even better one in ours. But Lewis did not consider the possibility that the Good Shepherd might call some sheep to learn the ways and wiles of wolves to help defend His flock from the real wolves. If current packs of biblical scholars include many such sheep in wolves’ clothing, one of the most skilled must be N. T. Wright, whom some believe to be the most significant New Testament scholar in recent decades.

Many conservative Christian scholars do not follow Wright all the way down some of the historical and doctrinal paths that he takes. Some flatly balk at his views about justification in the epistles of Paul. But overall their responses to his study of the Resurrection seem to be justifiably admiring and grateful.

Wright’s renowned The Resurrection of the Son of God is a huge and formidable work of scholarship, astonishing (and to this mere bookworm, daunting) in its breadth and depth. Wright begins by surveying the wide spectrum of beliefs about the afterlife in ancient paganism, in the Old Testament, and in post-Biblical Judaism (Part I). He then considers the doctrine of the Resurrection in the writings of Paul (Part II) and in the remainder of the New Testament and early non-canonical Christian texts (Part III). In Part IV he addresses the Easter accounts in the Gospels. And finally, in Part V, 685 pages after he begins, Wright assesses alternative historical explanations for the early Christians’ belief in Jesus’ empty tomb and bodily appearances. Wright argues powerfully that neither the empty tomb alone nor the appearances alone could have provided a sufficient condition for that early belief. Both were necessary.

The limitations of this newsletter (and of this reviewer) prevent me from providing an adequate summary and critique of this work, but this has been done expertly by many. I would only highlight one of the several interesting and corroborating surprises that Wright points out in the Gospel accounts, a surprise that should be noted in every evangelical Easter sermon. In spite of the fact that in the remainder of the New Testament and in the post-canonical literature, “virtually every mention of resurrection” is connected with the personal resurrection of Christians, all the Gospels exhibit what Wright calls “the strange absence of personal hope” in their resurrection accounts.

But the significant thing to notice here is this: neither ‘going to heaven when you die’, ‘life after death’, ‘eternal life’, nor even ‘the resurrection of all Christ’s people’, is so much as mentioned in the four canonical resurrection stories. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wanted to tell stories whose import was ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you will be too’, they have done a remarkably bad job of it…Instead, we find a sense of open-ended commission within the present world: ‘Jesus is risen, therefore you have work ahead of you.’ (emphasis mine)