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Friday, August 19, 2016

Wright, T. (2011) Simply Jesus - Who He Was, What He Did, Why it Matters 

Themes of exodus 
Wicked tyrant-chosen leader-victory of God-rescue by sacrifice-new vocation and way of life-presence of God-promised/inherited land.66

Making sense of miracles
Suppose that the ancient prophetic dream had a glimpse at deeper truth. Suppose there were a God like Israel's God. Suppose this God did after all make the world. And suppose he were to claim, at long last, is sovereign rights over that world, not to destroy it... Or merely to "intervene" in it from time to time, but to fill it with his glory, to allow it to enter a new mode in which it would reflect his love, his generosity, his desire to make it over a new. Perhaps the stories are not, after all, the sort of bizarre things that people invent in retrospect to boost the image of the dead hero. Haps they are not even evidence of the kind of "interventionist", miracle work in supernatural divinity of some Conservative speculation. Preps they are, instead, the sort of things that might just be characteristic of The new creation, of the field time, of what happens when heaven and earth come together. 139

It will not do to suppose that Jesus came to teach people "how to get to heaven". That do you has been immensely popular in Western Christianity for many generations, but it simply won't do. The whole point of Jesus is public career was not to tell people that God was in heaven and that, at death, I would leave behind and go to being with him there. It was to tell them that God was now taking charge, right here on Earth; that they should pray for this to happen; that they should recognise, in his own work, the signs that it was happening in deed; and that when he completed his work, it would become reality. 142

The gospels are not about "how do you just turn out to be God". They are about how God became king on earth as in heaven. 147

If Jesus is behaving as though he were the temple in person, what will this mean for both the existing temple and for his followers? And if, through his work, new creations breaking into the world, how is it going to make any headway against the apparently still all powerful forces of corruption, evil and death itself? 147

He cannot establish the new creation without allowing the poison in the old to have its full effect. He cannot launch gods kingdom of justice, truth and peace Mr injustice, lies and violent to do their worst and, like a hurricane, blow themselves out, exhausting the force on this one spot. He cannot begin the work of healing the world unless supervised antidote to the infection that would otherwise destroyed the project from within. This is the point at which we see how the early work of Jesus is public career, the healing, The celebrations, forgiveness, the change heart, all look forward to this moment. This is what it looks like when is rail is God becomes king. This is what it looks like when Jesus is in throned as king of the Jews.175

How can we interpret Jesus's death?
It is easy to belittle Jesus's death theologically. This can be done by placing it solely within a framework that speaks of Jesus as the automatic top of love-although why, without more of a framework, his death would be an act of love it is in Justin Lee difficult to say. Or it can be done by making Jesus the representative model who goes through death to NewLife and thereby enables us to make the same journey "in him" or "through him". Or, notoriously it can be done by imagining a straightforward transaction in which a God who wanted to punish people was content to punish the innocent Jesus instead. This always, of course, Leeds and answered the question of how such a punishment could it self be just let alone loving. 180

The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We've been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. Now there is a completely different way to live away of love and reconciliation and healing and hope. It's away nobody is tried before, a way that is as unthinkable to most human beings and societies as-well, as Resurrection itself. 190 

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