Continuity/Discontinuity

Well, justification thoughts are pending, but here's a few on the new heavens and the new earth...

There was pretty universal acclaim for Tom Wright's little book 'Surprised by Hope' when it appeared back in '07 (see, for example, the review at www.beThinking.org). And fairly too - there's lots good about it. Disclaimer here: I'm only a third of the way through now, so I can't yet comment on all of it. But I've two cautions for those from a conservative evangelical camp who are so keen on it...

1. Wright dismisses anyone who believes that the new heavens and the new earth are not directly continuous with the present ones as a Platonist. I happen to think that the NT is pretty clear that there's lots of discontinuity between the present creation and the new one, as well as lots of continuity (it'll be both a renewed and a genuinely 'new' creation). I suspect that understanding of discontinuity leads me to a different view of how and why we interact and care with the present world than Wright takes. But that doesn't mean I believe in 'floating up to heaven when we die' to live a new existence as disembodied souls. I believe in a physical resurrection in a physical new creation. I'm not a Platonist, but neither do I have the same view of the continuity between this world and the next as Wright does. Sadly he consistently collapses these two viewpoints together, so while he excellently knocks Platonism on the head, he never really interacts with the case for discontinuity between the current creation and the new one.

Paul Helm has some good thoughts on this: http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2009/01/taking-line-v-speaking-up-for-heaven.html

And there is a great long discussion on it over at the Sola Panel - the Aussies are sharper than us on this I feel... http://solapanel.org/article/how_new_will_the_new_creation_be/

2. This stuff isn't particularly new to Wright. Christopher Ash wrote a great article in the Briefing in 2005 which said most of the things that (so far) have been good in 'Surprised by Hope'. Why are we only getting excited about it now? I wonder if we have reasons to want to like what Tom Wright says because we feel like he should be on 'our side'. But we can't agree with him on e.g. justification, so we need to find some common ground to praise him on? Maybe that's unfair... I just think a more careful reading of him would show that all his theology is affected by the way he reads salvation history. Which is methodologically as it should be, yet I think he's misread key parts of that unfolding story, and so various areas of his thought end up looking strange - in what I've read so far, his Christology, eschatology, and theology of justification particularly suffer...