Tom Wright: Surprised by Hope – the Victorious Battle
Here’s another enjoyable little snippet from Tom Wright’s book ‘Surprised by Hope’ which I’m reading in between Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.
Chapter 6 – What the whole world’s waiting for – God’s future plan:
The victorious battle – page 110-111
The first letter to the Corinthians then continues with a quite different image, one not so organically related to the natural order of creation, but with many Biblical antecedents: that of a king establishing his kingdom by subduing all possible enemies.
Paul is careful to stress both that Jesus will rule until every single power in the cosmos has been subjected to him, and that God the father is not included in that category. Whatever we say about the implied Christology of this passage, Paul is clearly articulating a theology of a new creation. Every force, every authority in the whole cosmos will be subjected to the Messiah; and finally death itself will give up its power. In other words, that which we are tempted to regard as the permanent state of the cosmos – entropy, threatening chaos and dissolution – will be transformed by the Messiah, acting as an agent of the creator God. If evolutionary optimism is squelched by, amongst other things, the sober estimates of the scientist that the universe as we know it today is running out of steam and cannot last forever, the gospel of Jesus Christ announces that what God did for Jesus at Easter he will do, not only for all those who are ‘in Christ’, but for the entire cosmos. It will be an act of new creation, parallel to and derived from the act of new creation when God raised Jesus from the dead.
Here we find, coming in to full view, one of the direct results of saying that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, rather than saying that upon his death he began to exist in a new, non-bodily mode. As I have argued elsewhere, if after his death he had gone into some kind of non-bodily existence, death would not be defeated. it would remain intact; it would merely be re-described. Jesus, humankind and the world itself could not look forward to any future within a created and embodied mode such as we know. But this is precisely what Paul is denying. Death is the last enemy, not a good part of the good creation; and therefore death must be defeated if the life-giving God is to be honoured as the true Lord of the world. When this has happened, and only then, Jesus the Messiah, the Lord of the world, will hand over the rule of the kingdom to his father, and God will be all in all.