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Why do you say that the doctrine of the resurrection is politically revolutionary?

Liberals like Crossan seem to imagine that bodily resurrection is just a way of saying the present world is irrelevant and what matters is the future postmortem existence. Like Marx, they think that if you tell people that all is going to be right in some future life, they won't worry about their social and political disquiet in the present.

Clearly, in the 1st century and in the 21st, that is not so. The reason the Sadducees opposed the doctrine of resurrection was not primarily philosophical, but because they knew that people who believed this kind of thing were likely to be much more vigorous in their pursuit of upending the social order and trying to redress injustice than people who didn't.

If you believe in resurrection, you believe that the living God will put his world to rights and that if God wants to do that in the future, it is right to try to anticipate that by whatever means in the present. It is your job as a Christian, in the power of the Spirit, to anticipate that glorious final state as much as you possibly can in the present. Live now by the power that is coming to you from the future, by the Spirit. And in the same way, live socially and politically because God is going to put the world to rights. That's the great theme of justice in new creation. It is up to us to produce signs of resurrection in the present social, cultural, and political world.

Because resurrection is a creation-affirming doctrine, it also goes with the desire to change injustice in the present. That's why I love the epigraph at the beginning of the book's final part—a quote from Oscar Wilde's play Salome, where Herod hears about Jesus raising the dead and says, "I forbid him to raise the dead. This man must be found and told I don't allow people to raise the dead."

Herod knows, as all tyrants know, that if somebody is going about raising the dead, then their power has met a greater power.

I also apply this culturally: within the Enlightenment world of the last two centuries (as represented not least by liberal theology), we see a horror of any idea that God might actually act in the world. People produce fancy-sounding reasons for this, as though it would be quite wrong for God to step in and raise one person from the dead. Why didn't he step in and stop the Holocaust? And so on. But in fact the whole Enlightenment project is at risk. They want God banished upstairs so they can get on with running the world downstairs.

But with the resurrection, we have God saying, "No, I want to put things downstairs to rights, thank you very much. I started doing it with Jesus and you'd better get in line." That's a shock to liberal theology, just like it's a shock to all kinds of other tyrannies—and liberal theology has become its own sort of tyranny.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright is this month's selection for the Christianity Today Editor's Bookshelf. Other sites of interest include:

Buy the book online

Buy other books of N.T. Wright

Read our extended review by David Neff

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April (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47