The Politics of Resurrection

This Easter season, I am finally getting around to reading Surprised By Hope. This morning I finished Wright's chapter on "The Strange Story of Easter," where he considers what Resurrection means in light of historical and scientific questions. His conclusion is that the biblical account of resurrection transcends history and science (but that it does not ignore or withdraw from them), and he says that good historical inquiry leads people to ask the Thomas question: "Let me see and touch your wounds." But Wright, quoting Wittgenstein, says that "It is love that believes the resurrection" (72). So after science and history raise the questions, Wright says that love gets us to reimagine a world in which resurrection and new creation are possible. Love, according to Wright, makes us exclaim, "My Lord and my God" (71).

But in addition to this, Wright makes an interesting observation about the politics of resurrection. He begins:

I am convinced that the climate of skepticism ... was never and is not now itself a neutral thing, sociologically or politically. The intellectual coup d'état by which the Enlightenment convinced so many that "we now know that dead people don't rise" ... goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment's other proposals, not least that we have now come of age ... Who, after all, was it who didn't want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant's last weapon, death itself ... (74-75).

Wright goes on to say that the new creation established at Easter establishes hope, saying:

Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world (75).

Thanks be to God!