Re: [asa] Is NT Wright a YEC?

I am at present trying to read Wright's book for a review in PSCF. I simply cannot get into it as it is totally unearthed - lit and metaphorically. NTW does have some funny ideas and the quote below seems to be classic YEC, - Adam took a chunk out the apple and lo thistles appeared and tsunamis!

I would love to know who these physicists are!

NTW is regarded as a fairly liberal evangelical over here and not kosher in strict circles among Anglican Evangelicals.

Part of the problem is his unnecessary rejection of the Enlightenment - if he was consistent he wouldn't fly or have a computer!

Michael

Seattle Pacific Univ Mag

            Summer 2005 | Volume 28, Number 2 | Features
           
     
      God, 9/11, the Tsunami, and the New Problem of Evil
     

What then about the tsunami? There is of course no straightforward answer. But there are small clues.

We are not to suppose that the world as it currently is, is the way God intends it to be at the last. Some serious thinkers, including some contemporary physicists, would actually link the convulsions which still happen in the world to evil perpetrated by humans; and it is indeed fair enough to probe for deeper connections than modernist science has imagined between human behavior and the total environment of our world, including tectonic plates. But I find it somewhat easier to suppose that the project of creation, the good world which God made at the beginning, was supposed to go forward under the wise stewardship of the human race, God's vice-gerents, God's image-bearers; and that, when the human race turned to worship creation instead of God, the project could not proceed in the intended manner, but instead bore thorns and thistles, volcanoes and tsunamis, the terrifying wrath of the creation which we humans had treated as if it were divine.

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: Asa
  Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 2:49 AM
  Subject: [asa] Is NT Wright a YEC?

  I love NT Wright and have read lots of his stuff. I just picked up his new book "Evil and the Justice of God." I only skimmed it really briefly, but since it's a theodicy, I was curious to see what he'd say about death. He notes that death and the curse on the ground are the result of the fall, but says "Death, which we may rightly see as a natural and harmless feature of the original landscape, now assumes the unwelcome guies of the executioner, coming grimly to prevnt the poison [of sin] from spreading too far. God's anxiety that Adam might now take the fruit from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever in his fallne state (Gen. 3:22) leads to God's equal anxiety that arrogant humankind would be able to plot ever greater folly (Gen. 11:6). Judgment in the present time is a matter of stopoing evil in its tracks before it gets too far." (p. 52)

  Later, when discussing the new creation, Wright says "Death -- the corruption and decay of the good creation and of humans who bear God's image - is the ultimate blasphemy, the great intruder, the final satanic weapon, and it will itself be defeated. . . . the truly remarkable thing Paul is talking about here is an incorruptible, unkillable physical world. New creation is what matters, a new kind of world with a new kind of physicality, which will not need to decay and die, which will not be subject to seasons and the apparently (to us) endless sequence of deaths and births within the natural order. . . . Creation, writes Paul, has been subjected to futility (Romans 8:20). Don't we know it: the tree reaches its full fruitfulness and then becomes bleak and bare. Summer reaches its height and at once the days start to shorten. Human lives, full of promise and beauty, laughter and love, are cut short by illness and death. Creation bears witness to God's power and glory (Romans 1:19-20) but also to the present state of futility to which it has been enslaved."

  This discusion seems curious to me coming from Wright. In a way, I expect something more nuanced from Wright. The idea that something like the seasons and the hibernation cycles of trees somehow reflects creation's futility seems strange. Maybe it is that I haven't really read the book yet, or maybe it's that this is a short popular book and not a scholarly one. Anyway, I'm curious to hear from anyone who knows Wright or his work better than I do if he's written or spoken in some deeper way about how this question of death and the new creation relate to the doctrine of creation and to natural history.

  Also, a semi-related question: I like Alister McGrath alot too. A thing for Brits I guess. Has McGrath written a theodicy?

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Received on Thu Apr 12 11:20:11 2007