NT Wright has recently raised the question as to whether it is necessary to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It’s in relation to his friend Marcus Borg, a more liberal scholar. Wright’s assessment is that Borg was a muddled Christian, he didn’t think the body mattered and had rejected a more dogmatic form of Lutheranism. He had come back to faith through a series of spiritual experiences. Wright thinks that Borg was a Christian because he had told him that to cope with insomnia, he regularly prayed to Jesus to fill his mind and life with his light.[1]
It’s worth clarifying what Wright is and is not saying here. Please note, he isn’t saying that the bodily resurrection of Jesus doesn’t matter. Wright is a long-term advocate of the physical resurrection of Jesus. Even here in the video he points out again that he thinks the body matters and that Jesus’ bodily resurrection therefore matters. We must not mishear Tom Wright and end up attacking him for things he has not said.
The second thing it is worth remembering, which Wright draws our attention to is that our salvation is not based on intellectual assent to specific doctrines. We are justified by faith alone not by having a fully joined up understanding of the doctrine of justification. It’s our trust in Jesus and relationship to him that matters. We would therefore recognise that there are a number of things that we might get wrong at different times. How many people have accidentally strayed into a form of modalism for example? This might be especially the case both with young Christians and with small children.
Yet, I find myself parting company with Wright because there’s a couple of things that don’t add up here. In fact, there are three things. First of all, there is surely a distinction between a child or young Christian getting confused in their understanding and articulation of the detail of a doctrine, itself recognised as a mystery (have any of us really got our head round the Doctrine of the Trinity yet?) and someone claiming not only to be a mature Christian but a teacher in the church fully and comprehensively rejecting the totality of a doctrine and indeed by implication other doctrines that are connected?
Secondly, Jesus said that his sheep know his voice and so I wonder how much we can really claim to know Jesus and not know things that are crucial to who he is. How can you really pray to the one who is fully God and man, the man who intercedes for us in heaven and not know that he is fully God and man, right now in heaven? It seems unlikely that you can know Jesus now without knowing and believing that crucial truth about who he is. Indeed, I am inclined to insist that the Scriptures point us to believers as being those who have met the risen Jesus. The Resurrection is after all as central to the preaching of the early church as is the crucifixion. Indeed, it begs the question as to whether Wright thinks one could be saved without believing in the physical death of Jesus on the Cross in our place.
Thirdly, I’m afraid that we seem to be settling for a bit of sentimentalism here. It is understandable that when a dear friend dies that we want to hope the best for them, especially when we grieve with others who we hold close and want to bring comfort to. Yet, all we have to go on is some vague mysticism including references to spiritual experiences and some meditative practices that although they use the name and title of Jesus are not particularly rooted in the Gospel and could be said by anyone. In fact, the prayer is completely detached from the Gospel.
As I’ve often said, it is possible that on his death bed, in his final moments that Borg met the risen Jesus and put his trust in him. Whatever happened, we can say clearly that he now not only believes but knows that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. The point is that if he was saved then it wasn’t through vague mysticism but through the Gospel that Jesus doed and rose, bodily for him.
And this matters because Wright seems to dismiss those dogmatic Lutherans, blaming them for their insistence on truths that matter, seeing them as the bad guys rather than the horrendous liberal, life destroying, soul stealing nonsense that is far too often paraded around by dead churches. Wright’s answer is both unsatisfying from a scholarly theological perspective but also pretty useless evangelistically and pastorally too.
[1] See Does Tom Wright consider belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus essential to Christian faith? Around about 8 minutes in.
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