Wright Wrong on the Resurrection?

N.T. Wright says one can deny the resurrection and still be a Christian

Al Mohler disagrees

Kevin is terrified...and agrees with Mohler
(BBrown? Comments?)

Technorati Tags: AlMohler, N.T. Wright, resurrection

Comments

[murph]

Murph agrees...with Kevin...in being terrified

[Trey]

This is really shocking.I understand Wright trying to be all scholarly and charitable, but this is over the line. Also, I subscribe to the Wrightsaid email list and have been a bit surprised how many people on the list come out to defend Wright and play the "open minded" roll. Brian...still waiting on your thoughts???

[Daling]

A little surprised by this one myself. It would be one thing if he decided not to comment on the issue, but without the resurrection what basis does he have for affirming one's salvation? I am really having trouble understanding this one.

[Brian]

Aren't interviews a bugger?
If this is indeed what Mr. Wright believes then I would happily disagree with his openness to resurrection non-confessors. This, ofcourse would not negate any of his other work, but it would be a curious, and perhaps tragic, inconsistency. But I find more everyday that such tragic inconsistencies plague my own theological life- and pray that such inconsistencies would not forfeit everything else I do and say. But these comments do seem to be utterly inconsistent with nearly everything else he has ever said about the resurrection- unless there was more to the interview than the reporter let on. So I'll stick to his published work.

Here is Wright's published commentary on Romans 10:9 -
"Paul then explains this with a remarkable statement, one of the clearest in all his writings, of what precisely Christian faith consists of. It is not, for him, a vague religious awareness, a general sense of the presence of a benevolent deity. It is the confession of Jesus as Lord and the belief that God raised him from the dead.
This, of course, is what undergirds the earlier argument of the letter, as is apparent from 1:3-5 and 4:24-25. Verbal confession of Jesus as Lord was a primitive baptismal formula; it also, from early on, lay at the heart of the confrontation between the kingdom theology of the early church and the ideology of imperial Rom. Jesus' resurrection was, for Paul, the demonstration that he really was the Messiah; his belief in Jesus as the truning-point of Jewish and world history, the bearer of God's purposes, the climax of the story of God's covenant, is unthinkable without it. The resurrection is to be understood, as always in Paul, as the action of God. And when Paul declares belief in Jesus' resurrection is located in the heart, he links the argument with 2:28-29 and 5:5; the very core of the personality is where the renewal must take place, and belief in the resurrection is the telltale symptom of that renewal. Belief in Jesus' resurrection is thus not an arbitrary dogmatic test, a demonstration that one is prepared to believe something ridiculous on someone else's supposed divine authority. Genuine heart-level belief can only come about, Paul believed, through the action of the Spirit in the gospel. This faith is the sure sign tha the gospel has done is work."
(p. 664)

[fr'nklin]

It seems to me that Wright is facing a very difficult issue...one many of us perhaps have faced: the issue is judging the spiritual condition of a friend.

He is obviously friends with Borg...& he has obviously experienced in his friend a deep love for Jesus Christ...even if he has a different understanding of what it means for Jesus to be resurrected.

Wright is saying that his friend is DEAD WRONG, but not hell-bound.

[john chandler]

Interesting, though I don't want to say I fully agree with Wright, I appreciate his charitable view of Borg, even in their differences. Mohler also seems to misrepresent Borg in his article. It's not that Borg believes in a dead Jesus, but that Jesus resurrection wasn't a bodily resurrection.

[Mike Daling]

brian -

my first inclination was to not freak out about it due to the fact that it was an interview. If he said that, though, is there a context that would make that not sound completely antithetical to his other work? It just seems like such a strange statement given what he has published (for instance, your earlier post).

[Steven Carr]

Was 1 Corinthians written to Christians?

Did they deny the resurrection?