Atonement Theology, also not all about me: Wright Stuff 1

OK, How God Became King. We're down to the wire here: the book's overdue and on reserve and my next library trip (happy day!) is this evening. So: here are my thoughts, around 200 pages in.

This article at Internet Monk is really helpful before, during, and after reading. While Wright's sentences are all very clear individually, the distinction he constructs between how the Gospel is perceived now and how it was intended by the evangelists is hard to grasp. This may be because I don't have a background in liturgy: I've heard the creeds he starts with, but the church in which I grew up didn't use them. So essentially, Wright is arguing against an interpretation of Christ couched in terms that don't actually seem ubiquitous to me.

What is recognizable in Wright's description of contemporary Christianity is its focus on being saved so you can go to Heaven. None of the "four speakers" that Wright envisions blaring the Gospel as it culminates at the cross touch on this; none of them are about how now Amanda gets to go to Heaven if she's good, and her dad won't be sick and her unborn babies will be there.

Honestly, the idea that Jesus's death is not fundamentally about my personal Get out of Mortality Free card is overwhelming. I don't want to die. I'm not really afraid of it; my worst fears about death involve there just not being a God or Heaven to "go to", which is sad, not scary.

If instead of walking down to the public library, my Grandpa is with his Creator, well, I'm not really sad about that at all, then. If my baby won't know me because he went directly to Christ, I'm pretty okay. If they're just gone, if what they get now is a big "nothing" -- well, that hurts.

It hurts more to think of all the people whose primary experiences of grief don't only involve people they loved who lived into their eighties and babies they never met. I want this to be resolved so badly that I have to fight back anxiety as I grapple with the idea that God is allowing this now, whatever the plan is for then.

It will be resolved. I think that's central to the Gospel -- Christ's claims that He will make all things new, that He is the way, that those who believe in Him, though they die, will live.

I just wonder if that really means the things we tell ourselves it means, or if -- as Wright seems to suggest -- I've become so caught up in attaching Christ's work to my hopes for my individual future that I am missing the actual nature of that work, its immediacy. I wonder if, in clinging to that idea that salvation guarantees my individual assurance of Heaven, I have kind of missed the point -- which ultimately is what God did, what He is, not what I might get out of it.

I'm not trying to say that Wright denies the existence of Heaven in this book. I do think it's fair to say that Wright makes an only apparently subtle shift from the evangelical claim that "Christ died for you" to "Christ died for us" -- for Israel, and, by extension, for the world. I think it's that us, that acknowledgement that His death was less to save me individually than it was to rework the entire terms under which we all live, that  undoes the division between cross (Wright's signifier for atonement theology) and kingdom.

Really -- and this is at the heart of the call to love one another, at the heart of the charge for us, broken, frail, and impermanent, to advance His kingdom -- there is no Christ dying for me. My salvation, stemming, as it does, from Someone entirely outside myself, can't be untangled from that of anyone else. In accepting it, I'm not just claiming my space in the afterlife; I'm committing myself to an ongoing transformation that starts now and extends indefinitely -- regardless of how my role in that kingdom and my experience of it may change when my body dies.