SIMPLY CHRISTIAN - EXCERPTS 2

剛剛讀完N.T. WRIGHT所著SIMPLY CHRISTIAN （why christianity makes sense), 很有收獲。基督徒隻讀聖經可能不夠，要讀一些有名的著作，幫助自己理解。這裏我摘了一部分打出來，和大家分享。 

2. God’s Spirit and God’s future

The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present. That is the first, and perhaps the most important, point to grasp about the work of this strange personal power to which so many images are used. Just as the resurrection of Jesus opened up the unexpected world of God’s new creation, so the Spirit comes to us from that new world, the world waiting to be born, the world in which, according to the old prophets, peace and justice will flourish and the wolf and the lamb will lie down side by side. One key element of living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules, of God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one (which Paul calls “the present evil age”) and Jesus calls “this corrupt and sinful generation”

That is why St. Paul speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee or the down-payment of what is to come…

Paul speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee of our “inheritance” He isn’t simply using an image taken from the ordinary human transaction whereby, when a person dies, someone else inherits his/her wealth – an “inheritance” from which one might perhaps receive something in advance, an early first installment. Nor is he simply speaking as many Christians have supposed, of our “going to heaven”, as though celestial bliss were the full “inheritance” God had in mind for us. No, he is drawing on a major biblical theme and taking it in a striking new direction. To grasp this is to see why the Spirit is given in the first place, and indeed who the Sprit actually is.

The theme upon which Paul is drawing when he speaks of the “inheritance” to come, of which the Spirit is given as a down payment, is our old friend the exodus story, in which Israel escapes from Egypt and goes off to the Promised Land. Canaan, the land we now call the Holy Land, was their promised “inheritance”, the place where they would live as God’s people. It was where – provided they maintained their side of the covenantal agreement – God would live with them and they with God. As both the foretaste of that promise, and the means by which they were led to inherit it, God went with them on the way, a strange holy Presence guiding and directing their wanderings and grieving over their rebellions.

So when Paul speaks of the Spirit as the “guarantee of our inheritance,” he is evoking, as Jesus himself had done, this whole exodus tradition, the story which began with Passover 逾越節 耶穌的死及複活 and ended with the Promised Land 天堂。 He is saying, in effect, you are now the people of the true exodus. You are now on your way to your inheritance.

But if that “inheritance” isn’t a disembodied heaven, neither is it simply one small country among others. The whole world is now God’s holy land. At the moment the world appears as a place of suffering and sorrow as well as of power and beauty. But God is reclaiming it. That’s what Jesus’s death and resurrection were all about. And we are called to be part of that reclaiming. One day all creation will be rescued from slavery, from the corruption, decay, and death which deface its beauty, destroy its relationships, remove the sense of God’s presence from it, and make it a place of injustice, violence, and brutality. That is the message of rescue, of “salvation”, at the heart of one of the greatest chapters Paul ever wrote, the eighth chapter of his letter to Romans.

So what does it mean to say that this future has begun to arrive in the present? What Paul means is that those who follow Jesus, those who find themselves believing that he is the world’s true Lord, that he rose from the dead – these people are given the Spirit as a foretaste of what the new world will be like. If anyone is “in Messiah （ one of Paul’s favorite ways of describing those who belong to Jesus, ） what they have and are is … new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17)” Your own human self, your personality, your body, is being reclaimed, so that instead of being simply part of the old creation, a place of sorrow and injustice and ultimately the shame of death itself, you can be both part of the new creation in advance and someone through whom it begins to happen here and now.

What does this say about Holy Spirit? It says that the Spirit plays the same role in our pilgrimage 朝聖 from Passover to the Promised Land – from Jesus’s resurrection, in other words, to the final moment when all creation will be renewed – that was played in the old story by the pillar of cloud and fire. The Spirit is the strange, personal presence of the living God himself, leading, guiding, warning, rebuking, grieving over our failings, and celebrating our small steps toward the true inheritance.

But if the Spirit is the personal presence of God himself, what does this say about us as Christians? Let Paul again give the answer. You, he says, are the Temple of living God.

If the Spirit is the one who brings God’s future into the present, the Spirit is also the one who joins heaven and earth together. We are back again with Option Three. We had better remind ourselves how this works.

…

Somehow, God’s dimension and our dimension – heaven and earth- overlap and interlock. All the questions we want to ask – how does this happen, who does it happen to, when, where, why, under what conditions, what does it look like when it does? – remain partly mysterious, and will do so until creation is finally renewed and the two dimensions are joined into one as they were designed to be (and as Christians pray daily that they will be). But the point of talking about the Spirit within Option Three ought by now to be clear. If it wasn’t, St. Paul would rub our noses in it: those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.

to be continued