Sounds like science fiction?

N. T. Wright, the biblical scholar and Anglican bishop, has put a new book out (by my estimates Wright publishes a new book every single day). Wright has long argued that, in the biblical view, resurrection and "afterlife" are very material affairs, and that otherworldly ideas about spirits or "The Rapture" are misguided. This idea isn't particularly new, of course, but Wright's background as a scholar enables him to read and discuss the relevant texts very closely. Apparently this book consists of lectures on this topic.

I happened to come across a review and I noticed this paragraph:

Reflecting on the notion of “reigning” in texts like Rom 5:17 and 1 Cor 6:2, Wright says that the renewal of the cosmos will leave “plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake...the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed.” He admits that these are “only images”; yet they serve as “true signposts to a future reality—a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought.” Still, tending gardens in a transformed universe comes close to sounding like science fiction.

Of course it does! And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a compliment! Particularly in light of this later snippet:

Origen, the great 3rd-century thinker and Scripture scholar, let his imagination roam when he thought about what might await human beings after death. For him, it would involve ongoing seminars where he could learn more about cosmology and the nature of the stars.

Heaven should include ongoing astronomy and cosmology seminars? Not everybody's cup of tea, perhaps, but it sounds good to me.

The Bible and Race

Here's a highly interesting review of a book which explores the way the Bible has often been used against racist ideas, as well as in support of them.

The book is entitled: The Forging of Racism: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000, by Colin Kidd. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006.

"Moreover, far from this being the incidental implication of a few verses, orthodox Christians have consistently recognized the solidarity of the human race as a core theme of both the biblical narrative and formal Christian theology: the image of God in humanity, the Fall, and original sin are predicated on the understanding that all human beings are bound together in a single, common origin, lineage, and family. The Christian tradition has consistently discerned that this doctrinal teaching has substantial implications when it comes to the issue of race. To take a typical example, the 18th-century conservative biblical scholar Nathaniel Lardner averred: "all men ought to love one another as brethren. For they are all descended from the same parents, and cannot but have like powers, and weaknesses, and wants … . For notwithstanding some differences of outward condition, we have all the same nature, and are brethren."

...

The Bible, therefore, has actually been a roadblock in the way of racists—although a barrier that all too many Christians, alas, have managed to find their way around. Kidd forcefully explains how it would have been so much easier for white southerners to have defended their "peculiar institution" ideologically if they could have accepted polygenesis. A few voices made the tempting argument that blacks were closer to soulless beasts than blood brothers but, as southerners were not generally ready to throw away their Bibles, they did not win out. The truths revealed in Scripture remained present to bear witness against them: African Americans were their brothers and sisters, co-recipients of the plan of redemption in the one, human family that is made in the image of God. The Bible was even an obstacle when it came to the stand against miscegenation: for example, was it not patently clear from the scriptural narrative that Moses had married a black woman? Even the pro-apartheid Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa was forced to concede that the Bible permitted interracial marriages."