AND NOW A WORD ABOUT THE RESURRECTION
Tom Wright has an interesting piece on the resurection in CT. A few quotes:

+ "But conservative Christian readers often scrunch together two very different things. One is going to heaven after you die, and the other is the resurrection of the body as the final destination. Many conservatives are puzzled when I tell them that there's not very much in the New Testament about going to heaven when you die, and that where you do find material in the New Testament about going to heaven when you die, this is a temporary thing. What really matters is resurrection—life after life after death.

"In many conservative circles, the word resurrection has come to denote the state upon which the Christian enters immediately after death. And my point is that throughout—from Paul as our earliest Christian writer right onto Origen at the end of the second century—that is simply not what the word resurrection meant to such people. Actually, if I walk around Westminster Abbey, most of the tombs earlier than the 19th century say, in effect, I am resting at the moment but I shall be raised in the future. That two-stage life after death is the classic Christian position."

+ "All talk about justification and resurrection has to begin with the future and work back to the present. In the present we find somebody coming to faith and being baptized. When somebody comes to faith, Paul says, that person is justified by faith in the present. But he also says when he talks about baptism, that baptism is itself a dying and a rising with Christ.

"So, the justification and the resurrection come forward into the present when someone believes and is baptized. So if you start with the future and say the event will be resurrection, and it is to be interpreted as justification, and then the present event is the coming to faith and baptism which is to be interpreted as resurrection, and which is the moment when God declares in the present, this person is righteous. And that is justification by faith."

+ "But with the resurrection, we have God saying, 'No, I want to put things downstairs to rights, thank you very much. I started doing it with Jesus and you'd better get in line.' That's a shock to liberal theology, just like it's a shock to all kinds of other tyrannies—and liberal theology has become its own sort of tyranny."

David Neff has also written a review of Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God.