Why (N. T.) Wright Is Wrong on the Redemption of Creation
Why (N. T) Wright Is Wrong on the “Redemption of Creation.”
THE NATURE OF THE RESURRECTION – THE NATURE OF THE PAROUSIA – THE DAY OF THE LORD
Note: I am currently producing a series of YouTube videos on “Why (N. T.) Wright is wrong. Why (N. T.) Wright is Wrong on the Redemption of Creation #1, so be sure to check them out.
The following is a small excerpt from my upcoming (hopefully in 2022) on The Last Day / Last Hour / Last Trumpet Resurrection. In that work I spend a good deal of time demonstrating that the Biblical view of the Day of the Lord, the restoration of Israel, the end times “in-gathering” and the resurrection are NEVER posited as end of time, physical events. A small part of that book explores and refutes the idea of a coming restoration of physical creation, i.e. a physical “redemption of creation” as posited by noted and respected scholar N. T. Wright, one of the leading voices of that view.
In that book, I demonstrate that the following tenets / elements of the redemption of Israel / restoration of “creation” narrative are never posited as physical, visible realities. Those elements never teach:
A literal, geographical return of the nation of Israel to the Land- See my book on Colossians 3.
They do not entail a literal, restored Temple.
They did not speak of a restored Jakobite / Levitical priesthood.
They do not predict a restored animal blood sacrificial system.
They do not predict the restoration of the Mosaic Cultus at all.
They do not anticipate a physical pilgrimage to physical Zion- Hebrews 12
In light of these facts, then since the resurrection is inseparably bound up with the “restoration of Israel” and each of these tenets, it is more than apparent that just as those constituent elements are not literal, physical, material events, the resurrection is likewise not viewed as a literal, physical, material events.
Consider the following:
In the Tanakh the end times episunagogee (gathering) was the resurrection gathering into the New Creation. (I discuss this extensively in the book). In light of that consider 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3:
Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,
Notice that Paul said some were teaching that the Day of the Lord and the gathering together to him – the episunagogee– had already taken place. It had come (from the perfect tense of enestimi–> enesteken). Now, in my book, How Is This Possible, (Don K. Preston, (Ardmore, Ok.; JaDon Management Inc., 2009). I pose the question: “If the Day of the Lord is an earth burning, time ending event, in which every person who has ever lived, died and decomposed is reconstituted and resurrected, how could anyone, convince anyone, that that event had already happened?
Let’s also re-frame the question in light of the popular doctrine of the “redemption of creation” as taught by Wright and others.
N. T. Wright and other scholars understand that 1 Thessalonians 4:15f is fundamentally important and definitive, as proof of a yet coming literal coming of Christ to redeem creation. This is the historical view of Postmillennialism. (Cf. Kenneth Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, 2009, 327).
Wright says that Paul is evoking Daniel 7 and the vision of the coming of the Son of Man in his kingdom, to avenge the saints (Paul, 2005, 140f). For Wright, this takes place at the Christ’s end of time parousia when physical creation is reborn and recreated. However, there are serious problems with this, since the vision of Daniel 7 is clearly delimited to the days of the fourth beast of Daniel’s vision, i.e. the days of Rome! There is no way to extrapolate the vision beyond the days of Rome. That means that for Daniel, and thus, for Paul, the “redemption of creation” had to take place within the days of the Roman Empire. (Technically, Wright should not be applying Daniel 7 to 1 Thessalonians 4 at all, since it is his view that Daniel 7 spoke of Christ leaving the earth and ascending to the Father. Yet, in 1 Thessalonians he has Christ coming to earth to fulfill Daniel 7!)
At this juncture I want to take note of Wright’s incredible inconsistency in regard to the coming of the Lord. In his Paul (2005, 54-58), Wright delineates between the Day of the Lord and the parousia. He claims that the Day of the Lord occurred in AD 70, while we are still waiting for Christ’s literal, physical parousia to at the end of the current age. Here is what he says in regard to the Day of the Lord:
It is uncontroversial to point out that this (1 Thessalonians 4:13f, DKP), is Paul’s reworking of the Jewish ‘Day of the Lord’ traditions; but it is highly controversial to point out, as I did…that for Paul, ‘the Day of the Lord’ by no means denoted the end of the world. Just as in Amos or Jeremiah the really appalling thing about the Day of YHWH was that there would be another day after it–had it been the actual end of the world it would have been a shame, but there wouldn’t have been anybody around to worry about it after it had happened–so in Paul the Day of the Lord is clearly something which might well happen during the continuing lifetimes of himself and his readers. It is something you might hear about in a letter. Nevertheless, it is a great moment of judgment as a result of which everything will be different, and the world will be changed. …I have no hesitation in say that, had Paul been alive in the year we call AD 70,, when the convulsions in Rome during the Year of the Four Emperors were quickly followed by the destruction of Jerusalem, he would have said, ‘That’s it. That’s the Day of the Lord.’ I think that this is precisely what the notorious passage in 1 Thessalonians 2:16 is referring to; God’s wrath has come upon them eith telos, in a climactic and decisive way (Paul, 2005, 141).
However, commenting on 1 Thessalonians 4, Wright is adamant that this text is speaking of the end of the time-space continuum at the parousia of Christ (Paul, 54-57). Thus, for Wright, the Day of the Lord is an event within history- not the end of history – while the parousia is the end of time, end of history event. This is hardly Biblical. (See my YouTube video, Why (N. T.) Wright is Wrong, #3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMSzHsMxnF8).
In 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, Paul speaks of the parousia, using that word twice. Then, in chapter 5, he says, “now concerning the times and the seasons, you have no need that I write to you for you know perfectly that the Day of the Lord comes as a thief in the night.” It is patently obvious that Paul was using parousia and Day of the Lord to speak of the same event.
Likewise, in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3, the apostle penned these words:
Now, brethren, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him, we ask you, not to be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter, as if from us, as though the day of Christ had come. Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day will not come unless the falling away comes first, and the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition,
When Paul said we beseech you “by the coming of the Lord,” he used parousia. Not only that, he appealed to them based on the, “gathering together to him” and he used the word episunagogee, to speak of that gathering. It is significant that Wright applies Jesus’ prediction of his coming in vindication of his suffering and that of his disciples in Matthew 24:29-31 / Mark 13:26 to the AD 70 judgment (Jesus and the Victory of God, Minneapolis; Fortress, 1996, 362).
So, Jesus used episunagogee to speak of his coming in AD 70 in vindication of his saints, and Paul used it to speak of Christ’s coming in vindication of the suffering saints. There is no distinction between the events, either in time or nature. But that means that the Day of the Lord of Thessalonians was the time of AD 70. Paul clearly uses parousia and “The Day of the Lord” synonymously. The Greek of v. 2-3 makes it abundantly clear that “that day” i.e. the time of the Day of the Lord, is the parousia and gathering (episunagogee). (The majority of translations render v. 2 as “the Day of the Lord” and not Day of Christ as in the NKJV). I suggest therefore that this poses insurmountable problems for Wright’s view.
The fact is that the parousia and the Day of the Lord / The Day of Christ are synonymous and synchronous. They both are applied to the events of AD 70. This being true, then if Wright’s view of the “redemption of creation” is correct, the Thessalonians and the Ephesians (2 Timothy 2:18) believed that the promised redemption of creation had already come!
So, did the Thessalonians, in 2 Thessalonians 2, believe that “bugs, slugs and mosquitoes” had begun to be delivered from the bondage of corruption? Did they believe that, to use Wright’s language,
The myrtle will come up in place of the briar, the cypress instead of the thorn; In other words, Genesis 3 will be reversed, as God’s word comes from heaven to recreate the earth (Paul, 2005, 131).
It seems more than clear to me, and virtually all commentators, that to cite F. F. Bruce’s comments on 2 Thessalonians 2:2. In his translation he renders it as “present.” In his commentary, however, he says,
It cannot be seriously disputed that ‘is present’ is the natural sense of enesteken.” (Translated as “has come” DKP). He says there is, “considerable support for the sense of imminence,” but admits enesteken “will not bear” this.
It is clear Bruce is troubled by the significance of this for he says, “it cannot be supposed that the Thessalonians could have been misled that the events of I Thessalonians had taken place. ( F. F. Bruce, Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 45, (Dallas; Word Incorporated, 1982), 165).
Wright likewise recognizes the problem. He says of Paul’s instructions:
When he writes in 2 Thessalonians that the young church should not be worried if they get a letter saying that the Day of the Lord had arrived, it is clear that he cannot be referring to anything of the same order as the renewal of creation in Romans 8 or 1 Corinthians 15, still less to the end of the end of the space-time universe, which the Thessalonians themselves would have presumably noticed.
Indeed!
What is at stake here is Wright’s misguided dichotomization between the Day of the Lord and the parousia. There is not a syllable in the text so suggest that the parousia, the episunagogee and the Day of the Lord are in any way temporally separated, or that the gathering is at the parousia, and not the Day of the Lord– or vice versa. For Paul, the text makes it clear that the parousia, the episunagogee and the Day of the Lord are synchronous events. Let me express it like this:
In 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 the parousia, the episunagogee and the Day of the Lord are synchronous events.
Some at Thessalonica were teaching that the parousia, the episunagogee and the Day of the Lord had already come.
The parousia is the time of the Redemption of Creation, the restoration of earth and man to the Edenic state at the end of the space time continuum– N. T. Wright.
Therefore, some at Thessalonica were teaching that the time of the Redemption of Creation, the restoration of earth and man to the Edenic state at the end of the space time- had already come.
But to cite Wright once again: “it is clear that he (Paul, DKP) cannot be referring to anything of the same order as the renewal of creation in Romans 8 or 1 Corinthians 15, still less to the end of the end of the space-time universe, which the Thessalonians themselves would have presumably noticed.”
One cannot take Wright’s definition of parousia and fail or refuse to consider the power – the challenge – of 2 Thessalonians 2:1-3 and 2 Timothy 2:18f. Those in Thessalonica and Ephesus were clearly not affirming that material creation had already been reborn. They were undeniably not claiming that the end of time had arrived. Furthermore, they clearly did not believe that every human who had ever lived, died and decomposed had now been – or were being – reconstituted, and resurrected!
The fact that Paul did not challenge their concept of the nature of that which they were saying had already comes, demonstrates that they, and Paul, were on the same page as to the nature of that event. Had they been affirming the present reality of something radically different from that which Paul was anticipating, Paul would have taken note of that disparity. He would have pointed out that those teachers were teaching one thing about the nature of the parousia and resurrection, while he was teaching something else. Only if those teachers and Paul were discussing the same issue, of the same nature, would Paul actually need to challenge and refute them.
To suggest that some in the early church were actually teaching that the parousia, the gathering, the end of time – as envisioned by Wright – had already happened is, in actuality, ludicrous to say the least.
Wright’s attempt to dichotomize between parousia and the Day of the Lord is also falsified in yet another of the passages that Wright considers fundamental to his futuristic “restoration of creation” paradigm. (See also Richard Middleton’s extended discussion of 2 Peter 3 (and other texts) in which he affirms an end of time, comprehensive transformation of, “the entire created order of heaven and earth.” (Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and Earth, (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2014), 160f). But a closer look at the text dispels any attempt at such a distinction.
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up.
Many translations render the passage as the earth and the works that are in it will be “disclosed” or “will be discovered’ or similar thought. (The textual controversy on 2 Peter 3:10 is whether the text should read “burned up” as many older translations render it, or “disclosed” or “discovered.” The word on which the controversy rest is εὑρεθσεται – a futurist cognate of huerisko. For some information on this controversy and the likely proper translation: https://bible.org/article/brief-note-textual-problem-2-peter-310. Wright relies on the translation of “discovered” or similar thought, and not “burned up.”).
It is important to realize that Peter was addressing the scoffers who said: “Where is the promise of his coming (parousia)?”
So, the subject of the chapter is the parousia of the Lord. Peter answers those scoffers by noting that similar scoffers had appeared in the past, but that God was faithful and that He had always kept His word. Peter then assures them “the Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.”
Peter’s appeal to Christ’s coming as a thief in the night reflects Jesus’ teaching Matthew 24:43f in which Jesus was discussing his parousia (24:37), which would result from his “coming” (erchetai- a verbal). It likewise echoes 1 Thessalonians 5, noted above, where Paul said that “the Day of the Lord” would come as a thief. That Day of the Lord in 1 Thessalonians 5 is patently the same event as the parousia of Christ, as we demonstrated above. Thus, just like Jesus used parousia, erchomia and Day of the Lord interchangeably, Paul used the same terms synonymously. There is no grounds for claiming that the Day of the Lord is not the same as the parousia of Christ. This falsifies Wright’s attempted dichotomization between parousia and the Day of the Lord. And since he insists that the Day of the Lord is not an end of time event, that means that the parousia is not an end of time event.
There is not a hint of a clue of a suggestion that Peter’s refutation of the scoffers who were denying the parousia, and Peter’s discourse on The Day of the Lord is about two different events, one within history, the other at the end of history. Remember, for Wright, the Day of the Lord does not bring in the New Heavens and Earth. Only the parousia does that. Yet, in 2 Peter 3 that is patently not the case. In fact,l the very opposite is true! In Peter it is the Day of the Lord that brings in the New Creation. The problem for Wright therefore is this:
Wright has the New Heavens and Earth coming at the parousia – not the Day of the Lord.
For Wright, the parousia of Christ is an end of time event, the Day of the Lord was in AD 70.
But in 2 Peter 3, the New Heavens and Earth comes, not at the parousia (that is, if those are different events), but after the Day of the Lord.
Therefore, Wrights attempted dichotomization between the parousia and the Day of the Lord is false.
Peter is emphatic that “the earth and the elements that are therein” would be “displayed” at the Day of the Lord. The insistence of Wright that parousia and Day of the Lord must be distinguished cannot be sustained. The Biblical texts clearly reject that claim.
Consider the following: If it is true that 2 Peter 3 predicts the end of time, the space-time continuum, (as Wright likes to express it), as well as the literal, physical restoration of the physical cosmos, then how was it possible for anyone to convince anyone that this Day of the Lord had already come to reality? To suggest that anyone could believe that time ended last week, last month, or yesterday, the earth and the entire cosmos had been destroyed, and / or and that we live in a totally new, re-created physical utopia is beyond specious and untenable.
I think the reader can see how the view of Wright and other scholars in regard to the parousia and the Day of the Lord, is not a Biblical view. If -SINCE – the Day of the Lord and the parousia were the same event, and since the Day of the Lord was to be the time of the AD 70 judgment of Israel in vindication of the martyrs, this completely dispels all arguments and claims that Christ’s parousia is an end of time, earth burning event.