Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

The Gnostic attitude: the creative world is at best irrelevant, at worst, a dark, evil, Gloomy place, and we immortal souls, who existed originally in a different fear, are looking forward to returning to it, as soon as we are allowed to.

Creation not itself is divine. Creation was designed to reflect God, both to reflect, go back to God, and worship, and reflect God into the rest of creation, and Stewart Shipp.

The early Christians did not think the world was getting better and better. Under. It’s own steam or even under the study influence of God. But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse. The early Christians believe that God was going to do for the whole cosmos. What he did. For Jesus at Easter.

Gnostic myth, often suggest that the way out of our mess is to return to our primal state, before the creation of the world. In this view, creation itself is the fall, producing matter, which is the real evil.

Diagnostics believed, that the material world was an inferior and dark place, evil, and it’s very existence, but that within this world could be found certain people who were meant for something else. These children of Light were like Fallen. Stars, Tinney, pricks of light, currently hidden within a gross material body. Once they had realized who they were, they would be able to enter into a spiritual existence.

Only in the Christian story itself. Do we find any sense that the problems of the world are solved, not by a straightforward upward movement into the light, but by the creator, God going down into the dark rescue human kind in the world from its plight.

The ninth of progress fails, because it does not in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and power of evil itself, and the Bailes to see the vital importance of the Cross, gods know to evil, which then opens the door to his yes, to creation.

Even if “progress” brought us to Utopia. After all, that wouldn’t address the moral problem of all the evil that is happened to date in the world. Suppose the golden age arrive tomorrow morning; what would that say to those who are being torture to death today?

In the absence of real Hope, all that is left is feelings.
Persuasion is not enough, we will never just Believe in persuasion.