Wounded and Healed: An Easter Hermeneutic in Conversation with 1 Peter

Scott Goode

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“By his wounds you have been healed.” — 1 Peter 2:24¹

Much of the modern hermeneutical enterprise assumes that Scripture is subject to human inquiry—texts which are examined by deploying a range of critical tools that ensure the horizon of reader is not blurred with that of author.² Yet, the first Easter—the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection of Jesus—is an event which stretches, and is ultimately beyond, the capacity of known interpretive approaches; it resists becoming the mere object of human inquiry and instead summons humankind, across all horizons of history, to be addressed by God in an act of divine self-disclosure.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ signals the end of an era characterised by death and the dawning of a new creation. Such a reality, argues N. T. Wright, “cannot simply be ‘known’ from within the old world of decay and denial . . . . If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing.”³

In this essay I propose a theological account of Easter as a hermeneutic for interpreting human experience as presently wounded but offered divine healing. Taking as my theological reference point the metaphors of wounding and healing from 1 Peter 2:24, and in conversation with the entire letter, I explore the ontological and epistemological aspects of the human condition and argue that Jesus’ wounds are those of God himself through which a transformative experience of love summons us to new ways of knowing ultimate reality. Easter, therefore, is not merely an event that the reader can interpret from the texts of the New Testament. The death and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ is the central way in which Scripture anticipates being read, and the way in which a believer is invited to understand themselves and ultimate reality.

The Wounds of Humanity: Veiled Epistemology within a World of Tragedy

That human experience involves suffering finds broad religious and philosophical acknowledgement, even if the explanations for it are diverse. This near universal acknowledgement constitutes what Clemens Sedmak describes as a “wound of knowledge,” the result of “living within structures of the tragic.”⁴ The knowledge of world hunger, for example, reveals an “epistemic vulnerability” in which we experience a disjunction between what is and what should be.⁵

This persistent wound of moral consciousness reaches deep and wide into known anthropological history and, despite the influence of philosophical empiricism in the West, shows no signs of easing. To the contrary, in the first part of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves awash with justice movements making various environmental and social and moral claims with little explanation of the is that underwrites the ought. We are confronted time and time again with how to solve the problem of pain.

In a book with the very same title, C. S. Lewis argues that “pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.”⁶ The ongoing human propensity to treat our own collective wounds—to prescribe an ought—reveals a prior conception of a moral order, the grounds of which are not at all self-evident for the non-theist.

For this reason, Hume’s law challenges the legitimacy of any “wound of knowledge” by probing the basis of any claim that reality is not as it ought to be. The Christian, on the other hand, has every reason to believe in the tragedy of existence, for the is of the Easter event reveals an ultimate reality that is righteous and loving. This self-revelation of a good God, therefore, exposes the extent to which the human condition is wounded.

However, it is not simply human experience which is wounded—as if to suggest the problem is external to us. The tragic structure of the reality in which we live raises the possibility that we ourselves are moral agents who contribute to the problems about which we feel so troubled.

The archetypal story of moral failure is that of Adam and Eve, whose partaking of the forbidden fruit served as a depiction of human autonomy: “You will be like God” was the temptation posed by the serpent, “knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5). This so-called original sin resulted in self-imposed exile from the Creator (Gen 3:8) and the remaining primeval history of Genesis tells of of the tragic wounding of self and each other as humanity held firm to a moral vision of independence from the Creator. To this day, this destructive propensity in human experience is not simply a matter of learned behaviour, as if to suggest it could be reversed by better parental role-modelling. Rather, we are in Adam, and his story is now the starting point for all lived human experience (Rom 5:12–21; 7:7–12; 1 Cor 15:22).

As such, our wounding is also epistemological: we suppress the truth about God, and our thinking becomes futile and our hearts darkened (Rom 1:18–21). Our struggle with the is–ought conundrum is due to an epistemological wound we carry, what the Augustinian and Reformed traditions explain as the noetic effects of sin. The result is that we cannot self-reason our way to God; God must self-reveal to us. The Easter event is that divine self-revelation which promises no less than a cosmological and epistemological healing by a reversal of human alienation from God—it anticipates the divine declaration: “Look! God’s dwelling place in now among the people” (Rev 21:3).

This epistemological sketch of fallen human knowing is inseparable from the tragic structure of reality with which I began. Our wounding is alien to our true nature, and although terminal, even this is a divine imposition designed to limit the associated burden (Gen 3:22). Human experience in Adam is not natural but unnatural; not a result of creation but uncreation. This is why C.S. Lewis can write that “pain insists upon being attended. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”⁷ Our “wounds of knowledge” are in fact a disjunction between what is and what ought to be precisely because we await reconciliation with God through his self-revelation in Jesus Christ in whom we behold both the is and the ought. The triune God removes the veil of incapacitated epistemology, and we see the One who is the image of God: Jesus Christ, the true archetypal expression of humanity (1 Cor 3:12–4:6). Easter invites us to unlearn our starting point from Adam, and to understand the self in Christ—or, in the words of our Petrine metaphor, to experience healing.

This theological account of the woundedness of humanity addressed by the Easter event is evident within Peter’s first letter. His recipients are identified in reference to the tragedy of Israel’s exile—their heaven-bound homecoming is interrupted by suffering (1 Pet 1:1–9; 4:12–19). The rule of the emperor and the institution of slavery are an assumed social reality which inflict wounds of unjust knowledge (2:13–20). The readers, however, are not only victims but have moral agency, being engaged in a war of temptation which can perpetuate the foolishness of evil (1:13–16; 2:11–17; 4:1–6). Moreover, God’s megaphone goes too easily unanswered by willful ignorance (2:15), a condition that once characterised the believing community, too (1:14).

The mortal destiny of wounded humanity is only redeemed through divine self-revelation which points, through Christ’s resurrection, to a more proper destiny in heaven (1:3, 10–12, 20; 3:21–22; 4:5–6). However, the objectivity of this resurrection must be subjectively perceived through the initiative of the triune God (1:2), who lifts the epistemological veil to reveal the incorruptible realm of heaven to which the believer belongs (1:3–9). The wounds of self-knowledge which form part of an Easter hermeneutic give to the author of 1 Peter the resources to recognise and live within tragedy, to make moral judgements, and point to divine healing rather than merely the self-management of symptoms. Yet, like Simon Peter, in whose name the letter is written, an awakening to our woundedness in the presence of Christ tends towards dread: “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). Such trepidation will only be conquered through divine benevolence—what Scripture calls agapē.

The Wounds of God: Agapeistic Hermeneutics

Like Simon Peter, the wounded self in Adam will flee, seeking to hide from divine exposure (Gen 3:10). In a way similar to Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we sense Christ’s omnipotence but are uncertain regarding his benevolence. In response to her question as to whether Aslan is “safe,” Mr Beaver retorts, “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he is good. He’s the King, I tell you.”⁸

The answer to human vulnerability is not a dilution of the divine being so to make God less dreadful to us, but rather an encounter with God’s benevolence which nurtures trust. The Easter event is just that assurance that Lucy and all creatures need when facing the Christ. It is the definitive self-revelation of God that is indicative of ultimate reality being loving and righteous. No longer do we struggle with the problem of pain through our veiled knowing; we now know unveiled that God has said yes to humanity (2 Cor 1:20). “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16) becomes not simply the message of the New Testament but the loving lens through which all of Scripture is written and read.

To draw again from Sedmak, we are to undertake an “agapeistic interpretation” of Scripture because “the essential form of the divine causality in Jesus Christ is . . . always love.”⁹ Now, while Sedmak’s agapeistic emphasis lies in transformative love exemplified in the life of Jesus, the Easter event invites us to discover Jesus’ wounds as the ultimate demonstration of God’s love. For it is by Christ’s wounds that healing is promised, and it is on the tree that Christ “bore our sins in his body” (1 Pet 2:24). The cross is a place of dread until seen through Easter eyes as the agapeistic wounds of God.

Without a robust theology of the Godhead we risk remaining veiled and seeing only the wounds of a human victim. Yet the Gospels reveal them to be the chosen wounds of a divine friend (John 15:13) who anticipated an atonement in his own Passover words: “This is my body given for you . . . . This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Luke 22:19–20). This recollection of the Passover tradition brings to the foreground the motif of judgement.

While it may be unpopular to entertain notions of divine judgment, Miroslav Volf offers a compelling case for its philosophical necessity. Through a personal reflection on the horrors of ethnic cleansing in his Croatian homeland, Volf argues that God must wield the sword: “In a world of violence it would not be worthy of God not to wield the sword; if God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship.”¹⁰ His thesis is an argument for the practice of nonviolence, but he contends that this is only possible if one holds to a loving God who cares enough about violence to act in ultimate judgement against it: “God is wrathful because God is love.”¹¹

I have already offered an account of humanity in Adam, complicit in the wounding of self and others, which places us on the wrong side of justice. In our failure to perceive rightly the is, and having fallen short of the ought, we have made ourselves enemies of God deserving judgement (Rom 5:6–11). Any attempt to hide is an exercise in futility for God will one day come to us as he did for Adam and Eve.

It is here that the self-chosen wounds of the divine-human Son can be seen through an agapeistic hermeneutic. The language of bearing or carrying away (anapherō) sins in 1 Peter 2:24 is a quotation from the LXX Isaiah 53:11–12, where it translates a Hebrew phrase that corresponds with the symbolic bearing of guilt.¹² This places Jesus’ wounds in the economy of divine forgiveness, a space which accuses the wrongdoer and then does not count their offenses against them.¹³ The divine sword of judgement is not sheathed but rather used in an act of divine self-wounding. God’s justice is satisfied while also declaring the forgiven one to be just (Rom 3:26). The wounds of Jesus then are also the wounds of God, for “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Cor 5:19). Such atoning wounds of God do not weaken but rather strengthen an agapeistic hermeneutic. God’s willingness to be wounded despite what humankind deserves shows that the cross, although not “safe,” is an expression of extraordinary divine goodness. It is Good Friday because it invites us to emerge from hiding and exercise trust in an ultimate reality that is both loving and righteous.

This agapeistic hermeneutic compels the author of 1 Peter to not only read the Isaiah Servant Song in terms of Jesus, but to see the entire Old Testament as pointing towards the Christ event (1 Pet 1:10–12, 20; 2:6–10, 22–25). It is here that one can begin to appreciate the way in which the resurrected Christ fulfills Israel’s story of salvation. The alienation from God which characterises the epoch of Adam is overcome by the Christ of reconciliation who enacts the gathering of exiles (1:1–2), the returning of straying sheep (2:25), the bringing home of the unrighteous (3:18), and the healing of the wounded (2:23). It is here that we discern in 1 Peter the importance of agapē for trust and transformation: Christian growth is made possible “now that you have tasted that the Lord is good” (2:3). Trust is the primary posture invited by a loving and suffering God (2:21; 4:19).

A theological reflection of transformation, therefore, can be framed in terms of the redemptive function of Jesus’ wounds: “For you know . . . that you were redeemed from your empty way of life . . . with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet 1:18–19). The atonement does not simply offer forgiveness but allows self-examination precisely because human vulnerability is met through the agapeistic wounds of God. In this space of divine love, confession can operate to order, more accurately, re-order, our love—what Augustine would describe as ensuring “all things are . . loved in reference to God.”¹⁴

So, while the author of 1 Peter can refer to Christ as an example (2:21), transformation is predicated upon such re-ordered love: “Though you have not seen him, you love him . . . and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy” (1:8). This might be called an epistemology of love, a type of knowing that corresponds to ultimate reality and to our nature as imaging creatures who resemble and reflect that which we worship.¹⁵ Thus, Christian knowing is inherently transformative for the very reason that it re-orders our loves, enabling an existential Easter transformation of death and resurrection that the author of 1 Peter anticipates as normative for the believer (2:24).

Resurrected with Christ: Epistemology of Faith

It is no accident of Scripture that the resurrected Jesus bears scars (John 20:20), for even the slaughtered lamb represents the Christ of the Apocalypse (Rev 5:6). Scripture points to the fundamental unity of the Christ event: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification” (Rom 4:25). Thus, as the central act of divine self-disclosure, an Easter hermeneutic invites us to recognise the tragic, acknowledge our epistemic woundedness, engage in agapeistic modes of interpretation, undergo transformation through confession and trust, and now, in view of the resurrection of Christ, experience healing.

It may be reassuring to realise that the claim that Jesus rose from the dead was as extraordinary in the first century as it sounds in the twenty-first. Although general Jewish belief anticipated resurrection on a final day, nobody—and this is clear from the Gospel narratives—nobody expected the crucified Jesus to be anywhere but in his tomb. Yet an empty tomb is what the Gospel texts claim in such a way that does not artificially harmonise them, nor shield the soon-to-be apostolic leaders of the church from embarrassment.

Moreover, the resurrection was a claim for which the apostles were willing to, and indeed did in many cases, lose their lives. Yet, no historical or scientific arguments can prove that the events of the resurrection took place. How could they? The modern sciences, as Jürgen Moltmann points out, “interpret nature on the basis of anthropocentric interests” and assume that “humankind stands over nature.”¹⁶ Scientific method cannot assess that which is an entirely new ontological event in human history—it simply does not have the tools. Indeed, the very nature of Jesus’ resurrection is that it stands above human judgement, enacting an eschatological verdict upon humankind and ushering in a new era of re-creation. The resurrection of Christ stands as the door between these two epochs, closing the door on a present evil age (Gal 1:4) and opening another to a new heaven and a new earth (2 Pet 3:13).

Jewish resurrection expectations in the first century generally reflected an eschatological vindication of the righteous who would be raised on the last day (Dan 12:13; Matt 13:43). The apostolic kērugma portrayed Jesus as inaugurating this last day—his resurrection vindicating him as the eschatological Messiah (Acts 2:26, 40) and agent of world judgment (Act 17:30–31). But this judgment has been split in two, the door between the two epochs staying open for a time for the kērugma to go into all the world (Acts 1:7–8). This delay, due to divine patience (2 Pet 3:9), indicates that judgment did not only have negative connotations but was, from the perspective of God’s people, entirely positive: a vindication of the just. Such language of the righteous and the just (they both derive from the Greek root dik–) is that which is applied to the believer by faith (Rom 1:17; 3:21–26). In other words, the realist language of positive judgement, when applied to the believer, is in anticipation of the future day of vindication—what N.T. Wright calls “God’s advance declaration.”¹⁷ It is to know, even in the present, something that belongs to the future new creation: that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1).

The resurrection of Christ not only judges human history but overthrows an epoch of death to make way for the healing of the cosmos where God’s dwelling will be with humanity (Rev 21:3–5). The resurrection, to again quote N.T. Wright, “is not an absurd event within the old world, but the symbol and starting point of the new world.”¹⁸ This is accomplished through the one in whom divinity and humanity is already joined: Jesus Christ, who became the true archetypal human, the last Adam, whose wounds were not a moral failure leading to death, but the sacrifice of the righteous leading to incorruptibility (Rom 5:12–21; 1 Cor 15:20–28, 35–49).

The splitting of the day of judgement works likewise for the new creation: Jesus’ resurrection is the first-fruit of the image that we too will bear at his second coming (1 Cor 15:23). Although this seems, to those so accustomed to woundedness, that everything is turned upside down, it is in fact, in the words of T. F. Torrance, the event which turns everything “right side up.”¹⁹ Our earlier suspicion from our wounds of knowledge is now confirmed: the resurrection verifies that the cosmos of tragedy, and our woundedness within it, is indeed unnatural, examples of de-creation that cannot serve as our ontological and epistemological starting points. The invitation to those in Adam, is to now experience a truer, healed humanity, by being in Christ. This is not to suggest such a shift is easy—on the contrary, T. F. Torrance points out that the Easter event is so new “that it is only knowable through a radical reconstruction of our prior knowledge.”²⁰ Such a reconstruction, like the resurrection itself, requires an act of divine self-disclosure, this time to the subjective self.

This new subjective knowing of this new objective event is made possible through the Holy Spirit: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit, who lives in you” (Rom 8:11). It is this correspondence which means that resurrection “brings with it the capacity to create in us new conceptions and new categories of thought with which to apprehend and speak appropriately and therefore objectively about it.”²¹ It is to experience “the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2)—what I have called an epistemology of faith: a knowing not only of the objective reality of the resurrection but an epistemology that views all of reality through resurrection eyes.

However, these eyes of faith behold reality from within a present wounded perspective. We are between the first-fruits and the full harvest; the eschatological kingdom has broken into the present world order, but we remain between the epochs. It is no surprise then that to see with Easter eyes is to be sensitive to the tragedy and moral failings in which one still lives. Thus T. F. Torrance outlines an existential epistemological conflict:

In seeking to grasp the message of the resurrection, therefore, we must allow for a yawning disparity between it and our own habits of thought, but allow also for a movement on the part of the risen Lord whereby he discovers himself to us in the sovereign freedom and authority of his own independent reality, summoning us to renounce ourselves, take up the cross and follow him, but enabling us to know him beyond any capacity we have in ourselves through the power of his own resurrection.²²

This sovereign summoning of all humanity is possible once all the strands of the Easter event come together: from the incarnation through to the ascension—that “festival,” according to Augustine, “which confirms the grace of all the festivals together.”²³ For it is the ascension which enables the Holy Spirit to be given at Pentecost. Not simply is healing an objective or cosmic reality, nor even the knowing of such a reality, but Oliver O’Donovan points out that “the Pentecostal gift means that the renewal of the universe touches me at the point where I am a moral agent.”²⁴ For this reason the New Testament portrays in very realist terms that the new creation in Christ has begun personally, but remains hidden: “you have been raised with Christ . . . your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:1–3). This is the paradox of the epistemology of faith. It is as C.S. Lewis writes, to behold this “land of the Trinity” from “here in exile, in the weeping valley.”²⁵

To return for the final time to the teaching of 1 Peter, we discover it is the land of the Trinity, disclosed at Easter, from which a new birth (1 Pet 1:3; 23) and identity is formed: “To God’s elect, exiles scattered . . . who have been chosen” (1:1–2). Through resurrection eyes, triune election overshadows exile (1:1–2) and suffering is a “short” trial on the way to salvation (1:6, 9). The rest of the letter reveals how the risen and ascended Christ resourced those first readers of 1 Peter with an adaptable pattern of social interactions with those around them.

Morally, they were to avoid the empty lifestyle which is enslaved to desire (1:13–22; 4:2–3) and instead live in holy resemblance of the one whom they love in accordance with their new birth (1:13–25). Ecclesially, their new birth is causally linked to the conception of belonging to a new family in which the ethic of love is normative (1:22–23; 3:8; 4:7–11; 5:1–7). One’s marriage was to transcend social norms—a man’s wife was to be treated in accordance with their resurrection status as “heirs with you of the gracious gift of life” (3:7). Socially, their identity was to be tied to the divine Sovereign whose final day of vindication was imminent. They were thus kept from demanding a geo-political expression of God’s kingdom in the present. They could honour the emperor knowing that such authority is ultimately derivative (2:11–17): “Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves” (2:16). Divine authority freed them to fear only the one who would bring ultimate justice (1:17; 3:14). It is for this reason that unjust suffering could be endured as a sharing in the sufferings of Christ (4:13) because, to borrow again from Volf’s image, the sword of God’s wrath would ultimately do justice for them (2:18–25; 3:13–4:6; 4:12–19).

This leads to the missional implications of Easter in 1 Peter in which the readers are to winsomely engage within their hostile social context in order to draw others into the people of God who will share in their vindication on the last day (2:12, 15; 3:1, 15). 1 Peter serves as a pertinent example of how Easter underpins the structure of thought in New Testament texts and promotes, amidst the tragic reality of this present world, an epistemology of faith which is enabled by the agapeistic wounds of God.

Conclusion

In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis relates an interaction whereby an old author asks, “Is it easy to love God?” “‘It is easy,’ he replies, ‘to those who do it’.”²⁶ The question posed highlights the difficulty that humankind perceives in apprehending God and responding to the Easter event. This essay has explored some of these difficulties, noting our woundedness and the limitation of human knowing. And yet, “to those who do it”, who begin to love God, there is an increasing ease: a yoke which is easy and a burden that is light (Matt 11:30).

The is–ought disjunction of our wounds of knowledge begins to find resolution; the agapeistic wounds of God in Christ give space for reconciliation and healing; wholeness is restored as our loves are re-ordered; and the resurrection of Christ forms a new identity for us that both transcends this tragic world and gives freedom to live within it. What seems difficult at first is discovered to correspond with deep structures of human knowing such as love, hope, and faith (1 Cor 13:2). Scripture invites a reading in such terms, and then invites us to have such Easter eyes as to “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7).

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”²⁷

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The Rev. Scott Goode is an ordained minister who pastors an Anglican church in regional New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Salvific Intentionality in 1 Corinthians: How Paul Cultivates the Missional Imagination of the Corinthian Community (Wipf & Stock, 2023), and has research interests in New Testament marriage theology, hermeneutics, and the Historical Jesus.

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Image: Mikhail Nesterov, The Empty Tomb

1. All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (Anglicised edition), copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica (formerly International Bible Society).[↩]
2. For a brief summary and some analysis of “the two horizons,” see Anthony C. Thiselton, “Situating the Explorations: ‘Thirty Years of Hermeneutics’ (1996),” in Thiselton on Hermeneutics: Collected Works with New Essays (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdmans, 2006), 7–12.[↩]
3. Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (London: SPCK, 2007), 84.[↩]
4. Clemens Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge: Epistemic Mercy and World Hunger,” in Transformation Theology: Church in the World, eds. O. Davies, P.D. Janz & C. Sedmak (London: T & T Clark, 2007), 145.[↩]
5. Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 143–49.[↩]
6. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Collins Fontana, 1957), 12.[↩]
7. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 81.[↩]
8. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Lions, 1980), 75.[↩]
9. Sedmak, “The Wound of Knowledge,” 151.[↩]
10. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 303.[↩]
11. Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 121.[↩]
12. See for example the scapegoat in Leviticus 16:22 and the comments by David Peterson, “Atonement Teaching in 1 Peter and 1 John,” in Where Wrath and Mercy Meet: Proclaiming the Atonement Today, ed. David Peterson (London: Paternoster, 2001), 58.[↩]
13. Volf, Free of Charge, 133.[↩]
14. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.27.28, in The Complete Works of Saint Augustine, trans. James F. Shaw, ed. Philip Schaff (1887). Kindle. Location: 23785–27820.[↩]
15. G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Westmont, IL: IVP, 2008), 16.[↩]
16. Jürgen Moltmann, “The Resurrection of Christ and the New Earth,” in Resurrection and Responsibility: Essays on Theology, Scripture, and Ethics in Honor of Thorwald Lorenzen, ed. Keith D. Dyer & David J. Neville (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 55.[↩]
17. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 153.[↩]
18. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 78.[↩]
19. T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, Cornerstone series (London: T & T Clark, n.d). Kindle. Location: 4110.[↩]
20. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection. Location: 4280–4297.[↩]
21. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection. Location: 4316.[↩]
22. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection. Location: 4316–4323.[↩]
23. Augustine, Sermo 53.4, Coll. Selec. SS. Ecclesiae Patrum, ed. D.A.B. Caillau, 131 B, 1842, p 278, cited in Peter Toon, “Historical Perspectives on the Doctrine of Christ’s Ascension, Part 1: Resurrected and Ascended: The Exalted Jesus,” Bibliotheca Sacra 140/559 (1983), 195.[↩]
24. Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, 2^nd ed. (Leicester: Apollos, 1994), 23.[↩]
25. C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Fount, 1998), 133.[↩]
26. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 133.[↩]
27. C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory: A Collection of Lewis’ Most Moving Addresses (London: Williams Collins, 2013), 139–40.[↩]