Quote:
Originally Posted by AV1611  I think you need to read the original interview  |
Yes, thanks for the link. This interview appears to be what WorldNetDaily was responding to, and it shows that the WND article is overly sensationalistic if not downright misleading. Notice what Blueridge Baptist said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blueridge Baptist I had the impression he was teaching some kind of soul sleep. |
Reading the WND article does leave that impression, and maybe the person who wrote the article simply didn't understand what soul sleep is. It appears that whoever wrote it may have focused in on the following statement and heard "soul sleep" when Wright says "asleep":
"We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep."
Soul sleep is the teaching that our souls are unconscious after death until the resurrection. Notice that that is not what Wright is saying above. He says he believes we will be in the presence of God and "be conscious." Then he points out that, in comparison to our
body being alive, it is "like sleep." Notice how clever it is to phrase it like that. There are many who do believe soul sleep because they take passages in the new testament quote-un-quote "literally." Wright relativizes their understanding of passages referring to the dead as being "asleep." He says that
relative to a body being alive, death is
like sleep. Now a person who may hold to soul sleep has a new interpretive grid with which to read the passages about the dead being asleep and awaking.
Just to see if I was off, I did a quick search and found another Wright quote which seems to confirm how I was reading what he said above:
Wright: "[Paul] uses the regular image of falling asleep for death, enabling him to speak of people who have fallen asleep but will one day wake again, and to do so with echos of Daniel 12:2... This has led some interpreters to speak of 'the sleep of the soul', a time on unconcious post-mortem existence prior to the reawakening of resurrection. But this is almost certainly misleading – another case of people picking up a vivid Pauline metaphor and running down the street and waving it about. ...in fact, if we were speaking strictly, we should say that it is the
body that 'sleeps' between death and resurrection; but in all probability, Paul is using the language of sleeping and waking simply as a way of contrasting a stage of temporary inactivity, not necessarily unconsciousness, with a subsequent on of renewed activity." ["The Resurrection of the Son of God" p.216]