Does resurrection doctrine give us unique reasons to work for justice?

I’ve been reading Tom Wright’s Surprised By Hope, defending his orthodox view on resurrection. One of his key claims is that only by accepting the orthodox position on resurrection can Christians justify striving for justice on earth.

To argue this, he needs to first show that resurrection doctrine does justify striving for justice on earth, and secondly that the available alternatives fail to do so. Firstly, the positive argument.

Does resurrection give us reasons to work for justice?

Wright’s argument depends on his view on what God’s ultimate future will look like: the present creation will not be abandoned, destroyed, or replaced, but physically transformed into the new creation.

He argues that our work now has value, because, at the time when God transforms the old world into the new, he will incorporate the outcomes of our good works into the new creation, like an architect incorporating the works of many stonemasons into a great cathedral.

He argues this on the basis of 1 Cor 15. I found it a struggle to find a good justification for Wright’s view in chapter 15 alone, but I did find some crucial context in chapter 3, just before he begins the first of his many exhortations to the Corinthians. It would be best to read the whole chapter, but here is verses 11-15:

For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.

This at least implies that the outcome of all our work will persist at least until the time of judgement, when it will undergo testing, and those that pass the test will enjoy a reward. You could read this as being like a quality check, with God dishing out benefits to those that pass his assessment. But you could read it in another way, more favourable to Wright. The works will be proven, and the ones that withstand the process will themselves generate a benefit. You could think of it like baking: when you put a cake in the oven, you prove whether or not you got the recipe right; if not, it goes in the bin, and if you did get it right, you get to enjoy the cake. So I agree that 1 Cor provides a reason to think that the outcome of our works will somehow persist until the time of judgement.

However, Wright doesn’t just think that our works will persist until the time of judgement, he also believes that they will at that time be transformed and then incorporated into the new creation. 1 Cor doesn’t directly justify this view. It is, at least, coherent. Baking a cake in the oven transforms the dough.

So it seems reasonable to me to use 1 Cor to justify Wright’s view that our works will be transformed into the new Creation. However, that’s before considering any counter-arguments, and I have two which concern me.

One is that, as Ecclesiastes points out, the profits of our work will be laid to waste by time. We don’t know when God is going to bring about the new creation. It could be tomorrow, and we should be behaving today in light of that possibility - but of all the available possibilities, most of them are in the distant future, so we should expect on average that there will be a long interval between my deeds today and the judgement of them. Since time lays waste to all our endeavours, we should expect that the profits of our work will have vanished long before the judgement. Therefore, it would be unreasonable to work for justice in the hope that our work will persist until the time of judgement in order to be incorporated into the new creation, as Wright argues we should do.

This first problem is probably the most important, but it’s vulnerable to some counter-arguments, which rather miss the point. So I’m going to move on to my second problem, which is more niche, but which I think holds stronger against counter-arguments.

In 1845, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror left Britain on an expedition to explore the Northwest Passage. In July 1845, they were spotted by whalers in Baffin Bay. None of the sailors were ever seen alive again by Europeans. Both ships became locked into ice in September 1846, and probably never sailed again. In April 1848, the remaining crew began a desperate 250-mile march to the nearest European outpost. It is almost certain that all of them died.

Now, suppose that one of those sailors, between 1846 and 1848, did something good. Maybe a major act of heroism, or maybe a small, kind word. I think it’s reasonable to suppose that someone, at some time, did something good.

All the profits of that good act have now completely perished. They are not recorded in the small records the sailors left behind. None of the sailors who benefited lived to pass on the benefits. None survived to pass on the light of justice to the next generation.

At the time of judgement, then, there will be no remnant of this good act for God to test, transform and incorporate into his new creation.

Does this mean that the good act was wasted? Was it only worth a shot just in case, despite all the odds, the sailors made it home again?

I think this is a cruel conclusion: but it seems to be where Wright must go.

If it is implausible that the profits of all our good works will make it through to the time of judgement, then we have to accept that 1 Cor 3 is true only in some metaphorical sense, not that our works will literally persist in order to be tested. And if that is true, then the premise of Wright’s argument is false: our work will not necessarily be incorporated into the new creation, so that cannot generate reasons for working for justice now.

I am not convinced by Wright’s positive argument. I would like to consider alternative interpretations of 1 Cor. This is what Wright goes on to do.

Do alternative views give us reason to work for justice?

The first view which Wright considers is the gnostic view that resurrection is just an afterlife in heaven. He argues that this does not generate reasons for working for justice now, but his argument is really the converse of the argument in favour of his own view, which I’ve already considered above, so I’ll move on.

The other alternative Wright considers is what he calls ‘evolutionary optimism’. You might also call this ‘progressivism’. By this he means the view that the new creation will be made the Church gradually building upon its own works, generation after generation, approaching and eventually achieving God’s perfect standard by its works. This is the Victorian optimism which is still a powerful force in our politics: that history is building upon itself, and progressing from barbarism to civilisation, from brutishness to beauty, from tragedy to justice.

He argues that this view, too, does not give us reasons to work for justice now. His argument is intriguing: if our work for justice is condemned to only ever be partially successful, then we have no reason to do it. In fact, contra the evolutionary optimist, no amount of hard work on our part will ever achieve perfect justice, and therefore if bringing in the new creation is all about our works, we have no reason to strive for justice.

I’m intrigued by the premise that if we know that our work will at best be partially successful, then we have no reason to do it.

This isn’t how we ordinarily think: typically, if I think attempting to go to the gym twice a week is going to be partially successful, I would say that this generates a reason for me to go to the gym.

But I sense there may be an interesting meta-ethical thesis here: perhaps what we ordinarily call ‘partial success’ is in fact a mistake, papering over what is in fact simply a failure.

There’s an obvious error theory: we had to create the concept of the ‘partial success’ in order to generate reasons in the world as it appears, the world as described in Ecclesiastes as ‘vanity’, where the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and all our works crumble into the dust eventually. In order to think we had reasons at all, we needed to invent the concept of the ‘partial success’.

But is there a good argument for the view that there is no such thing as a partial success?

In 1915, the HMS Endurance, under the command of Captain Ernest Shackleton, became stuck fast in Antarctic pack ice in the Weddell Sea. In the face of extraordinary challenges, Shackleton vowed to bring all his sailors back to the UK alive: and in one of the most famous exploits of Antarctic exploration, he succeeded.

It would have been wrong, had Shackleton vowed only to bring back most of his sailors. We know that he would have been able to bring all of them back, because he in fact did so. To strive for less would have been negligent.

This is to illustrate a general principle: we ought to strive for the best that we are able.

Grant that necessarily, no particular justice is inevitable. It follows that necessarily, it is possible to prevent all injustice. Therefore, perfect justice is achievable.

And yet we know that we will not achieve perfect justice. It’s way too hard.

It does seem that I’ve proven a contradiction: both that perfect justice is possible and that it is impossible. I expect these are two different kinds of modality. I’m not too bothered to carefully distinguish them, as long we agree that these two things can both be true in some sense. By analogy, consider that, if you can run a mile in so many seconds, you can run it in a second less; that, by sorites, it follows that you can run a mile in a minute; and that you obviously cannot run a mile in a minute: it is too hard. Perfect justice is perhaps a little like this: it is achievable in the sense that it is physically possible for us to achieve it, but unachievable in the sense that it’s way too hard.

So, since perfect justice is in some sense achievable, it follows that we ought to strive for it. But since we know we will not achieve perfect justice, it follows that we cannot have a reason to strive for it: we cannot genuinely strive for what we know we cannot do. Therefore, if you reject that God will work to transform our world of vanity into something fundamentally different where perfect justice is not only genuinely achievable but actually realised, then you will be stuck in this hopeless tension, where you both must bring about perfect justice, and have no reason to do it, because you have no hope of success.

Where from here? I would really like to find alternative interpretations of 1 Cor, and weigh them up against Wright’s interpretation. It may be that, whatever the counter-arguments, Wright’s view is the strongest available. It may not.