Surprised by Hope: rethinking heaven, the resurrection and the mission of the church
N.T. Wright (HarperOne, 2008)
Thank God for Tom Wright! This is a book that needed to be written and I’m thankful that the Bishop of Durham was the person. For two reasons really – one is that it would be difficult to get a more trusty guide of the New Testament and secondly, because Wright has the uncanny ability to write and speak not just as an academic, but also to the thoughtful non-academic. Surprised By Hope is another example of this.
So what’s the book really about? Well, as the subtitle states, it’s an attempt to “rethink heaven and the resurrection” and in doing so to note the very clear implications for how we engage in mission today.
And this last part is critical. Wright is less concerned to write a theological treatise on the afterlife than he is to demonstrate how thinking clearly about the New Testament’s teaching on resurrection and the future, radically shapes how we live and relate to the world – here and now.
In his own words,
This book addresses two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separately but that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?…As long as we see Christian hope in terms of “going to heaven”, of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated.
Not a book review, nor a synopsis
When I read this book a few months ago I began to write a book review. Then I thought it might be easier to just write a synopsis. But what I’ve produced is really neither – though it has elements of both. Essentially I’ve extracted some lines from the book and tried to loosely group them together under some headings. I recognise the danger in doing this – particularly in the ease with which you may read his comments “out of context” – without all the other thoughts that surround these statements. (Smells a little like prooftexting!) You could easily gain a false impression of what he is saying. Or at the very least it will be an incomplete picture.
So having alerted you to the risks of what I’ve done, let me note that my hope is that you’ll be challenged, intrigued and maybe even annoyed by some of the extracts I’ve taken out of Wright’s book and be sufficiently stirred to pick up the book yourself. Then you can read “in context”.
If you do choose to read the book, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Wright’s contention regarding what many Christians believe about the future
Wright’s contention is that much of our thinking about life after death, heaven and hell etc is shaped more by the dualistic beliefs of Platonism and Gnostism than New Testament ones. And it’s reinforced and built on by Dante’s description of “hell”. In fact, Wright notes that “…there is very little in the Bible about ‘going to heaven when you die’ and not a lot about a postmortem hell either…Many Christians grow up assuming that whenever the New Testament speaks of heaven it refers to the place to which the saved will go after death…(However) ‘God’s kingdom’ in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is heaven’.” 18
Heaven is not our ultimate destination
“Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life – God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21-22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.” 19
Wright argues that the New Testament and the early Christians “…hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world.” 41 This is our ultimate destination.
“What does Jesus mean when he declares that there are ‘many dwelling places’ in his father’s house?…the word for ‘dwelling places’ here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run…This fits closely with Jesus’s words to the dying brigand in Luke: ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’ Despite a long tradition of misreading, paradise is here, as in some other Jewish writing, not a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquility, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day.” 150
“…all Christians departed are in substantially the same state, that of restful happiness. Though this is sometimes described as sleep, we shouldn’t take this to mean that it is a state of unconsciousness. Had Paul thought that, I very much doubt that he would have described life immediately after death as ‘being with Christ, which is far better.’ Rather, sleep here means that the body is ‘asleep’ in the sense of ‘dead’, while the real person – however we want to describe him or her – continues.” 171
Resurrection
Wright spends a lot of effort unpacking the meaning of “resurrection”. He does so because of his belief that most Christians have little or no idea what the word actually means or why we say we believe it. When many use the word, Wright contends they actually use it as a synonym for “life after death” or “going to heaven”. My experience is that he’s quite right in his contention.
In fact, resurrection means new bodily life – a transformed body. Tom Wright spends some time unpacking 1 Corinthians 15 (which he thinks is a badly misunderstood passage). Paul’s theology, he maintains, views resurrection as “…a body whose material, created from the old material, will have new properties”, one that is incorruptible.
The New Heavens and New Earth
God’s new creation is not about abandoning the current creation – it’s about re-making and redeeming it. And “As in Philippians 3, it is not we who go to heaven, it is heaven that comes to earth…” 104
“Heaven and earth, it seems, are not after all poles apart, needing to be separated forever when all the children of heaven have been rescued from this wicked earth. Nor are they simply different ways of looking at the same thing…No, they are different, radically different, but they are made for each other in the same (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female. And when they finally come together, that will be cause for rejoicing in the same way that a wedding is…” 105
“So far from sitting on clouds playing harps, as people often imagine, the redeemed people of God in the new world will be the agents of his love going out in new ways, to accomplish new creative tasks, to celebrate and extend the glory of his love.” 106
Hope
“Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.” 75
View of Time
“The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam – or even under the steady influence of God…But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists…They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.” 93
Redemption
“Redemption doesn’t mean scrapping what’s there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved…Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it.” 96-7
Citizens of Heaven, Colonising the Earth
“…when Paul says, ‘We are citizens of heaven’, he doesn’t at all mean that when we’re done with this life we’ll all be going off to live in heaven. What he means is that the savior, the Lord, Jesus the King – all of those were of course imperial titles – will come from heaven to earth, to change the present situation and state of his people. The key word here is transform.” 100
“Being citizens of heaven, as the Philippians would know, doesn’t mean that one is expecting to go back to the mother city but rather means that one is expecting the emperor to come from the mother city to give the colony its full dignity, to rescue it if need be, to subdue local enemies and put everything to rights.” 133
The Second Coming and Eschatology
“At one end, some have made the second coming so central that they can see little else. At the other, some have so marginalized or weakened it that it ceases to mean anything at all. Both positions need to be challenged
“Scholars and simple folk alike can get led astray by the use of a single word to refer to something when that word in its original setting means both more and less than the use to which it is subsequently put…the Greek word parousia. This is usually translated ‘coming’ but literally it means ‘presence’ – that is, presence as opposed to absence…People often assume that the early church used parousia simply to mean ‘the second coming of Jesus’ and that by this event they all envisaged, in a quite literal fashion, the scenario of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17…Neither of these assumptions is in fact correct.”128
“The word eschatology, which literally means ‘the study of the last things,’ doesn’t just refer to death, judgement, heaven and hell, as used to be thought (and as many dictionaries still define the word). It also refers to the strongly held belief of most first-century Jews, and virtually all early Christians, that history was going somewhere under the guidance of God and that where it was going was toward God’s new world of justice, healing and hope. The transition from the present world to the new one would be a matter not of the destruction of the present space-time universe but of its radical healing…So when I (and many others) use the word eschatology, we don’t simply mean the second coming, still less a particular theory about it; we mean, rather, the entire sense of God’s future for the world and the belief that that future has already begun to come forward to meet us in the present.” 122
Redeemed Bodies
“God’s people are promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life.” 147
“Bodily resurrection is not just one odd bit of that (Christian) hope. It is the element that gives shape and meaning to the rest of the story we tell about God’s ultimate purposes.” 148
“The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about.” 149
“We assume that to be bodily, to be physical, is to be impermanent, changeable, transitory, and that the only way to be permanent, unchanging, and immortal is to become nonphysical. Paul’s point here (2 Cor 5) is that this is not so…What Paul is asking us to imagine is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body…We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self…” 154
(note: this is what CS Lewis encourages us to envisage in The Great Divorce)
“How will it happen?…I don’t think it’s too much of a caricature to express it like this: God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again. Paul says that God will give us new bodies; there may well be some bodily continuity, as with Jesus himself, but God is well capable of recreating people even if their ashes are scattered into a fast-flowing river.” 163
Reward
“…the image of reward in the New Testament…isn’t a matter of calculation, of doing a difficult job in order to be paid a wage. It is much more like working at a friendship or marriage in order to enjoy the other person’s company more fully…The ‘reward’ is organically connected to the activity, not some kind of arbitrary pat on the back, otherwise unrelated to the work that was done.” 161-2
Hell and the destiny of those who refuse to follow God
“Part of the difficulty of the topic is that the word hell conjures up an image gained more from medieval imagery than from the earliest Christian writings. Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a being they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire, or for that matter as a kind of torture chamber at the center of God’s castle of heavenly delights, decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped believing in hell.” 175
“…when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna, he was not, as a general rule, telling them unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one…His message to his contemporaries was stark and political. Unless they turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God’s kingdom in their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries whose resources they covet or whose strategic location they are anxious to guard. Rome would turn Jerusalem into a hideous, stinking extension of its own smouldering rubbish heap (Gehenna). When Jesus said, ‘Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,’ that is the primary meaning he had in mind.
“It is therefore only by extension, and with difficulty, that we can extrapolate from the many gospel sayings that articulate this urgent, immediate warning to the deeper question of a warning about what may happen after death itself…Jesus didn’t say very much about the future life: he was, after all, primarily concerned to announce that God’s kingdom was coming ‘on earth as in heaven.” 176-7
“When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what’s more, you reflect what you worship not only back to the object itself but also outward to the world around…My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings so to continue down this road, so to refuse all whisperings of good news, all glimmers of the true light, all promptings to turn and go the other way, all signposts to the love of God, that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all…I am well aware that I have now wandered into territory that no one can claim to have mapped. Jesus, Christians believe, has been to hell and back, but to say that is to stand gaping into the darkness, not to write a travel brochure for future visitors.” 183
“…heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope…the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context – not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being ‘fellow workers with God’) within that larger picture and purpose. And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alternatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question.” 184-5
Mission – partnering God
“The early Christians knew the world was still a mess. But they announced, like messengers going off on behalf of a global company, that a new CEO had taken charge. They discovered through their own various callings how his new way of running things was to be worked out. It wasn’t a matter (as some people anxiously suppose to this day) of Christians simply taking over and giving orders in a kind of theocracy where the church could simply tell everyone what to do…But neither is it a matter of the church backing off, letting the world go on its sweet way, and worshipping Jesus in a kind of private sphere.
“Somehow there is a third option…We can glimpse it in the Book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus might also be displayed.” 112
“…the task of the church between ascension and parousia is therefore set free both from the self-driven energy that imagines it has to build God’s kingdom all by itself and from the despair that supposes it can’t do anything until Jesus comes again. We do not ‘build the kingdom’ all by ourselves, but we do build for the kingdom. All that we do in faith, hope and love in the present, in obedience to our ascended Lord and in the power of his Spirit, will be enhanced and transformed at his appearing.” 143
“What you do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbour as yourself – will last into God’s future…They are all part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” 193
“It’s no good falling back into the tired old split-level world where some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace, and hope for the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the New Testament and everything to do with the silent enslavement of many Christians to the Platonic ideology of the Enlightenment. Once we get the resurrection straight, we can and must get mission straight.” 193
“As long as we see salvation in terms of going to heaven when we die, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for that future. But when we see salvation, as the New Testament sees it, in terms of God’s promised new heavens and new earth and of our promised resurrection to share in that new and gloriously embodied reality – what I have called life after life after death – then the main work of the church here and now demands to be rethought in consequence.” 197
“We are saved not as souls but as wholes.” 199 (Great line, eh!)
“To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!) and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, me must always and only play with it in private.” 200
“”…the work of salvation, in its full sense, is 1. about whole human beings, not merely souls; 2. about the present, not simply the future; and 3. about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us. If we can get this straight, we will rediscover the historic basis for the full-orbed mission of the church.” 200-1
“…if you want to help inaugurate God’s kingdom, you must follow in the way of the cross, and if you want to benefit from Jesus’s saving death, you must become part of his kingdom project.” 204-5
“Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nuture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world – all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God.” 208
“To put it bluntly, creation is to be redeemed; that is, space is to be redeemed, time is to be redeemed, and matter is to be redeemed.” 211
“For many conservative Christians today, belief in Jesus’s bodily resurrection is all about God’s supernatural action in the world, legitimating an upstairs-downstairs view of reality – a dualism – in which the supernatural is the real world and the natural, the this-worldly, is secondary and largely irrelevant.” 220
“When the church is seen to move straight from worship of the God we see in Jesus to making a difference and effecting much-needed change in the real world; when it becomes clear that people who feast at Jesus’s table are the ones in the forefront of work to eliminate hunger and famine; when people realize that those who pray for the Spirit to work in and through them are the people who seem to have extra resources of love and patience in caring for those whose lives are damaged, bruised, and shamed, then it is not only natural to speak of Jesus himself and to encourage others to worship him for themselves and find out what belonging to his family is all about but it is also natural for people, however irreligious they may think of themselves as being, to recognize that something is going on that they want to be part of.” 267
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