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Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
by N. T. Wright
Harper One, 2008, $24.95
Review summary by Dan Brent
It looks like a book about death and where we go when we die. It’s not. It’s a book about Jesus and the final renewal that God began with the resurrection of his son. “For the Christian,” he says, “death is a beaten enemy.” (p.15)
Many people, Christians even, he laments, think of heaven as a place of clouds where we can be safe finally with God and the angels and good people we’ve known. God’s design is not to take us away to heaven but to bring heaven to our earth where Jesus will, at last, reign. The All Saints Day hymn, “For All the Saints” gets it right in one of the later verses: “But lo! There breaks a yet more glorious day. The saints triumphant rise in bright array. The King of Glory passes on his way.”
When Martha said of her brother Lazarus, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day,” she was reflecting the belief of the Pharisees and the general theology of the Jews of Jesus’ time. Resurrection referred to body, not just spirit or soul. Only the Jews held on to this type of hope. Then something special happened on that first Easter. What God did at Easter was advance that hope for one person. He gave Jesus a real body now beyond the reach of death. And he did it to show that he could and would fulfill that hope for all those who trusted his mercy and love.
What of the meantime? “When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day, paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection. 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.” (p.41) Paul also “speaks of two sorts of body, the present one and the future one.” (p.43)
So from the beginning, Christianity saw the resurrection of Jesus as an inauguration that “consisted in the resurrection itself happening to one person in the middle of history in advance of its great, final occurrence, anticipating and guaranteeing the final resurrection of God’s people at the end of history.” (p.45)
This shifts some of our pious thinking about Easter. The feast is, of course, about the promise of our personal resurrection and eternal life. But it’s not mainly about that! Mainly it’s about the ultimate establishment on earth of God’s kingdom where Jesus rules! And anticipating this—even now—Jesus is king. (And Caesar isn’t.)
Wright spends a number of pages addressing some of the theories that dismiss or distort the resurrection narratives of the Gospel. Ultimately he says that “faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science.” (p.71)
So the resurrection of Jesus is the defining event of God’s new creation. Wright rejects de Chardin’s theory that the world is evolving toward a time of Christ’s triumph. Nor does he accept the Platonic-Gnostic idea that the world of space, time, and matter will be replaced with something spiritual. Rather, “the early Christians believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.” (p.93) Paul describes it as like the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old. And the book of Revelation uses the image of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven like a bride. In the last days, we won’t be going to heaven; heaven will be coming to earth!
In the meantime, Jesus has returned to his Father but remains with us still in a different way. “The Holy Spirit and the sacraments become enormously important since they are precisely the means by which Jesus is present.” (p.114) But in other ways too—prayer, the word, the poor—God’s kingdom is striving to blossom toward its full reality. It is like “the fresh grass growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world.” (p.123) And it is all in anticipation of the “time when, in the great renewal of the world that Easter itself foreshadowed, Jesus himself will be personally present and will be the agent and model of the transformation that will happen both to the whole world and also to believers.” (p.136)
Paul explains that transformation as including a new kind of body for us—still physical but now incorruptible and immortal (1Cor.15). “God can do new things with dust!” (p.158) And author Wright expects that, far from sitting around on clouds listening to harps, God will have things to do to keep us busy developing and celebrating his new creation. (Reviewer’s thought: . . . perhaps as he keeps the angels from an earlier creation busy with our world?)
Bishop Wright addresses—but doesn’t resolve—the questions about purgatory. He believes that “death itself gets rid of all that is still sinful; this isn’t magic but good theology.” (p.170)
From the beginning, the author says this book is not about what happens to us after our death. It’s about “Life after life after death.” And what about life after death? “The body is ‘asleep’ (dead) while the real person—however we want to describe him or her—continues. This state is not the final destiny for which the Christian dead are bound, which is the bodily resurrection. But it is a state in which the dead are held firmly within the conscious love of God.” (p.171)
Wright has a section on hell which is deliberately inconclusive. (Hell is “one of the darkest theological mysteries.”)
The final section of the book speaks to the practical implications of our Easter faith. God uses our goodness now to build this kingdom that has already begun. We have the opportunity to put into place a stone that will one day be part of a finished cathedral. We contribute to works of justice, to creating beauty, and to evangelism (through prayer and preaching). For the Church itself, resurrection means mission to (not escape from) the world. “Heaven and earth at certain points intersect and interlock. Christians are meant to be such points.” (p.252) “Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter.” (p.253)
Easter, then, liturgically “ought to be an eight-day festival with champagne served after morning prayers.” (p.256) And then “there is ultimately no justification for a private piety that doesn’t work out in actual mission!” (p.270) In this we are supported by scripture, prayer, and love.
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