Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

published	February 1st 2008 by HarperOne
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0061551821 (isbn13: 9780061551826)
pages	352
description	For years Christians have been asking, "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?" It turns out that many believers have been...more [close] For years Christians have been asking, "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?" It turns out that many believers have been giving the wrong answer. It is not heaven. Award-winning author N. T. Wright outlines the present confusion about a Christian's future hope and shows how it is deeply intertwined with how we live today. Wright, who is one of today's premier Bible scholars, asserts that Christianity's most distinctive idea is bodily resurrection. He provides a magisterial defense for a literal resurrection of Jesus and shows how this became the cornerstone for the Christian community's hope in the bodily resurrection of all people at the end of the age. Wright then explores our expectation of "new heavens and a new earth," revealing what happens to the dead until then and what will happen with the "second coming" of Jesus. For many, including many Christians, all this will come as a great surprise. Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus's resurrection—the church cannot stop at "saving souls" but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God's kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life. Lively and accessible, this book will surprise and excite all who are interested in the meaning of life, not only after death but before it. [close]
date added	12-13-07 edit book

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Phil rated it:

05/06/08

Read in April, 2008

This is a great book, and a valuable book, in many ways. NT Wright packages together neatly some of his most important points about Christianity that he has a unique ability to understand and articulate. I also think it is one of his best written books so far.
The book can be thought of as centering around the basic question: what is the Christian hope? For Wright, this is a question that is vastly misunderstood within Christianity these days, and consequently misunderstood outside of Christi...more This is a great book, and a valuable book, in many ways. NT Wright packages together neatly some of his most important points about Christianity that he has a unique ability to understand and articulate. I also think it is one of his best written books so far.
The book can be thought of as centering around the basic question: what is the Christian hope? For Wright, this is a question that is vastly misunderstood within Christianity these days, and consequently misunderstood outside of Christianity as well. What we've lost is an awareness of the significance of bodily resurrection, and the entire renewal and restoration of the created reality that, according to the New Testament, goes with it. By overemphasizing individual salvation, we've forgotten or distorted the total scheme that it fits into, making Christianity into religion that is all about "getting into heaven," understood in a vague and spiritual sense. He argues that many "conservative" Christians, who firmly believe in the resurrection of Jesus, don't grasp the total significance of it, seeing it only as a sort of proof that Jesus is divine, or that there is "life after death" after all. But, for the early Christians, the resurrection of Jesus meant much more than this. For one, it meant that God's kingdom had already begun: evil had been defeated and God's promises to restore the world through Israel were coming about. This meant that there is work for us to do in the present, work towards building that kingdom. It also meant that a redemption of the whole creation had begun.
This second part is something that Wright focuses on quite a bit. One of the major consequences our misapprehending of resurrection, according to Wright, is that we no longer appreciate the scope of the project that God is engaging in, nor do we understand the importance of creation itself, including the fact that we ourselves are creatures. We've made everything about salvation of individual souls, which we've over-spiritualized, forgetting that God intends to redeem our bodies and all of creation, to renew the actual space-time universe so that, eventually, humanity and creation will be the glorious thing that they were always intended to be, reflecting God's wisdom, beauty, and love. Jesus's resurrected body, described in the gospels, is a for-taste of this, the future reality breaking into the present and giving us an image of what it will be like for all of those in Christ when the final resurrection occurs. Indeed, Wright argues that it was the apostles' (including Paul's) experience of this risen Christ that so consistently focused and oriented their vision of the future hope for the world. Using this observation, Wright works into the book a summary his powerful argument for the historical truth of the resurrection.
According to Wright, a proper understanding of the Christian hope clears up a lot of difficulties that people have had in terms of the whole supposed dichotomy between "saving souls" on the one hand, and "doing good works" on the other. Wright makes the important point that these two are not in opposition, nor is one simply a means to the other. We don't get saved simply to do good works, nor do we do good works to get saved. Rather, the two go together as part of the project of redemption that God is engaged in. The difficulty in seeing this starts, Wright argues, when we disconnect our salvation from the reality we live in. And Wright's alternative isn't the "social gospel" because it is all a work accomplished by God's Spirit, through his people, to defeat the powers of evil in the world.
One question was on my mind throughout reading this book: how accurate is Wright's assessment of our misunderstandings? Well, I've found that most good Christian writers and theologians at least have a grasp of the fact of bodily resurrection, and a restored creation, as being our ultimate hope, though sometimes it seems to be a neglected area of discussion. Perhaps the same cannot be said about some preachers--say, your average bible thumping fundamentalist (I sometimes get the sense of this being what Wright has in mind when he criticizes modern conservative Christianity). I think he's definitely right that those outside of the church rarely have any comprehension of the reality of Christian hope, and that this is our fault and is a serious problem. How can such a central part of our message fail to come across? Christianity believes in something that is so unique, so different from what is hoped by other religions (or belief systems in general), and is so fundamentally good, that it is a scandal that so few people are aware of the possibility of this hope. I think he's right on that this should be emphasized more: a world without disease, without death, without war or hatred, a world of beauty and love, filled with people who rejoice in these things, each other, and God--if we hope for these things, why don't more people do not know about it?
At the same time, as wonderful as it will be, a restored creation and cosmos really is only a consequence of a restored relationship with God. That is, and always should be, at the center of what Christianity offers (though admittedly it's hard to understand, and easy to misunderstand, the latter without at least some grasp of what is meant by the former). We have to desire God first; Wright obviously realizes this, but often when he criticizes the modern Christianity hope as being Gnostic, I feel like it is a bit of a caricature. There is a world of difference between what Gnostics believe and what is believed by your average (slightly misinformed) Christian, who may not have the same biblical vision of future resurrection and the new creation that Wright has. I feel like an injustice is being done to the genuine love of the true God that many people have, the beautiful vision of him that they hope for, in the desire to "be at home with him" that is at the center of of the hope of many Christians who might not be able to articulate Wright's orthodox understanding of the new creation. Wright obviously intends no such injustice, and even goes out of his way to address such fears, but I think perhaps more could have been said about this.
I think this book was so good, though, that I'll be reading it again!
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