The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

by N.T. Wright

As we saw briefly above, one of the key problems about the idea of a platonic “disembodied heaven” is that it generates the wrong view of what human life ought to be in the present time as an anticipation, or even a qualification, for that destiny. The idea of “heaven” carries with it in the popular mind and even in many well-taught Christian minds the notion that this is where “good people” go, while “bad people” go somewhere else. This, of course, quickly gets modified by standard teachings of the gospel: we are all “bad people,” so that if anyone “goes to heaven,” it must be because our badness has somehow been dealt with and, in some traditions, because someone else’s “goodness” has somehow been “reckoned to our account.” But the problem with this entire way of looking at things is that the idea of moral behavior as the qualification for “heaven” is itself a distortion. As we saw above, we have Platonized our eschatology—our vision of the ultimate end—and, to match, have “moralized” our anthropology, our sense of what humans are and what they are meant to be. This has worked its way into traditions of Christian ethics, and I have argued elsewhere (in my book Virtue Reborn, whose American title is After You Believe) that we need to replace this with the biblical vocation of human beings, which is to be image-bearers, God’s “royal priesthood.” Being priests includes “moral behavior”