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

by N.T. Wright

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when people who badly want something to be true but are faced with strong evidence to the contrary manage to leap over the data that point the wrong way and become even more strident in announcing their claims.

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding.

The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivaled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.

There are, after all, different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.

History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial.

Resurrection therefore necessarily impinges on the public world. But at this point we meet a third element in knowing, a puzzling area beyond science (which “knows” what in principle can be repeated in a laboratory) and the kind of history that claims to “know” what makes sense by analogy with our own experience. Sometimes human beings—individuals or communities—are confronted with something that they must reject outright or that, if they accept it, will demand the remaking of their worldview.

My point is that the resurrection of Jesus, presenting itself as the obvious answer to the question “How do you explain the rise of early Christianity?” has that kind of purchase on serious historical inquiry and therefore poses that kind of challenge to the larger worldview of both the historian and the scientist.

I reply that precisely now, in the early twenty-first century, there are all kinds of reasons for questioning current paradigms.

What is at stake is the clash between a worldview that allows for a God of creation and justice and worldviews that don’t.

the creator of the world, not simply a divine presence within it, the God of justice and truth.

History, I believe, brings us to the point where we are bound to say: there really was an empty tomb, and there really were sightings of Jesus, the same and yet transformed.

History then says: so how do you explain that? It offers us no easy escapes at that point, no quick side exits to the question. They’ve all been tried, and none of them work. History poses the question. And when Christian faith answers it, a sober, humble, questioning history (as opposed to an arrogant rationalism that has decided the issue in advance) may find itself saying, “That sounds good to me.”

And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century.

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.

There is the bluster of the tyrant who knows his power is threatened, and I hear the same tone of voice not just in the politicians who want to carve up the world to their advantage but also in the intellectual traditions that have gone along for the ride.

Evolution, in this more general sense of progress, was already widely believed; it was a deeply convenient philosophy for those who wanted to justify their own massive industrial and imperial expansion; Darwin gave it some apparent scientific legitimacy, which was quickly seized upon and which, within half a century, had been used to justify everything from eugenics to war.

The Platonic strain entered Christian thinking early on, not least with the phenomenon known as Gnosticism.

Redemption doesn’t mean scrapping what’s there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved.

Paul declares that the gospel has already been announced to every creature under heaven

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in other words, is by no means limited to its effects on those human beings who believe the gospel and thereby find new life here and hereafter. It resonates out, in ways that we can’t fully see or understand, into the vast recesses of the universe. Creation, evil, and the plan of redemption revealed in action in Jesus Christ: these are the constant themes that the New Testament writers, particularly Paul and the author of Revelation, struggle to express.

that love and not hate have the last word in the universe;

that fruitfulness and not sterility is God’s will for creation.

What is promised in this passage, then, is what Isaiah foresaw: a new heaven and a new earth replacing the old heaven and the o...

Basically, heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.

Part of Christian belief is to find out what’s true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

That has sometimes been tried, of course, and it’s always led to disaster.

Somehow there is a third option, which we shall explore in the third part of the present book.

the church effectively presented itself (with its structures and hierarchy, its customs and quirks) instead of presenting Jesus as its Lord and itself as the world’s servant, as Paul puts it.6

We are also, significantly, rescued from the attempts that have been made to create alternative mediators, and in particular an alternative mediatrix, in his place.8

This places a full stop on all human arrogance, including Christian arrogance.

One day, as we saw in the last chapter, they will be joined in a quite new way, open and visible to one another, married together forever.

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.

in relation to the future: Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn’t.

Jesus is the reality of which Caesar is the parody.

we have the language of parousia, of royal presence, sitting in a typically Pauline juxtaposition with the language of Jewish apocalyptic.

We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy and the trees of the field to clap their hands.1

In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be.

It is good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them; the Messiah who took the world’s judgment upon himself on the cross. Of course, this also means that he is uniquely placed to judge the systems and rulers that have carved up the world between them, and the New Testament points this out here and there.8 In particular, as we have already seen and as some medieval theologians and artists highlighted, Jesus comes as judge much as Moses descended the mountain into the camp where idolatry and revelry were in full swing.

In his appearing we find neither a dualist rejection of the present world nor simply his arrival like a spaceman into the present world but rather the transformation of the present world, and ourselves within it, so that it will at last be put to rights and we with it.

Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all.

Whenever the question of “how” is raised in the early Christian writings, the answer comes back: by the Spirit. The Spirit who brooded over the waters of chaos, the Spirit who indwelt Jesus so richly that it became known as the Spirit of Jesus: this Spirit, already present within Jesus’s followers as the firstfruits, the down payment, the guarantee of what is to come, is not only the beginning of the future life, even in the present time, but also the energizing power through which the final transformation will take place.

The early creed spoke of “the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.”

In fact, Paul makes it clear here and elsewhere that it’s the present life that is meant to function as a purgatory. The sufferings of the present time, not of some postmortem state, are the valley through which we have to pass in order to reach the glorious future.

This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story, here and now.

But it is a state in which the dead are held firmly within the conscious love of God and the conscious presence of Jesus Christ while they await that day.

In the New Testament it is clear: because of Christ and the Spirit, every single Christian is welcome at any time to come before the Father himself.

But the whole process of developing not only hierarchies among such people but also elaborate systems for designating them (canonization and the like) seems to me a huge exercise in missing the point.

But, at least at a popular level, it is not the serious early Christian doctrine of final judgment that has been rejected but rather one or other gross caricature.

The most common New Testament word sometimes translated by hell is Gehenna. Gehenna was a place, not just an idea: it was the rubbish heap outside the southwest corner of the old city of Jerusalem. There is to this day a valley at that point that bears the name Ge Hinnom.

The two parables that appear to address this question directly are, we should remember, parables, not actual descriptions of the afterlife. They use stock imagery from ancient Judaism, such as “Abraham’s bosom,” not to teach about what happens after death but to insist on justice and mercy within the present life.10