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

by N.T. Wright

First, it is about the ultimate future hope held out in the Christian gospel: the hope, that is, for salvation, resurrection, eternal life, and the cluster of other things that go with them.

Second, it is about the discovery of hope within the present world: about the practical ways in which hope can come alive for communities and individuals who for whatever reason may lack it.

And it is about the ways in which embracing the first can and should generate...

At the first level, the book is obviously about death and about what can be said from a Christian perspective about what lies beyond it.

though Christians still use the word resurrection, they treat it as a synonym for “life after death” or “going to heaven” and that, when pressed, they often share the confusion of the wider world on the subject.

My aim

to bring their beliefs to light, and I hope to life, again in the conviction that they offer not only the best hope but also the best-grounded hope that we have and, what’s more, a hope that joins up, as I have said, with the hope that ought to energize our work for God’s kingdom in the present world.

At the second level, then, the book is about the groundwork of practical and even political theology—of, that is, Christian reflection on the nature of the task we face as we seek to bring God’s kingdom ...

All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality.

Five snapshots set the scene for the two questions this book addresses.

In autumn 1997

The second scene

The third scene

fourth moment,

The fifth scene

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 main ...

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 quest...

But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for “new heavens and new earth,” and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is also answering the other.

I am convinced that most people, including most practicing Christians, are muddled and misguided on this topic and that this muddle produces quite serious mistakes in our thinking, our praying, our liturgies, our practice, and perhaps particularly our mission to the world.

It’s a matter of thinking straight about God and his purposes for the cosmos and about what God is doing right now, already, as part of those purposes.

The main beliefs that emerge in the present climate seem to me of three types, none of which corresponds to Christian orthodoxy.

First, some believe in complete annihilation;

in some form of reincarnation.

a sort of low-grade, popular nature religion with elements of Buddhism. At death one is absorbed into the wider world,

The funeral practices that have grown up, or reappeared, in our own day exhibit the same kind of confusion.

Finally, at the popular level, belief in ghosts and the possibility of spiritualistic contact with the dead

most people simply don’t know what orthodox Christian belief is.

The idea that “life after death” might include variations embodying significantly different beliefs about God and the world, and significantly different agendas for how people might live in the present, has simply never occurred to most modern Western people.

death is important; it is an enemy, but for the Christian, it is a beaten enemy.

Donne sees life after death in two stages: first, a short sleep, then an eternal waking.3 And death shall be no more.

the central New Testame...

at the last, death will be not simply redefin...

Christian thought has oscillated between seeing death as a vile enemy and a welcome friend.

there is very little in the Bible about “going to heaven when you die” and not a lot about a postmortem hell either.

“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 in heaven.”

The wonderful description in Revelation 4 and 5 of the twenty-four elders casting their crowns before the throne of God and the lamb,

is a picture of present reality, the heavenly dimension of our present life.

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.12

What we see in today’s church is, I think, a confused combination of several things.

one, the old heaven-and-hell view has been under attack.

the rehabilitation of a modern, sanitized, version of the old theory of purgatory:

a universalism in which God will endlessly offer to the unrepentant the choice of faith until at last all succumb to the wooing of divine love.

heaven as traditionally pictured looks insufferably boring—sitting

a God who simply wants people to adore him all the time is not a figure they would respect.

many-sided confusion plays out in the hymns we sing, in the way we celebrate the Christian year, and in the type of funerals or cremations we have.

First, hymns.

into, the way many mainstream Christians keep the Christian year shows much the same thing.