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

by N.T. Wright

The same confusions are apparent in the ways we do funerals.

I am not of course saying that cremation is heretical.

I am merely noting that the huge swing toward it in the last century reflects at least in part some of the confusions, both in the church and in the world, that we have observed.

What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and color to everything else. If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform lives and communities in the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new earth.

religion is an ‘opium’ when the religion in question includes the Platonic downgrading of bodies and of the created order in general, regarding them as the “vain shadows” of earth, which we happily leave behind at death.

the robust Jewish and Christian doctrine of the resurrection, as part of God’s new creation, gives more value, not less, to the present world and to our present bodies.

sense of continuity as well as discontinuity between the present world (and the present state), and the future, whatever it shall be, with the result that what we do in the present matters enormously.

A piety that sees death as the moment of “going home at last,” the time when we are “called to God’s eternal peace,” has no quarrel with power-mongers who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends.

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God’s justice and of God as the good creator.

list the key questions that underlie the whole book

First, how do we know about all this?

Second, do we have immortal souls, and if so, what are they?

Third, the starting point for all Christian thinking about this topic must be Jesus’s own resurrection.

what then is the ultimate Christian hope for the whole world and for ourselves?

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The whole book thus attempts to reflect the Lord’s Prayer itself when it says, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”

Our task in the present—of which this book, God willing, may form part—is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.

The issue is not whether the Bible is true or not. The issue is not whether miracles occur or not. The issue is not whether we believe in something called the supernatural or not. The issue is not whether Jesus is alive today and we can get to know him for ourselves. If we treat the question of Easter simply as a test case in any of those discussions, we are missing the point.

deep questions remain. What precisely was it that the early Christians believed? Why did they use the language of resurrection to express that belief? Is it possible to mount a historical case for or against the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection, or will it always be a take-it-or-leave-it matter? How far can history take us, what role does faith have, and how do they work together? The question is not simply what we can know but also how we can know, and at this point all our knowing is called into question.

Resurrection was used to denote new bodily life after whatever sort of life after death there might be.

Resurrection wasn’t, then, a dramatic or vivid way of talking about the state people went into immediately after death.

In content, resurrection referred specifically to something that happened to the body;

much modern writing continues, most misleadingly, to use the word resurrection as a virtual synonym for life after death in the popular sense.

The answer, put simply, is that the early Christian belief in hope beyond death belongs demonstrably on the Jewish, not the pagan, map but that in seven significant ways this Jewish hope underwent remarkable modifications, which can be plotted with remarkable consistency in writers from Paul in the middle of the first century to Tertullian and Origen at the end of the second and beyond.

1. The first of these modifications is that within early Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of belief about life beyond death.

2. This leads to the second mutation. In second-Temple Judaism, resurrection is important but not that important.

3. In Judaism it is almost always left quite vague as to what sort of a body the resurrected will possess.

4. The fourth surprising mutation evidenced by the early Christian resurrection belief is that the resurrection, as an event, has split into two.

Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

5.

Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.

6. The sixth remarkable mutation within the Jewish belief is the quite different metaphorical use of resurrection.

7. The seventh and last mutation of the Jewish resurrection belief was its association with messiahship.

four strange features shared by the accounts in the four canonical gospels.

First, we note the strange silence of the Bible in the stories.

The second strange feature of the stories is more often remarked upon: the presence of the women as the principal witnesses.

The third strange feature is the portrait of Jesus himself.

The fourth strange feature of the resurrection accounts is the fact that they never mention the future Christian hope.

Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world’s true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God’s new creation has begun—and we, his followers, have a job to do!

This, then, is the more or less universal witness of the early Christians: that they are who they are, they do what they do, they tell the stories they tell not because of a new religious experience or insight but because of something that happened; something that happened to the crucified Jesus; something that they at once interpreted as meaning that he was after all the Messiah, that God’s new age had after all broken into the present time, and that they were charged with a new commission; something that made them reaffirm the Jewish belief in resurrection, not swap it for a pagan alternative, but introduce several distinctive but consistent modifications within it.

The only way we can explain the phenomena we have been examining is by proposing a two-pronged hypothesis: first, Jesus’s tomb really was empty; second, the disciples really did encounter him in ways that convinced them that he was not simply a ghost or hallucination.

No: in order to explain historically how all the early Christians came to the belief they held, that Jesus had been raised, we have to say at least this: that the tomb was empty, except for some graveclothes, and that they really did see and talk with someone who gave every appearance of being a solidly physical Jesus,

When we ask what a scientist can believe about something, we are asking a two-level question. First, we are asking about what sort of things the scientific method can explore and how it can know or believe certain things. Second, we are asking about the kind of commitment someone wedded to scientific knowing is expected to have in all other areas of his or her life.

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.

The challenge is in fact the challenge of new creation.

The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.

The epistemological weight is borne not simply by the promise of ultimate resurrection and new creation but also by the narrative of God’s mighty actions in the past.