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

by N.T. Wright

What are we waiting for? And what are we going to do about it in the meantime? Those two questions shape this book. 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 and sustain the second.

I approach the question as a biblical theologian, drawing on other disciplines but hoping to supply what they usually lack and what I believe the church needs to recapture: the classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond, which these days is not so much disbelieved (in world and church alike) as simply not known.

I often find that 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.

I regularly return with a sense that their voice has not been disbelieved but simply not heard at all.

At the second level, then, the book is about the groundwork of practical and even political theology—

I freely hand to potential critics these two disclaimers, my inexperience in both grief and politics and my hope that nevertheless the surprise of the Christian hope in both areas will reenergize and refresh those who work, more than I have been able to do, with both the dying and the dispossessed.

One more general word of introduction. All language about the future, as any economist or politician will tell you, is simply a set of signposts pointing into a fog. We see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul as he peers toward what lies ahead. 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. But that doesn’t mean it’s anybody’s guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one. And—supposing someone came forward out of the fog to meet us? That, of course, is the central though often ignored Christian belief.

They showed a rich confusion of belief, half belief, sentiment, and superstition about the fate of the dead. The reaction of the churches showed how far we had come from what might once have been traditional Christian teaching on the subject.

Cremation, almost unknown in the Western world a hundred years ago, is now the preference, actual or assumed, of the great majority. It both reflects and causes subtle but far-reaching shifts in attitudes to death and to whatever hope lies beyond.

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 world in the present?

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 questions are bound to appear as unrelated.

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.

we find that answering the one is also answering the other. I find that to many—not least, many Christians—all this comes as a surprise: both that the Christian hope is surprisingly different from what they had assumed and that this same hope offers a coherent and energizing basis for work in today’s world.

Nor is this a matter simply of sorting out what to believe about someone who has died or about one’s own probable postmortem destiny, important though both of those are. 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.

For me [Barley comments], ancestor worship was something to be described and analysed. For him, it would be the absence of such links between the living and the dead that would require special explanation.

Some historians have suggested that belief in hell, already under attack from theologians in the nineteenth century, was one of the major casualties of the Great War.

The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living, and death is once again in the cultural air.

The play was more successful in New York than in London; perhaps Britain is not yet as ready for a full exploration of midlife death as are our American cousins. But the questions are around us all the time, and people are increasingly curious about possible answers. Where does all this leave us? What do people believe in when they talk about life after death?

But in general the mood is that traditional beliefs, both in judgment and hell and in resurrection, are actually offensive to modern sensibilities.5

First, some believe in complete annihilation;

Also on the fringe of New Age ideas is a revival of the views we discovered in Shelley, a sort of low-grade, popular nature religion with elements of Buddhism.

Many funerals, memorial services, and even funerary inscriptions now give voice to this kind of belief. Many would-be Christians try to persuade themselves and others that this kind of ongoing life is really what is meant by traditional teaching either about the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the dead.

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 has resisted all the inroads of a century of secularism.

so far as I can tell, most people simply don’t know what orthodox Christian belief is. It is assumed that Christians believe in life after death, as opposed to denying any survival after death, and that every sort of life after death must therefore be the same kind of (Christian) thing.

people. In particular, most people have little or no idea what the word resurrection actually means or why Christians say they believe it. What is more worrying, this multiple ignorance seems often to be true in the churches as well.

What nobody usually points out is that this was not the view that Scott Holland himself was advocating. It was simply what, he suggested, came to mind as we “look down upon the quiet face” of “one who has been very near and dear to us.”

Scott Holland went on to attempt something of a reconciliation between these two views of death. The Christian has, according to the New Testament, “already passed from death to life” so that the further transition of actual death ought not to be as terrifying as it appears. In addition, we should (he suggests) think of the life beyond death in terms of a continuation of the growth in the knowledge of God and in personal holiness that has already begun here. That raises questions we cannot address at this stage of the book, but it is already clear that to take the paragraph so frequently quoted out of the context of the sermon in which it was originally spoken does serious violence to the author’s intention.

It offers hollow comfort. By itself, without comment, it simply tells lies. It is not even a parody of Christian hope. Instead, it simply denies that there is any problem, any need for hope in the first place.

Death be not proud, though some have callèd thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those who thou think’st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure—then, from thee much more must flow; And soonest our best men with thee do go, Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery. Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die.

the last two lines say it all. Death is a great enemy, but it has been conquered and will at the last be conquered fully.

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

In line with much classic Christian thought, Donne sees life after death in two stages: first, a short sleep, then an eternal waking.3 And death shall be no more. Donne grasped what we shall discover to be the central New Testament belief: that at the last, death will be not simply redefined but defeated. God’s intention is not to let death have its way with us. If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.

Let us again be quite clear. If this is true, then death is not conquered but redescribed: no longer an enemy, it is simply the means by which, as in Hamlet, the immortal soul shuffles off its mortal coil.

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

This is more or less exactly what millions of people in the Western world have come to believe, to accept as truth, and to teach to their children. The book was sent me by a friend who works with grieving children and who described this as “one of the worst books for children” and said, “I hope you find this awful book helpful in what not to say”! It is indeed a prime example of that genre. The truth of what the Bible teaches is very, very different at several levels.

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

The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante’s classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination.

But the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn’t work that way. “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.”10 The roots of the misunderstanding go very deep, not least into the residual Platonism that has infected whole swaths of Christian thinking and has misled people into supposing that Christians are meant to devalue this present world and our present bodies and regard them as shabby or shameful.

the pictures of heaven in the book of Revelation have been much misunderstood.

11 It 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.

Those of us who protest that the orthodox picture is of a vibrant and active human life, reflecting God’s image in the new heavens and new earth, are sometimes accused of projecting our go-getting contemporary life onto the screen of the future.

First, hymns. A glance through the average hymnbook reveals that a good many references to the future life beyond death are closer to Tennyson, or even to Shelley, than they are to orthodox Christianity:

but the idea of cycles of history eventually returning to a golden age is neither Christian nor Jewish but decidedly pagan.

The second line (to anticipate our later argument) might better read, “And heal this world, what joy shall fill my heart.” Actually, the original Swedish version of the hymn doesn’t talk about Christ coming to take me home; that was the translator’s adaptation. Rather, it speaks of the veils of time falling, faith being changed into clear sight, and the bells of eternity summoning us to our Sabbath rest, all of which has a lot more to recommend it.18

“For All the Saints,” whose sequence of thought catches the New Testament emphasis exactly right.

Only after that does the resurrection occur:

Which leads in to the triumphant final verse, arriving at last in the new Jerusalem.

What’s more, Christmas itself has now far outstripped Easter in popular culture as the real celebratory center of the Christian year—a move that completely reverses the New Testament’s emphasis. We sometimes try, in hymns, prayers, and sermons, to build a whole theology on Christmas, but it can’t in fact sustain such a thing. We then keep Lent, Holy Week, and Good Friday so thoroughly that we have hardly any energy left for Easter except for the first night and day. Easter, however, should be the center. Take that away and there is, almost literally, nothing left.