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

by N.T. Wright

The myth, then, cannot deal with evil, for three reasons. First, it can’t stop it: if evolution gave us Hiroshima and the Gulag, it can’t be all good.

None of these scenarios makes any sense within the myth of progress.

Second, even if “progress” brought us to utopia after all, that wouldn’t address the moral problem of all the evil that’s happened to date in the world.

They used to say that when people objected to cutting down ancient trees to build a new road, but we have begun to realize that progress in that sense wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.)

But before we look at the truly Christian alternative, we must briefly examine the other myth, the negative myth, the story that tells us the world is a wicked place and we’d do better to escape it altogether.

Plato remains the most influential thinker in the history of the Western world. For Plato, the present world of space, time, and matter is a world of illusion, of flickering shadows in a cave, and the most appropriate human task is to get in touch with the true reality, which is beyond space, time, and matter. For Plato, this was the reality of eternal Forms.

Here worldviews diverge radically. The optimist, the evolutionist, the myth-of-progress school all say that these are just the growing pains of something bigger and better. The Platonist, the Hindu, and, following Plato, the Gnostic, the Manichaean, and countless others within variants of the Christian and Jewish traditions all say that these are the signs that we are made for something quite different, a world not made of space, time, and matter, a world of pure spiritual existence where we shall happily have got rid of the shackles of mortality once and for all. And the way you get rid of mortality within this worldview is to get rid of the thing that can decay and die, namely our material selves.

The Gnostic myth often suggests that the way out of our mess is to return to our primeval state, before the creation of the world. In this view creation itself is the fall, producing matter, which is the real evil.

Though most people in today’s world have probably only a sketchy idea of Gnosticism, assuming they’ve heard of it at all, it has been argued with some plausibility that some elements of it—and Gnosticism is always an eclectic phenomenon—are found in some of the seminal thinkers and writers of the last two hundred years in our culture.

Basically, if you move away from materialistic optimism but without embracing Judaism or Christianity, you are quite likely to end up with some kind of Gnosticism.

But there are many who without going that far now assume that some kind of Gnosticism is what genuine Christianity was supposed to be about.

Most Western Christians—and most Western non-Christians, for that matter—in fact suppose that Christianity was committed to at least a soft version of Plato’s position.

A massive assumption has been made in Western Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least mainly, to “go to heaven when you die,” and texts that don’t say that but that mention heaven are read as if they did say it, and texts that say the opposite, like Romans 8:18–25 and Revelation 21–22, are simply screened out as if they didn’t exist.13

Secularists often criticize Christians for contributing to ecological disaster, and there’s more than a grain of truth in the charge.

I have heard it seriously argued in North America that since God intends to destroy the present space-time universe, and moreover since he intends to do so quite soon now, it really doesn’t matter whether we emit twice as many greenhouse gases as we do now, whether we destroy the rain forests and the arctic tundra, whether we fill our skies with acid rain. That is a peculiarly modern form of would-be Christian negativity about the world, and of course its skin-deep “spiritual” viewpoint is entirely in thrall to the heart-deep materialism of the business interests that will be served, in however short a term, by such hazardous practices.

That remains the popular perception, both from inside and outside the church, of what we Christians are supposed to believe when we speak of heaven and when we talk of the hope that is ours in Christ.

Over against both these popular and mistaken views, the central Christian affirmation is that what the creator God has done in Jesus Christ, and supremely in his resurrection, is what he intends to do for the whole world—meaning, by world, the entire cosmos with all its history.

The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam—or even under the steady influence of God. They knew God had to do something fresh to put it to rights. But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists. Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that the early Christians held a quite different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

First, the goodness of creation. Granted the swirling currents of alternative worldviews available in the first century, it is a remarkable feature of the earliest Christianity known to us that it refused to lapse at any point into a cosmological dualism in which the created world is regarded as less than good and God-given. But it is good as creation, not as an independent or self-sufficient “nature.”

Second, then, the nature of evil. Evil is real and powerful, within biblical theology, but it consists neither in the fact of being created nor in the fact of being other than God (since being loved into life by the one God is quite good enough!) nor yet in the fact that it’s made of physical matter and belongs within space and time instead of being pure spirit in an eternal heaven. Nor—and this is crucial—does evil consist in being transient, made to decay.

Transience acts as a God-given signpost pointing not from the material world to a nonmaterial world but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant one day to be—pointing, in other words, from the present to the future that God has in store.

What matters is eschatological duality (the present age and the age to come), not ontological dualism (an evil “earth” and a good “heaven”).

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honor elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them.

The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God’s wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something that will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure. The result is that death, which was always part of the natural transience of the good...

Mysteriously, this out-of-jointness seems to become entangled with the transience and decay necessary within the good-but-incomplete creation so that what we perhaps misleadingly call natural evil can be seen as, among other things, the advance signs of that final “shaking” of heaven and earth that the prophets understood to be necessary if God’s eventual new world was to be born.1

Third, the plan of redemption. Precisely because creation is the work of God’s love, redemption is not something alien to the creator but rather something he will undertake with delight and glad self-giving.

Redemption doesn’t mean scrapping what’s there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberatin...

And because of the analysis of evil not as materiality but as rebellion, the slavery of humans and of the world does not consist in embodiment, redemption from which would mean the death of the body and the consequent release of the soul or spirit. The slavery consists, rather, in sin, redemption from which must...

If you put these two ways of telling the story together and cast them into poetry, you will find you have rewritten Colossians 1:15–20. This is the real cosmic Christology of the New Testament: not a kind of pantheism, running under its own steam and cut off from the real Jesus, but a retelling of the Jewish story of wisdom in terms of Jesus himself, focusing on the cross as the act whereby the good creation is brought back into harmony with the wise creator.

The balance of the clauses in the poem in Colossians 1 shows the extent to which Paul insists on holding together creation and redemption.2 Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.

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.

There are six main themes to be explored; several of these are themselves powerful images taken from the world of creation. If you’re going to speak of God doing something new that nevertheless affirms the old, what better way than to speak of seedtime and harvest, of birth and new life, and of marriage?

Paul applies this Passover image to Jesus. He is the firstfruits, the first to rise from the dead. But this isn’t an isolated instance. The point of the firstfruits is that there will be many, many more. Jesus’s Passover, that is, Calvary and Easter, which occurred of course at Passover time and was from very early on interpreted in the light of that festival, indicated that the great slavemaster, the great Egypt, sin and death themselves, had been defeated when Jesus came through the Red Sea of death and out the other side.

Please note, over against any move toward Gnosticism, how this imagery indicates continuity as well as discontinuity. Note too, over against any kind of evolutionary optimism, that moving from seed sown to crop harvested involves discontinuity as well as continuity and in particular that the Exodus from Egypt, symbolized by this story, could be seen only as an act of pure grace. Progress, left to itself, could never have brought it about.4

1 Corinthians then continues with a quite different image, one not so organically related to the natural order of creation but with many biblical antecedents: that of a king establishing his kingdom by subduing all possible enemies.

but also for the entire cosmos. It will be an act of new creation, parallel to and derived from the act of new creation when God raised Jesus from the dead.

Death as we now know it is the last enemy, not a good part of the good creation; and therefore death must be defeated if the life-giving God is to be honored as the true lord of the world.

When this has happened, and only then, Jesus the Messiah, the Lord of the world, will hand over the rule of the kingdom to his father, and God will be all in all.

So when Paul says, “We are citizens of heaven,” he doesn’t at all mean that when we’re done with this life we’ll be going off to live in heaven.6 What he means is that the savior, the Lord, Jesus the King—all of those were of course imperial titles—will come from heaven to earth, to change the present situation and state of his people. The key word here is transform:

In a great act of power—the same power that accomplished Jesus’s own resurrection, as Paul says in Ephesians 1:19–20—he will change the present body into the one that corresponds in kind to his own as part of his work of bringing all things into subjection to himself.

Philippians 3, though it is primarily speaking of human resurrection, indicates that this will take place within the context of God’s victorious transformation of the whole cosmos.

Turning back to 1 Corinthians 15, we find Paul declaring that as the goal of all history, God will be “everything in everything,” or if you like, “all in all” (15:28). This is one of the clearest statements of the very center of the future-oriented New Testament worldview.

if creation was a work of love, it must have involved the creation of something other than God. That same love then allows creation to be itself, sustaining it in providence and wisdom but not overpowering it. Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.

That, though, is not the end of the story. God intends in the end to fill all creation with his own presence and love. This is part of an answer to Jürgen Moltmann’s proposal to revive the rabbinic doctrine of zimzum, in which God as it were retreats, creates space within himself, so that there is ontological space for there to be something else other than him.8 If I am right, it works the other way around. God’s creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.

It looks as though God intends to flood the universe with himself, as though the universe, the entire cosmos, was designed as a receptacle for his love. We might even suggest, as part of a Christian aesthetic, that the world is beautiful not just because it hauntingly reminds us of its creator but also because it is pointing forward: it is designed to be filled, flooded, drenched in God, as a chalice is beautiful not least because of what we know it is designed to contain or as a violin is beautiful not least because we know the music of which it is capable.

This brings us to Romans 8, where we find a further image deeply embedded within the created order itself: that of new birth. This passage has routinely been marginalized for centuries by exegetes and theologians who have tried to turn Romans into a book simply about how individual sinners get individually saved. But it is in fact one of the great climaxes of the letter and indeed of all Paul’s thought.

In this passage Paul again uses the imagery of the Exodus from Egypt but this time in relation not to Jesus, nor even to ourselves, but to creation as a whole. Creation, he says (verse 21) is in slavery at the moment, like the children of Israel. God’s design was to rule creation in life-giving wisdom through his image-bearing human creatures. But this was always a promise for the future, a promise that one day the true human being, the image of God himself, God’s incarnate son, would come to lead the human race into their true identity.

Meanwhile, the creation was subjected to futility, to transience and decay, until the time when God’s children are glorified, when what happened to Jesus at Easter happens to all Jesus’s people. This is where Romans 8 dovetails with 1 Corinthians 15. The whole creation, as he says in verse 19, is on tiptoe with expectation, longing for the d...

Paul then uses the image of birth pangs—a well-known Jewish metaphor for the emergence of God’s new age—not only of the church in verse 23 and of the Spirit a couple of verses later but also here in verse 22 of creation itself. ...

The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.