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

by N.T. Wright

This time the image is that of marriage. The New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.

We notice right away how drastically different this is from all those would-be Christian scenarios in which the end of the story is the Christian going off to heaven as a soul, naked and unadorned, to meet its maker in fear and trembling. As in Philippians 3, it is not we who go to heaven, it is heaven that comes to earth; indeed, it is the church itself, the heavenly Jerusalem,10 that comes down to earth. This is the ultimate rejection of all types of Gnosticism, of every worldview that sees the final goal as the separation of the world from God, of the physical from the spiritual, of earth from heaven. It is the final answer to the Lord’s Prayer, that God’s kingdom will come and his will be done on earth as in heaven.

It is the final fulfillment, in richly symbolic imagery, of the promise of Genesis 1, that the creation of male and female would together reflect God’s image in the world. And it is the final accomplishment of God’s great design, to defeat and abolish death forever—which can only mean the rescue of creation from its present plight of decay.

Heaven and earth, it seems, are not after all poles apart, needing to be separated forever when all the children of heaven have been rescued from this wicked earth. Nor are they simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism. No, they are different, radically different, but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female. And when they finally come together, that will be cause for rejoicing in the same way that a wedding is: a creational sign that God’s project is going forward; that opposite poles within creation are made for union, not competition; that love and not hate have the last word in the universe; that fruitfulness and not sterility is God’s will for creation.

22). The Temple in Jerusalem was always designed, it seems, as a pointer to, and an advance symbol for, the presence of God himself. When the reality is there, the signpost is no longer necessary.

There is a sign here of the future project that awaits the redeemed in God’s eventual new world. So far from sitting on clouds playing harps, as people often imagine, the redeemed people of God in the new world will be the agents of his love going out in new ways, to accomplish new creative tasks, to celebrate and extend the glory of his love.

What creation needs is neither abandonment nor evolution but rather redemption and renewal; and this is both promised and guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This is what the whole world’s waiting for.

flat literalism, on the one hand, facing modernist skepticism, on the other, with each feeding off the other.

Many people insist—and I dare say that this is the theology many of my readers have been taught—that the language of Jesus’s “disappearance” is just a way of saying that after his death he became, as it were, spiritually present everywhere, especially with his own followers. This is then often correlated with a nonliteral reading of the resurrection, that is, a denial of its bodily nature:

What happens when people think like this? To answer this, we might ask a further question: why has the ascension been such a difficult and unpopular doctrine in the modern Western church? The answer is not just that rationalist skepticism mocks it

It is that the ascension demands that we think differently about how the whole cosmos is, so to speak, put together and that we also think differently about the church and about salvation.

Both literalism and skepticism regularly operate with what is called a receptacle view of space; theologians who take the ascension seriously insist that it demands what some have called a relational view.4 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.

The idea of the human Jesus now being in heaven, in his thoroughly embodied risen state, comes as a shock to many people, including many Christians.

it’s because our culture is so used to the Platonic idea that heaven is, by definition, a place of “spiritual,” nonmaterial reality so that the idea of a solid body being not only present but also thoroughly at home there seems like a category mistake.

The ascension invites us to rethink all this; and, after all, why did we suppose we knew what heaven was? Only because our culture has suggested things to us. Part of Christian belief is to find out what’s true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

Somehow there is a third option,

the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom.

What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer is that the church expands to fill the vacuum. If Jesus is more or less identical with the church—if, that is, talk about Jesus can be reduced to talk about his presence within his people rather than his standing over against them and addressing them from elsewhere as their Lord, then we have created a high road to the worst kind of triumphalism.

And the other side of triumphalism is of course despair. If you put all your eggs into the church-equals-Jesus basket, what are you left with when, as Paul says in the same passage, we ourselves are found to be cracked earthenware vessels?

Conversely, only when we grasp and celebrate the fact that Jesus has gone on ahead of us into God’s space, God’s new world, and is both already ruling the rebellious present world as its rightful Lord and also interceding for us at the Father’s right hand—when we grasp and celebrate, in other words, what the ascension tells us about Jesus’s continuing human work in the present—are we rescued from a wrong view of world history and equipped for the task of justice in the present (we’ll come back to both of those later).

Get the ascension right, and your view of the church, of the sacraments, and of the mother of Jesus can get back into focus.9

You could sum all this up by saying that the doctrine of the Trinity, which is making quite a comeback in current theology, is essential if we are to tell the truth not only about God, and more particularly about Jesus, but also about ourselves.

And now we see at last why the Enlightenment world was determined to make the ascension appear ridiculous, using the weapons of rationalism and skepticism to do so: if the ascension is true, then the whole project of human self-aggrandizement represented by eighteenth-century European and American thought is rebuked and brought to heel.

To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.

The ascension thus speaks of the Jesus who remains truly human and hence in an important sense absent from us while in another equally impo...

At this point the Holy Spirit and the sacraments become enormously important since they are precisely the m...

We need, in fact, a new and better cosmology, a new and better way of thinking about the world than the one our culture, not least post-Enlightenment culture, has bequeathed us.

The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time.

All such aids to the Christian imagination are to be welcomed as long, of course, as they are not mistaken for the real thing. What we are encouraged to grasp precisely through the ascension itself is that God’s space and ours—heaven and earth, in other words—are, though very different, not far away from one another.

One day, in other words, the Jesus who is right now the central figure of God’s space—the human Jesus, still wearing (as Wesley put it) “those dear tokens of his passion” on his “dazzling body”—will be present to us, and we to him, in a radically different way than what we currently know. The other half of the truth of the ascension is that Jesus will return, as the angels said in Acts 1:11.

But when people hear those prayers today (speaking of Jesus being exalted to heaven and of us going in heart and mind to be with him forever; or speaking of the Holy Spirit as the one who will exalt us to the place where he has gone before), they are almost bound, within today’s muddled worldview, to be reinforced in their view that the whole point of the Christian faith is to follow Jesus away from earth to heaven and stay there forever.

the New Testament insists, on the contrary, that the one who has gone into heaven will come back.

Answering these questions has become more difficult in the past century. There are two reasons for this, more or less equal and opposite.

One reason is that the second coming of Jesus Christ has become the favorite topic of a large swath of North American Christianity, particularly but not exclusively in the fundamentalist and dispensationalist segment.

The American obsession—I don’t think that’s too strong a word—with the second coming of Jesus, or rather with one particular and, as we shall see, highly distorted interpretation of it, continues unabated.

It turned out (as I indicated in the previous chapter) that many conservative Christians in the area, and more importantly just to the south in the United States, had been urging that since we were living in the end times, with the world about to come to an end, there was no point worrying about trying to stop polluting the planet with acid rain and the like. Indeed, wasn’t it unspiritual, and even a sign of a lack of faith, to think about such things?

We face similar questions today. So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians.

the second coming is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction while the chosen few are snatched up to heaven.

Partly in reaction against such an idea, but partly powered by the energy of good old Enlightenment liberalism, many in the mainstream churches of the West have for some time been doing their best to divest themselves of the doctrine that Jesus Christ “will come again in gl...

Both parts are disliked: the coming an...

We are therefore faced, as we look at today’s large-scale picture, with two polar opposites. At one end, some have made the second coming so central that they can see little else. At the other, some have so marginalized or weakened it that it ceases to mean anything at all. Both positions need to be challenged.

become a very moralistic, very judgmental, generation. We have judged apartheid and found it wanting. We judge child abusers and find them guilty. We judge genocide and find it outrageous. We have rediscovered what the Psalmists knew: that for God to judge the world meant that he would, in the end, put it all to rights, straighten it out, producing not just a sigh of relief all around but shouting for joy from the trees and the fields, the seas and the floods.

At the same time, we may not as a culture be fond of old-fashioned supernaturalism, but we certainly like spirituality in whatever form we can get it.

The word eschatology has often been used, in relation to early Christianity, to mean the expectation of the return of Jesus within a generation—and the redefinitions that took place when this did not happen. This expectation, it used to be thought, was based on and gave new focus to the expectation of first-century Jews that the world was about to come to an end.

The word eschatology, which literally means “the study of the last things,” doesn’t just refer to death, judgment, heaven, and hell, as used to be thought (and as many dictionaries still define the word). 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.

The transition from the present world to the new one would be a matter not of the destruction of the present space-time universe but of its radical healing.

So when I (and many others) use the word eschatology, we don’t simply mean the second coming, still less a particular theory about it; we mean, rather, the entire sense of God’s future for the world and the belief that that future has already begun to come forward to meet us in the present. This is what we find in Jesus himself and in the teaching of the early church.

This is indeed true, as we shall see, of what happens to his people after death, in the interim state. But it isn’t the main truth that the New Testament teaches, the main emphasis that the early Christians insisted on over and over again. The main truth is that he will come back to us.1 That is the thing of which we must now speak, in two main movements. He will come again; and he will come again as judge.

In fact, the New Testament uses quite a variety of language and imagery to express the truth that Jesus and his people will one day be personally present to each other as full and renewed human beings. It is perhaps an accident of history that the phrase “the second coming,” which is very rare in the New Testament, has come to dominate discussion. When that phrase is identified, as it has often been in the United States, with a particular view of that coming as a literal downward descent, meeting halfway with the redeemed who are making a simultaneous upward journey, all sorts of problems arise that are avoided if we take the New Testament’s multiple witness as a whole.

The first thing to get clear is that, despite widespread opinion to the contrary, during his earthly ministry Jesus said nothing about his return.