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

by N.T. Wright

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.

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.4

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 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.

The classic Christian doctrine, therefore, is actually far more powerful and revolutionary than the Platonic one. It was people who believed robustly in the resurrection, not people who compromised and went in for a mere spiritualized survival, who stood up against Caesar in the first centuries of the Christian era. 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. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in th...

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.

“We had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), with the implication, “but they crucified him, so he can’t have been.”

When Jesus was crucified, every single disciple knew what it meant: we backed the wrong horse. The game is over. Whatever their expectations, and however Jesus had been trying to redefine those expectations, as far as they were concerned hope had crumbled into ashes.

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.

But we never find outside Christianity what becomes a central feature within it: the belief that the mode of this inauguration consisted in the resurrection itself happening to one person in the middle of history in advance of its great, final occurrence, anticipating and guaranteeing the final resurrection of God’s people at the end of history.

“collaborative eschatology.” My understanding of this, in line with what I believe Crossan intended, is this. 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.

It was not merely that God had inaugurated the “end”; if Jesus, the Messiah, was the End in person, God’s-future-arrived-in-the-present, then those who belonged to Jesus and followed him and were empowered by his Spirit were charged with transforming the present, as far as they were able, in the light of that future.

resurrection as referring metaphorically to baptism (a dying and rising with Christ), and resurrection as referring to the new life of strenuous ethical obedience, enabled by the Holy Spirit, to which the believer is committed.

This, then, is the sixth modification of the Jewish belief: resurrection, while still being embraced as literal language about a future embodied existence, has shed its powerful earlier meaning as a metaphor for the renewal of ethnic Israel and has acquired a new one, about the renewal of human beings in general. In fact, within early Christianity we begin to discover the language of return from exile, of the ethnic and territorial renewal of Israel, now itself used metaphorically to refer both to the present renewal of human beings and to their eventual bodily resurrection.

But already in Paul the resurrection, both of Jesus and then in the future of his people, is the foundation of the Christian stance of allegiance to a different king, a different Lord.

Death is the last weapon of the tyrant, and the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated. Resurrection is not the redescription of death; it is its overthrow and, with that, the overthrow of those whose

power depends...

The second strange feature of the stories is more often remarked upon: the presence of the women as the principal witnesses. Whether we like it or not, women were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. When the tradition had time to sort itself out and

acquire the fixed form we already find in Paul’s quotation of it in 1 Corinthians 15, the women were quietly dropped; they were apologetically embarrassing. But there they are in all four gospel stories, front and center, the first witnesses, the first apostles. Nobody would have made them up. Had the tradition started in the male-only form we find in 1 Corinthians 15, it would never have developed, in such different ways as well, into the female-first stories we find in the gospels.

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! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven! To be sure, as early as Paul the resurrection of Jesus is firmly linked to the final resurrection of all God’s people. Had the stories been invented toward the end of the first century, they would certainly have included a mention of the final resurrection of all God’s people. They don’t, because they weren’t.

To put it at its most basic: the resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history or science no less than the Christian or the theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be. It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world.12 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 world of new creation is precisely the world of new creation; as such, it is open to, and indeed eager for, the work of human beings—not to manipulate it with magic tricks nor to be subservient to it as though the world of creation were itself divine but to be its stewards. And stewards need to pay close, minute attention to that of which they are stewards, in order the better to serve it and to enable it to attain its intended fruitfulness.

Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.

The reality that is the resurrection cannot simply be “known” from within the old world of decay and denial, of tyrants and torture, of disobedience and death. But that’s the point. To repeat: the resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event within the present world (though it is that as well); it is, principally, the defining event of the new creation, the world that is being born with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing that involves us in new ways, an epistemology that draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached quasi-scientific research but also that whole-person engagement and involvement for which the best shorthand is “love,” in the full Johannine sense of agapē.

To do so would be like lighting a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of historical scholarship will do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t look like it did last night, and that would-be normal explanations for this won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work, maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to investigate whether this is so, we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do so, we won’t rely on the candles anymore, not because we don’t believe in evidence and argument but because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home. All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than that of faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

rebelled. Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews.18 And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.

If we start with the future hope of the individual, there is always the risk that we will, at least by implication, understand that as the real center of everything and treat the hope of creation as mere embroidery around the edges.

We turn then to the large-scale hope of the whole cosmos, the great drama within which our little dramas are, as it were, the play within the play.

Like the mythical Prometheus, defying the gods and trying to run the world his own way, liberal modernism supposes that the world can become everything we want it to be by working a bit harder and helping forward the great march into the glorious future.

The real problem with the myth of progress is, as I just hinted, that it cannot deal with evil. And when I say “deal with,” I don’t just mean intellectually, though that is true as well; I mean in practice. It can’t develop a strategy that actually addresses the severe problems of evil in the world. This is why all the evolutionary optimism of the last two hundred years remains helpless before world war, drug crime, Auschwitz, apartheid, child pornography, and the other interesting sidelines that evolution has thrown up for our entertainment in the twentieth century. We can’t explain them, given the myth of progress, and neither can we eradicate them.

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. Suppose the golden age arrived tomorrow morning; what would that say to those who are being tortured to death today? How would that be a satisfactory solution to the huge and indescribable evils of the last century, let alone all of world history? If, akin to Teilhard de Chardin, we were to make God part of the process of it all, what sort of a god would it be who builds his kingdom on the bones and ashes of those who have suffered along the way?

Only in the Christian story itself—certainly not in the secular stories of modernity—do we find any sense that the problems of the world are solved not by a straightforward upward movement into the light but by the creator God going down into the dark to rescue humankind and the world from its plight.

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. I hope it is clear both how closely this view parodies some aspects of Christianity and how deeply and thoroughly it diverges from it.

My point for now is to notice that in many parts of the world an appeal to a Christian view of the future is taken to mean an appeal to the eventual demise of the created order and to a destiny that is purely “spiritual” in the sense of being completely nonmaterial. 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.

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.

They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming the goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. At its height, which according to Genesis 1 is the creation of humans, it was designed to reflect God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship.

it is precisely the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose. Creation was good, but it always had a forward look.

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.

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 creation, gains a second dimension, which the Bible sometimes calls “spiritual death.” In Genesis, and indeed for much of the Old Testament, the controlling image for death is exile. Adam and Eve were told that they would die on the day they ate the fruit; what actually happened was that they were expelled from the garden. Turning away from the worship of the living God is turning toward that which has no life in itself. Worship that which is transient, and it can only give you death. But

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 liberating what has come to be enslaved.

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 ultimately involve not just goodness of soul or spirit but a newly embodied life.

If you tell this story from the point of view of the good creation, the coming of Jesus emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for. Humans were made to be God’s stewards over creation, so the one through whom all things were made, the eternal son, the eternal wisdom, becomes human so that he might truly become God’s steward, ruler over all his world. Equally, if you tell the story from the point of view of human rebellion and the consequent sin and death that have engulfed the world, this again emerges as the moment all creation had been waiting for: the eternal expression of the father’s love became the incarnate expression of the father’s love so that by his self-giving to death, even the death of the cross, the whole creation can be reconciled to God. 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.

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.

Paul declares that the gospel has already been announced to every creature under heaven (1:23). 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.

The offering of the firstfruits signifies the great harvest still to come.

The two strands were woven together since part of God’s promise in liberating Israel and giving it the law was that Israel would inherit the land and that the land would be fruitful.