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

by N.T. Wright

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.

First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. 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.

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.

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.

Resurrection meant bodies. We cannot emphasize this too strongly, not least because much modern writing continues, most misleadingly, to use the word resurrection as a virtual synonym for life after death in the popular sense.

When he told them not to breathe a word about the transfiguration “until the son of man is raised from the dead,” they discussed among themselves, in some puzzlement, what this “rising from the dead” might mean.8 It wasn’t that they didn’t know about resurrection. It was rather that they had never thought—despite Herod’s supposed remark about John the Baptist—that, as Jesus seemed to be implying, it was something that would happen to one person ahead of everybody else.

the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world.

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.

Nobody in Judaism had expected the Messiah to die, and therefore naturally nobody had imagined the Messiah rising from the dead. This leads to a remarkable modification not just of resurrection belief but of messianic belief itself. Where messianic speculations existed (again, by no means all Jewish texts spoke of a Messiah, but the notion became central in early Christianity), the Messiah was supposed to fight God’s victorious battle against the wicked pagans; to rebuild or cleanse the Temple; and to bring God’s justice to the world. Jesus, it appeared, had done none of these things. He had suffered the typical injustice of the world; he had mounted a strange and apparently ineffectual demonstration in the Temple; and he had died at the hands of the pagans rather than defeating them gloriously in battle. No Jew with any idea of how the language of messiahship worked could have possibly imagined, after his crucifixion, that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Lord’s anointed. But from very early on, as witnessed by what may be pre-Pauline fragments of early creedal belief, the Christians affirmed that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, precisely because of his resurrection.

What is more (to round off this final mutation from within the Jewish belief), because of the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah, we find the development of the very early belief that Jesus is Lord and that therefore Caesar is not.

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 on it.

The early Christian belief in resurrection remains emphatically on the map of first-century Judaism rather than paganism, but from within the Jewish theology of monotheism, election, and eschatology, it opened up a whole new way of seeing history, hope, and hermeneutics. And this demands a historical explanation.

Bible in the stories. Up to this point, all four evangelists have drawn heavily upon biblical quotation, allusion, and echo to make it clear that Jesus’s death was “according to the scriptures.” Even the burial narrative has biblical echoes. But the resurrection narratives are almost entirely innocent of them, with only a couple of small exceptions.

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

The fourth strange feature of the resurrection accounts is the fact that they never mention the future Christian hope. Almost everywhere else in the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus is spoken of in connection with the final hope that those who belong to Jesus will one day be raised as he has been, adding that this must be anticipated in the present in baptism and behavior.

There are, after all, different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable. Caesar only crossed the Rubicon once, and if he’d crossed it again it would have meant something different the second time. There was, and could be, only one first landing on the moon. The fall of the second Jerusalem Temple took place in a.d. 70 and never happened again. Historians don’t of course see this as a problem and are usually not shy about declaring that these events certainly took place, even though we can’t repeat them in the laboratory.

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.

What is at stake is the clash between a worldview that allows for a God of creation and justice and worldviews that don’t.

What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief, which rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply—which would be much safer!—a belief that inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment.

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.

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.

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.

The myth of progress fails because it doesn’t in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the nature and power of evil itself and thus fails to see the vital importance of the cross, God’s no to evil, which then opens the door to his yes to creation. 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.

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

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.

Redemption doesn’t mean scrapping what’s there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved.

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 world is created good but incomplete. One day, when all forces of rebellion have been defeated and the creation responds freely and gladly to the love of its creator, God will fill it with himself so that it will both remain an independent being, other than God, and also be flooded with God’s own life.

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.

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. And the point about heaven is twofold. First, heaven relates to earth tangentially so that the one who is in heaven can be present simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth: the ascension therefore means that Jesus is available, accessible, without people having to travel to a particular spot on the earth to find him. Second, heaven is, as it were, the control room for earth; it is the CEO’s office, the place from which instructions are given.

This results from a confusion: if the texts that speak of “the son of man coming on the clouds” refer to a.d. 70, as I have argued that (in part) they do, this doesn’t mean that a.d. 70 was the “second coming” because the “son of man” texts aren’t “second coming” texts at all, despite their frequent misreading that way. They are about Jesus’s vindication. And Jesus’s vindication—in his resurrection, ascension, and judgment on Jerusalem—requires a still further event for everything to be complete.

We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist. Signposts don’t normally provide you with advance photographs of what you’ll find at the end of the road, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t pointing in the right direction. They are telling you the truth, the particular sort of truth that can be told about the future.

The point is that, having gone out to meet their returning Lord, they will escort him royally into his domain, that is, back to the place they have come from.

The resurrection body of Jesus, which at the moment is almost unimaginable to us in its glory and power, will be the model for our own.

God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end. This doctrine, like that of resurrection itself, is held firmly in place by the belief in God as creator, on the one side, and the belief in his goodness, on the other.

In other words—to sum up where we’ve got so far—the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us. If we can get this straight, we will rediscover the historic basis for the full-orbed mission of the church.

He did not want to rescue humans from creation any more than he wanted to rescue Israel from the Gentiles. He wanted to rescue Israel in order that Israel might be a light to the Gentiles, and he wanted thereby to rescue humans in order that humans might be his rescuing stewards over creation. That is the inner dynamic of the kingdom of God.

This long tradition screened out the possibility that when Jesus spoke of God’s kingdom, he was talking not about a heaven for which he was preparing his followers but about something that was happening in and on this earth, through his work, then through his death and resurrection, and then through the Spirit-led work to which they would be called.

But when we reintegrate what should never have been separated—the kingdom-inaugurating public work of Jesus and his redemptive death and resurrection—we find that the gospels tell a different story. It isn’t just a story of some splendid and exciting social work with an unhappy conclusion. Nor is it just a story of an atoning death with an extended introduction. It is something much bigger than the sum of those two diminished perspectives. It is the story of God’s kingdom being launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’s followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.

Atonement, redemption, and salvation are what happen on the way because engaging in this work demands that people themselves be rescued from the powers that enslave the world in order that they can in turn be rescuers. To put it another way, if you want to help inaugurate God’s kingdom, you must follow in the way of the cross, and if you want to benefit from Jesus’s saving death, you must become part of his kingdom project.

First, God builds God’s kingdom. But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image. That, I believe, is central to the notion of being made in God’s image. God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected—imaged, if you like—into his world through his human creatures. He has enlisted us to act as his stewards in the project of creation.

Seeing evangelism and any resulting conversions in terms of new creation means that the new convert knows from the start that he or she is part of God’s kingdom project, which stretches out beyond “me and my salvation” to embrace, or rather to be embraced by, God’s worldwide purposes.

The first and perhaps most obvious meaning of the resurrection of Jesus, which emerges strongly in all four gospels, is that God has vindicated the Jesus who proclaimed the kingdom and died as Israel’s representative.

The resurrection completes the inauguration of God’s kingdom. In Mark’s perspective, it is at least part of what Jesus meant when he said that some standing with him would not taste death before they saw the kingdom of God come with power.

So Matthew gives us the clear message of what the resurrection means: Jesus is now enthroned as the Lord of heaven and earth. His kingdom has been established. And this kingdom is to be put into practice by his followers summoning all nations to obedient allegiance to him, marking them out in baptism. The closing line draws together the major themes of the gospel: the Emmanuel, the God-with-us, is now Jesus-with-us until the final end of the old age, the time when the new age, which has been inaugurated in the resurrection, has completed its transforming work in the world.

John has so ordered his gospel that the sequence of seven signs, climaxing in the cross of Jesus on the sixth day of the week and his resting in the tomb on the seventh, functions as the week of the old creation; and now Easter functions as the beginning of the new creation. The Word through whom all things were made is now the Word through whom all things are remade.

Easter and Pentecost belong together. Easter commissions Jesus’s followers for a task; Pentecost gives them the necessary equipment to accomplish it.

We must keep our eyes fixed on the hope that is set before us and on the resurrection of Jesus, which is our launching pad, and we must reorder our worship and our work in the world accordingly.