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

by N.T. Wright

We have been buying our mental furniture for so long in Plato’s factory that we have come to take for granted a basic ontological contrast between “spirit” in the sense of something immaterial and “matter” in the sense of something material, solid, physical. We think we know that solid objects are one sort of thing and ideas or values or spirits or ghosts are a different sort of thing (often not noticing that they are themselves all rather different sorts of things). We know that bodies decay and die; that houses, temples, cities, and civilizations fall to dust; and so we assume that to be bodily, to be physical, is to be impermanent, changeable, transitory, and that the only way to be permanent, unchanging, and immortal is to become nonphysical. Paul’s point here is that this is not so. Actually, it wasn’t so even in the dominant cosmology of his day, which was Stoic rather than Platonic. Still less was it so within the Jewish creation theology, which formed the seedbed out of which, because of the resurrection of Jesus himself, Paul grew his theology of new creation.11 Paul is making his Corinthian readers think in new patterns, and he has the same effect on us. What Paul is asking us to imagine is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body as our present body is more substantial, more touchable, than a dise...