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by
N.T. Wright
Paul speaks of the future resurrection as a major motive for treating our bodies properly in the present time (1 Corinthians 6:14), and as the reason not for sitting back and waiting for it all to happen but for working hard in the present, knowing that nothing done in the Lord, in the power of the Spirit, in the present time will be wasted in God’s future (1 Corinthians 15:58).
skeptical friends have cheerfully pointed out to me, it is always possible for anyone to follow the argument so far and to say simply, “I don’t have a good explanation for what happened to cause the empty tomb and the appearances, but I choose to maintain my belief that dead people don’t rise and therefore conclude that something else must have happened, even though we can’t tell what it was.” That is fine; I respect that position; but I simply note that it is indeed then a matter of choice, not a matter of saying that something called scientific
There are, after all, different types of knowing. Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.
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.
But when people say, “But that can’t have happened because we know that that sort of thing doesn’t actually happen,” they are appealing to a would-be scientific principle of history, namely, the principle of analogy. The problem with analogy is that it never quite gets you far enough. History is full of unlikely things that happened once and once only, with the result that the analogies are often at best partial. In any case, if someone declares that certain kinds of events “don’t normally happen,” that merely invites the retort, “Who says?”
This is different, in other words, from asking, “Can a scientist believe that Schubert’s music is beautiful?” or “Can a scientist believe that her husband loves her?”
The most important decisions we make in life are not made by post-Enlightenment left-brain rationality alone. I do not suggest that one can argue right up to the central truth of Christian faith by pure human reason building on simple observation of the world. Indeed, it is should be obvious that that is impossible.
one writer has called “current paradigms of reality.” If this means capitulating before the worldview of Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers, I reply that precisely now, in the early twenty-first century, there are all kinds of reasons for questioning current paradigms.
wrong to imply that the choice is between an ancient worldview and a modern (or even a postmodern) one. The ancient worldview of Homer, Plato, Cicero, and the rest had no room for resurrection either.
I am convinced that the climate of skepticism, which for the last two hundred years has made it unfashionable and even embarrassing to suggest that Jesus’s resurrection really happened, was never and is not now itself a neutral thing, sociologically or politically.
intellectual coup d’état by which the Enlightenment convinced so many that “we now know that dead people don’t rise,” as though this was a modern discovery rather than simply the reaffirmation of what Homer and Aeschylus had taken for granted, goes hand in hand with the Enlightenment’s other proposals, not least that we have now come of age, that God can be kicked upstairs, that we can get on with running the world however we want to, carving it up to our advantage without outside interference.
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.
What God did for Jesus on the first Easter Day, he has promised to do for each one who is in Christ, each one indwelt by the Spirit of Christ. That is the biblical and historic Christian expectation in terms of ourselves as human beings.
Instead of dependence on God’s grace, we will become what we have the potential to be by education and hard work. Instead of creation and new creation, science and technology will turn the raw material of this world into the stuff of utopia. 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.
One of the strange and perhaps poetically appropriate twists in that story is our increasing recognition that Darwin was himself not so much the great new thinker, coming from nowhere to his radical new idea, but rather the exact product of his times, one particular high-water mark in the onward rush of liberal modernist optimism, himself the product of a particular evolution in Western thought.
Evolution, in this more general sense of progress, was already widely believed; it was a deeply convenient philosophy for those who wanted to justify their own massive industrial and imperial expansion;
Darwin gave it some apparent scientific legitimacy, which was quickly seized upon and which, within half a century, had been used to justify everything from eugenics to war. The same could be said, of course, mutatis mutandis, of Karl Marx.4
Many Christians embraced what they called the social gospel, trying to put into practice in society the promises of the Christian message. An enormous amount of good work was done by this means, though after a century of it we now all know that it isn’t the full answer.
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,
if evolution gave us Hiroshima and the Gulag, it can’t be all good. There is no observable reason in science, philosophy, art, or anywhere else to suppose that if we simply plow ahead with the enlightenment dream these glitches will be ironed out and we’ll get to utopia eventually.
the cosmos as a whole is simply not evolving toward a golden future. The world that began with the Big Bang is heading either for the Big Cool-Down, as energy gradually runs out and the universe expands into the cold dark beyond, or for the Big Crunch,
It is quite possible that before either of these worrying possibilities takes place, a giant meteorite such as likely wiped out the dinosaurs could strike the Earth with similar devastating effects. None of these scenarios makes any sense within the myth of progress.9
Plato remains the most influential thinker in the history of the Western world.
indeed, 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
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.
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.
Only Luke tells an explicit story about this event (though he, as if making up for his colleagues’ omissions, tells it twice, once at the end of his gospel and once at the beginning of Acts).
The early Christians knew the world was still a mess. But they announced, like messengers going off on behalf of a global company, that a new CEO had taken charge. They discovered through their own various callings how his new way of running things was to be worked out. It wasn’t a matter (as some people anxiously suppose to this day) of Christians simply taking over and giving orders in a kind of theocracy where the church could
simply tell everyone what to do. That has sometimes been tried, of course, and it’s always led to disaster. But neither is it a matter of the church backing off, letting the world go on its sweet way, and worshipping Jesus in a kind of private sphere.
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.
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).7
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. We post-Enlightenment Westerners are such wretched flatlanders. Although New Age thinkers, and indeed quite a lot of contemporary novelists, are quite capable of taking us into other parallel worlds, spaces, and times, we retreat into our rationalistic closed-system universe as soon as we think about Jesus.
We do not “build the kingdom” all by ourselves, but we do build for the kingdom. All that we do in faith, hope, and love in the present, in obedience to our ascended Lord and in the power of his Spirit, will be enhanced and transformed at his appearing.13
Paul speaks of “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). There is no room for doubt as to what he means: God’s people are promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life.
in Colossians 3:1–4: when the Messiah appears, the one who is your life, then you too will appear with him in glory. Paul does not say “one day you will go to be with him.” No, you already possess life in him. This new life, which the Christian possesses secretly, invisible to the world, will burst forth into full bodily reality and visibility.
God will give life, not to a disembodied spirit, not to what many people have thought of as a spiritual body in the sense of a nonphysical one, but “to your mortal bodies also.”
the word for “dwelling places” here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.
“Today you will be with me in Paradise.”5 Despite a long tradition of misreading, paradise is here, as in some other Jewish writing, not a final destination but the blissful garden, the parkland of rest and tranquillity, where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day.6
Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psychē (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation.
your labour is not in vain.” Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess.
It isn’t just that hair and fingernails grow and are cut off; our entire physical substance is slowly changing. What we today call atoms and molecules pass through us, leaving us with continuity of form but transience of matter. (C. S. Lewis, summarizing this argument, offers an illustration: I am in that respect, he says, like a curve in a waterfall.)16 This argument is repeated by Thomas Aquinas a millennium after Origen and nearly a millennium before Lewis. It’s a good argument: as we now know, we change our entire physical kit,
I am physically a totally different person now from the person I was ten years ago. And yet I am still me. Thus it really doesn’t matter whether we get the identical molecules back or not, though some continuity is perfectly possible. The ones we use for a while have been used by other organisms before us and will be used by others when we are done with them. Dust we are, and to dust we shall return. But God can do new things with dust.
this new body will be immortal. That is, it will have passed beyond death not just in the temporal sense (that it happens to have gone through a particular moment and event) but also in the ontological sense of no longer being subject to sickness, injury, decay, and death itself. None of these destructive forces will have any power over the new body. That indeed may be one of the ways of understanding the strangeness of the risen body of Jesus.
Why will we be given new bodies? According to the early Christians, the purpose of this new body will be to rule wisely over God’s new world. Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it. All the skills and talents we have put to God’s service in this present life—and perhaps too the interests and likings we gave up because they conflicted with our vocation—will be enhanced and ennobled and given back to us to be exercised to his glory.
there will be plenty to be done, entire new projects to undertake. In terms of the vision of original creation in Genesis 1 and 2, the garden will need to be tended once more and the animals renamed. These are only images, of course, but like all other future-oriented language they serve as true signposts to a larger reality—a reality to which most Christians give little or no thought.
“the old field of space, time, matter and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not.”24
destination is (once more) not “going to heaven when you die” but being bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ. (The point of all this is not, of course, merely our own happy future, important though that is, but the glory of God as we come fully to reflect his image.)
Thus, if we want to speak of “going to heaven when we die,” we should be clear that this represents the first, and far less important, stage of a two-stage process. Resurrection isn’t life after death; it is life after life after death.
there are so many things said in the New Testament about the greatest becoming least and the least becoming greatest that we shouldn’t be surprised at this lack of distinction between the postmortem state of different Christians. I appreciate that it may be hard for some to come to terms with this,
