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

by N.T. Wright

But we shouldn’t let a proper penitence for past wickedness turn into a false humility about the extraordinary achievements of the church in both the past and the present. The Wilberforces and the Tutus are real, and they matter, and so do a million others who are less well known but equally signs of the strange lordship of Jesus over the world.

Personal holiness and global holiness belong together. Those who wake up to the one may well find themselves called to wake up to the other as well.

Like a great church bell ringing out over a sleepy town, every time someone puts a date on something it speaks of the lordship of Jesus, whether people listen or not.

Thus the church that takes sacred space seriously not as a retreat from the world but as a bridgehead into it will go straight from worshipping in the sanctuary to debating in the council chamber—discussing matters of town planning, of harmonizing and humanizing beauty in architecture, in green spaces, in road traffic schemes, and (not least in the rural areas, which are every bit as needy) in environmental work, creative and healthy farming methods, and proper use of resources.

A good deal of this activity will cheerfully and rightly overlap with work being done, and often done very well, by those of other faiths or none.

If we bring ourselves simply into harmony with the created order as it is at present, we are embracing death: not only nature red in tooth and claw but also the cosmos running down into the cold night of entropy.

when we read the Old Testament, we must read it—as it manifestly asks to be read—as the long and winding story of how God chose a people to take forward his plan to rescue his creation, not the story of how God had a shot at calling a people whom he would save from the world and how this was aborted, forcing him to try something else (a caricature, I know, but one many will recognize).

(This, by the way, is the deep-level reason why the other gospels were not included in the canon. It isn’t that they were the really exciting or subversive bits that the early church excluded in the interests of power and control. They were the books that had stopped talking about new creation and were offering a private, detached spirituality instead. The sudden enthusiasm for these other gospels in certain quarters of the Western world in our own day is a token not of the rediscovery of genuine Christianity but of the desperate attempts to avoid it. New creation is far more demanding—though ultimately, of course, far more exhilarating—than Gnostic escapism.)

What you do with your body in the present matters, he insists, because God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Glorify God in your body because one day God will glorify the body itself. What is to be true in the future must begin to be true in the present, or it will be called into question whether you are really on track in the first place.

For Paul, holiness is never a matter of simply finding out the way you seem to be made and trusting that that’s the way God intends you to remain. Neither is it a matter of blind obedience to arbitrary and out-of-date rules. It’s a matter of transformation, starting with the mind.

Christian ethics is the lifestyle that celebrates and embodies that new creation. Living out a life of Christian holiness makes sense, perfect sense, within God’s new world, the world into which we are brought at baptism, the world where we are nourished by the Eucharist. Of course, if you try to live a Christian lifestyle outside this framework, you will find it as difficult, indeed nonsensical, as it would be for an orchestral performer to play his or her part separated from the rest of the players amid the crashes and metallic screeching of an automobile factory.