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

by N.T. Wright

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. This is why, when after the transfiguration Jesus tells the disciples not to mention the vision until the son of man has been raised from the dead, they are (as we saw a few moments ago) puzzled and wonder what this “rising from the dead” can mean—if it is to be an event that will leave them in a position to be telling people about details of Jesus’s life rather than an event in which God’s whole new world will be born.

the early Christians held a quite different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.

The main truth is that he will come back to us.1 That is the

The reality to which it refers is this: Jesus will be personally present, the dead will be raised, and the living Christians will be transformed.

heaven is actually a reverent way of speaking about God so that “riches in heaven” simply means “riches in God’s presence” (as we see when, elsewhere, Jesus talks about someone being or not being “rich toward God”).8 But then, by derivation from this primary meaning, heaven is the place where God’s purposes for the future are stored up.

The “reward” is organically connected to the activity, not some kind of arbitrary pat on the back, otherwise unrelated to the work that was done.

The ultimate destination is (once more) not “going to heaven when you die” but being bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ.

Salvation, then, is not “going to heaven” but “being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.”