Take a photo of a barcode or cover
159 reviews for:
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
N.T. Wright
4.33 AVERAGE
159 reviews for:
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
N.T. Wright
4.33 AVERAGE
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Beautiful vision of new heavens & earth to revitalize how the church engages the world, in anticipation of the kingdom of God
Would you be surprised if someone said that Christianity does not teach that the soul goes to heaven when a Christian dies? In "Surprised By Hope," N.T. Wright tries to set non-Christians, but especially uninformed Christians, straight about what orthodox Christianity really teaches about life after death (or, more accurately, "life after life after death.")
The modern popular notions of heaven, the soul, and the "after life" often shared by Christians and non-Christians alike do not find their roots so much in Judaism, the Bible, or the writings of the early church fathers as they do in Gnosticism, Greek philosophy (particularly Platonic thinking) and pantheism. "At least since the Middle Ages," writes Bishop Wright, "the influence of Greek philosophy has been very marked, resulting in a future expectation that bears far more resemblance to Plato's vision of souls entering into disembodied bliss than to the biblical picture of new heavens and new earth."
Unfortunately, this view of the after life treats creation as "mere embroidery around the edges," and it fails to substantiate the Christian hope that Christ defeated death. A soul leaving the body and going to heaven would not mean the defeat of death at all, but would only be a description of "death seen from another angle." Orthodox Christianity, however, teaches that Christ is the "first fruits" of the tomb and that we shall all be resurrected and transformed, the recipients of new, incorruptible, individual physical bodies, that, like the new earth, are not subject to decay. Heaven will come to earth and unite with earth, so that there is a "new heaven and a new earth." In other words, when we Christians sing, "this earth is not my home, I'm just a' passing through," we don't quite have it right. In a sense, this world is indeed our home, this good creation, but it is incomplete, and it will be transformed, liberated from the slavery of sin and the death of decay.
"It is not we who go to heaven," explains Bishop Wright, "it is heaven that comes to earth…This is the ultimate rejection of all types of Gnosticism, of every world view that see the final goal as the separation of the world from God, of the physical form the spiritual, of earth from heaven…And it is the final accomplishment of God's great design, to defeat and abolish death forever, which can only mean the rescue of creation from its present plight of decay."
What then IS heaven? Wright's not overly clear about that. On the one hand, he describes heaven as "a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection" (not wholly unlike the Jewish Sheol). When Christ speaks of the "many mansions" that are in his Father's house, He uses the word that means temporary lodging. This is how Christ can tell the thief on the cross that he will be "in Paradise" with Him "tonight." (But in what form? Surely not, like Christ, in a transformed body, if the resurrection hasn't occurred. But surely not as a disembodied soul, if Wright is right about that not being the right view of the afterlife. Wright borrows and revises a contemporary metaphor from Polkinghorne to attempt to explain this intermediate state: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again." But it is hard to see how the idea of "software" is all that different from an idea of a "disembodied soul," which may explain why, despite the lack of talk of disembodied immortal souls in the Bible and the focus instead on the resurrection, it is so easy for Christians to slip into such talk.) So heaven is a stage; but, then, on the other hand, Wright also describes it as a dimension: "Basically heaven and earth in the biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter." Nor are they "a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one." Rather, "they are two different dimensions of God's good creation." They are different KINDS of space, matter, and (perhaps) time, but they are not two different "places." Heaven is not "up." Heaven is all around. Eventually, these two dimensions, earth and heaven, will be visibly united once and for all. So which is it? A stage or a dimension? Somehow both? His arguments lack clarity on this point.
Why does Wright feel compelled to set the record straight and make a distinction between the orthodox and popular Christian beliefs? One, because he thinks the orthodox belief is not so much disbelieved as unknown, and, second, because he believes that what we believe happens after we die affects how we live here and now. If this body is only a shell that will be one day be shed for a formless existence, if the earth is a thing we will one day leave entirely behind, if death is not an enemy to be defeated but only a gentle ushering away of our souls, then things like sexual licentiousness, euthanasia, exploitation of the poor, and unrestrained environmental exploitation become much easier to justify to ourselves. The "soul" mentioned in the Bible, he insists, was never meant to refer to some separate, nonphyscial part of us, but to the WHOLE person.
Of course, different denominations have different ideas of what constitutes orthodoxy. Wright's view of the after life will not seem orthodox to Catholics, because he utterly dismisses the idea of purgatory; nor will it seem orthodox to many evangelicals, because he utterly dismisses the idea of the rapture. Normally, he sticks to critiquing ideas rather than groups, but sometimes he slips to critiquing groups, and that is unpleasant.
As for the mission of the church in the light of "life after life after death," Wright takes a middle ground between the liberal's social gospel efforts to create heaven on earth and the fundamentalist's insistence that because the kingdom is not of this world, we should concentrate only on "saving souls." He speaks not of building the kingdom, as though we could, but rather building FOR the kingdom. While I find this middle-ground inviting in general and agree that Christians should work for good in the world, Wright seems to think all conservative opposition to liberal social policy is opposition to the idea that we should bother trying. This is simply not true; more often, it is opposition to the idea that liberal social policy is the best means to succeed.
The two causes about which he is most passionate are ecology and remission of Third World Debt. In his passion for them, he overlooks the possibility that while Christians may agree that we should work for justice and the alleviation of poverty and the conservation of God's creation, they may yet disagree on the best political method for doing so. Wright does not seem to acknowledge this and paints these issues in moral black and white, simply equating a refusal to remit Third World Debt with slavery and the Holocaust. He speaks of refusal to ratify Kyoto as though it had only to do with American desire to greedily maintain prosperity, and as though there were no other issues (such as national sovereignty and potential increased poverty in the developing world) at stake.
There are serious trade-offs involved in political decisions, and these trade-offs, more than apathy, are the reason for the conservative focus on the individual life in Christ rather than on the transformation of society through political change. He dismisses all this complexity with a flick of the wrist, saying, well, of course slavery was complex too. He says, in effect, "X is right (or wrong) so do (or stop) it now, and damn the consequences." But even with regard to slavery, moral people could agree it was wrong without agreeing on the best and least harmful path to abolishing it. Not all abolitionists were John Browns. Wright has no patience for discussions of political and economic trade-offs in matters of ecology and redistribution of wealth and sees them only as excuses of the morally weak or greedy. For this reason and others I do not have space for here, the third section of the book, on the mission of the church, was less edifying to me than the rest.
There are two things I really like about Wright:
(1) He makes me think and see things from a different perspective; he challenges me theologically, whereas most modern Christian books seem like a rehashing of the things I've heard before. This book, in particular, has made me much more conscious about how I talk about heaven and the great Christian hope with my children. It has been natural for me to speak to them of heaven as a place the soul goes to, not because I do not believe in the bodily resurrection and the ultimate transformation and wedding of heaven and earth, but because the explanation is simpler to relate to a child, and because this vocabulary of the afterlife is so common in the culture that surrounds me that it is hard not to absorb it.
(2) He reminds me of what I like most about Anglicanism—that it really does strive to provide a via media between Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism, between tradition and modernity, between the liberal and the conservative, etc.
There are two things I really dislike about Wright:
(1)He sometimes mistakes being right about a moral issue with being right about the best social/political means for dealing with that moral issue. If X is absolutely wrong, then his opinion of how to stop X is absolutely right.
(2)His writing style is sometimes tedious. He tends to tell you what he is going to tell you later, only to tell you, "but I won't say anything more about that now." He also tends to start telling you something only to say, "but I've written another books that talks about that." He raises questions with one idea that he does not explain until later, if he explains them at all. In other words, his writing is poorly structured. This book seemed really to be two books cobbled together into one and underdeveloped in the first half.
The modern popular notions of heaven, the soul, and the "after life" often shared by Christians and non-Christians alike do not find their roots so much in Judaism, the Bible, or the writings of the early church fathers as they do in Gnosticism, Greek philosophy (particularly Platonic thinking) and pantheism. "At least since the Middle Ages," writes Bishop Wright, "the influence of Greek philosophy has been very marked, resulting in a future expectation that bears far more resemblance to Plato's vision of souls entering into disembodied bliss than to the biblical picture of new heavens and new earth."
Unfortunately, this view of the after life treats creation as "mere embroidery around the edges," and it fails to substantiate the Christian hope that Christ defeated death. A soul leaving the body and going to heaven would not mean the defeat of death at all, but would only be a description of "death seen from another angle." Orthodox Christianity, however, teaches that Christ is the "first fruits" of the tomb and that we shall all be resurrected and transformed, the recipients of new, incorruptible, individual physical bodies, that, like the new earth, are not subject to decay. Heaven will come to earth and unite with earth, so that there is a "new heaven and a new earth." In other words, when we Christians sing, "this earth is not my home, I'm just a' passing through," we don't quite have it right. In a sense, this world is indeed our home, this good creation, but it is incomplete, and it will be transformed, liberated from the slavery of sin and the death of decay.
"It is not we who go to heaven," explains Bishop Wright, "it is heaven that comes to earth…This is the ultimate rejection of all types of Gnosticism, of every world view that see the final goal as the separation of the world from God, of the physical form the spiritual, of earth from heaven…And it is the final accomplishment of God's great design, to defeat and abolish death forever, which can only mean the rescue of creation from its present plight of decay."
What then IS heaven? Wright's not overly clear about that. On the one hand, he describes heaven as "a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection" (not wholly unlike the Jewish Sheol). When Christ speaks of the "many mansions" that are in his Father's house, He uses the word that means temporary lodging. This is how Christ can tell the thief on the cross that he will be "in Paradise" with Him "tonight." (But in what form? Surely not, like Christ, in a transformed body, if the resurrection hasn't occurred. But surely not as a disembodied soul, if Wright is right about that not being the right view of the afterlife. Wright borrows and revises a contemporary metaphor from Polkinghorne to attempt to explain this intermediate state: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time when he gives us new hardware to run the software again." But it is hard to see how the idea of "software" is all that different from an idea of a "disembodied soul," which may explain why, despite the lack of talk of disembodied immortal souls in the Bible and the focus instead on the resurrection, it is so easy for Christians to slip into such talk.) So heaven is a stage; but, then, on the other hand, Wright also describes it as a dimension: "Basically heaven and earth in the biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter." Nor are they "a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one." Rather, "they are two different dimensions of God's good creation." They are different KINDS of space, matter, and (perhaps) time, but they are not two different "places." Heaven is not "up." Heaven is all around. Eventually, these two dimensions, earth and heaven, will be visibly united once and for all. So which is it? A stage or a dimension? Somehow both? His arguments lack clarity on this point.
Why does Wright feel compelled to set the record straight and make a distinction between the orthodox and popular Christian beliefs? One, because he thinks the orthodox belief is not so much disbelieved as unknown, and, second, because he believes that what we believe happens after we die affects how we live here and now. If this body is only a shell that will be one day be shed for a formless existence, if the earth is a thing we will one day leave entirely behind, if death is not an enemy to be defeated but only a gentle ushering away of our souls, then things like sexual licentiousness, euthanasia, exploitation of the poor, and unrestrained environmental exploitation become much easier to justify to ourselves. The "soul" mentioned in the Bible, he insists, was never meant to refer to some separate, nonphyscial part of us, but to the WHOLE person.
Of course, different denominations have different ideas of what constitutes orthodoxy. Wright's view of the after life will not seem orthodox to Catholics, because he utterly dismisses the idea of purgatory; nor will it seem orthodox to many evangelicals, because he utterly dismisses the idea of the rapture. Normally, he sticks to critiquing ideas rather than groups, but sometimes he slips to critiquing groups, and that is unpleasant.
As for the mission of the church in the light of "life after life after death," Wright takes a middle ground between the liberal's social gospel efforts to create heaven on earth and the fundamentalist's insistence that because the kingdom is not of this world, we should concentrate only on "saving souls." He speaks not of building the kingdom, as though we could, but rather building FOR the kingdom. While I find this middle-ground inviting in general and agree that Christians should work for good in the world, Wright seems to think all conservative opposition to liberal social policy is opposition to the idea that we should bother trying. This is simply not true; more often, it is opposition to the idea that liberal social policy is the best means to succeed.
The two causes about which he is most passionate are ecology and remission of Third World Debt. In his passion for them, he overlooks the possibility that while Christians may agree that we should work for justice and the alleviation of poverty and the conservation of God's creation, they may yet disagree on the best political method for doing so. Wright does not seem to acknowledge this and paints these issues in moral black and white, simply equating a refusal to remit Third World Debt with slavery and the Holocaust. He speaks of refusal to ratify Kyoto as though it had only to do with American desire to greedily maintain prosperity, and as though there were no other issues (such as national sovereignty and potential increased poverty in the developing world) at stake.
There are serious trade-offs involved in political decisions, and these trade-offs, more than apathy, are the reason for the conservative focus on the individual life in Christ rather than on the transformation of society through political change. He dismisses all this complexity with a flick of the wrist, saying, well, of course slavery was complex too. He says, in effect, "X is right (or wrong) so do (or stop) it now, and damn the consequences." But even with regard to slavery, moral people could agree it was wrong without agreeing on the best and least harmful path to abolishing it. Not all abolitionists were John Browns. Wright has no patience for discussions of political and economic trade-offs in matters of ecology and redistribution of wealth and sees them only as excuses of the morally weak or greedy. For this reason and others I do not have space for here, the third section of the book, on the mission of the church, was less edifying to me than the rest.
There are two things I really like about Wright:
(1) He makes me think and see things from a different perspective; he challenges me theologically, whereas most modern Christian books seem like a rehashing of the things I've heard before. This book, in particular, has made me much more conscious about how I talk about heaven and the great Christian hope with my children. It has been natural for me to speak to them of heaven as a place the soul goes to, not because I do not believe in the bodily resurrection and the ultimate transformation and wedding of heaven and earth, but because the explanation is simpler to relate to a child, and because this vocabulary of the afterlife is so common in the culture that surrounds me that it is hard not to absorb it.
(2) He reminds me of what I like most about Anglicanism—that it really does strive to provide a via media between Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism, between tradition and modernity, between the liberal and the conservative, etc.
There are two things I really dislike about Wright:
(1)He sometimes mistakes being right about a moral issue with being right about the best social/political means for dealing with that moral issue. If X is absolutely wrong, then his opinion of how to stop X is absolutely right.
(2)His writing style is sometimes tedious. He tends to tell you what he is going to tell you later, only to tell you, "but I won't say anything more about that now." He also tends to start telling you something only to say, "but I've written another books that talks about that." He raises questions with one idea that he does not explain until later, if he explains them at all. In other words, his writing is poorly structured. This book seemed really to be two books cobbled together into one and underdeveloped in the first half.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
One of the greatest books I've ever read on the Christian message. Challenging and brilliant.
A must read for Christian's grappling with the future and fallout of the post-2020 world. Much more I could say.
Okay I absolutely loved this book. N.T. Wright is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever read. He clearly, logically, and with plenty of references and biblical basis, tears apart the common view of heaven and the resurrection. I think I will be coming back to this one a lot
I really enjoyed this one, even though I am already an NT Wright fan.