In Chapter 2 of Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright examines the “christian confusion about hope” aka the church’s view of what happens to us after death. If the final future promised to Christians is simply that we leave our mortal bodies to exist as immortal souls in the presence of God, then has death truly been defeated or has it just been redefined? As Christians, we declare each Sunday that we believe in “the resurrection of the body”, but do we really?
If, in the end, we will live as immortal souls in the presence of God, Wright says “then death is not conquered but re-described: no longer an enemy, it is simply the means by which, as in Hamlet, the immortal soul shuffles off its mortal coil. (pg 16)”
Do Christians view “the kingdom of God” as the Bible describes it or have medieval pictures of heaven and hell, pictures reflected in Dante’s trilogy, clouded our thinking?
Where Wright begins to step on evangelical toes is when he attacks the common Christian assumption that “whenever the New Testament speaks of heaven it refers to as the place to which the saved will go after death.” (pg 18) Instead, he says that when Jesus preached about “God’s kingdom”, he was not referring to our postmortem destiny nor even our escape from this world, but was teaching of the coming of God’s sovereign rule “on earth as it is in heaven.”
The wonderful description in Revelation 4 and 5 of the twenty-four elders casting their crowns before the throne of God and the lamb, beside the sea of glass, is not, despite one of Charles Wesley’s great hymns, a picture of the last day, with all the redeemed in heaven at last. It is a picture of present reality, the heavenly dimension of our present life. Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like it. (pg 19)
The problem is that this popular picture is reinforced again and again in hymns, prayers, monuments, and even quite serious works of theology and history. (pg 19)
This confusion works its way through the whole of contemporary christian life. Wright gives examples from many of our hymns of not only unorthodox ideas but outright Platonism. Don’t read this section unless you want to spoil some of your favorite songs forever. Some of the songs do reflect poor teaching, some I want to be more generous with and give the benefit of the doubt, but how much slack should we give to songs that are sung as part of our worship service?
I will not be able to sing the final line of It Came upon a Midnight Clear now without thinking of the theme song from Lion King:
“…When, with the ever-circling years Comes round the age of gold.” Hakuna Matata.
From our hymns he moves on to Christmas and how it far outstrips Easter in popular culture and even in the church “as the real celebratory center of the Christian year—a move that completely reverses the New Testament’s emphasis.” (pg 23)
Where would one expect to find the most explicit teaching about life after death? You would think it would be at a funeral service but Wright contends that “if someone came to these funeral services with no idea of the classic Jewish and Christian teachings on the subject, the funeral services would do little to enlighten them and plenty to mislead them or confirm them in their existing muddle.” (pg 25)
In the coming chapters Wright intends to counter this “vague and the fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end” and replace it with what the old liturgies called “the sure and certain hope for the resurrection of the dead” because the resurrection is the central doctrine of Christianity and “What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and color to everything else.” (pg 25)
Karl Marx spoke of religion being the ‘opium’ of the people. Wright believes this to be true when religion teaches a dualistic Platonism, when creation is thought of as just a vain shadow of reality. “Why try to improve the present prison if release is at hand?” or as I have heard it said “Why polish the brass on a sinking ship?”. But this is not the teaching of biblical Christianity, a faith that works against tyrants and tyranny because “the robust Jewish and Christian doctrine of the resurrection, as part of God’s new creation, gives more value, not less, to the present world, and to our present bodies.”
Paul speaks of the future resurrection as a major motive for treating our bodies properly in the present time, 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) (pg 26)
How much of our current view of death and the life beyond comes from semi-Christian and other informal traditions of our culture?
These traditions need to be reexamined in the clear light of scripture from which we will learn things “about the future life that most Christians, and almost all non-christians, have never heard of”. (pg 27)
Final Quotes:
The whole book thus attempts to reflect the Lord’s Prayer itself when it says, “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.” (pg 29)
As I see it, the prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined to the new Jerusalem. Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the past. (pg 29)
Our task in the present—of which this book, God willing, may form part—is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second. (pg 30)
