Wright starts from the discomfiting assertion that most Christians have fundamentally misconceived the basics of the gospel message: the gospel is not so much about "saving souls" to "go to heaven" as it is about announcing God's kingdom, God's new creation—God's transformative reclamation of his material creation. "A massive assumption has been made in Western Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least mainly, to 'go to heaven when you die,'” Wright writes, “and texts that don't say that but mention heaven are read as if they did say it, and texts that say the opposite, like Romans 8:18-25 and Revelation 21-22, are simply screened out as if they didn't exist.”

Wright's iteration of the core of the gospel uses a British idiom for which there's no concise American equivalent: the biblical promise of the coming of Christ is that God will "put the world to rights," and that this started with Christ's first coming and will be made perfectly complete at his second. Going back to the Old Testament, Wright says, "Again and again the Messiah is stated to be God's agent to bring the whole world, not just Israel, back into the state of justice and truth for which God longs as much as we do." And in the New Testament, Wright says, "early Christians ... had concluded from Easter that Jesus was indeed the Messiah [and] naturally identified him as the one through whom God would put the world to rights." This means that the eschatological destiny of the whole cosmos—including, but not at all limited to, human "souls"—is not evaporation but complete reconciliation and transformative restoration. "Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God's dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever … in a lasting embrace."

Here's where Christians have to make perhaps the most dramatic change to our beliefs about the afterlife: Wright says that resurrection hope is not so much a matter of life after death, but instead, as he puts it: "life after life after death." In other words, between Christ's first and second comings, there is an intervening, non-bodily afterlife, but it's just a temporary state that will give way, after Christ's return, to resurrected bodies in a perfect new creation—an eternal, bodily afterlife after a temporary, non-bodily afterlife. The so-called "intermediate state" of the dead between Christ's two comings was a marginal afterthought to Paul and other early Christians, who instead invested most of their hope in God's eventual new creation, but Wright says we have it backwards—we've put all our Easter eggs in this one basket of the non-bodily intermediate state, with the eternal new creation just an afterthought at best, and bodily resurrection largely ignored or tacitly disbelieved.

Instead, Wright says, Christians too easily adopt generic secular portraits about an ethereal heaven, like a children's book by the philosopher (actually, California’s first lady) Maria Shriver that says heaven is "is a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds ... next to the stars." But he also castigates pious nineteenth-century hymnody for its "blatant Platonism" in over-spiritualizing life after death. In any case, he says, the essence of biblical redemption has been miscast. "At no point in the gospels and Acts does anyone say anything remotely like, 'Jesus has gone into heaven, so let's be sure we can follow him [there].' They say, rather, "Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete.'" And so Wright gets off a good barb at Gnosticism, one of the earliest attempts to let Plato beat out Paul in Christianity (which is strangely back in vogue right now). "It was the Gnostics, who translated the language of resurrection into a private spirituality and a dualistic cosmology, thereby more or less altering its meaning into its opposite, who escaped persecution. Which emperor would have sleepless nights worrying that his subjects were reading the Gospel of Thomas?"

God's act of reclaiming creation, rather than removing souls from it, is truer to the biblical message, and also happens to make more theological sense, Wright says: "Because ... evil [is] not materiality but rebellion, the slavery of humans and of the world does not consist in embodiment, redemption from which would mean the death of the body and the consequent release of the soul or spirit. The slavery consists, rather, in sin, redemption from which must ultimately involve not just goodness of soul or spirit but a newly embodied life." This is why one pastor I know wisely insists on saying at graveside services, "May she rest in peace and rise in glory." Wright even suggests we may need to all but drop the word "heaven" from our vocabulary, in favor of "new creation," until we can get this straight.

Rhetorically, Wright bears the image of one of his favorite subjects, the apostle Paul: his writing is increasingly marked by percussive argumentation abruptly punctuated by soaring doxological interludes. No doubt it will take someone of his stature and theological weight to put any kind of dent in the church’s overly spiritual treatment of the afterlife. And Wright can, like few others, convincingly merge personal piety and social witness. But my high "hope" for Surprised By Hope is guarded by a few considerations.

First, Paul's pervasive language of "spirit"-versus-"flesh" plays right into Platonic hands. I'm convinced by commentators—including Wright—who say that when Paul talks about "spirit" and "flesh" he means the work of the Holy Spirit against the sinful nature and curse of sin, but that's one or two exegetical steps beyond what many Platonically-conditioned readers tend to take from these passages. Second, despite Wright's good critique of the nineteenth century "social gospel" and its attempts to read eschatological implications into social progress, his enthusiasm for the church engaging (or re-engaging) the public square at times risks overwhelming his caution about Christian political excesses. Finally, even Paul, who was far from argumentatively shy, says that between Christ's first and second comings, we see "through a glass darkly." When it comes to eschatology, the Bible doesn't give us doctrines, it gives us dreams—Daniel's, Ezekiel's, John's in Revelation—which almost by definition defy deriving dogma from them. Especially since, as Wright says, Paul compares new creation before and after Christ's return to a seed and a plant: they have important lines of continuity between them but little resemblance. This is no reason to accept bad theology or philosophy and tack on an irrelevant immaterial eternity to the biblical story, rather than tracing the theme of new creation through the Bible from start to finish. But what Wright wants most for the church will be as difficult and elusive as it is essential to our health: a more biblical eschatological imagination.

Nathan Bierma, contributing editor to Books&Culture, is author of Bringing Heaven Down To Earth: Connecting This Life to the Next (P&R Publishing, 2005). His “On Language” column appears in the Chicago Tribune; a collection of these columns will be published later this year. He is communications and research coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His website is www.nbierma.com.

1. "The Resurrection of the Body," in Van Harn, Roger, ed. Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles' Creed (Eerdmans, 2004).
2. Van Biema, David. “Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop.” Time web exclusive, 7 February 2008. Accessed at <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1710844,00.html>
3. Augsburg Fortress, 2003

Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
by N.T. Wright
HarperOne, 2008
332 pages, $24.95

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