Wrestling with Tom: An American Evangelical's coming-to-grips with N. T. Wright's Surprised By Hope

Few writers have gained the attention of, and made waves in, the Christian blogosphere in recent memory in quite the way that N. T. Wright has. (The other that immediately comes to mind is Mark Driscoll, but his similarity with Wright probably ends about right there.) A “Lord Bishop” (ach, a hierarchical title!) in the Anglican (aren’t they all liberals?) Church, Wright is a brilliant yet down-to-earth scholar of the New Testament. He has written a thick three-volume set on Jesus (one volume of which I received as a Christmas gift and am still wading through), a defense and apologetic of Christian beliefs (Simply Christian), and a little book that went off like a bomb in the Reformed world called What St. Paul Really Said. (As a non-Reformed evangelical, I don’t really get what the huge deal is about, though I do appreciate the insights that Wright has to Paul.)

I have been listening to as many of Wright’s messages as I could get my hands on over the past year (check out ntwrightpage.com - a great resource!) and have heard much that seemed to make sense, though it seemed different than what I’ve learned in the evangelical church, regarding the resurrection, heaven, and the end times. So when I heard that Wright was writing a book to sum up those arguments, I put it on my to-buy list and grabbed it as soon as it was released.

Surprised By Hope runs just over 300 pages (not counting the copious end notes) and is full of the reminder of the hope of Christians not for some ethereal existence in some far-off “heaven”, but for a resurrected body (similar to Jesus’ prototype) and eternal existence as a part of a redeemed and restored creation on the “new earth”. Wright makes powerful arguments that this hope of resurrection is consistent with the belief of Israelites before Christ, with the belief of the early church, and that it makes much more sense of the gospels and of Paul than do some of today’s more popular views of heaven.

I have completed one pass through Surprised By Hope and have managed to mark up almost every page. What I have found has been eye-opening; not so much that it is a hugely different doctrine than what my denomination holds to, but more that it sets out so clearly beliefs that we tend to get muddled up and then just gloss over. Wright hits it on the head in Chapter 2:

It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about “going to heaven when you die” and not a lot about a postmortem hell either. The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante’s classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination.

And a bit later:

Most Christians today… remain satisfied with what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope. Indeed, the popular picture is reinforced again and again in hymns, prayers, monuments, and even quite serious works of theology and history. It is simply assumed that the word heaven is the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.

Yeah, that’s me. That’s what I’ve been taught… though not so much taught it, because other than a requisite Sunday School class teaching the standard dispensational view of the book of Revelation, we don’t teach it much more than the usual thumbnail sketch: heaven is where Christians go when they die. They are there forever in God’s presence. It’s pretty much an eternal conversation with the saints of old who you want to get to know, and there’s some idea of worshiping God, though we’re not quite sure what that’ll look like, and then the glassy sea, and crowns, and well, yeah, it’s a bit muddled. We don’t teach it much because we don’t have a coherent framework that incorporates the gospel with the resurrection and then applies it to our mission today. Sure, if we’re current we’ll talk about things like contextualization, of paying attention to the culture and being in the community, but we see it with just the end goal of being “normal” people so we’ll have an in with the non-Christians who we want to tell about Jesus. Wright is saying throughout the book that there’s more to it than that, and he makes a powerful argument.

I’m planning on chewing on the book with multiple blog posts over the next week or two; I also now need to make another pass through the New Testament with this new understanding in mind and see how it fits. Oh, and to Dad and to Richard: I have ordered you copies and they’re on the way. :-)

[You can buy Surprised by Hope from Amazon.com.]