Our idea of heaven wrong, says N. T. Wright
May 24, 2012 by John Murawski
An oft-clichéd notion of heaven—a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels—has remained a fixture of the faith for centuries. Even as arguments go on as to who will or won’t be “saved,” surveys show that a vast majority of Americans believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place.
But scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. They have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.
The most recent expert to add his voice is the prolific Christian apologist N. T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. Wright has explored misconceptions about heaven in previous books but has now devoted an entire volume to the subject, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels.
Wright’s book could mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not an academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.
“This is a very current issue—that what the church [says about heaven], or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said theologian Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world; they are the beginning of the real world—in biblical understanding.”
Still, the appearance of a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that the putting-the-heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond seminaries. Wright and Morse both say they have lectured on heaven at churches and were surprised by the public interest and acceptance. “An awful lot of ordinary churchgoing Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this,” Wright said.
Wright and Morse work independently of each other and in very different ideological settings, but their work converges on key points. In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God’s kingdom—a restored Eden where redeemed human beings would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.
“This represents an instance of two top scholars who have apparently grown tired of talk of heaven on the part of Christians that is neither consistent with the New Testament nor theologically coherent,” said Trevor Eppehimer of Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina. “The majority of Christian theologians today would recognize that Wright’s and Morse’s views on heaven represent, for the most part, the basic New Testament perspective on heaven.”
Of the first-century believers who accepted Jesus as Messiah, many were convinced that the world would be transformed in their own lifetimes. This inauguration, however, was far from complete and required the active participation of God’s people practicing social justice, nonviolence and forgiveness to become fulfilled, Wright said.
Once the kingdom is complete, he said, the bodily resurrection will follow with a fully restored creation here on earth. “What we are doing at the moment is building for the kingdom,” Wright explained. Indeed, doing God’s kingdom work has come to be known in Judaism as tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.” This Hebrew phrase is a “close cousin” to the ancient beliefs embraced by Jesus and his followers, Wright said.
“We are so fortunate in this generation that we understand more about first-century Judaism than Christian scholarship has for a very long time,” Wright said. “And when you do that, you realize just how much was forgotten quite soon in the early church, certainly in the first three or four centuries.”
On the idea of heaven, things really veered off course in the Middle Ages, he said. “Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consonant with what we find in the New Testament,” Wright said.
Wright notes that many clues to an early Christian understanding of the kingdom of heaven are preserved in the Gospels, most notably the phrase “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” from the Lord’s Prayer. Two key elements are forgiveness of debts and loving one’s neighbor. While heaven is indisputably God’s realm, it’s not some distantly remote galaxy hopelessly removed from human reality. In the ancient Judaic worldview, Wright notes, the two dimensions intersect and overlap so that the divine bleeds over into this world.
Other clues have been obscured by sloppy translations, such as the popular John 3:16, which says God so loved the world he gave his only son so that people could have “eternal life.”
Wright offers a translation that shows how the passage would have been heard in the first century: God gave his son “so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.” According to Wright, “It’s not a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught. It is very definitely that there will come a time when God will utterly transform this world—that will be the age to come.” —RNS
Christian Century May 20, 2012:
Life after life after death
May 17, 2012 by Rodney Clapp
The standard view of life after death has long focused on a disembodied soul that, immediately pursuant to the expiration of the body, goes either to heaven or to hell. I remember the sermon preached at my father’s funeral some years ago. It was classic Platonism—Dad’s soul had now escaped the entrapping shell of his cancer-ravaged body and was free in the beautiful communion of heaven.
Christian scholars have long questioned this easy dualism of body and soul. Karl Barth, for instance, insisted that the more biblical view calls us to see ourselves as both “ensouled bodies” and “embodied souls.” But the standard view has remained strong, especially in everyday church circles. That may be changing, as a passel of recent books indicate.
Premier among them is N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. Rob Bell’s bestseller Love Wins follows Wright in putting the post-mortem emphasis on resurrected bodies in the context of a new heaven and a new earth. More recently Howard Snyder and Joel Scandrett, in Salvation Means Creation Healed, make an extended argument that salvation focuses not just on souls and not just on people, but presents the hope of a transformed and new earth. Meanwhile, biblical scholar Richard Middleton is at work on a book that will closely examine the major biblical texts and argue for the eschatological hope of a new heaven and a new earth.
This sea change in thinking is largely because scholars have reappraised the New Testament with a keener eye to its Hebraic roots. The body-soul dualism of Greek thought always fit uneasily at best with the Old Testament, which contains only glimmers of an afterlife and remains throughout very this-worldly. Rereading the New Testament in a more Hebraic light has brought to the fore several texts that point to an eschatology that is focused not on disembodied souls but on resurrected bodies and a transformed earth.
Scholars in the midst of this reappraisal build on Old Testament texts such as Isaiah 65:17–25, where God declares, “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” a new earth in which weeping will be heard no more, where there will be no hunger or infant death, and where the wolf and lamb will feed together side by side. They consider also Micah 4:1–4, an eschatological text that looks to the day when nations will “learn war” no more, and so they “shall beat their swords into plowshares.”
They then turn to New Testament texts such as Romans 8, in which Paul envisions a creation “groaning” in wait of its transformation and promises: “He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you” (v. 11). Elsewhere Paul declares that the God who raised Jesus will also raise us by his power (1 Cor. 6:13–15) and mulls at length on the nature of our resurrection bodies (1 Cor. 15).
The eschatological hope of reembodiment and a renewed earth doesn’t belong to Paul alone. Second Peter 3:13 reads that “in accordance with his [God’s] promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.” And of course there are chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation, in which the seer beholds “a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (21:1) and focuses on a resplendent New Jerusalem, into which the nations will proceed by the light of the Lamb and offer up all their glories (22:23–24).
Such texts suggest that the new view is not so new but is indeed a recovery of an old and more decidedly biblical view of death and the afterlife. The “new” view changes the complexion of funeral sermons: less attention should rest on where the departed has gone immediately and more attention on the new heavens and new earth we all can ultimately look forward to, in resurrected bodies. The new view also puts more value on the earth, which will not after all simply be destroyed and pass away but will itself be renewed.
The new view also comports well with advances in neurological science, which by way of MRIs and other techniques has observed evidence of religious experience in the brain. Such evidence suggests that the (physical) brain and the soul are not strictly separated.
Of course, the new view raises a number of questions. Probably the most pressing pastoral question is about the nature of the soul and what happens to us, to my “I” and your “you,” immediately after death. Some expect a kind of soul sleep until the day of resurrection. Others point to eternity’s comprehension of all time—past, present and future—so that the dead enter into an eternity where the resurrection future has already occurred.
However such quandaries are resolved, the new view decidedly shifts the emphasis to the eschatological Resurrection Day of corporate and final judgment. As Wright puts it, the biblical picture is ultimately focused not on individual life directly after death but on “life after life after death.” The new view can certainly preach. It will be interesting to see if this recent cascade of books, aimed at the church even more than the academy, will bring changes in attitudes and hopes to the daily lives of congregations.