Christian Hope Future
Chris Knepp

Christian Hope Future

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Christian Hope Future  -  the Text

                       Christian Hope

         It’s Not All About “GOING TO HEAVEN”

N.T. “Tom” Wright: TIME Magazine, Monday, April 16, 2012

Heaven vs. Earth?

“It is all too easy for Christians to suppose that ‘thy will be done on earth’ is a kind of concession. While we’re on earth, we hope, things will work out as God intends – but then, of course, we hope to leave earth behind and go off to ‘heaven’, in which, naturally enough, God’s kingdom will be fully present, and his will be perfectly done. All God’s people will be there with him, and earth will be left behind forever.

“But that very dualistic, very unJewish view has no claim to be Jesus’ meaning.”

N.T. Wright, The Millennium Myth (1999)

Christian Hope

•       “Hope has to do, not with steady progress, but with a belief that the world is God’s world and that God has continuing plans for it.”

•       “The hope is that God will eventually do for the whole creation what he did for Jesus; God is at work in the present, by the Spirit of Jesus, to prepare the world for that great remaking, that great unveiling (that great apocalypse, in fact) of the future plan.”

“But that future, when it arrives, will not mean the abandonment of the present world, but rather its fulfillment. The whole creation, says Paul, will be liberated from its present enslavement to the forces of decay and death. You don’t liberate something by destroying it. All the beauty, all the goodness, all the pulsating life of the present creation, is to be enhanced, lifted to a new level, in the world that is to be. There is no room here for the dualism that goes with so much apocalypticism. Rather there is a strong incentive to work, in the present, to anticipate the new world in every possible way.”

N.T. Wright, The Millennium Myth (1999)

Christian Hope: Romans 8

18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Biblical Hope Properly Understood

“The proper way of interpreting the great biblical hope is to see the present work of healing and liberation, the accomplishment of salvation at every level, as the bridge between what happened in Jesus and what will happen in the end. Deeds that truly embody justice, mercy, hope and freedom in the present are signposts pointing back to Jesus’ resurrection, the ground of hope, and on to God’s future, to the final presence of Jesus, the fulfillment of hope.”

N.T. Wright, The Millennium Myth (1999)

The New Heaven and Earth: Revelation 21

21 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

The New Heaven and Earth: Revelation 21

5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. 8 But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

N.T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008)

Two questions shape this book:

(1)  What are we waiting for? In other words, what is the ultimate Christian hope?

(2)  What are we going to do about it in the meantime? In other words, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?

The Problem

“As long as we see Christian hope in terms of ‘going to heaven,’ of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear unrelated…. But if the Christian hope is for God’s new creation, for ‘new heaven and earth,’ and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together.”

“Resurrection”: Early Christian Belief

•       For early Christians, future hope centered firmly on resurrection.

“The first Christians did not simply believe in life after death; they virtually never spoke simply of going to heaven when they died…. When they did speak of heaven as a postmortem destination, they seemed to regard this heavenly life as a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection of the body. When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day [Luke 23:42-43], paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke’s next chapter [Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances] makes clear. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection.”

42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

•       “[T]he early Christians held firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a remade world.” Wright, Surprised By Hope

NOT What It’s All About!

“We do not have to look forward to an eternal life of isolated loneliness (as pictured in the typical cartoon of someone sitting all alone on a little private cloud in a vast empty sky). Nor do we have to think of a lazy pastoral scene in which there is nothing to do but sit around for eternity in bored idleness. The Bible chooses rather the picture of city life to talk about what eternal life will be like.” Shirley Guthrie, Christian Doctrine

What the Whole World Is Really Waiting For!

•       “The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam…. They knew God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.”

•       “But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.”

•       “They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.”

•       “What creation needs is neither abandonment nor evolution, but rather redemption and renewal; and this is both promised and guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This is what the whole world is waiting for.” Wright, Surprised By Hope

What About Us? The Redemption of Our Bodies

The NT is “crystal clear” about what happens when people die: “God’s people are promised a new type of bodily existence….”

Romans 8:23: And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Wright's Proposition

“My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey … represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope.”

•       “Instead of talking vaguely about heaven and then trying to fit the language of resurrection into that, we should talk with biblical precision about the resurrection and reorganize our language about heaven around that.” Wright, Surprised By Hope

Resurrection: Life After Life After Death

Philippians 3:20-21: 20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

“This little statement contains in a nutshell more or less all Paul’s thought on the subject. The risen Jesus is both the model for the Christian’s future body and the means by which it comes about.”

Wright, Surprised by Hope

Resurrection: Life After Life After Death

Romans 8:9-11: 9 You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

“The clearest and strongest passage…. God will give life not to a disembodied spirit, not to what many people have thought of as a spiritual body in the sense of a nonphysical one, ‘but to your mortal bodies also.’” Wright, Surprised by Hope

Resurrection: Life After Life After Death

John 14:2: In my Father's house are many monai (rooms/mansions/dwelling places). If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?

The Greek word monai “is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.” Wright, Surprised by Hope

Resurrection: Life After Life After Death

Luke 23:43:  And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

“Despite a long tradition of misreading , paradise is here, as in some other Jewish writing, not a final destination but the blissful garden … where the dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day…. Luke must have understood him [Jesus] to be referring to a state of being-in-paradise, which would be true, for him and the man dying beside him, at once – that very day – in other words, prior to the resurrection.”

“Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant…. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death.” Wright, Surprised by Hope

Resurrection: Who, Where, and What?

•       Who will be raised? All people.

•       Where will the resurrection take place? On the new earth, joined as it will be then to the new heaven.

•       What will the resurrection body be? “All we can surmise from the picture of Jesus’s resurrection is that just as his wounds were still visible, not now as sources of pain and death but as signs of his victory, so the Christian’s risen body will bear such marks of his or her loyalty to God’s particular calling as are appropriate, not least where that has involved suffering.”

“In particular, this new body will be immortal.”

Wright, Surprised by Hope

Resurrection: Why, When, and How?

•       Why will we be given new bodies? To rule wisely over God’s new world. “Forget those images about lounging around playing harps. There will be work to do and we shall relish doing it.”

•       When will the resurrection happen? “Paul says that if Christ is the firstfruits, those who belong to him will be raised ‘at his coming,’ which clearly hasn’t happened yet.”

•       How will it happen? “Paul says that God will give us new bodies; there may well be some bodily continuity, as with Jesus himself, but God is well capable of recreating people even (as with the martyrs of Lyon) their ashes are scattered into a fast-flowing river.” Wright, Surprised by Hope

So where are the dead now?

•       Paradise: “All the Christian departed are in substantially the same state, that of restful happiness…. This state is not, clearly, the final destiny for which the Christian dead are bound, which is the bodily resurrection. But it is a state in which the dead are held firmly within the conscious love of God and the conscious presence of Jesus Christ while they await that day. There is no reason why this state should not be called heaven….” Wright, Surprised by Hope

Between Death and Resurrection

“The obvious though revolutionary answer to the question of personal continuity between bodily death and bodily resurrection is hiding in plain sight…. Jesus’s first followers … would have answered in terms of the holy spirit: the spirit who dwells within us in the present will continue to sustain us between death and resurrection….

Once God’s spirit has come to dwell in a person, and to be (so to speak) fused with their own spirit, God himself provides the continuity between the previous bodily life and the future one.” Wright, God’s Homecoming

Between Death and Resurrection

“Perhaps the best way to begin this exposition is with the last words of Jesus in Luke’s gospel. Quoting Psalm 31:5, he prays ‘Here’s my spirit, Father! You can take care of it now!’ – or, in the better known New Revised Standard Version, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ I suspect that many modern Christians, reading this, make no distinction between ‘spirit’ and the more familiar ‘soul’ and understand the passage in terms of the latter. However, … the New Testament nowhere uses ‘soul’ in that sense. Jesus’s words are then echoed by Stephen, the first martyr, in his dying prayer, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’” Wright, God’s Homecoming

So, it’s not all about heaven ….

“The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood in that context – not simply in the sense that we are only a part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role … within that larger picture and purpose.”

•       Our challenge: “to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.” Wright, Surprised by Hope

Hope in Practice: Resurrection and the Mission of the Church

Does all this talk about “life after life after death” have any practical consequences here and now?

Yes indeed. “A proper grasp of the … future hope held out to us in Jesus Christ leads directly … to the vision of a present hope that is the basis of all Christian mission.”

“The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future. And what he was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose – and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project.”

Hope in Practice: Resurrection and the Mission of the Church

•       “ What you do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself – will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether…. They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” 

•       “As long as we see salvation in terms of going to heaven when we die, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for that future. But when we see salvation … in terms of God’s promised new heavens and earth and of our promised resurrection to share in that new and gloriously embodied reality – what I have called life after life after death – then the main work of the church here and now demands to be rethought in consequence.” Wright, Surprised by Hope