N.T. Wright Project

“The important thing is that we grasp the central hope of the ultimate resurrection, set within new creation itself, and that we reorder all our thinking and speaking about every other after-death question in that light.” (Surprised by Hope, 174)

This simple statement helps me see questions of the afterlife in a new light. When reading a book it’s much more important to grasp the thesis, the author’s underlying argument, than details or specifics of its chapters and passages. When watching a play it’s much more important to catch the plot, the storyline that is pushing the play along, than one scene or a dialogue within the play. In a way this describes the importance of grasping the hope of resurrection in the New Testament compared to other afterlife issues. This is not to say the other details are not important such as the intermediate state between death and resurrection, the realities of heaven and hell, etc. These specifics are important, for together they must constitute a coherent whole. However, it would be a grave mistake to weigh these after-death details with the same heaviness as the great after-death question the New Testament is concerned with: resurrection. Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions. Where will we go? What will it be like? Will I still be married? Come to think of it, we’re pretty good at asking the wrong questions. Wright says the question ought to be, “How will God’s new creation come?” and then, “How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world?” (185). Resurrection and new creation are at the center, the very core, of Christian hope; they’re the plot holding the play together. And understanding the plot of a play is the first step in making sense of its smaller scenes.

Why not end this post with another Wright quote, one just as robust as the first:
“But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. 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.” (184)