By Christian / Tom Wright
This series takes up the main ideas from the book by Bible scholar N. T. Wright Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (German Von Hoffnung überrascht – Was die Bibel zu Auferstehung und ewigem Leben sagt).
I read the book in the German translation. So the quotes are from the German translation and retranslated into English. The quotes will therefore differ from the English original.
Jesus, heaven and the new creation
1. Ascension
For the followers of Jesus in the first century, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus were two completely different things: „Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.“ (John 20:17 NIV). And Paul also makes a distinction (Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:20,2:6).
However, when John 20:17 speaks of „ascended“, we must understand this in the context of biblical cosmology:
Basically, in biblical cosmology, heaven and earth are not two different places within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation.
Heaven is indirectly related to earth, so that someone who is in heaven can be present anywhere on earth at the same time. Therefore, the ascension means that Jesus is available and accessible without having to travel to a specific place on earth to find him.
Heaven is, so to speak, the control room for the earth; it is the office of the CEO, the place from which all instructions emanate. „All authority has been given to me,“ said Jesus at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, „in heaven and on earth.“
N. T. Wright, Von Hoffnung überrascht, S. 139
According to the text of the New Testament, Jesus did not go to heaven at his resurrection, nor did his soul. What idea does the text of the New Testament convey?
The idea of the man Jesus, who is now in heaven, in his thoroughly embodied resurrection state, is a shock for many people, including many Christians.
N. T. Wright, Von Hoffnung überrascht, S. 139
He explains why this is the case immediately afterwards:
Sometimes this is because many people think that Jesus was divine, then stopped being divine and became human, only to stop being human again after a while in order to return to the divine mode of existence (at least that’s what Christians supposedly believe according to many people).
More often, however, this is because our culture is so accustomed to the Platonic idea that heaven is by definition a place of „spiritual“, not material reality, that the idea of a real body that is not only present in heaven, but thoroughly at home there, seems to them like a confusion of categories, i.e. philosophically defined forms of state.
N. T. Wright, Von Hoffnung überrascht, S. 139
And if you too are now surprised: „The Ascension invites us to rethink all these things; and anyway, why did we assume we knew what heaven was?“ (N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, p. 139)
When thought through in this way, the idea of the return of Christ makes sense:
But the New Testament, on the contrary, insists that the one who has gone to heaven will return. Nowhere in the Gospels or in the Acts of the Apostles is there a sentence even remotely like this: „Jesus has gone to heaven, so let’s make sure we follow him there.“ Rather, it says: „Jesus is in heaven, he rules the world, and he will return one day to establish his reign in perfection.“
N. T. Wright, Von Hoffnung überrascht, S. 145
2. What is the return of Christ all about?
Are we now heading towards ideas that have become widespread since the millenarian movements of the 19th century? Behind this is often the idea that Jesus has somehow been ‚gone‘ for almost 2000 years and will then return in a dramatic end time. And that „this return is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction, while the chosen few are swept away to heaven.“ (S. 148)
However, we have already seen that this idea does not correspond to the biblical cosmology and the first-century idea that we find in the New Testament. Even in the Psalms, the judgement of the world had a positive meaning: „For God, the judgement of the world means that he will set it right in the end, that he will bring it into order and thus not only cause a sigh of relief on all sides, but shouts of joy from trees and fields, from the sea and the floods.“ (Psalm 96, Psalm 98)
So what is meant by eschatology?
The word eschatology, which literally means „the doctrine of the last things“, refers not only to death, judgement, heaven and hell, as commonly thought (and as the word is still defined in many dictionaries). The term also refers to the passionately held belief of most 1st century Jews and almost all early Christians that history was going in a certain direction under the direction of God, and that this direction consisted in the new world of God, the world of justice, healing and hope. The transition from the present world to the new world would not be a matter of destroying the present spatio-temporal universe, but a matter of radically healing that universe.
So when I (and many others) use the word eschatology, we don’t simply mean the return of Christ, much less a particular theory about that return; we mean the whole meaning of God’s future for the world, and we mean the belief that that future has already begun to meet us in the present.
N. T. Wright, Von Hoffnung überrascht, S. 151
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