In his 2008 book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright tackles several misconceptions many have about what happens when we die. Popular thought is that, if we are good, we pass on to heaven never mind what feelings and convictions we harbor about Jesus Christ. Being nice or, as the saying goes, being a good human is the point. We do not have to concern ourselves so much with a relationship with our Creator. We simply hold the door for others, pick up the tab, collect the mail when our neighbor is out of town. Simple. But Wright takes his readers into the weeds, so to speak, to discover a vastly more involved theology that should prompt non-believers and uncommitted believers alike to seriously reconsider their views. Heaven, it seems, is not a given, and hell very much exists. Wright notes that “some historians have suggested that belief in hell, already under attack from theologians in the nineteenth century, was one of the major casualties of the Great War. There had been so much hell on earth that people couldn’t believe that God would create such a place hereafter as well.” The truth is that if a person freely rejects God in this life then that person exists with the consequences of that decision in the next. No God now. Fair enough. No God then either. Hell is the absence of God
For Christian believers, however, heaven is much more than, as Maria Shriver writes in her book What’s Heaven?, “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there.” This, Wright continues, “is more or less exactly what millions of people in the Western world have come to believe, to accept as truth, and to teach their children.” A careful interrogation of scripture, however, yields a different story.
Upon death, our soul separates from our body. Most of us understand this basic premise. What happens afterward, though, is not in keeping with popular assumptions. Our souls are suspended in what we might call paradise until they will once again occupy a physical body – a transformed body that will have new properties, namely that it will be incorruptible. This reoccupation, if you will, occurs the instant heaven and earth combine. It happens, in other words, when Eden has been, in effect, reinstituted. Wright asserts that “[s]alvation ... is not ‘going to heaven’ but ‘being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth,’ which means, Wright continues that “[w]e are saved not as souls but as wholes.” It is, to put it another way, a multi-step process toward an unimaginably beautiful and blissful destination
Although I am a practicing Catholic, I will not here weigh in on purgatory. For Wright, his position is clear. “For millions of our theological and spiritual ancestors,” he writes, “death brought a pleasant surprise. They had been gearing themselves up for a long struggle ahead, only to find it was already over.” In either case, it is the desired step toward an eternity with the one true God. But above and beyond this debate is a grander and, I suppose, more reassuring reality. “What [we] do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, loving your neighbor as yourself – will last into God’s future.” Again, what we do will last, which means that the story of our lives does not end with our passing. Because of Christ’s work on the cross, we get to live, turn a new page, write another chapter. On and on. Forever and ever.
This is the reason to hope, which is another way of saying rise above the lies of the enemy that prompt us to fixate on the temporal and assume that’s all there is. Doing so is a recipe for despair, and we should avoid it at all costs. In the Lord, Wright reminds us, “[our] labour is not in vain,” but we must be in the Lord. We must have a relationship with Him that is not superficial, not one of convenience, not one hidden away from some groups and revealed for others: a hypocritical faith, indeed. Put simply, we need to be serious, honest, and open about our faith. If we want to be “bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ,” as Wright put it, we should want to get to know Jesus Christ in the here and now. Telling ourselves stories that do not reflect scripture does no good. In fact, it does the opposite. Being nice is important, but being nice without a relationship with Jesus Christ is futile. Even when we think we deserve it, there is only one way, the narrow way, to enter into the light.
