47 pages • 1 hour read
N. T. WrightSurprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, The Resurrection, And The Mission Of The Church
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Philosophical Context: Platonism and Life After Death
Plato’s (427-347 BCE) theories about death, the soul, and the afterlife have had a profound influence on Western thought and form an important philosophical background to Wright’s book. Plato’s views are expounded in his dialog Phaedo, in which his teacher Socrates is presented as arguing that death is “nothing other than the separation of the soul from the body” (Phaedo, 64c). For Plato, the soul is the spiritual part of a human being, and it is superior to the body, with which it exists in an uncomfortable relationship. The philosopher seeks wisdom as embodied in the ideal spiritual world of the Forms (a transcendent world to our own), but the body makes this search difficult with its desire for physical pleasures and its tendency toward sickness and other inconveniences. The body is, therefore, an obstacle to the soul. It follows that death should be welcomed as a fortunate event. It means that the soul (or at least the soul of the philosopher) can now fly away to a purely spiritual existence of contemplation and beatitude.
The quality of each soul’s afterlife will depend on the kind of life it leads. Thus, Plato’s view of the afterlife, as in various world religions, includes an element of reward and punishment. For Plato, the philosopher leads the highest and most virtuous kind of life, and their afterlife will consist of pure spiritual happiness and contemplation. Those who lead baser lives limited to the physical will accordingly be reincarnated as other bodies in the material world. These souls will have the chance to improve themselves over time and many lives. Thus, Plato’s system includes an element of reincarnation as well. The philosopher alone escapes this cycle. Those who are irremediably corrupt will experience neither of the above fates but will suffer an afterlife of punishment.
Platonism has both points of contact with and sharp differences from Jewish and early Christian beliefs. In the form of Gnosticism, Platonic views influenced both religions over time, and Wright emphasizes the incompatibility of some of the main Platonic ideas about the afterlife with those of Jewish and Christian revelation (see below). Wright contends that Platonic influence on the way that Christians conceive the afterlife—which he characterizes as a form of “escapism”—is an error in need of correction and that the New Testament view of life after death is immeasurably richer, more hopeful, and more productive. In his book, Wright aims to point toward such a correction.
Theological Context: Life After Death in Ancient Judaism
Christian teachings about the afterlife have their immediate basis in ancient Jewish belief, but Platonism was also there as a potential influence on both religions. According to Encylopedia.com, “The concept of an afterlife in Judaism took shape gradually and was rarely cast into dogmatic or systematic form” (“Afterlife: Jewish Concepts.” Encyclopedia.com). In Jesus’ day, most Jews (except for the Sadducees) believed that there would be a bodily resurrection for all God’s people at the end of time. Jews believed that immediately after death, the individual went to she’ol, a kind of shadowy underworld (similar to the Greek Hades); here, a person waited until eventually being sent either to Eden (paradise) or to Gehenna (hell).
The incompatibility of Platonic and ancient Jewish views of the afterlife is most marked in the attitudes of each toward physical matter, an issue that ties in directly with the belief in bodily resurrection. For Judaism, matter (including the human body) is part of God’s good creation, a belief that is missing from Platonism. For Plato, the soul merely “uses” the body during this life instead of being intimately united to it. The afterlife consists of the soul escaping the body and thus achieving freedom and happiness.
In Judaism, by contrast, “soul” (nefesh) refers to the entire person, not to some spiritual part of the person separate from the body. Since the body is part of God’s good creation, it will be rehabilitated at the end of time, although separated from the body at death. According to George Foot Moore, Jewish belief looked forward to “the reunion of soul and body to live again in the completeness of man’s nature” (“Afterlife: Jewish Concepts”). This issue is crucial for Wright, who insists that “we are saved not as souls, but as wholes” and that the goodness of creation implies the resurrection (199).
Starting in the Hellenistic Age, Platonic concepts started to influence Jewish thinkers, and the Greek idea of the “immortality of the soul” (as opposed to bodily resurrection) started to appear in Jewish thought (e.g., in the biblical book of Wisdom and in the writings of Philo), but these did not fundamentally alter Jewish belief.
In Wright’s analysis, what was so surprising about Jesus’ resurrection from the Jewish perspective was not the fact that a bodily resurrection occurred at all—this was already part of the belief of most Jews—but rather the fact that this event happened “early” to one particular individual. Jesus’ resurrection, for the early Christian believers, proved that he was God’s Messiah. The early Christian belief in resurrection was thus solidly built on a Jewish foundation, though Christianity developed this belief in new directions. By contrast, Wright argues that Platonic concepts of the afterlife are essentially foreign to both Jewish and Christian traditions.
