Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, The Resurrection, And The Mission Of The Church

Wright gives “five snapshots” from contemporary life that illustrate the “rich confusion of belief” about death, funerals, and the afterlife (30). In the book, Wright intends to examine two questions: “What is the ultimate Christian hope?” and “What hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?” (5). The two questions are ultimately related because Christianity teaches that God has entered human history in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and intends to create a “new heavens and new earth” (as prophesied in the book of Revelation) on the basis of the present earthly reality (5).

There are many beliefs about death and the afterlife in different world cultures. Wright identifies three main types seen in contemporary life: complete annihilation, reincarnation, and absorption into the wider world of nature. Orthodox Christian belief offers a different view, one with which most of the public is unfamiliar.

Wright critiques an excerpt of a sermon by Henry Scott Holland, often used in Anglican funerals, as misleading because it treats death as insignificant, whereas in reality, it is a tragic break from life. A sonnet by John Donne gets closer to the orthodox Christian view, treating death as “an enemy” yet “a beaten enemy.” Such a view, which Wright will advocate in the book, “sees life after death in two stages: first, a short sleep, then an eternal waking” (15).

Christian tradition has oscillated between regarding death as a “vile enemy” and a “welcome friend.” Both Christians and non-Christians tend to see the Christian view of the afterlife as consisting of “heaven” up above and “hell” down below—a view reinforced in many hymns and celebrations of Christian holidays. However, surprisingly, the Bible does not speak in such terms about the afterlife. In fact, the “kingdom of God” in the gospels refers not to a postmortem place but to the coming of “God’s sovereign rule.” In biblical books like Revelation, heaven refers not to a place we go to after we die but to “God’s dimension,” which God is gradually joining to the human, earthly dimension, thus reconciling the divine and human realms.

Wright stakes a major claim: The confusion and “vaguely held theories and opinions” about the afterlife have serious consequences for how we live our lives and how the church carries out its mission in the world (25)—and in particular for how we relate to evil and injustice in the world. The rest of the book will be structured in terms of a series of “key questions”: returning to scripture and the “forgotten riches of the Christian tradition” (28); considering the meaning of the concept of “soul” as denoting the core of the person, “not a disembodied entity” (28); and examining Jesus’ resurrection as the starting point for all thinking about the afterlife. In all, the book’s message will reflect the central part of the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven” (29).

Wright uses a famous debate at Cambridge in 1946 between two famous Viennese philosophers as an analog for interpreting the resurrection. Just as different eyewitnesses remember the events of the debate differently, so we ought to accept the resurrection as a definite historical event about which the gospels differ on particular details. However, unlike the Cambridge debate, the Easter event continues to be relevant and important to today’s society. Wright will attempt to get to the root of what happened at the first Easter by examining ancient beliefs about the afterlife.

Most ancient peoples (both pagans and Jews) believed in some sort of survival after death. Resurrection was always understood to involve the physical rehabilitation of the body. Pagans did not think that this was possible, and many would not have considered it desirable; Platonic philosophers believed that a happy afterlife would consist of the soul escaping the body and living a “glorious though disembodied future” (37). Jews, in general, believed that there would be a bodily resurrection for all God’s people at the end of time. However, the Sadducees (a priestly sect within Judaism) did not believe in a resurrection. Both Jews and pagans believed that immediately after death, a person entered a kind of spiritual existence, which was different from resurrection. Thus, according to Jewish belief, there was a “two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world” (941).

Jesus, in his teaching, reinforced the basic Jewish teaching about resurrection. When Jesus’ resurrection occurred, his followers understood that the end-of-time resurrection had happened early to Jesus. To them, this was a sign that Jesus was the Messiah and that God’s kingdom had begun to break into the world. Whereas the crucifixion had seemed to indicate Jesus’ defeat and contradicted the notion of him being the Messiah, the resurrection reversed this.

Although there is continuity between Jewish and early Christian ideas about resurrection, Christianity made seven “remarkable modifications.” There was a notable consensus about these beliefs in the first two centuries of Christianity. The changes were as follows: First, there was almost total unanimity in belief about the afterlife in early Christianity, in contrast to Judaism, where there were different schools of thought (e.g., the Sadducees vs. the Pharisees). This is significant in that people from various pagan and Jewish backgrounds, when they became Christian, all converged on a single belief about life after death. Second, whereas resurrection was a “peripheral topic” in first-century Judaism, in early Christianity, it moved to the center, becoming the cornerstone of the religion. Third, what resurrection actually entailed was left “quite vague” in Judaism. Christianity sharpened up the specific details of what the resurrected body would be like—namely, “incorruptible” and “transformed.” Fourth, in early Christianity, the resurrection as an event became split in two. Like Jews, Christians believed that God’s people would be resurrected at the end of time, but they added the belief that Jesus had been resurrected ahead of schedule as a sign that “God’s whole new world will be born” (45). Fifth, Christians believed that human beings had a role to play in “transforming the present” in light of the future resurrection (46). Sixth, resurrection took on a new metaphorical use in Christianity. In Judaism, resurrection had often functioned as a metaphor for the return of God’s people from exile. In Christianity, resurrection became a metaphor for baptism and for the new moral and ethical life in Christ—a metaphor for renewal in the present life. Seventh and last, the resurrection became associated with messiahship: Christians affirmed Jesus as the Messiah because of his resurrection.

In fact, it is impossible to account for the early Christians’ belief in Jesus as the Messiah without the resurrection. Thus, modern revisionist interpretations of the resurrection as merely a metaphor or a “spiritual event” do not hold up. How all these mutations took place so consistently demands “a historical explanation” centering on the gospel accounts of the first Easter Day.

Many pieces of evidence point to the idea that the Easter accounts in the gospels are very early in origin and that they are based on actual events. To support this view, Wright notes that the accounts give women a central role in a time and society in which women were not considered credible witnesses. They also do not incorporate scriptural references or theology (as found in St. Paul’s writings), suggesting that there had not yet been time to engage in such reflection and that St. Paul’s works had not yet been written. Finally, they do not refer to the “final resurrection of all God’s people” (57), as found in later writings, but instead concentrate exclusively on the resurrection of Jesus.

Wright stakes the claim that the Easter narratives “though lightly edited and written down later, are basically very, very early” (57). We can conclude that the resurrection event was not a subjective experience, nor a later invention, but something that actually happened because it was this event that led the disciples to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and start the Christian movement.

Having established the historicity of the resurrection, Wright devotes the second half of the chapter to explaining how the “stories and beliefs” about the resurrection developed. Wright’s answer is simple: The resurrection “actually happened” (63). This is, admittedly, a leap “into the unknown” because it contradicts what usually happens from the natural, scientific point of view. However, none of the alternative explanations work. All the evidence points toward the resurrection, even though it is what “we do not normally expect” (65). The resurrection event poses a challenge to “the larger worldview of both the historian and the scientist” (67).

While Jesus’ resurrection admittedly “burst[s] the boundaries of history,” it “also remains within them,” and it is this that makes it “so important, so disturbing, so life-and-death” (68). Wright makes a plea to “locate our study of history within a larger complex” of human realities (69). This is a viewpoint that questions the scientific-rationalist standard of thinking inherited from the Enlightenment, which sees miracles (like the resurrection) as impossible. Wright claims that we need to open our minds to “what […] might be possible in God’s world” (69), particularly the God of creation and the justice of which the Bible speaks.

This view of an expanded creation “transcends and includes what we call history and what we call science” (71), and it includes an active role for human beings as stewards of the new creation. This new way of seeing things creates the grounds for a new kind of faith (as illustrated by the apostle Thomas), a new kind of hope (as illustrated by the apostle Paul), and a new kind of love (as illustrated by the apostle Peter). Finally, the belief in resurrection is courageous and revolutionary because it disarms tyrants in this world of the one weapon that they think they have: the power to destroy life.