heaven, hell and everything in between

The New Testament and the People of God

Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfill the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.

- N.T. Wright, Interview with TIME Magazine (7 Feb 08)

Jesus and the Victory of God

But the story of the Bible, which is the story that I am telling you, is not - as many of you may have been brought up imagining - is not a story simply about random individual men and women, and whether they behave or misbehave, and whether or not they go to heaven or hell at the end. That is our Western reshaping of the story of the Bible, our fitting of it into different categories.

The story the Bible itself actually tells is the story of the creator God and His world, of the plan for humans within that world to manage creation and then to help in the task of putting it right.

- N.T. Wright, Reconstructing Hope (Harvard Graduate School Christian Fellowship Series, 18 Nov 08)

The Resurrection of the Son of God

This book addresses two questions which have often been dealt with entirely separately but which, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?

And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see 'Christian hope' in terms of 'going to heaven', of a 'salvation' which is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern.

But if the 'Christian hope' is for God's new creation, for 'new heavens and new earth' - and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth - then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is also answering the other. I find that to many - not least many Christians - all this comes as a surprise: both that the Christian hope is surprisingly different from what they had assumed, and that this same hope offers a coherent and energising basis for work in today's world.

- N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope