Rethinking Life After Death (NT Wright)

[Music] Welcome to Inner Compass. I'm Karen Sa. What do Christians believe about life after death? If you're picturing puffy clouds, robes, and harps for me, and fiery lakes of torture for the bad guys, you may be due for a theological tuneup.

Fortunately, we have an expert on hand, a world-renowned scholar and Anglican bishop who spent a lifetime studying New Testament scripture. And whether or not you're a believer, you may be interested in hearing his take on what the Bible really says about heaven, hell, and life after life after death. Join us on Inner Compass from the campus of Calvin College. This is Inner Compass, exploring how people use faith and ethics to guide them through critical issues of today.

[Music] My guest today is NT Wright, Anglican Bishop, professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the one Newsweek called the world's leading New Testament scholar. Wright has written over 50 books on understanding the scriptures, including the one we'll focus on today, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. Welcome, Tom.

Thank you. Good to be here. The Christian church has put a lot of emphasis on Christmas in the last century or so. But the much more central holiday is Easter. That's that's the center of human time according to medieval theology.

Yes. And that that has to be right. And if you read the New Testament, if you take the Christmas stories out, wonderful though they are, you lose a couple of chapters of Matthew and a couple of chapters of Luke and that's it. Um, nothing else really in the New Testament hinges on that. Paul mentions the birth of Jesus in one line in Galatians. That's it. Imagine taking Easter out and there just isn't a story. Um, all you have is another sad attempt at a first century Jewish revolution with a very interesting character in the middle. But without Easter, it doesn't mean any of the things that we say it means. And it's the resurrection of Christ's body and later, and we'll talk about this later in the conversation, uh, the resurrection of our bodies that's central to Christian thought.

Yeah. What does it mean to say that that Jesus conquered death in that resurrection? People get very muddled about this because in the western world we have often imagined that resurrection is just a fancy way of saying go to heaven when you die. And so that when people talk about our resurrection they muddle that up with the idea of what happens immediately after death. In the first century Jewish world and all the early Christians were of course first century Jews. Uh resurrection had a very clear meaning. It meant that after you die, there is a period of being dead where your body has died and is corrupting and then God gives you a new or renewed body. And resurrection is therefore not life after death. It's the next stage beyond that which I have called, some people find this confusing, I find it very clear, life after life after death. and and that I think we need to reinhabit because it's it's very strange to many people, even devout Christians who say they believe in the resurrection of the body but haven't actually thought through what it's all about. So that when the early Christians said Jesus was raised from the dead, they didn't mean his body lies a moldering in the grave and his soul goes marching on or something. That really wasn't what they were saying. They were talking about him being bodily alive after a period of being dead. Therefore, resurrection is not the same thing as simply dying and going somewhere else. It is actually the overcoming the conquest of death. Death is the denial of the goodness of God's created order. Resurrection is the reaffirmation of the goodness of God's created order.

Okay. And and when Jesus is resurrected, he doesn't appear to them as a ghost, though that's what they're afraid of initially. Yeah. And they knew all about ghosts and spirits and so on. There's plenty of kind of ghost story stuff in the first century. And also they knew interestingly which contemporary research goes into as well the way in which after somebody you love has died some people sometimes have a very vivid awareness of them as a visible presence in the room with them or speaking to them or whatever then they disappear again and some people have said ah that's what obviously happened at Easter but the thing is they knew about that as well and if there hadn't been an empty tomb as well they would have probably said that's what it was but then the physical stuff about eating and drinking and and inviting Thomas to touch him and so on. Um, it's very strange. It's very mysterious. They the way they tell the stories is as though to say we know this is like weird. We didn't expect this to happen. This is not just oh yeah sure resurrection fine. This is very very very strange because Jesus has gone into previously uncharted territory. It he hasn't just come back into the present life so he has to die again. It isn't reincarnation in other words. And he's different. They don't recognize him. The difference is fascinating and it goes with this sense that Paul says that the Messiah being raised from the dead will never die again. Death doesn't have any power over him anymore. He's gone into and this again to our western minds is very puzzling, a physical immortality. We think of immortality as the immortal soul, but this is a bodily immortality. And that body is just a bit different. And so, yeah, they don't recognize him. They're puzzled. One of my favorite lines in John's gospel is where John says, "None of them dared ask him, 'Who are you?' Because they knew it was the Lord." You know, this is the guy they've been with for three years, day and night. You know, you don't say, "Who are you?" But they they wanted to say, and yet they knew. And that sort of knowing and not knowing is very typical of the resurrection.

And as you say, and as many Christians sort of mistake, that's not just the resurrection of Jesus's body, but it's a promise that our bodies too will be resurrected. And again, it's very interesting. I was in Italy a year or two ago and was in one or two old churches where they've got these fresco uh of the last things. And at some point in the earlier middle ages, they were still doing paintings of like Ezekiel 37, bodies coming up out of the ground and g getting fleshed and and breath and so on. And then at a certain point and you reach it by the time you get Michelangelo with the Sistine Chapel. Here is Christ in majesty and this lot are going to heaven and that lot are going to hell. How do you fit resurrection into that? And so the great classic view which has dominated western Christianity ever since of heaven and hell really doesn't make it easy for us to understand what for the New Testament is absolutely central. Namely, God will remake the whole creation and within that of course we will be raised from the dead because this will be a physical world, a more than physical world in which we will then share.

So, the Bible does talk about heaven and hell, and uh you've said that our our images of that have gotten a little skewed. Um and and we'll talk about that. When when did that start to happen? Is it is it the the medievals who got it wrong? Was it later? One of the interesting things about this is that the idea, the loose idea of heaven and hell is actually a much older ancient pagan idea. The Jews, the ancient Jews, the Israelites who wrote the Old Testament were not particularly interested in what we call heaven and hell. But there were plenty of people in the Greek and the Roman world who were interested. And indeed the fear of hell was one of the things that drove for instance the epicuran poet Lucriccius in the first century BC to say actually it's just like John Lenon imagine there's no heaven you know no hell beneath us. Lucriccius was there before. Um I think Lenon thought he just invented that but no. Um so that I think what happened in in the early and then high middle ages was Christians were were kind of putting together what the Bible was saying with what the folk culture of the whole western world sort of dimly believed. And sadly it's the folk culture that's taken over. And many people in our culture think that that's Christianity because when the Bible talks about heaven, it usually doesn't talk about it as the ultimate place where God's people go when they die. You've got the dying thief on the cross. Jesus says, "Today you will be with me in paradise" in Luke 23. Um, but of course, we know because we know the whole story. that may be today, but paradise is only the temporary resting place before then Jesus is raised from the dead. And you've talked about heaven as a sort of wayside inn uh or or or storage unit, which is not quite as nice an image, but but um please talk about that because I think that's the sort of that's that was for me the surprising part of the book is to imagine heaven as only temporary.

Yes. Well, he heaven in that sense is only temporary. And that the bit you just quoted is John 14 where Jesus says in my father's house are many and the King James version says mansions or rooms whatever but the Greek is moni and a monet in Greek is not a place you go to live forever and ever. It is a wayside inn. I don't like the idea of a storage like the storage shed. All right. I'm not sure where that came from. You just made that up. I made that. Um it's a lovely wayside inn. It's a beautiful place. And uh Paul says in Philippians 1, "My desire is to depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better." In other words, this is not a period when we're waiting to be with Jesus. We will be with him during that period. He will be with us. It's very mysterious. We don't have good language for this. I've often said all our language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a fog. And the signposts are true signposts, but they don't give us a photographic reproduction of what we'll find when we get there. And the great imagery in the book of revelation is not about people dying and going to heaven. It's about the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth so that the dwelling of God is with humans. And that is the fulfillment of the aim of Genesis 1 and two in the first place. You know the idea is God made a world which is heaven and earth together. And that world is as it were a temple. That's where God wants to live. But he puts the creatures who bear his image into that temple. That's what temples have is an image of the god and his desire is that he will be there and his imagebearers will be there and that they will be together and all part of the same reality. That's a much richer and more interesting picture actually than most of the common western pictures about people just sitting on a cloud listening to some somebody playing harp. Um you know there was there was a a wonderful cartoon of some guy sitting there on a cloud looking bored and saying gee I wish I bought a magazine. Right. Right.

Uh the images of of hell are a lot richer. Uh I know and and u Milton in in Paradise Lost uh goes into a lot more detail about hell. Um it's fun to think about as long as you're not planning to go there. But we do have sort of vivid images, some of us, of the fiery lake and and so forth. Um and yet as I look at mentions of hell in the Bible, there aren't very many. Why have we fixated on those those ideas? And again I think we've done that because um preachers have plugged into that deep reservoir of ancient basically ancient pagan thought. Um and then they have taken the imagery from say the book of revelation and they've treated it as though this was uh a representation of something that was concretely the case. And of course the book of revelation is full of you know here is um here's the lion of Judah but it turns out to be a lamb and the lamb is standing as if it had been slaughtered. Have you ever seen a killed lamb standing up? I mean, you know, the whole thing right from the beginning is full of images which are all signposts there. This is how music works. This is part of our trouble here, to be honest, is that since the Enlightenment, Western culture has been so leftbrain dominated, that we've forgotten about music, art, imagery, etc. But that's the stuff the right brain does, which is supposed to give us the larger framework within which the details make sense. We've gone for the detail. Oh, well, it says there's going to be a lake of fire, right? There will be a lake of fire. You know, somebody once on a phonian program said to me, "Do you believe there'll be worms in hell?" In my Bible, it says there'll be worms in hell. Yes. Um uh where do you even start?

But how do we know when to read metaphorically? You've said, and I agree, that we have to take the resurrection of the body literally. That can't be a metaphor. John Updike, you mentioned this in your book, his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, says, "If this didn't really happen like this, then Christianity falls apart." Exactly. But how do how do I know that I need to read that literally but that I should look at images of hell as figurative?

Yes. Yes. Um there's a problem even with the language because the language about literal and metaphorical those words are words about the way that words work. If we want to talk about the actual realities, we ought to talk about concrete and abstract. That things are either concrete in the sense of of of actually there and solid or they're abstract in which case they're ideas. Plato's theory of forms that phrase refers literally to the abstract theory do you see which is itself about abstractions but this show will run and run. Um but so so the the point then is take a book like Daniel here we have a rich uh book of Jewish apocalyptic and its heart is chapter 7 which has four monsters coming up out of the sea looking like different you know one's like a bear or a lion or whatever it is and nobody in their right mind then or subsequ quently imagines that Daniel is saying that one day something concretely like that will appear crawling up from the sea to attack God's people or whatever. However, when he says that there are four of them and then he explains something about that, we think actually he intends us to to to read these as four great kingdoms and he presumably knows which these four kingdoms are and there's debate about that. So when we read a text like that we have to use our brains our minds to think of course this is a wonderful rich metaphor but there is a concrete reality to which it points.

So when we have theologies that fixate uh dispensationalism fixates on a particular image I think really and uh the left behind books the famous left behind books uh sort of fixate on an idea of the rapture and you're suggesting that that's maybe a failure to look at at the bigger picture and context of what's being said. The rapture theory simply is based on uh an overliteral reading of 1 Thessalonians 4 and actually only of a couple of verses in there, verse 17 following. Um and it's interesting because dispensationalism comes up particularly in the 19th century at precisely the time when with post-enlightenment rationalism people have forgotten about how metaphor works. And so for all sorts of interesting socioultural reasons in my country and then in yours um people say ah here we are um this will fit into this particular and these are the verses that say that that God will come and take us up into the clouds and that's right we'll be caught up in the clouds Jesus will come now we'll go up and meet him and then as far as I understand the theory the idea is that we then go off somewhere and when I wrote some years ago an article explaining that isn't what first Thessalonians is all about and the the magazine that printed it got lots of angry letters, including one which said, "How does Mr. Wright think he'll get to heaven if he doesn't get raptured?" And I thought, "Uh, excuse me. In this wonderful, sophisticated culture of yours, there are people who think that heaven is a few miles up in the sky and that the way to get there is for Jesus to snatch you up bodily. And I think there are sadly people who really do think that."

Well, and let's land on that. You suggest uh that heaven is a different dimension. Heaven. This is the great thing about heaven which we've all missed is that heaven is God's dimension of present reality. And that heaven and earth are not millions of miles apart. That is epicuranism and that is endemic as well in modern culture. Um that the world just goes on under its own steam. God or the gods are somewhere else entirely and that it's a long journey to get from A to B. In the Bible, heaven and earth kind of intermingle and their intermingling has a very particular focus in the ancient scriptures. It's the temple and then the Torah that when you're in the temple or when you're reading or hearing or studying Torah, God and humans are somehow getting it together and that's very scary and actually a bit dangerous which is why the temple is also the place of sacrifice. This is when you're doing this you're taking your life in your hands. Of course you are. But uh so you it's not a great long journey to get from A to B. And then in the New Testament, Jesus and the spirit together do what temple and Torah did in ancient Israelite culture. They are the place where and the means by which heaven and earth get together. Together uh the Celtic thin places that we talk about. I mean, yeah, there's lots of Christian cultures, the Greek Orthodox and so on. the way they do their liturgy, heaven and earth meeting with this thin screen with the iconicist and so on and then the gospel and the sacrament coming from heaven to earth and you know and catching us up in it.

Uh c can my grandmother in heaven see me? Does she know what I'm doing? That that's that's an interesting and good question. I lost my father just under a year ago and and he and I were really quite close and first major bereiement I've had actually in all my adult life extraordinarily. And I have asked myself that does dad know what I'm doing now? I do not have an answer for that. I don't think the Christian tradition actually gives us an answer for that. Um I think uh my dad who was a devout um very in a very quiet way, a very devout Christian, I think he is just enjoying the peaceful presence of Jesus. And I don't think that some of the messy stuff that I and the rest of the family are getting up to is really bothering him. I think he knows that Jesus is on top of all of that. who goes to be with God. The images of judgment in the New Testament are very sharp and clear. And though as I say the the descriptions have to be taken as vivid metaphorical pictures, there is I believe a reality to which they correspond, which is that if somebody, and I'm just tracking here with what Paul says in Romans 2, if somebody persistently says to God, I don't want you. I don't want to reflect your love in the world. I don't want to reflect your wise stewardship over the world. Um, I want to do my own thing. I want to embrace uh death and I want to use death for my own purposes, etc. Which is what classically tyrants do. It's what classically um people who make a lot of money and don't care who they trample on in the way do. It's what people who mess with other people's lives and also that's what a lot of people do. And sadly, it's what in a measure all of us do. But then we we turn from it and we turn to the gospel. we turn to the love of God. Um, so if you go on saying no to God, what you are doing is basically dehumanizing yourself. You are saying, "I didn't actually want to be human. I want to be something else because it's more fun. It's more powerful. It's because you're defining human as bearing the image of God as refcting." The basic biblical definition of being human is is uh being made in God's image. But that is not merely to reflect God back to God. It's to reflect God out into the world. and to reflect the praises of creation to God. Um, this is what it means in uh uh Exodus 19 and the book of Revelation where we are a royal priesthood or kings and priests or kings and queens and priests that the royal bit is our vocation to run God's world on his behalf in his way. The priestly bit is to sum up the praises of creation. And if a human being just throughout their life just goes on saying no I'm not going to do that. I don't want to do that. um in you know they won't conceptualize it like that but if that's what they do then they are saying uh I don't want to be a human being anymore and I actually believe and it's it's a terrifying thing to believe but I believe that that is a decision which God in his justice and mercy endorses God is not going to force them to to to be something that they are choosing not to be. That's that's very scary. So this isn't a traditional view of hell, but nor is it a conditionalism which says they just cease to exist. I think they cease to exist as humans. They they become something we can only call an exhuman. I perhaps I should say this. Um I wonder why American culture is so fixated on this. This is the most rich, welloff, powerful, elite culture the world has ever seen. Why is it that so many people in this culture, which it this isn't so in my culture, um really want there to be a hell, you know? Um well, and I wonder sometimes if it's if it's a fear if if uh for some of us it's guilt. It's it's the fear that we'll land there and so we obsess about it and for others it's the hope that somehow injustice will be corrected by seeing those people suffer.

That's yes and that is of course a picture which does come through throughout scripture. There's a sense the world is out of joint but we believe in the creator God who will put it back into joint again and that is a cause for enormous celebration. We should launch the judgment day. Judgment is a good thing. Judgment is a good thing. Judgment is a positive thing. Psalms 96 and 98. The trees of the field, the rivers and the floods will celebrate because Yahweh is coming to judge the world to sort it. You imagine ancient Israel, you live in a little village. All sorts of nonsense goes on. People steal, people are mean, whatever. One day the judge comes around on his circuit and sits there, tries the cases, and there's a sigh of relief goes through the whole village. Things get sorted out, put back right again. That's now imagine that cosmically.

Well, I want all those people judged. But I I don't I don't want him to judge me for the bad things I did. That's the scary part. It is a scary part because Romans 2, Romans 14, 2 Corinthians 5, Paul says quite clearly, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ so that we will each receive the things done in the body. And that's where Paul's view of salvation is very strong on the Holy Spirit that the Holy Spirit transforms those who are already justified by faith. So that in fact the tenor of their life there will still be that moment 1 Corinthians 3 when the day will come with fire and the fire will test the work that we've done. Indeed some Roman Catholic theologians now say that that's actually what purgatory is all about. That fiery moment when everything that we've done which is not of God and not kingdom building um is just going to be burnt up and they will say that's that's in a flash. it isn't sort of years and years that you can quantify or get time off for good behavior or whatever. Um, very interesting though that that that bit of 1 Corinthians 3 is really very important in that whole sequence.

You you mentioned earlier the idea of life after life after death after uh the rest of our souls uh when the judgment day comes, our bodies will be resurrected and uh and then we'll have work to do. And you say that heaven and earth will come together and it'll be here. Well, here I'm not sure what here means in that sense, but yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, the the the three big New Testament passages on this. Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 21 and 22, each of them is telling a story pictorially. Romans 8 has this image, very violent image of giving birth. Creation is in labor pains waiting for the new world to be born. Um 1 Corinthians has this image of a battle. Jesus has won the initial victory and finally he will put all his enemies under including death itself. Um and that must mean bodily resurrection because you know some people say oh there are some people who saw death as resurrection. No resurrection is not a fancy way of talking about what happens at death. It's the overthrow of death. Then revelation is the great marriage. The the heaven and earth coming together. Um, and you know back in Genesis 1, heaven, earth, the sea, the dry land, this, the that that, this, that, the male and female, it's all part of the way God's creation works. The the the complimentary parts which come together. Revelation makes that the image of heaven and earth, the bride of Christ finally marrying. So within that new world, um the idea that it's just lying around doing nothing, enjoying God, God is the creator for goodness sake, and God has made us to be creators. That's part of being image bearers. And the work we do now is work toward that work as you were working for the Lord. Um and everything we do now counts toward that. And so you talk about the hope-shaped mission of the church in a world that believes in this life after life after death.

Yes. Exactly. Uh the the image that I've used often because of course when I was a bishop I used to work often in Darham Cathedral. Great medieval building. Here's the stonemason's yard and the stonemason in the middle ages is probably illiterate and the foreman would just say to him, "I want you to carve this bit of stone and like thus and so he doesn't know how it's going to fit. But one day he will look at the great west front or whatever and there will be his stone part of this much much larger thing which the architect has built. And so let's be quite clear. We do not build the kingdom of God by our own efforts. We build for the kingdom. God will build the kingdom. But when he does that, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:58, great verse, "Get on with your work because what you do in the Lord is not in vain. It's not wasted."

That's great. In 25 minutes, we've just touched the tip of the iceberg of what you cover so much more eloquently in this book. Thank you very much. My guest today has been NT Wright, Anglican Bishop, professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and author of Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I'm Karen Sappi. Thank you for watching Inner Compass.

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