Book review - Surprised by Hope
Surprised by Hope by NT Wright. SPCK 2007
Guess Who's Not Going To Heaven?
We had it again last Sunday - 'We'll go-o-o, to a much better place'.
Yet another stirring song about the hope of getting away from it all. There's no future for this sad old world, is there? It's stuffed, you know. Never mind, our future's elsewhere. We're off to heaven, aren't we?
Well, no, if Wright's powerful unpacking of Scripture is to be the guide.
Heaven, Wright counters, is God's space. Earth is our space. Revelation speaks of an Earth made new, of the Holy City coming down out of heaven, of the dwelling of God with man, not the other way around.
In a provocative and challenging book, Tom Wright dismantles 'the tired old theologies of escapism and evacuation to help a whole generation of us more clearly grasp a Jesus revolution for her, now, today', as Rob Bell puts it.
Wright argues convincingly that there is widespread confusion about the Christian hope, both within the church and in the wider world.
Further, what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. The old tension between saving souls and healing bodies becomes meaningless, if in fact the promised future Kingdom is the renewed creation of what we now know as home.
Christian hymns and songs too frequently present a mixture of reincarnation, Buddhism and Platonism.
Consider the words of a much-loved carol, 'And fit us for heaven to live with thee there', or the last stanza of How Great Thou Art, words added to the original Swedish by the translator and which run, 'When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation, and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart'.
Bishop Tom suggests a better version would be, '...with shout of acclamation and heal this world...'
Of course, there are many hymns which get it right, such as God Is Working His Purpose Out, and For All The Saints. Read 'em and you will see what he means.
The wonderful, distinctive Christian hope, of course, is the resurrection of the body, as Lewis amplifies so well in his final chapter of Letters to Malcolm, perhaps the last thing he wrote.
Wright has concerns for the Prayers of Entrusting and Commending from the current Church of England funeral liturgies, prayers which he says are moving, humble and gentle but which so often fail to mention the distinctive Christian hope.
One which gets the thumbs up runs, 'Trusting in your faithfulness we commend N to your mercy as we await that great day when you raise us with him/her to life in triumph and we shall stand before you, with all your whole creation made new in him, in the glory of your heavenly kingdom'.
This book of some 300 pages is far from heavy going, but nevertheless builds on careful, scholarly analysis of Scripture.
The implications for a right theology of the Christian Hope are far-reaching, as his chapter headings show: Puzzled About Paradise?, The Strange Story of Easter, What the Whole World's Waiting For, Reshaping the Church for Mission and so forth.
Newsweek calls Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, 'the world's leading New Testament scholar' and this book certainly does not disappoint. I bought a copy online for around $20 including postage from the UK and had it in ten days. It took fewer to read!
Surprised by Hope, NT Wright. SPCK 2007
Reviewed by RA Morton