Surprised by Hope

Rethinking heaven, the resurrection and the mission of the Church

Tom Wright

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281064779
• eBook ISBN: 9780281062584
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What do Christians hope for? To leave this wicked world and go to 'heaven'? For the 'kingdom of God' to grow gradually on earth? What do we mean by the 'resurrection of the body'? And how does all this affect the way we live in the here and now?Tom Wright addresses these questions in this lively and thoroughly biblical book. He describes the persistent confusion about 'the last things' in both Church and world. Then, having explained why Christians believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus himself, he explores the biblical hope for 'new heavens and new earth', and shows how the second coming of Jesus, and the eventual resurrection of the dead, belong within that larger picture.'Strips away popular sentimentality and medieval imagery, allowing the original biblical writers to speak to us afresh... It gives substance to our hope and deserves widespread and careful reading.'
Reform'Builds on C.S. Lewis' succinct defence of the faith and takes it to a new level.'
World Magazine'This book is Tom Wright at his finest.'
Rob Bell'Unmissable.'
Krish Kandiah

Part 1

SETTING THE SCENE

1

All dressed up and no place to go?

1. Introduction

Five snapshots set the scene for the two questions which this book addresses.

In autumn 1997, Britain was plunged into a week of national mourning for Princess Diana, reaching its climax in the extraordinary funeral service in Westminster Abbey. All over the country, and in many parts of the world, people brought flowers, teddy bears and other objects to churches, cathedrals and town halls, and queued for hours to write touching if sometimes tacky messages in books of condolence. Similar if somewhat smaller occasions of public grief took place following such incidents as the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 (when many football supporters were crushed to death) and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. They showed a rich confusion of belief, half-belief, sentiment and superstition about the fate of the dead. The reaction of the churches showed how far we had come from what might once have been traditional Christian teaching on the subject.

The second scene was farce, with a serious undertone. Early in 1999 I awoke one morning to hear on the radio that a public figure had been sacked for heretical statements about the afterlife. I listened eagerly. Was this, perhaps, a radical bishop or theologian, exposed at last? Back came the answer, incredible but true: no, it was a football coach. Glenn Hoddle, the manager of the England team, declared his belief in a particular version of reincarnation, according to which sins committed in one life are punished by disabilities in the next. Groups representing disabled people objected strongly, and Hoddle was dismissed. It was commented at the time, however, that reincarnation had become remarkably popular in our society; and that it would be very odd if Hindus (many of whom hold similar beliefs) were automatically banned from coaching a national sports team.

The third scene is not a single moment, but the snapshot will be familiar. Twenty or thirty people arrive in slow-moving cars at a shabby building on the edge of town. A tinny electronic organ plays supermarket music. A few words, the press of a button, a solemn look from the undertaker, and they file out again, go home for a cup of tea, and wonder what it was all about. Cremation, almost unknown in the United Kingdom a hundred years ago, is now the preference, actual or assumed, of the great majority. It both reflects and causes subtle but far-reaching shifts in attitudes to death and to whatever hope lies beyond.

I initially wrote those opening descriptions in early 2001. By the end of that year, of course, we had witnessed a fourth moment, too well known but also too horrible to describe or discuss in much detail. The events of September 11 of that year are etched in global memory; the thousands who died, and the tens of thousands who were bereaved, evoke our love and prayers. I shall not say much more about that day, but for many people it raised once more, very sharply, the questions which this book seeks to discuss – as did, in their different ways, the three massive so-called ‘natural disasters’ of 2004 and 2005: the Asian tsunami of Boxing Day 2004; the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast of America of August 2005, bringing long-lasting devastation to New Orleans in particular; and the horrifying earthquake in Pakistan and Kashmir in October of that same year.

The fifth scene is a graveyard of a different sort. If you go to the historic village of Easington in County Durham, and walk down the hill towards the sea, you come to the town called Easington Colliery. The town still bears that name, but there is no colliery there any more. Where the pit head once stood, with thousands of people at work and producing more coal, faster and more efficiently, than most other pits, there is smooth and level grass. Empty to the eye, but pregnant with bereavement. All around, despite the heroic efforts of local leaders, there are the signs of post-industrial blight, with all the human fallout of other people’s power-games. And that sight stands in my mind as a symbol, or rather a symbolic question. What hope is there for communities that have lost their way, their way of life, their coherence, their hope?¹

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 energizing basis for work in today’s world.

In this first chapter I want to set the scene and open up the questions by looking at the contemporary confusion in our world – the wider world, beyond the churches – about life after death. Then, in the second chapter, I shall look at the churches themselves, where there seems to me a worryingly similar uncertainty. This will highlight the key questions that have to be asked, and suggest a framework for how we go about answering them.

I have become convinced that most people, including most practising Christians, are muddled and misguided on this topic, and that this muddle produces quite serious mistakes in our thinking, our praying, our liturgies, our practice, and perhaps particularly our mission to the world. What’s more, as the examples at the start of this chapter indicate, the non-Christian world, not least within the contemporary West, is not just confused about what to believe on its own account; it is confused as to what Christians themselves are supposed to believe. Often people assume that Christians are simply committed to a belief in ‘life after death’ in the most general terms, and have no idea how the more specific notions of resurrection, judgment, the second coming of Jesus, and so on, fit together and make any sense. Let alone how they relate to the urgent concerns of today’s real world.

Nor is this a matter simply of sorting out what to believe about someone who has died, or about one’s own probable post-mortem destiny, important though both of those are. It’s a matter of thinking straight about God and his purposes for the cosmos, and about what God is doing right now, already, as part of those purposes. From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else – and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse.

So, without further delay, we plunge into the confusion on this topic that exists in the wider world, the world outside the church door.

2. Confusion about hope: the wider world

Beliefs about death and what lies beyond come in all shapes and sorts and sizes. Even a quick glance at the classic views of the major religious traditions gives the lie to the old idea that all religions are basically the same. There is a world of difference between the Muslim who believes that a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli soldiers goes straight to heaven, and the Hindu for whom the rigorous outworking of karma means that one must return in a different body to pursue the next stage of one’s destiny. There is a world of difference between the Orthodox Jew who believes that all the righteous will be raised to new individual bodily life in the resurrection, and the Buddhist who hopes after death to disappear like a drop in the ocean, losing one’s own identity in the great nameless and formless Beyond.² And there are of course major variations between different branches or schools of thought in these great religions.

So, too, there are wide varieties of beliefs about what the dead are up to right now. In many parts of Africa the ancestors still play a large role in communal and family life, and there are widespread and complex systems for seeking their help, or at least preventing them making mischief. Nor are these – as western secularists might arrogantly assume – confined to so-called ‘primitive’ peoples. The anthropologist Nigel Barley tells how he met a highly trained Japanese colleague who had worked near him in Chad. Barley had been fascinated by ‘the complicated form of ancestor-worship involving bones and the destruction of the skull and all sorts of exchanges between the dead and the living’. His Japanese friend had found all this quite dull. Barley comments:

He was, of course, a Buddhist who had a shrine to his departed parents in his living room, on which regular offerings were made . . . he had taken to Africa some bone from his dead father’s leg, carefully wrapped in white cloth, to ensure protection during his fieldwork. For me [Barley comments], ancestor worship was something to be described and analysed. For him, it would be the absence of such links between the living and the dead that would require special explanation.³

Coming closer to home, we have seen in our own day and culture a bewildering variety not only of stated beliefs, but of telltale practices associated with death and life afterwards. I suspect there was never a period when Christian orthodoxy on the subject was the belief of even the majority of people in Britain. Certainly, already by the time of the Victorians, there was a wide variety of belief, as people wrestled with questions of faith and doubt from several angles. The famous painting by Henry Alexander Bowler entitled The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live?, painted in 1855/56, sums up the problem, as a young woman leans on the tombstone of one John Faithful, which bears the text ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. On the neighbouring stone is the word RESURGAM – ‘I shall arise’ – which was inscribed on many tombs of the period. A horse chestnut sprouts from the tomb, and a butterfly, symbolizing the soul, sits on an exposed skull. The swirling questions and half-beliefs represented by this picture go with the similar set of questions in Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam. Tennyson himself, in the very last poem of his collected works, written in 1889 within three years of his death, sounds for a moment as though he is moving towards a Buddhist view of being absorbed like a drop in the ocean, but eventually comes round to a Christian note:

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.⁴

Contrast with this, however, the more robustly orthodox view of Rudyard Kipling, in a poem of 1892. How much he himself believed it, I don’t know, and of course the poem is more about art than about theories of the future life; but he certainly uses, as the frame for his ideas, the Christian belief that after a period of rest there will be a new life, a new embodiment:

When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,

When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,

We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it – l...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Setting the scene
• Part 2: God’s future plan
• Part 3: Hope in practice: resurrection and the mission of the church
• Tailpiece: two Easter sermons
• Notes
• Search items for biblical references
• Search items for names
• Search items for topics