Surprised by Hope

N. T. Wright

• Editore: HarperOne
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061940590
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Christianity

In Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, top-selling author and Anglican bishop, N.T. Wright tackles the biblical question of what happens after we die and shows how most Christians get it wrong. We do not "go to" heaven; we are resurrected and heaven comes down to earth--a difference that makes all of the difference to how we live on earth. Following N.T. Wright's resonant exploration of a life of faith in Simply Christian, the award-winning author whom Newsweek calls "the world's leading New Testament scholar" takes on one of life's most controversial topics, a matter of life, death, spirituality, and survival for everyone living in the world today.

PART 1

SETTING THE SCENE

1. ALL DRESSED UP AND NO PLACE TO GO?

INTRODUCTION

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

In autumn 1997 much of the world was plunged into a week of national mourning for Princess Diana, reaching its climax in the extraordinary funeral service in Westminster Abbey. People brought flowers, teddy bears, and other objects to churches, cathedrals, and town halls and stood in line 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 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 soccer coach. Glen 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 Western world 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 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 North 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, England, and walk down the hill toward the sea, you come to the town called Easington Colliery. The town still bears that name, but there is no colliery there anymore. Where the pit head once stood, with thousands of people working to produce more coal faster and more efficiently than at 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 postindustrial 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, every bit as relevant to similar communities in America and elsewhere in the world as they are to my home territory. 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 that have often been dealt with entirely separately but that, 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 that 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 am convinced that most people, including most practicing 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 confused about what to believe on its own account, and it is confused too about what Christians 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 postmortem 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 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.

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 from making mischief. Nor are these beliefs—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 also of telltale practices associated with death and life afterward. 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. This variety of belief toward the end of the nineteenth century was closely reflected, as we shall see, in the hymns and prayers of the church.

Moving forward toward our own time, the First World War produced not only a great deal of sudden death but also much reflection on its meaning. Some historians have suggested that belief in hell, already under attack from theologians in the nineteenth century, was one of the major casualties of the Great War. There had been so much hell on earth that people couldn’t believe that God would create such a place hereafter as well. So much death affected so many at that time, and again less than a generation later in World War II, that my own reading of our twentieth-century British attitudes to death is that there was simply too much to cope with. I grew up in a culture of near silence about death; children in the 1950s were insulated from it. I didn’t attend a funeral until I was nearly twenty. This may have been, I suspect, a reaction against perceived melodramatic Victorian deathbed and funeral practices. It may also have been a strategy whereby adults might protect themselves from their own enormous and still-buried grief, which could all too clearly be reflected in and brought to the surface by the innocent reactions of a child.

But if death, and life beyond, was the great unmentionable in the 1950s, it certainly is not today. Films, plays, and novels explore it from all kinds of angles. Films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Perchance to Dream reflect the interest, even the fascination, of a new generation with the question they had not asked and to which they knew no satisfying answers. The darker end of the market wallows in death, not only in screened violence but also in snuff movies, where death becomes the ultimate thrill. The nihilism to which secularism has given birth leaves many with no reason for living, and death is once again in the cultural air.

The most brilliant play I saw when we lived in London was the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Wit by Margaret Edson, a schoolteacher from Atlanta, Georgia.⁴ The heroine, Vivian Bearing, is a renowned specialist in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, and the entire play takes place in the cancer ward, where she is herself dying, reflecting as she does so on Donne’s great sonnet “Death Be Not Proud,” to which I shall presently return. The play was more successful in New York than in London; perhaps Britain is not yet as ready for a full exploration of midlife death as are our American cousins. But the questions are around us all the time, and people are increasingly curious about possible answers.

Where does all this leave us? What do people believe in when they talk about life after death?

VARIETIES OF BELIEF

The main beliefs that emerge in the present climate seem to me of three types, none of which corresponds to Christian orthodoxy. There are still attempts at restating a more traditional view; I think, for instance, of William Golding’s dark but stunning Pincher Martin. But in general the mood is that traditional beliefs, both in judgment and hell and in resurrection, are actually offensive to modern sensibilities.⁵

First, some believe in complete annihilation; that is at least clean and tidy, however unsatisfying it may be as an account of human destiny. This, presumably, is what lies underneath Dylan Thomas’s angry outburst at the death of his father:

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.⁶

But not many can sustain complete denial of any future life. Look at the religion section of the average bookshop, and you will find that more and more people today seem to believe in some form of reincarnation. This is not confined to practicing Hindus and half converts like Glen Hoddle. In the gruesome but fascinating novel by Will Self, How the Dead Live, his central character, a grumpy...