N.T. (Tom) Wright has announced his intention to retire from the see of Durham at the end of August this year.
In common with a number of previous bishops of Durham, he has sought to combine his scholarly work with his pastoral and other commitments. Now, at the age of 61, he wants to return to the world of scholarship, complete the various writing projects that are under way, and take a more active role in broacasting.…
Shame on me. The name of Tom Wright features prominently on this web site, and yet I missed, until very recently, the excellent biography that has been posted on alistair.adversaria. This tracks the development of Wright’s thought, and offers some insightful comments on his relationship with evangelicalism.
The ways in which Wright has deliberately set out to question and re-think his evangelical heritage is well set out. He himself is quoted as saying:-
…I continue to respect the Reformers, and men like Charles Simeon, of 200 years ago, John Stott, Jim Packer and Michael Green, at whose feet I was privileged to sit, and whose work in a variety of ways created space for me to do things differently.
Bishop Tom Wright opposes the idea of the government setting up an independent enquiry to look at assisted suicide. Speaking recently in the House of Lords, he said that
‘Parliament is there not to bend to every media-manipulated public whim, but to take the larger and longer view.’
It is often the case that ethics debates taking on a special meaning when individual cases are considered. Bishop Wright drew attention to
…‘The old lady who last summer told me several times that she just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up, but who eventually made a full recovery and celebrated her 63rd wedding anniversary last month and greeted her sixth greatgrandchild last week.
One of the more controversial aspects of the teaching of Bishop Tom Wright is his understanding of the Christian gospel, and of the task of proclaiming that gospel.
He notes that much ‘evangelism’ has consisted of
…‘taking the traditional framework of heaven-and-hell expectation and persuading people that it’s time they considered the ‘heaven’ option and grabbed it which they had the chance. What’s stopping them getting there is sin; the solution is provided in Jesus Christ; all they have to do is to accept it!’
Bishop Tom Wright is a firm and frequent critic (in Surprised by hope and other writings) of the idea that ‘salvation’ equates to ‘going to heaven when you die’.
What, then should we understand to be the meaning of ‘heaven’ in Scripture? Several answers may be given to this question:-
1. ‘Heaven’ can mean ‘sky’, or what we would understand as the rest of the cosmos apart from the earth, Gen 1:1.
2. ‘Heaven’ can mean the abode of God and of those closely associated with God. …
In 1 Corinthians 15:58 Paul writes,
Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
Tom Wright (Surprised by Hope, SPCK) places considerable emphasis on this verse, coming as it does after Paul’s great affirmation of physical resurrection. Although I do not think that Wright offers a novel interpretation of this verse, I do think that he draws out its implications more clearly and helpfully than most:-
…For Paul, the bodily resurrection does not leave us saying “so that’s all right; we shall go, at the last, to join Jesus in a non-bodily, Platonic heaven”…Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess.
Most of us (writes Tom Wright in Surprised by hope, 206-213) take ‘salvation’ to mean ‘going to heaven when you die’; implying that this present body and this present world will be left behind and the ‘soul’ will fly off to some disembodied existence.
But this view scarcely counts as ‘rescue from death’. Rather, it colludes with death by denying that God’s good creation really is good, and that he intends ‘to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last’.…
Some people ask (says Tom Wright in his Surprised by Hope, 201-206), ‘even if Jesus was raised from the dead, what difference does it make?’ Indeed, even Easter hymns can give an inadequate answer by obscuring the fact that Jesus’ resurrection guarantees something more than life in some kind of future ‘heaven’.
…But when the New Testament strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom.
We do not subscribe to the myth of progress – the idea, popular in earlier evolutionary thinking, that the world will get better and better. Nor do we believe, with Plato, that we are souls in transit, passing through this illusory world on our way to to something beyond space, time and matter.
The shape of things to come is determined, in biblical thinking, by the threefold story of creation, rebellion, and redemption. We can tell the story of Jesus as the moment all creation has been waiting for:-
Maria Shriver is an award-winning American journalist and author and she is the wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. A practising Roman Catholic, in 2007 she published a book for children called What’s Heaven?
In this book, children are informed that
…Heaven is somewhere you believe in…it’s a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there. At night you can sit next to the stars, which are the brightest of anywhere in the universe…If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven…when your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you up to Heaven to be with him…[and Grandma is] alive in me…Most important, she taught me to believe in myself…She’s in a safe place, with the stars, with God and the angels…she is watching over us from up there…
“I want you to know” [says the heroine to her great-Grandma] “that even though you are no longer here, your spirit will always be alive in me.”
