Surprised by Hope

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+---
+title: Surprised By Hope
+description: I've been working on my resurrection doctrine. Here's where I've got to.
+pubDate: 2025-05-02
+---
+
+A couple of months ago, I was chatting to my friend Neil on the way home from
+church, and in that conversation, I confessed to him that I had no idea what
+happens to people after they die.
+
+This might come as a surprise to some people who know me. Lots of people have
+solid ideas about what happens to people after they die. For different people,
+those ideas are very different. Here in Scotland, many people believe that
+death is a final end. Many more believe that death marks a physical, and
+perhaps also a spiritual, reunion with the rest of the universe, as the matter
+of your body begins to be slowly digested and recycled: hence why ever more
+people are opting to be cremated rather than buried in one piece. Other
+minorities believe in an immortal soul that goes to some other place - be it
+heaven, hell, purgatory, nirvana or reincarnation. I belong to the Christian
+community, which is supposed to have clear answers on these questions passed
+down from ancient times, and people who know me know that I think hard about
+doctrines. So it may be a surprise that amongst all the convictions which
+people have all around me, and amongst all my own convictions on other topics,
+I hadn't the faintest clue what happens to people after they die.
+
+If you are surprised, let me surprise you some more: I am of no fixed opinion
+on a whole range of really important philosophical and theological topics,
+from the existence of the soul to the purpose of sex, from the nature of the
+sacraments to the metaphysics of the mind. But late last year, I set myself
+some New Year's resolutions to address some of these questions. Not, by any
+means, to decide once and for all the end of the matter: just to form a well
+informed opinion. Sometimes staying quiet isn't good enough: I'm aiming to
+rectify my silence on these topics, because I think these topics are too
+important to ignore.
+
+And one of the issues I picked out was this very issue: what happens to people
+after they die? To that end, Neil recommended me a book by the conservative
+Anglican theologian, Tom Wright, called _Surprised By Hope_, published in 2007,
+at which point I was just learning to spell.
+
+As a result of this book, I feel I understand what the Christian orthodoxy is,
+and feel able to treat that view as my working assumption.
+
+Wright defends traditional Christian orthodoxy. He claims that his view is
+orthodox, and I'm roundly convinced that it is. When I wrote down in bullet
+points what his view amounted to, I found that I had more or less re-written
+half the Nicene Creed.
+
+- Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
+- On the third day, he rose from the dead.
+- He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
+- He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
+- His kingdom will have no end.
+- We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
+
+Amen. That's pretty much it. All that I need to stress, to avoid under-stating
+Wright's view, is that he specifically thinks that physical creation,
+including our bodies, will be transformed into a new kind of physicality,
+including new kinds of physical bodies for you and me, and that the 'world to
+come' means that heaven and earth - which he regards as God's physical space
+and our physical space - will be united.
+
+He contrasts this orthodox view with several views common today amongst
+Christians, some of which have even been muddled up with the traditional orthodoxy:
+
+- 'Jesus was raised to new life, spiritually, like a ghost.'
+- 'Jesus literally ascended into the sky, as if he had an invisible jetpack:
+  and that's where he is now.'
+- 'The Christian hope is that we will go to be united with God in heaven after
+  we die.'
+- 'The Christian hope is that we will be snatched up to heaven at the rapture
+  and taken to a resurrection life there.'
+- 'The Christian hope is that we will experience God's eternal life temporarily
+  before we die.'
+- 'Jesus won't really judge anyone, because he loves everyone, and because he's
+  meek and lowly, not judgy.'
+- 'The world will be redeemed through the work of the Church.'
+- 'Only God can ever make a difference to the sinful state of the world, so the
+  only works we should care about now are "saving souls".'
+
+I am happy to admit that I have often been guilty of most of these heresies. The
+only ones I've never been tempted by are the 'rapture' view, and the thing
+about the invisible jetpack.
+
+Wright has not definitively put any of these ideas to rest for me. _Surprised By Hope_
+is just not that kind of book. It's not a treatise. It's actually quite light
+on substantial argument in favour of Wright's position. Wright's main
+achievement for me, isn't to convince me that he's right, but that his position
+is a good starting point, a good place from which I should need to be convinced.
+
+He does this chiefly by showing that his view is the consensus view of the New
+Testament. (He claims to be showing it is the consensus view of 'the early
+Church', but he never presents much evidence outside the New Testament, so I'm
+being charitable by restricting his claim to the New Testament authors.) Say
+what you like about Scriptural authority; if Mark, Matthew, Luke, John and
+Paul all were convinced something was apostolic teaching, you'd better well
+take it seriously.
+
+If you want convincing, take a look for yourself. Some of the key New
+Testament texts are John 5; Acts 17:30-32, 24:14-16; 1 Cor 15, 16:22; 2 Cor 4-5;
+Rom 6, 8; Col 3:1-4; Eph 1:10; 1 Thess 4:14-18 and of course Rev 21-22.
+
+You can also try convincing yourself that this is coherent with the Old
+Testament hope, by looking at Isa 11, Dan 7, Ps 2, and having another
+look at the assumptions behind Paul's behaviour in Acts 24:14-16.
+
+The only significant problem texts I've found for Wright's view are 2 Cor 4-5
+and Rev 21-22. In 2 Cor 4-5, Paul seems to plainly assert that we will have to
+leave the body in order to face the judgement seat of Christ, and which makes
+no apology for the assertion that, even though Christ has reconciled us to Go
+, we will still have to face judgement for our deeds - which seems immediately
+to justify the supposedly un-Biblical doctrine of purgatory. If you assume
+that Paul's writings express a completely consistent view, however, you will
+have routes out; in particular, you could look at the language of Rom 6 and 8.
+Large chunks of Paul's letter to the Romans also suggest, if taken out of
+context, that we will have to leave our bodies behind, and that even those
+reconciled through Christ will face judgement for their deeds - except that
+key verses contradict both of those views. Clearly, that's not what Paul meant
+in Romans; so, you might argue, it's not what he meant in 2 Cor either:
+provided you assume that Paul's writings present a consistent view. (If Paul
+changed his mind, no explanation is necessary why Rom and 2 Cor seem to be
+inconsistent: they could actually be inconsistent in that case.)
+
+Meanwhile, in Rev 21-22, John has a vision of a 'new heaven and a new earth,
+for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away'. This directly
+contradicts Wright's emphatic insistence that God's new creation will be
+continuous with the first. For Wright, this isn't an academic detail, it's
+needed in order to give us a motive to care for the world we've currently got.
+Without continuity, he fears we'd be right to join those who are content with
+trashing the natural environment because the whole thing's going to end up in
+fire and brimstone anyway. Yet this piece of Revelation seems to permit
+exactly that.
+
+If you were to defend Wright against Revelation, you might point out that
+Revelation is a literal description of a vision John had, and is therefore not
+in every detail an accurate picture of the future, but a metaphor, an image of
+the future. (Fine, but if the wholesale replacement of heaven and earth is a
+metaphor, what is it a metaphor for? If the literal future is continuity, why
+not describe a vision of continuity?) And you may also assume that the entire
+Bible is consistent on the matter of God's ultimate future, and on that
+assumption, bring your analysis of the rest of the New Testament to bear.
+
+Whatever you do with the problem texts, it seems clear to me that the
+overwhelming weight of Biblical evidence favours the traditional orthodox
+position over any of the alternatives. Given that, I'm happy to take it as a
+starting point as I continue to think about what happens to people after they die.
+
+So, I may go back to Neil now, and say - maybe not quite yet 'I have an opinio
+' - but at least 'I know what my working assumptions are.' I know what is the
+orthodox Christian view: that is, the consensus view of the relevant experts.
+The consensus view of relevant experts is generally a good place to start.
+
+I still have plenty of concerns, though. Here are my top three quandaries on
+this topic now.
+
+Firstly, it would be rather unsettling if the orthodox Christian vision for Go
+'s ultimate future popped entirely into existence after the Ascension. The
+apostles say that their teaching was given to them by the Holy Spirit - but
+are we going to trust our entire doctrine on the future to what a small number
+of men claim was told to them by an invisible being behind closed doors? If
+the view of the New Testament authors is trustworthy, then it at the very
+least needs to cohere very well with the Old Testament. The New Testament hope
+should be woven deep into the Old Testament promises. I find Genesis, Daniel,
+Isaiah and the Psalms promising, but I've only gotten skin-deep into comparing
+these texts to the New Testament: I'd like to go both deeper into these texts,
+and broader across the Old Testament.
+
+Secondly, I want to hear the opposition in their own words. Wright very openly
+admits that his view is currently a minority opinion even within Christianity,
+despite being Christian orthodoxy. Given that is the case, it's reasonable to
+expect the opposition to have some good arguments on their side. Wright has
+not presented any strong arguments from opposing views, which makes me suspect
+not that there are no good arguments, but that he has omitted to cover them in
+his short and accessible book. And if there really are no strong arguments
+against the traditional view, then we should expect powerful explanations as
+to why so few people accept what apparently they should.
+
+Thirdly, I have residual concerns from the metaphysics of mind. I recall from
+my undergraduate days that continuity is a major concern amongst the relevant
+experts. I think a minority of them even claim that the person who goes to
+sleep and the person who wakes up again are completely distinct people who
+just so happen to time-share the same body. If continuity is a major problem,
+then it is a major problem for resurrection doctrine, too, which even in the
+New Testament is compared to a kind of sleep, admitting that there is some
+kind of discontinuity between the old body and the resurrection body. Add to
+this the easily observable fact that many Christian bodies have rotted and are
+no longer suitable for re-animation: their new bodies will have to be
+physically discontinuous as well as mentally discontinuous with their old
+bodies. If I will be given a new body, is it metaphysically plausible that the
+person who inhabits that body will be the same 'me' that inhabits this body, now?
+
+Much love all. As always, answers on a postcard please.