N.T. Wright and Heaven">N.T. Wright and Heaven
N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, has given an interview about heaven to Time Magazine. You can read the interview here.
Reading Tom Wright is like watching Tony Romo with Jessica Simpson in the stands - there are all these flashes of brilliance, but then from time to time you find yourself asking, “What did he do that for?”
Wright gets it right when it comes to our resurrected bodies; at the end of the day (church age) we will have glorified bodies like that of the Lord Jesus Christ, the firstfruits of all creation. He also gets it right in saying that Jesus Christ is coming back to earth (and soon). But he runs out of bounds when he talks about the period between death and resurrection of the dead. Wright describes it this way:
We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep.
I’ve read these two sentences at least twenty thirty times and still cannot make heads or tails of what he means (as a lawyer you’d think that I could easily decipher it). How is one conscious and “asleep,” in God’s presence of all things, at the same time?
The quick answer-response is found in Luke 16 (which Wright believes is just a parable). In the account of the rich man, we see that the body is buried, but the spirit/soul of that man was conscious in Hades. Similarly, Lazarus, the beggar, was conscious in Abraham’s bosom. When the Christian dies, his body is buried, but his spirit/soul go to heaven to await the Second Coming where, like Wright describes, our bodies will be resurrected in a glorified state. In heaven, the Christian’s spiritual/soul is very much like his natural body (see Paul’s “I knew a man in Christ, whether in the body or out of the body I do not know”).
Wright also lobs a high-flyer with his talk about Paradise:
There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so “paradise” cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state… .
I’ve addressed Luke 23.43 in my essay, Trouble in Paradise, which, ironically, meshes nicely with Wright’s statements about the new heaven and new earth, but cuts against his idea of just what Paradise is all about.
Maybe one of these days I can cheer Tom on the way I did Eli Manning and the Giants.