In Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, N. T. Wright challenges us to rethink our notions of heaven and the implications of the doctrine of heaven for the entire Christian faith.
In Chapter Five Wright asks what God’s purpose for creation is and how the resurrection fits into that purpose. First, he lays out two popular options for answer the question about purpose.
Option 1 is called “Evolutionary Optimism.” EO argues that the world is getting better and better. It is the myth of progress perpetuated especially by politicians and secular commentators. Rooted in the Renaissance, EO argues that the human project will continue to grow and develop, producing unlimited human improvement and will march toward a utopia marked by prosperity. EO, however, cannot adequately deal with the reality and problem of evil for three reasons: 1) “it can’t stop it: if evolution gave us Hiroshima and the Gulag, it can’t be all good.”; 2) even if evolution led to utopia, it would be a utopia built on the suffering of millions; 3) it underestimates the power of evil.
Option 2 is called “Souls In Transit.” SIT, borne from the Platonic rejection of matter, suggests the world is getting worse and worse and we need to eventually escape from it. It argues that we were made for something quite different, “a world not of space, time, and matter, a world of pure spiritual existence where we shall happily have got rid of the shackles of mortality once and for all.”
Wright shows that most Western Christians, in fact, believe a “soft” version of SIT–we are “just passing through” this world and on our way to a better place. The world is “at best irrelevant, at worst a dark, evil, gloomy place, and we immortal souls, who existed originally in a different sphere, are looking forward to returning to it as soon as we’re allowed to.” This, however, is contrary to biblical teaching.
