Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Ten

1.   I love this chapter.  Here, Wright addresses straightforward questions with straightforward answers…at least as much as we can expect.  Right out of the gate, Wright addresses a host of misconceptions involving being “citizens of heaven,” the possessing of new bodies at the resurrection, the timing of the resurrection, as well as other biblical quotes and phrases that are commonly misinterpreted to refer to heaven as our immediate and final destination.

Wright sums up his introduction this way:  “Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death.”

“God’s future inheritance, the incorruptible new world and the new bodies that are to inhabit that world, are already kept safe, waiting for us, not so that we can go to heaven and put them on there but so that they can be brought to birth in this world or rather in the new heavens and new earth, the renewed world of which I spoke earlier.”

How do these initial discussions provide the foundation of our Easter hope as Christians?  How do they further define God’s plan for the redemption and salvation of all creation…including us?

2.  Wright notes, “All discussions of the future resurrection must sooner or later do business with Paul and particularly with his two letters to Corinth.”  “What Paul is asking us to imagine is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more firmed up, more bodily, than our present body as our present body is more substantial, more touchable, than a disembodied spirit.”

“We sometimes speak of someone who’s been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one—or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.”

Pause and imagine this new life, with remarkable new bodies.  What do you imagine such life to entail?

3.  “There were of course all kinds of debates and further discussions about the bodily resurrection in the second century and beyond. What is remarkable is that apart from the small corpus of Gnostic and semi-Gnostic writings, the early church fathers at least as far as Origen insisted on this doctrine, though the pressures on them to abandon it must have been very great. Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian—all of them stress bodily resurrection.”

Why is this ancient collective witnessing to a bodily resurrection crucial to our present dialogue?

4.  Wright concludes by addressing these “nut & bolts” questions:

- Who will be raised from the dead?

- Where will the resurrection take place?

- What precisely will the resurrection body be?

- Why will we be given new bodies?

- When will the resurrection happen?

- How will it happen?

Briefly review and discuss each of Wright’s responses, along with your own reactions.