“As genuine human beings, from Genesis 1 onward, we are given the mandate of looking after creation, of bringing order to God’s world, of establishing and maintaining communities. To suppose that we are saved, as it were, for our own private benefit, for the restoration of our own relationship with God (vital though that is!), and for our eventual homecoming and peace in heaven (misleading though that is!) is like a boy being given a baseball bat as a present and insisting that since it belongs to him, he must always and only play with it in private. But of course you can only do what you’re meant to do with a baseball bat when you’re playing with other people. And salvation only does what it’s meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.”
N. T. Wright (Surprised by Hope pg. 199-200)
NB. Wright is challenging the common misperception that our goal is to spend eternity floating around as some kind of disembodied spirits. Wright likes to remind people that the Bible tells us that what matters is the resurrection from the dead and the Life After Life After Death in the New Heaven and New Earth..and how we can live here and now in anticipation of that reality.
For reflections on Resurrection, Heaven, and what it means for life here and now please check the following:
Click HERE for a sermon by John Piper based on 1 Corinthians 15:50-58 entitled What Happens When You Die? The Dead Will Be Raised Imperishable.
Click HERE for a sermon by John Piper based on Romans 8:18-25 entitled The Triumph of the Gospel in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
Click HERE and HERE for recent interviews with Wright on the subject of Resurrection, Heaven, and social action in Christianity Today Magazine.
