N.T. Wright – Have We Gotten Heaven All Wrong?

Last updated on: May 17, 2012 at 10:06 am by Zack Hunt

N.T. Wright – Have We Gotten Heaven All Wrong? 2012-05-17T10:06:36-06:00 Zack Hunt

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I love N.T. Wright.

Then again, who doesn’t?

Hating N.T. Wright is like hating puppies, a rainbow, or cookies.

If you don’t like the guy, then there’s probably something wrong with you, not him.

Anyway, enough of the N.T. Wright lovefest. Here’s a great interview with him from Religion News Service about his view of heaven and how most of us don’t really understand what heaven is all about.

N.T. Wright asks: Have we gotten heaven all wrong?

John Murawski

(RNS) The oft-cliched Christian notion of heaven — a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels — has remained a fixture of the faith for centuries. Even as arguments will go on as to who will or won’t be “saved,” surveys show that a vast majority Americans believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place.

But scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

he most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist N.T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. Wright has explored Christian misconceptions about heaven in previous books, but now devotes an entire volume, “How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels,” to this trendy subject.

Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.

“This is a very current issue — that what the church, or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

Still, the appearance of a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that putting-the-heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond the academy. Wright and Morse say they have both made presentations on heaven research at local churches and have been surprised by the public interest and acceptance.

“An awful lot of ordinary church-going Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this,” Wright said.

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