Tom Wright for Everyone by Stephen Kuhrt

Author:Stephen Kuhrt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

Responding to ‘the hope of heaven’

All this, of course, means that a response is needed to those vast numbers of Christians previously receiving immense comfort from the belief that their loved ones who have died as Christian believers have now ‘made it’ by getting to heaven. This obviously requires sensitive handling. One means I have found helpful in doing this is by using the phrase, coined by Tom Wright himself, to describe the major focus of the New Testament hope being on ‘life after life after death’.3 This enables the major emphasis on ‘new heavens, new earth’ eschatology to be combined with the less central but nonetheless important biblical affirmation that those who have died as followers of Jesus have gone ‘to be with the Lord’. Since Jesus is in heaven, affirming that ‘the Christian departed’ have ‘gone to heaven’ can perhaps be justified. But the fact that the Bible avoids this language, and the danger of reinforcing this as the Christian hope, has led me to prefer to use the language of believers ‘going to be with Jesus’ ahead of their future resurrection. I suggest that Philippians 1 and Luke 23.43 both imply that this existence ‘with Jesus’ is something fully conscious. I am also happy to affirm, with Wisdom 3.1–4, that ‘the souls of the righteous are in God’s hand’, provided that ‘soul’ is understood to be referring to ‘that about us which continues in God’s care and presence’ rather than the Platonic idea of the disembodied soul as the essential and therefore only permanent part of someone’s being.4

While this still begs a number of questions that the New Testament doesn’t answer, I have found that this understanding of the future hope does work to resolve a number of greater problems that Christians have with the traditional understanding of ‘heaven’ as their final destination. One aspect of this, occasionally expressed by those braver than most, is that the whole idea of ‘heaven’ as a permanent dwelling place can sound rather boring. The final line of ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (‘all in white shall wait around’) shows that not all the blame for this can be placed on ancient paintings of angels sitting on clouds playing harps! Partly in response to this, a more recent tendency among younger evangelicals has been to present ‘heaven’ as a party, based upon those passages speaking of a future messianic banquet (Isaiah 25.6; Matthew 8.11; Luke 14.15). The weakness of this, however, was brought home to me some time ago through a comment from a young woman whose Christian father had died some years before. ‘I know I’m meant to see heaven as an endless party,’ she said, ‘but the problem is that I can’t imagine my dad enjoying that!’ Her remark was symptomatic of a struggle to see proper fullness and reality in the picture of the Christian hope that her evangelical tradition had given her.

Just as problematic is the implication that because heaven is ‘our real home’, Christians should not be too attached to life here on earth.

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