Heaven-At-Death Refuted in Time Magazine
February 9th, 2008 by Sean
In a recent interview with Time Magazine, Bishop NT Wright made some very encouraging statements about the biblical destiny of Christians. The interview was titled, Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop (click here for the article). Below are a few quotes that I thought were extraordinary:
In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children’s book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What’s Heaven, which describes it as “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk… If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]… When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him.” That, says Wright is a good example of “what not to say.” The Biblical truth, he continues, “is very, very different.”
I’ve often heard people say, “I’m going to heaven soon, and I won’t need this stupid body there, thank goodness.’ That’s a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.
At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, “Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven.” It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.
It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.
It’s more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul’s letters we are told that God’s people will actually be running the new world on God’s behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it’s a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.
Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their “souls going to Heaven.” If people think “my physical body doesn’t matter very much,” then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn’t matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of “traditional” Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won’t be going up there to him, he’ll be coming down here.
Although I do disagree with Dr. Wright about the intermediate state (he believes in conscious “sleep”), the above comments are a huge step, a leap perhaps, in the right direction–away from the traditional, systemic errors which arose out of mixing Christian ideas with Greek philosophy and towards the simple, elegant Hebraic ideas contained within Scripture.
Sean,
If you like the article, you’re gonna love the book. I thought you might be interested with the chapter-by-chapter review that I’m in the midst of posting at my site. Scot McKnight is also doing one over at the Jesus Creed blog.
Grace and Peace,
Raffi Shahinian
After I read the article, the title of the your article implies something that isn’t in the original. I really don’t think that Bishop Wright would say that he is refuting that you go to Heaven when you die, nor would he correct someone who said so.
I have heard teachings where Bishop Wright has said (paraphrased): Yes you go to heaven immediately after you die, but thats not the point, thats not what Jesus, or the apostles were talking about, in fact they never bothered to mentioned it… The point is the new creation. If I remember correctly, he then quoted the rich man an lazarus parable as a proof text.
To my knowledge NT Wright does not believe that souls go to heaven at death. He believes that souls go to Sheol/Hades (i.e. the realm of the dead) to participate in an intermediate state. His belief about the intermediate state is that it is conscious though compared to being alive as we are now it is like sleep. I think this tension is too much to bear–it sounds like dreaming to me. Be that as it may, I don’t think I have misrepresented him (at least I hope not).
JP I have heard Wright in the past say exactly what you have just said. However, he seems to be changing with the times.
John O,
Thanks, I needed that to be confermed. I thought maybe he had some sort of position that somehow harmonizes those 2 views.
Sean,
I guess i was expecting a flat out statement like, “you don’t Go to Heaven when you die.” Somehow I still don’t think he would say that quite yet, though if he is changing with the times…
Do you have anymore information by Wright or someone else explaining this consiously sleeping intermediate post-death/pre resurection state?
At thist point I could see Wright answering the question “Do Christians go to Heaven when they die?” with something to the effect of “Yes, they do, but its probably not what your thinking…” I could be wrong… do I need to re-read the article?
Here’s something from a Wright article:
“…where you find a belief in resurrection you also find, unsurprisingly, a belief in some kind of intermediate state in between death and resurrection. Various ways of describing this were developed: the souls of the righteous, said Wisdom (3.1), were in God’s hand. Others spoke of a quasi-angelic intermediate existence, or of spirits that lived on prior to the resurrection. The patriarchs were ‘alive to God’. The Persian term ‘Paradise’ was employed, not necessarily for the final destination of resurrection, but, sometimes at least (e.g. 1 Enoch 37-70), for the peaceful garden where people rested before their new bodily life began… Those Jews who believed in resurrection developed, as we saw, ways of speaking about the interim state of those who had died, ways of holding on to the belief that the physically dead had not entirely ceased to exist, but that they were still ‘there’ to be raised again on the last day. The early Christians, seeking to say the same thing, used some of the same language but some different expressions as well. They spoke of people being ‘asleep in Christ’. Revelation speaks of the souls under the altar who wake up, ask what time it is, and are told to go back to sleep again. The penitent thief will be with Jesus in Paradise — presumably not a final destination, even if we take ‘today’ metaphorically. Paul speaks of his desire being to ‘depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better’. The closest the New Testament gets to speaking of the dead being in ‘heaven’, even as a temporary resting place, is when in Revelation the New Jerusalem, the bride of Christ, comes down to earth from heaven, where presumably she has been waiting, in order that the wedding can take place.” (http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Jesus_Resurrection.htm)
That meaning of paradise doesn’t make much sense in light of the context. The thief wants to be remembered when Jesus comes into his Kingdom. And all Jesus can say is “today you’re going to be dead” ???
But regardless, “that paradise” is certainly not to be confused with going to heaven.
Karen,
Thanks for that article, it helped.
JohnO and Sean,
Great points.
Hey, JP, just came across this article from some website that picked up on the Time interview. Here is a quote from it.
Here is a site I ran across that lists a lot of folks who believed in conditional immortality, etc. It includes quite a few people.
http://www.specialtyinterests.net/champions_of_conditional_immortality.html
Sean,
Thanks for posting the link! I found it intersting but like you I feel his take on there being an actual intermediate state is way to literal and is almost to the point of promoting actual dream-like semi-consciousness. I just don’t see that with the reality of Eccl. 9:5 (i.e. “the dead know nothing” ) and other like verses.
That said I did find the following very intriguing:
Along those lines I’ve often thought of the “spirit that returns to God who gave it”, that “nephesh” or breath of life that God breathed into Adam and carries on down to each one of us when sperm fertilizes egg is pure engergy from God - the “spark of life”. And in that breath/spark of life - that energy from God that returns to Him at our death is the hard-coded instructions of everything about us. Think of it like our brains as a computer hard drive and at death within that God given energy/breath of life, everything that makes us truly us, gets wirelessly transmitted to God’s central server/hard drive as a full backup of us. Everything we are, our memories, our personality, our genetic makeup - ALL of it is recorded & stored by God like we store bits of information in binary code as 1’s and 0’s. Then at the Resurrection of the Dead, when we are given a new body, that energy from God is transmitted from His master hard drive back to us to remake us as we were and restore actual life and everything we were as a person.
Which when you think of man’s technology and how rapidly it is exponetially expanding each year, is not hard to fathom just how easily and effortesly the Supreme God of the universe could do such a thing.
Polkinghorne’s comment not only has the benefit of being accessible to a modern audience, but is Scripturally based in that God promises to ‘remember’ the faithful.
It is analogous to the book of life, which is certainly the equivalent ‘Old Skool’ metaphor for the same concept, which God chose deliberately to express this idea for an earlier generation.
It also seems to me that Polkinghorne knows full well that man is utterly mortal (as a physicist he knows that everything he has learned about the universe confirms this), and I wonder if he has expressed his thoughts on this subject in a manner which would confirm that he rejects the immortality of man?
Ron,
Good thoughts here. I too am a computer guy and can relate to this analogy.
Brian,
This is an excellent resource. It is a bit confusing though because the list includes people who are against the sleep of death, like John Calvin (whose first book was arguing for the immortal soul) and Pope Leo X who denounced our belief as heresy.
Hi Ron S., Sean and all
even though we may be “computer guys”, we shouldn’t use analogies that don’t necessarily apply, no matter how good they look or sound
We may make up some interesting pictures .. BUT are they true? who says that the biblical expression “spirit returns to God” used by a Hebrew writer a ew thousand years ago has anything whatever to do with the picture painted above about spark of life, brain as a harddrive, etc …?? Perhaps the Hebrew writer had a much more simple thought in mind … similar to what is expressed in another OT passage about God gviing and God taking?
What is proposed here appears to be rather close to claiming that “dead” doesn’t really mean “dead”, but means “alive in some different state” … is that what you all are meaning to promote?
Cheers,
Wolfgang
Wolfgang,
I’m gonna disagree with you because I think that the analogies DO apply.
Yes we should always view Scripture taking into consideration who wrote it, when it was written, and who they were writing to. I often make this point against trinitarians all the time about the Hebrew writers of the NT using 1st century Hebrew meanings vs. the later Greek influenced interpretations that changed the original meaning of what was being communicated.
Keeping that in mind, I don’t think there is anything wrong with using a modern analogy as long as the original meaning remains the same. Now you and I may disagree about that meaning (especially where your preterist views may come into conflict). But using a present day analogy in itself shouldn’t be a problem. After all God in his ultimate knowledge of the universe knew full well and even planned on our capacity to create new tools and new technology throughout time. Therefore I don’t see why we can’t view how we use modern tools in order to possibly help us relate to Scriptural teachings from times long ago.
Not to mention that the concept of God’s breath bringing life to lifelessness and that God remembers us in order to resurrect us is something directly communicated in Scripture. Here again I don’t see any problem with using the modern analogy of data storage technology in order to offer up a current day appropriate description of how God accomplishes this. Of course in the end (as I think I mentioned somewhat above) even our advancements of today pale in comparison to the power of God. He doesn’t need servers or hard drives when his memory is perfect and limitless - and his power is absolute. The God that created the entire universe can certainly re-create us just as we were with just an instant thought. And any description or analogy of God working in human terms is just a anthropomorphic representation of Him.
As far as your last statement & question:
No that’s not what we are meaning at all. At least I know I would never openly try to promote anything of the sort. I fully see the dead as dead (non-existent) to any type of reality known to the deceased until the resurrection. And I while I can never speak for Sean, I don’t believe that is his intent either - especially after seeing everything he’s been publishing here on his site. IMO all that is being suggested in our comments is that God “remembers” us completely and therefore is able to bring us back to life at the resurrection just as we were when alive. Perhaps you’re getting us mixed-up with NT Wright’s apparent opinion that there is some kind of low-level intermediate state between death and resurrection. Though I really thought that both Sean’s and my first posts here in this thread (where we both noted that we disagree with Wright on that) would have eliminated any such confusion, I now hope that I’ve cleared things up somewhat.
Peace!
Ron
Hi Wolfgang,
>
What is proposed here appears to be rather close to claiming that “dead” doesn’t really mean “dead”, but means “alive in some different state” … is that what you all are meaning to promote?
>
No, quite the opposite. The idea being expressed here is that only the memory of ourselves remains. Not the person themselves, only the memory of who and what we were. That’s the imagery of Scripture itself, using the book of life.
I don’t see any significant difference between the image of a book as a means of recording information, and the image of a computer chip as a means of recording information.
Hi all
thanks for further clarifications …. as far as God remembering a person and even using modern analogies as long as the content is correct, I agree with your concepts and have no problems either
It just seemed that the “breath of life… carries on down to each one of us when sperm fertilizes egg is pure engergy from God - the “spark of life” type of comment in an earlier post was now pointing in a slightly different direction …
Cheers,
Wolfgang