Apparently N. T. Wright has made some provocative comments about heaven. He doesn’t think Christians will spend eternity there. He has this “radical” notion that instead, a Christian’s eternal home will be in resurrected bodies on a recreated heaven/earth.
Radical? What the good bishop outlines has been my understanding for years. And years. How many Christians don’t believe it???
See the YouTube interview (where the above article came from).
HT: Denny Burk.
(The Internet Monk has a couple of posts about how heaven has been presented in his own life called, “Too Much Heaven? and Too Much Heaven? Part 2: Heaven and Earth. The guy is a great writer!)
I think there’s been a wide variety of discussion on ‘heaven’ or the ‘afterlife’ in terms of BOTH heaven and hell for a long time within Christendom. My personal exposure has been mostly dominated by evangelical interpretations (that proably most other evangs(or postevangs) in NZ/ Aus are familiar with).
It’s refreshing to know that senior people in mainline churches such as Wright are prepared to revisit these notions and explore them in more detail than simply reproducing sermons intersped with imagery from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
I guess my disbelief stems from my understanding of heaven and the new creation becoming just part of my worldview. In reality, I do know people with a very basic heaven/hell dichotomy – I used to be one – but it’s so out of my frame of reference nowadays that to have anyone suggest it seems out of left field.
Having said that, I think there is more to the Left Behind eschatology than Wright allowed for in the article/interview, but I still think it’s wrong regardless.