God’s Homecoming

Over Lent, I read the book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal – Biblical Theology from Genesis to Revelation on the New Creation by N. T. Wright. In this book, he talks about our future and God’s future. He explores how there was a shift in understanding of the original Biblical narrative because of the influence of Platonic thought. The Biblical theme of God making things right to come to dwell with humans was turned on its head to be a journey of humans towards the Beatific Vision of God to a non-earthly place.

The temple theme in the Bible is where heaven and earth meet. The temple went from Eden, to the tabernacle, to the temple, to Jesus, to the Jesus community (church) and will finally rest in the new creation of eternity.

The theme about a journey to heaven comes more from Plato, Dante and Bunyan than the Bible.

N. T. Wright describes the church as a “small working model of new creation”.

Here are some quotes from the book.

• In Surprised by Hope I explained how the early Christians drew on their scriptures to speak of their ultimate future hope, not in terms of “heaven and hell” but of new creation: a new heaven and a new earth, joined together into one. Within that new creation, God’s people are to be bodily raised from the dead to share in the freshly rejuvenated world. Many people have found this perspective revolutionary and liberating, as I know from letters, emails, phone calls, and even conversations in the street with strangers. But during the last decade or so I have become increasingly aware that even those who have grasped the principle of new creation still tend to think within the standard western categories of people “going up to be with God.” The whole Bible, however, thinks in terms of God coming to be with us. Coming to be at home.
• Most people today imagine that the point of Christianity is “to go to heaven when you die.” That’s what most believers believe. It’s what most unbelievers unbelieve. It’s certainly what journalists, broadcasters, and popular commentators think Christianity is supposed to be all about. They are all wrong. The point of Christianity is not that we should go to heaven. The point of Christianity is that heaven should come to us. “To earth,” in Jesus’s words. The story the early Christians told was not about how humans (or their souls) could, as it were, go upstairs into the presence of God. It was about how God had come downstairs to live with them—and would one day complete that operation, eventually suffusing all creation with his glorious presence. Thus, though people sometimes speak of those who have died as having “gone home” to be with God, from the early Christian point of view that is the wrong way around. The great hope is God’s own homecoming. That project, long promised in Israel’s scriptures, was launched with Jesus and with the holy spirit. Grasping this enables us to glimpse the true Christian hope and allow it to shape our mission and life. In much contemporary Christianity, this story has been all but forgotten. It is time to refresh our memories.
• When they spoke of salvation, they were not talking about people being saved from the present world. They were talking about the creator God’s plan of salvation for the present world—with themselves, as rescued and repurposed human beings, playing an important role in that project.
• But the main characteristic of Platonism all through, and particularly in its influence on developing Christian thought from the third century onward, is a dualism in which the world of space, time, and matter is seen as essentially secondary to the world of the unseen and atemporal realities. The former, the world of space, time, and matter, has to do only with “appearances,” which may be deceptive. The latter, the world of the unseen and atemporal realities, concerns ultimate reality, the object of real knowledge. Classic Platonism does not see the world of appearances as evil. That was an extreme view developed by, for instance, the second- and third-century Gnostics. Classic Platonism contends that the world we see and know in the present can be powerful and beautiful, but it is not the real thing, only secondary and transient.
• That going-to-heaven story is, of course, what many, perhaps most, modern western Christians understand to be the Christian position. At a popular level—but it is at the popular level where most people will meet it . . .
• From Genesis to Revelation, the biblical view of the world is bipartite: “heaven and earth.” . . . This phrase does not suggest that both spheres are part of the same space-time continuum, with “heaven” being simply a long way up in the sky. It assumes, on the contrary, that the two spheres were made to overlap and interlock. Rather, as we speak of a view being suddenly enhanced when the sun comes out from behind a cloud and all the shapes and colors come alive in a new way, so the space-time-matter world comes alive in a new way when we sense the presence of the Creator.
• Thus the popular view, that the letter to the Romans displays the going-to-heaven story, is not in the text. . . . It has to be read into the text from a quite different worldview. Ironically, this has often happened when the book is being expounded by people who claim to believe in “the authority of the Bible.” But if we really mean what we say about biblical authority it is incumbent on us, both with Romans and with the whole Bible, to ponder the stark mismatch between our easygoing (and probably platonic) assumptions and the text itself. In one sense, the present book is simply an appeal to let the Bible be the Bible.

As you know, N. T. Wright is one of my favorite New Testament scholars. This book is not at a popular level and also is not at an academic level. It is more at an “accessible scholarship” level. It took me a long time to finish the book.