That’s an excellent question—and it highlights one of the things I enjoy about NT Wright: he takes us back to the biblical text, and tries to show us what it does say, and what it doesn’t say.

While Andrew and Tom (Wright) differ from traditional preterists in that they still see a big something (namely, the final resurrection) as still ‘to come’, that means that the biblical text tells us very little about it (since the texts traditionally taken to point us to this event may have had something more local in mind).  The resurrection and the full renewal of all Creation remains as a future hope, but we can’t make decisive pronouncements about what it’ll look like (contra ‘Left Behind’)—though it must of course be understood as the fulfillment of the story up to now, so it does have a general shape.

So to answer your question, I’m not sure what Wright means.  It seems to me he’s just highlighting an open-ended piece of the text which traditional interpretations have tended to gloss over (to the best of my knowledge).  We don’t have it all figured out.  We know that God is good, but we also know that humans are sometimes (frequently?) stupid enough to resist him; but that even then, God doesn’t give up (I personally think something like what’s been called ‘annihilationism’ best fits with the data, but I don’t think it’s an open and shut case). 

Brian McLaren does a good job of exploring these themes in his "The Last Word and the Word After That" (you should read it if you haven’t).

Hope that helps.

 Cheers,

 -Daniel-