Steve, how is N.T. Wright’s "picturing people who reduce it [heaven] to merely saving souls for
the future while letting the world go to corruption" a straw man tactic? There ARE believers who believe in exactly this type of a reduced eschatology. Even popular conceptions of "heaven" is this very view of a truncated eschatology. If you talk to any run-of-the-mill classical dispensationalist about heaven, I’m pretty sure this is the same answer you will get. I don’t see this as straw man, but a real conception that people have about heaven.

I was at the actual event in which Wright spoke about his new book this past Monday in New York City, an event sponsored by Socrates in the City. In his lecture that night, Wright was surely reacting to such inadequate and incomplete view of heaven and was bringing it back to the notion of God’s "kingdom" that has already be inaugurated. He regards heaven as the already conceived reality which Christ has begun through his life, death, and resurrection. And it is because of Christ’s inauguration of the kingdom, that the church is able to stand in the future and look at the present with hope and proceed to live out the Gospel. This is what he’s arguing for.

Check out some pictures I took from the Wright lecture at Socrates in the City: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=34685&l=5c71e&id=722626820