I’m sorry if I’m banging on too much about Tom Wright at the moment – but I thought it worth drawing attention to an article in The Times today: Durham’s new Bishop abolishes Heaven and the soul. The bishopric of Durham has a longstanding association with theological controversy (most notoriously David Jenkins) but it makes a change for someone described as ‘the country’s leading evangelical theologian’ to put the cat among the traditionalist pigeons.
The article relates to a new book, due for publication in November, called For All the Saints, in which Wright argues that traditional Christianity has seriously misinterpreted New Testament teaching about what comes after death. He insists that we do not have an immortal soul and that there is no heaven, in the traditional sense, for the soul to go to when we die even if we had one. These are medieval developments with their roots in Platonism. ‘Immortality is a gift of God in Christ, not an innate human capacity.’ What Christians look forward to instead is bodily resurrection within God’s new creation after a period of ‘rest with Christ’.
So what do you think? Does emerging church believe in heaven?
Tom Wright on the soul
I would have thought most people who have read the Bible will not be surprised by what is said here. And in fact its a joy to see that the article seems to have been written sympathetically. After all Wright does not say we don’t have souls but rather our souls are not immortal which is from Greek Dualism and has more to do with Plato than Paul.
I think it is great we are having a debate that helps us focus on the real hope of the Christian faith that being a literal physical resurrection, together with the restoration of all things where heaven will be on earth as it was originally. Rather than harps and hymns for eternity. After all God’s end goal has not change even if it has been partially sidetracked by what happend in Gen 3.
Joy to read the site - sorry I am signed on as Anonymous names Dave Eadie. Grace and peace
dah! :)
Dave,
I couldn’t agree more! The doctrine of the bodily resurrection has ALWAYS been fundamental to Christian theology. Even the Greek Father’s who were indeed influenced by middle-platonism taught that! As far as I can tell, there really isn’t anything revolutionary here.
Loren Kerns. Grace and peace to you!
Resurrection
I think it is important to stress that Tom Wright is not speaking about any crudely physical realisation of resurrection, but a new state of being. His comments about the odd nature of the appearances, which he terms transphysical, are worth reading in this context.
abolishing heaven
“fine-tuning sloppy traditional beliefs”.
Hey, here’s the link where you can HEAR Tom Wright reply to the article.
Go to http://home.hiwaay.net/~kbush/wrightpage.html, find BBC RADIO INTERVIEW, click on it and enjoy the answer.
Tom Wright on the soul
I think Tom is correct. Popular theology seems to have carried the day about a Platonic soul and heaven with pearly gates and golden streets, reading Paul with Plantonic eyes and other NT authors with literal eyes. It’s time “popular theology” get beyond its own “folk theology.”
Pantheism discussion moved
Some comments were posted here positing a pantheist account of immortality. I took the liberty of moving them, and some follow-up comments, to a new thread in the discussion forum.
immortal soul
If we are made in the image of God then it would be more reasonable to suggest that the soul is immortal than not. God is only Spirit (until the incarnation) so it is likely to be in spirit that we have the divine image. In anycase, I don’t see any incompatability between immortal soul and bodily resurrection. One wonders if Tom Wright has bothered reading Aquinas.disclaimer:I haven’t read his book.
Immortal image?
It’s difficult to say exactly what is meant by creation in the image of God, but why should it include immortality and not omniscience, say, or some other divine attribute? The context rather suggests that humanity is like God to the extent that it has been given ‘dominion’ over the created order. But even if Adam and Eve were created immortal, the fall clearly put an end to whatever prospect of immortality they had (Gen.3:19).
Resurrection is part of, or provides the basis for, a new creation, but I think Wright would say that the Bible does not teach that at the resurrection an immortal soul, having survived the decay of the body, its return to dust, is reunited with a new body. With all due respect to Aquinas, it’s an entirely unnecessary hypothesis - we are simply ‘dead’ until we are raised again.
Having said that, there is a strand of Hellenistic Judaism that had a more dualistic conception of the relation of the soul to the body. Some would say that this shows up in Matt.10:28: ‘do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell (gehenna)’. But it’s interesting to note that Luke avoids the dualistic language: ‘do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell (gehenna)’ (Luke 12:5). This sort of statement also needs to be understood in relation to a particular set of historical circumstances.
I also see some ‘advantages’ in a monistic conception of what it means to be human for an emerging theology:
By the way, there is an overview of Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God here. It will save you reading the whole book! Maybe I should do a similar thing for Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. The third section (First century Judaism within the Greco-Roman world) has some relevance to this topic.
In God's image to what extent?
But it is not a valid argument that, if we are made in the image of the immortal God than humans must also have an immortal soul - are we also omnipotent or omniscient since we are made in the image of God? www.RadicalCongruency.com
Immortals
If we do not have immortal souls, then what did Christ mean when he said to the thief on the cross, “This day you will be with me in paradise?”
If the thief was going to die, only to be resurrected at the end of the world, was Christ only making false promises here?
Thus, I am fairly certain that we enter heaven soon after we die.
Paradise and the soul
That’s a reasonable argument and there may be other passages that point in a similar direction. Tom Wright has little to say on this verse (Lk.23:43) – he merely suggests in The Resurrection of the Son of God, 438, that “‘Paradise’ could well indicate a temporary resting place rather than a permanent destination.” It would be entirely in keeping with his reading of the Gospels, however, to point to the use of the word in the Septuagint version of Is.51:3:
The wider passage speaks of the salvation of Zion following divine judgment and resonates at a number of points with the crucifixion narrative, not least:
I would suggest that what Jesus means by this promise is that it is in this way that God will restore Israel – not through violence (the ‘criminal’ is not a petty thief but a revolutionary who sought the liberation of Israel?) but through the suffering of the servant of the Lord and through the repentance of Israel. The promise is a ‘cross-reference’ to the whole passage in Isaiah, just as the cry of dereliction in Matthew 27:46 (‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’) is an allusion to the whole of Psalm 22, which is ultimately an expression not of abandonment but of confidence in God who will deliver the one who is faithful to him.
‘Paradise’ is therefore not a place to which the soul goes at death but a metaphor for the salvation of Israel which is to be accomplished through Jesus’ death. The promise is an assurance to those who ‘pursue deliverance’ (Is.51:1) that the God who made Abraham many (50:2) will indeed comfort Zion and transform her wilderness into a garden like Eden. That fits Tom Wright’s argument very well; I also think it illustrates the difference between a traditional hermeneutic and Wright’s critical realism.
Paradise, not Souls
Three comments: 1) we must be wary of reading in a Dantean style idea of Paradise back into the text. 2) there is no mention of souls or immortality here. 3) what about the other thief? the context suggests he possibly was not going to paradise.
Paradise, not souls
Thanks for the succinct comments. Three responses:
1. ‘we must be wary of reading in a Dantean style idea of Paradise back into the text’: my argument is that we should read an Old Testament idea of paradise into the text. How does Dante come into it?
2. ‘there is no mention of souls or immortality here’: ‘here’ being where exactly? I suppose we should ask in what sense the ‘justified’ thief would be part of a restored Israel. Perhaps, if this is primarily a statement about the restoration of Israel by means of an allusion to Is.51:3, we should not press the individual significance of Jesus’ promise.
3. ‘what about the other thief?’: the other thief remains part of Israel under judgment; his death is the destruction of Israel in microcosm.
If this misses the point, you’ll have to be a bit clearer in your comments.
Immortals...
This is certainly a legitimate question. What did Christ mean when he spoke to the thief on the cross. One theory is that Christ was speaking what the man needed to hear. Since there is no immortal soul, the man would experience nothing more than a “sleep” and a waking on the day of resurrection. With that in mind, Jesus knew that as far as this man was concerned, he would awaken and find himself in paradise (or heaven). Notice that the only other references to paradise in the New Testament are once in Paul’s letter when he mentions having been caught up to the third paradise (though he himself was not sure whether it was an in or out of body experience). The other reference is in Revelation, traditionally thought to be a reference to the state of eternal life reserved for the saved. The idea is that Jesus, having offered forgiveness to the thief on the cross, knew that the man would “fall asleep,” awaken as if “in an instant,” and as far as he was concerned, he would be with Christ in Paradise on that very day. I’m not sure I’m super confortable with this explaination, but it’s the best one I’ve seen that supports the conditionalist/annihilationist view. What do you think?
Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection from the Dead?
Hi Everyone,
To give you guys some historical perspective. Tom Wright is arguing something very similiar to what Swiss exegete Oscar Cullmann did in the 1950s in a small book called ‘Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection from the Dead’.
It is good to see a mainstream Evangelical like Tom Wright arguing for something very similar to what Adventists have always taught. It is a view that is becoming increasingly common because it is a paradigm that makes more sense of the NT material than that of ‘immortality of the soul’. Conservative Evangelicals have usually dismissed Adventists as heretical here (e.g. Walter Martin), but they have never come to terms with Adventist exegesis. It is now far more sophiscated than in the past; and I suggest that despite all the proof-texting and fundamentalism there was a good exegetical intuition on the part of Adventists in the 19th century who questioned the immortality of the soul doctrine.
Grace & Peace PaulW
Just leave Hell alone.
More: http://www.iht.com/articles/127458.html