Heaven ON EARTH, escaping from evil, left behind and a whole lot of other nonsense

Another key to Wright’s thoughts is found in response to the once again, all too frequent thinking that the world is evil and one day we will simply escape it. This is one of those ideas which for years has rubbed me the wrong way, often leaving me frustrated, as I wasn’t sure why I thought this beyond the obvious objection of people becoming lazy and treating the world as if it wasn’t a gift from God and as if one of the first things god asked us wasn’t to look after it all:

‘The early Christians did not believe in progress. They did not think the world was getting better and better under its own steam- or even under the steady influence of God. They know God had to do something fresh to put it to rights.

But neither did they believe that the world was getting worse and worse and that their task was to escape it altogether. They were not dualists.

Since most people who think about these things today tend toward one or other of those two points of view, it comes as something as a surprise to discover that the early Christians held quite a different view. They believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter. This is such a surprising belief, and so little reflected on even in Christian circles, still less outside the church,that we must set it out step by step and show how the different early writers developed different images that together add up to a stunning picture of a future for which, so they insisted, the whole world was waiting on tiptoe.’

‘The world is created good but incomplete. One day, when all forces of rebellion have been defeated and the creation responds freely and gladly to the love of its Creator, God will fill it with himself so that it will both remain an independent being, other than God, and also be flooded with Gods own life. This is part of the paradox of love, in which love freely given creates a context for love to be freely returned, and so on in a cycle where complete freedom and complete union do not cancel each other out but rather celebrate each other and make one another whole’

‘At no point in the gospels of Acts does anyone say anything remotely like “Jesus has gone into heaven, so let’s be sure we can follow him.” They say, rather, Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete“’

‘The second coming of Jesus Christ has become the favourite topic of a large swath of North American Christianity, particularly but not exclusively in the fundamentalist and dispensationalist segment. Growing out of some millennium movements of the 19th century, particularly those associated with J.N darby and the Plymouth Brethren, a belief has arisen, and taken hold of millions of minds and hearts, that we are living in the end times, in which all the great prophecies are to be fulfilled at last. Central to these prophecies, it is believed, is the promise that Jesus will return in person, snatching the true believers away from this wicked world to be with him and then, after an interval of ungodliness, returning to reign over the world forever. The attempt to correlate these prophecies with the geopolitical events of the 1960s and 1970s, which echoed a height in Hal Lindseay’s bestselling book, The Late Great Planet Earth, has somewhat palled, but its place has been taken by the fictional scenarios offered by a series of books …called Left Behind…

So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians. More of that anon. For many millions of believing Christians in today’s world, the second coming is part of a scenario in which the present world is doomed to destruction while the chosen few are snatched up to heaven