Life after life after death

Wright presents an idea which so many people ascribe to today when it comes to heaven- that when we die we go straight to our final destination with Jesus and everything’s just great. He goes to great lengths throughout the book to dispel this- frequently talking of how our ‘final destination’ is actually life after life after death. (He would also probably have problems with the semantics of ‘final destination’)

‘When Jesus tells the brigand that he will join him in paradise that very day, paradise clearly cannot be their ultimate destination, as Luke’s next chapter makes clear. Paradise is, rather, the blissful garden where God’s people rest prior to the resurrection. When Jesus declares that there are many dwelling places in his father’s house, the word for dwelling place is mno, which denotes a temporary lodging…in terms of the discussion in the previous chapter, the early Christians hold firmly to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world’

‘My proposition is that the traditional picture of people going to either heaven or hell as a one-stage postmortem journey (with or without the option of some kind of purgatory or continuing journey as an intermediate stage) represents a serious distortion and diminution of the Christian hope’

‘Resurrection itself then appears as what the word always meant, whether (like the ancient pagans) people disbelieved it or whether (like many ancient Jews) they affirmed it. It wasn’t a way of talking about life after death. It was a way of talking about a new bodily life after whatever state of existence one might enter immediately upon death. It was, in other words, life after life after death’