So What?

To me, this is what distinguishes Wright’s book with others like it. It is one thing to disagree with something. It is another thing to articulate why you disagree (although sometimes discussing this is not worth the hassle...). It is, additionally, an entirely other (and much more admirable) thing to then articulate what you believe instead. Wright does all three with an eloquence, love, respect and authority that unfortunately are not often found in discussions on these topics.


Perhaps most importantly, the book does not end there. He beings the book to a wonderfully relevant conclusion by asking 'so what?'.


‘We have now reached the point where we must ask: So what? Is all this talk about God’s ultimate future, about ‘life after life after death,’ simply a matter of tidying up our beliefs about what will happen in the very end, or does it have any practical consequences here and now?’

‘When the NT strikes the great Easter bell, the main resonances it sets up are not simply about ourselves and about whatever future world God is ultimately going to make, when heaven and earth are joined together and renewed at last from top to bottom. Precisely because the resurrection has happened as an event within our own world, its implications and effects are to be felt within our own world, here and now.’



‘The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future. And what he was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way of the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose- and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project’


‘The promise of new creation…is not and cannot be simply about straightening out ideas about life after death. It is about the mission of the church…it’s not falling back into the tired old split-level world where some people believe in evangelism in terms of saving souls for a timeless eternity and other people believe in mission in terms of working for justice, peace and hope in the present world. That great divide has nothing to do with Jesus and the NT and everything to do with the silent enslavement of many Christians (both conservative and radical) to the Platonic ideology of the Enlightenment’


‘What you do for the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are- strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself- accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nature, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make…


I have no idea precisely what this will mean in practice. I am putting up a signpost, not offering a photograph of what we will find once we get to where the signpost is pointing’

NB- anyone who has just read the above quote and finishes frustrated at the apparent lack of a photograph needs their head seen to and a large dose of mystery.

‘But if God really does intend to redeem rather than reject his created world of space, time, and matter, we are faced with the question: what might it look like to celebrate that redemption, that healing and transformation, in the present, and thereby appropriately to anticipate God’s final intention?’


‘We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility, as many Christians try to do, not least within some parts of fundamentalism, by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns. That is classic dualism. Many people embrace it enthusiastically. It leaves the church with nothing to do in the present except care for the wounded as best we can while we wait for a different kind of salvation altogether.’


‘Much conservative theology, not least in the United States, where it counts heavily at the moment, has also served to reinforce the dominance of the West. The Cold War years enabled the United States to build up its persona as God’s answer to communism. Many conservative churches there still live by the belief that what’s good for America is good for God- with the result, for instance, that if their country needs to produce more acid rain in order to keep up car production, then God must be happy with it and anyone who talks about polultion or is disappointed that the president didn’t sign the Kyoto protocol is somehow anti-Christian or is simply producing a ‘baptized neosocialism,’ as one reviewer accused me of. Rampant belief in the rapture lends strong support to this, as we saw earlier: Armageddon is coming, so who cares what state the planet is in? The irony is that those American churches that protest most vocally against the teaching of Darwinism in their schools are often, in their public policies, supporting a kind of economic Darwinism, the survival of the fittest in world markets, and military power.’