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| Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church | 
 enlarge | Author: N. T. Wright
Publisher: HarperOne
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (41 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1996
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0061551821
Dewey Decimal Number: 236
EAN: 9780061551826
ASIN: 0061551821
Publication Date: February 1, 2008
Release Date: February 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Must Read to Revolutionize Your Life and Thought November 5, 2008
After education mostly at Oxford, in 1975 Wright became a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford and later also later junior chaplain. From 1978 to 1981 he was a fellow and Chaplain at Downing College, Cambridge. After this, he served as assistant professor of New Testament Studies at McGill University, Montreal, then as Chaplain, Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College and lecturer in New Testament in the University of Oxford. He moved from Oxford to be Dean of Lichfield Cathedral and then Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. In 2003, he became the Anglican Bishop of Durham. On 4 August 2006 he was appointed to the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved for a period of five years.
He is a prodigious author, whose sentiments resonate with E.P. Sanders and the New Perspective on Paul. His views on hell and on justification are matters of some controversy. However, he is a writer whose breadth, brilliance, and clarity demand respect and always, a hearing.
His purpose is to mobilize readers around a Christian hope long neglected and misshapen--the new creation resurrection hope secured and begun in the resurrection of Yeshua, the Messiah. This in turn forms a solid and transformational foundation for Christian practice and politics. Chapter 1 considers what the Christian hope is, and how this contributes to the transformation of the world. This hope is not the hope of heaven, but of life after life after death, embodied immortality in a renewed heavens and renewed earth. Chapter 2 surveys the confusion and misinformation clinging to the issue of heaven and hell. This confusion is perpetuated and reflected in hymnody, in how funerals are conducted, etc. It has real-life implications for how we live, how we relate to our bodies, and to matters such as social justice, the arts, and personal holiness. Chapter 3 examines why the resurrection is crucial for Christian faith, and why it is not another way of saying "life after death," but deals rather with life after life after death, "life after death" being our sojourn, however short or long, in the intermediate state known as heaven/paradise while awaiting our real destination, resurrection as eternal citizens of a renewed heavens and a renewed earth. He explores the kinship the NT shares with Judaism in its view of resurrection, and seven ways in which the NT parts from Jewish assumptions. He demonstrates that all of these differences are only explainable on the basis of the historic fact of Jesus' resurrection, which alone forms a credible basis for the boldness with which early Christians stood up to the might of Imperial Rome.
In Chapter 4, Wright examines four strange features of Gospel resurrection accounts which lend credibility to Messiah's resurrection. In addition, he shows it to be clear that the tomb was empty and that the apostolic band had so encountered Yeshua as to convince them that he had conquered death, entering into a new, and unprecedented realm of life. He considers and refutes contrary arguments, and finishes the chapter discussing epistemology, and the interconnection between the resurrection of Yeshua and the new creation.
Chapter 5 examines what God's purpose is for the cosmos, exploring evolutionary optimism and a souls-in-transit mindset (spiritual life as a continuing journey). He favors a third option, the resurrection of Messiah as the trigger and foretaste of the renewal of the entire cosmos, to be explored in Chapter 6. In this chapter he examines presuppositions and concepts that illumine what the NT means by resurrection: the goodness of creation, the nature of evil, the plan of redemption, seedtime and harvest with Christ as the first fruits, victorious battle, citizens of heaven colonizing the earth, God as all in all, the New Birth, and the marriage of heaven and earth: in short, the new creation. In Chapter 7, Wright presents the Ascension as a vital aspect of the Christian message, defeating residual platonic assumptions and reminding the Church that she does not circumscribe the limits of Christ's presence. The Ascension is also essential to a correct assessment of the Trinity. Heaven is not out there, but a different kind of space, matter and time coexistent with our own, more like a parallel dimension.
Chapter Eight contests dispensational/premillennial concepts of Christ's coming in the clouds to rapture his people. The focus of the parousia is Messiah's arriving royal Presence, and his people going out to meet him in order to welcome him/escort him back to their own territory. At the Second Coming Christ does not come to take us away but to join us. Chapter 9 reminds us that he comes as Judge. Here, Wright discusses the pedigree of the idea of God and Messiah as Judge. Judgment is not a negative, but a positive reality, and according to deeds. Jesus' coming is transformational, bringing redemption's story to a conclusion, calling us meanwhile to build for a coming Kingdom which is greater than we can imagine. In Chapter Ten, Wright deals with the redemption of our bodies, laying a basic picture of the bodily resurrection as taught in the Newer Testament and by the Church Fathers. He reviews Col 3:1-4, Romans 8:9-11, John 5, touching upon other passages as well, indicating how heaven is not our final resting place. Focuses especially on 1 Cor 15, and the who, what, where, why, when, and how of bodily resurrection. From such a perspective, we see heaven as an intermediate state.
Chapter 11, "Purgatory, Paradise, Hell," clarifies the meanings, distinctions, and histories of usage of these terms. Chapter 12 explores the on the ground, whole life implications of new creation perspective. Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension are the essential means for saving and deputizing his people for the work of the kingdom which he modeled as recorded in the gospels, foreshadowing the new creation. This perspective reintegrates the gospels and the epistles. Chapter 13 shows how new creation eschatology leads to a transformation of justice, beauty and evangelism. As we reflect the justice and beauty of the new creation and the tensions between the coming age and the present age, our evangelism becomes both attractive and credible. Evangelism is recruiting other people to the life that has found us, which we embody, however imperfectly.
Chapter 14 considers a hope-shaped mission. The resurrection of Yeshua was the center of apostolic witness, as demonstrated through a survey of the gospels, Acts and the Pauline corpus. Our witness should and can be empowered by a resurrection perspective as well. In Chapter 15 Wright explores how we might transform our concepts and practice in relation to space, time and matter, suggesting adaptations in worship, calendar, and sacramental understanding in view of new creation realities. He makes suggestions about collaboration without compromise, and how our relationship to prayer, scripture, and love is transformed through a new creation perspective. He concludes with an Appendix contrasting sermons advocating an ultra-right traditional view of the resurrection on the one hand, and an ultra-left view of the resurrection on the other, demonstrating how the new creation resurrection perspective is superior to both.
The book is a brilliant, compelling read, of crucial importance to Christian/Messianic Jewish spirituality and theologizing, providing a strong foundation for the kind of new creation eschatology necessary to undergird the New Messianic Jewish Agenda, an eschatological perspective anticipating Israel's differentiated destiny at the end of days, which perspective has no place in the kind of one size fits all homogeneity imagined in some eschatological schemas. I find little to differ with in this book, although his concept of perdition, as people being reduced to a subhuman status through their servitude to sin (reminiscent of Gollum in the Fellowship of the Rings), to be interesting but not yet convincing. This is a thorough treatment of the matters it addresses and will become a must read for many of the people I teach and mentor in Messianic Jewish spirituality and missiology. As nothing else I have encountered in the past forty five years, this book connected me to the resurrection as a matter of supreme importance not simply apologetically, but experientially and formationally. Bravo, no, bravissimo!
Concise Culmination October 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the best theological (not to mention eschatological) book I've read in a long, long time--a very valuable contribution to today's great conversation. Bishop Wright has written some very weighty, well researched and documented works on understanding the scriptures and the Person of Christ from a first-century perspective; more as the early Christians and Church fathers would have understood than we typically do with our postmodern spin. *Surprised by Hope* is a concise culmination of this: an excellent summary of thirty-some years of Wright's research.
Lest anyone should be scared off by the subtitle, "Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church," the book is not calling for innovation or novelty in any way; rather its rethinking is merely a call for today's Christians to harken back to the way early Christians saw it. Heaven is not to be seen as some great pie-in-the-sky place that all God's people will one day escape to; we should instead look forward to the future marriage of heaven and earth as the ultimate state of God's kingdom. Christ's resurrection is not just some great one-time miracle God did to demonstrate His power, but the inaugural sign of an entirely new age, which Christ now rules and in which Christ is (presently) putting all the cosmos under His lordship. The Church's mission is not simply to save souls one person at a time while the world all around us veers into abysmal despair, but to transform the world all around us into glorious subjection to the King of kings and Lord of lords. This is the way the early Christians saw it. Indeed, these were the threats Caesar inferred. We need to see things this way again too. The "rethinking," then, is really more a return.
N.T. Wright at his Best October 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For three months in the summer of 2004, I labored through N.T. Wright's massive book, The Resurrection of the Son of God - an important work for anyone interested in the historical evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Resurrection of the Son of God significantly deepened my appreciation for Easter. Wright's research bolstered my confidence in the historicity of the New Testament accounts, but more than that, it helped me to understand why the Resurrection was necessary and why it is so important to Christian theology.
Needless to say, I was happy to discover that Wright was working on an edited, popular-level supplement to The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fast forward to 2008. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church has been released, a sequel of sorts to Simply Christian. (And yes, the allusions to C.S. Lewis' works Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy are an intentional advertising gimmick, although readers quickly discover that the comparisons to Lewis do have some merit.)
In Surprised by Hope, Wright attempts to do three things. First, he exposes current Christianity's muddled views of the afterlife by taking us through the historical evidence for and the theological explanation of Jesus' resurrection. Second, he answers questions regarding eschatology that necessarily arise from his Resurrection theology - showing how his eschatological framework best fits the New Testament witness. Third, he shows how the Christian's future hope of resurrection forms the foundation for current social action, evangelism, and spirituality.
For those familiar with Wright's previous work on the resurrection, Surprised by Hope will not surprise you (no pun intended). For years now, Wright has been advocating a return to a more biblical, more creation-centered, more Jewish understanding of the future hope of new heavens and new earth. Other theologians have been speaking up about this subject too, in hopes that a more robust view of heaven will reenergize our Kingdom efforts on earth. (Michael Wittmer's Heaven Is a Place on Earth and Randy Alcorn's textbook-styled Heaven come to mind.)
But Surprised by Hope stands out in the amount of material that Wright is able to incorporate into a single volume and in the moving way in which he makes his case. This book carries an emotional resonance rarely encountered among works of theology. At times, Wright's description of the Christian hope so moved me that I found myself wiping away tears.
Surprised by Hope contains many paradoxes, which is what we have come to expect from a theologian like Wright. Here are a few examples:
Wright argues forcefully for Christ's bodily resurrection (to the "Amens" of his conservative readers), but then shows why that must necessarily inform our view of the Christian's future hope (and the picture is significantly different [i.e. grander!] than what conservatives have generally taught).
He devotes significant space to eschatology, firmly disagreeing with the Preterist position, while admitting that Jesus' prophecies concerned the Fall of Jerusalem.
Dispensationalists will not countenance his interpretation of Revelation or Daniel, and yet Amillennialists will be surprised by his refusal to spiritualize the Kingdom in ways that detract from an earthy application.
Reformed readers will have trouble with Wright's "New Perspective on Paul" that surfaces in a couple of places, and yet they will applaud his Kuyperian stance on the lordship of Christ over all creation.
Roman Catholics will disagree with Wright's decisive rejection of purgatory and praying to the saints, but some Protestants may be equally puzzled about Wright leaving room for Christians to pray for the dead (not for their salvation, mind you, but only for their rest!)
Traditionalists will be glad to see Wright rejecting universalism and affirming the existence of hell, and yet, Wright's innovative view of hell (in terms of dehumanization) is more akin to C.S. Lewis than to anything clearly taught in Scripture. (Wright's view serves as middle way between annihilationism and the traditional view of eternal torment.)
Pastors would do well to read the final chapters of Surprised by Hope. Wright gives food for thought on the nature of mission work and evangelism. He also offers practical advice on reinvigorating our anemic Easter celebrations.
Surprised by Hope will be one of Wright's most widely-read books. Though readers should proceed with caution regarding some of Wright's proposals, the wheat in this book far outweighs the chaff.
Never Surprised by Brilliance October 2, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have read the much larger and more detailed Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright's scholarly version of this book. Now he has written much the same book in a more casual form. It is more accessible but still accurate, still fascinating, still Wright. Perhaps I should be surprised that one man can do both, but I'm not, because it's Wright, and he's done it before.
 OK...but October 2, 2008
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Right off I would say that it is impossible for someone as prolific as Wright to have each book be successful. Having read several of his other works, I did hear some of the same music in this one. The initial two-thirds of the book aren't really much good. That being said, those portions on the Resurrection of Christ as ordering the mission of the Church were very good, although I think Bright's work "The Kingdom of God" is a much better work. You might also see "Royal Priesthood?" To his credit, Wright is trying to convince people--and perhaps those within his own confession--that traditional ideas about the resurrection really are not New Testament ideas. I don't think he succeeds. Finally, I hate footnotes that refer to other works by the same author; Wright's work is full of these. I doubt very much that Wright's ideas in this work are so ground-breaking that he is only able to cite himself. I do think that Wright would be better served to publish less as his work is starting to sound redundant.
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