Bishop N. T. Wright went on The Colbert Report last night, and the results weren’t what I would have expected. Stephen Colbert (as some have complained) wasn’t at his funniest, but it seems to me that that’s because he was actually interested in having a serious discussion with Bishop Wright about his book, Surprised by Hope. It’s probably just as well, since it seemed to me the good bishop got a bit testy as it was—I’m not at all sure he would have handled an all-out Stephen Colbert assault. Taken all in all, I think it’s a pretty good discussion, with some of the trademark Colbert humor and a pretty good exposition of Bishop Wright’s understanding of the concept of heaven (which I don’t agree with, though I still appreciated the clip); seeing a little of Colbert’s serious side as a man of faith, as I think we did, was a bonus.
Which aspect(s) of Wright’s view of heaven do you disagree with?
Curious . . .
Shoot. That last comment was me, Jared. Didn’t realize my father in law was somehow signed in to Blogger. (I’m assuming through Google.)
🙂 Simply put, I don’t believe in the interim phase; from my best understanding of Scripture, I don’t think body and soul are separable like that. I believe that life after death begins with the resurrection from the dead.
So what in your view is the interim? Something akin to soul sleep?
I don’t believe there’s an interim; I believe we die in this world and are raised to life in the new creation.
The thing is, I don’t believe in the common idea of the “immortal soul” as such. I don’t believe resurrection depends on part of us which is immaterial and immortal going on existing apart from the rest of us; neither do I believe that our spirits have independent existence apart from our bodies, nor that they’re intrinsically any more immortal than our bodies. Rather, I believe that our resurrection depends purely on God: it’s God who sustains us and God who resurrects us. As such, I don’t think there’s any sort of immaterial afterlife, either permanent or temporary; I think life after death begins with the resurrection of the dead.
Now, I’ll grant, there are arguments to be made against this, drawing from Scripture; I hold my conclusions lightly (after all, I’ve changed my views in this regard before, so there’s no guarantee I won’t do so again). At this point, though, this is the best understanding of the scriptural evidence that I have (including lines in the Psalms to the effect that the dead don’t praise God, though I hesitate to put too much weight on those).
In the end, I appreciate Wright’s contribution to the discussion, even though I disagree with him continuing to make room for the “immortal soul/heaven” idea, because he points people toward the better reality toward which Scripture points us: the resurrection from the dead, the new heavens and the new Earth, the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of God. That’s the most important thing, and the more people who catch that from him, the better off the church is, I think.
Interesting. And intriguing.
To clarify: Are you saying that the “experience” of death and then to resurrection would appear to be instantaneous for us?
I’ve wondered about that myself. If perhaps, in the economy of God-time, the interim, such as it is, is a blink of an eye, and each Christian who dies, even though hundreds and thousands if not millions of years are passing in earth-time, experiences an immediate emergence into resurrection.
I guess that would sort of make relative the apparent earth-time chronology of the resurrection and great throne judgment (etc.), though.
Now it occurs to me that another scenario (although not excluding the possibility of the other) is that at death we really do — consciously, bodily, spiritually — cease to exist entirely and then God re-creates us (from scratch, as it were) at the resurrection.
Interested in your clarification.
That’s what I’m saying, yes–I believe there’s just a blink of an eye between death and resurrection. Given that I believe God is outside our timestream (just as any human author is outside the timestream of their book), I don’t think the relative chronologies are a problem; I believe, and I’ve told my congregation, that we all arrive at the next life together, all the characters from all the parts of the story stepping out of the book into the same moment of the Author’s time.
If I’m wrong about that, though, the second scenario you mention is also, I think, perfectly tenable. Admittedly, the idea that dead means dead and we’re resurrected purely out of the memory of God is unnerving to some folks; but I’m not sure these two scenarios aren’t just the same reality seen from two different angles.
No, that makes a lot of sense. The instantaneous resurrection thing has been rattling around in my mind for a while.
The only verse that pops out at me, giving me pause, is the “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” and the fact that some people, in biblical times at least, die and then come back to this life.