A conversation on the “Platonic con,” the Hebrew nephesh, and reclaiming our earthy hope.
Interview with Stefani McDade
If you asked the average person in the pew what happens when we die, the answer is almost always about going to heaven. But in his latest book, God’s Homecoming, N.T. Wright argues this rescue narrative owes more to the Greek philosopher Plato than to Jesus or the writers of the New Testament. If the Gospel is ultimately about God returning here rather than us going there, much of our modern hymnody and funeral liturgy might be missing the point entirely. Wright makes a bold call to move past a dualistic hope of heaven and reclaim the robust, earthy biblical promise of a new creation where Christ finally returns home to dwell with his people.
Following up on his landmark work Surprised by Hope almost 20 years later, Wright discusses the “missing piece” of the eschatological puzzle: the Holy Spirit as “agent of our future resurrection”. Moving from the tragedy of resurrection-less funerals to the Hebrew concept of the nephesh (our whole person), Wright argues we should “forget” our modern understanding of the soul and explores what he thinks happens to us after death in the intermediate state. Along the way, he addresses how this “homecoming” vision reframes everything from creation care as part of our “priestly vocation” to hell as a “dehumanizing” vote against being a genuine image-bearer.
Stefani McDade: So if the Gospel is all about God coming here versus us going there, does that mean all of our songs and stories about going to heaven throughout Christian tradition are getting it all wrong?
Tom Wright: Yes, when you say throughout Christian tradition, one of the great redemption hymns is, of course, Revelation chapter five, which is about “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain”. But the ending of that song gets it right, of course, because it doesn’t say “You’ve ransomed humans for God so that they can go to heaven and stay there forever and ever.” It’s, “You ransomed humans for God so that they can be the royal priesthood, so that they can be genuine humans and they will reign on the earth.” Now, do you know any hymns that end up like that? I know one or two, but not very many.
Most of the hymns I grew up singing—one of the great hymns, “Love divine or loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down”—I talk about that at one point in the book. And it’s ironic, because almost all of that hymn is about God coming to us in Jesus and in the Holy Spirit. But then right at the end of the hymn, “Changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love and praise.” It’s a great ending to the hymn, except it’s completely wrong. It takes Revelation four and five, the image of the elders casting their crowns in front of the throne, as though that was a picture of the ultimate end, which is really bad exegesis. Because in the ultimate end, which is Revelation 21, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth, and so on.
So yes, we have all been conned by platonic versions of Christianity, and the more I look back at the Christian tradition, the more I think that’s true. Now, it’s much better to go with Plato than to go with a lot of other possible philosophers as a framework. The best sorts of Platonic Christians are doing a great job, and they say their prayers and they love their neighbors, but the narrative is still wrong, and particularly the narrative is not biblical. And unless we’re in tune with that, we’re selling ourselves short.
SM: Yes, that’s perfect. And why do you think it’s so much easier for us to talk about Jesus as my Savior and being saved, you know, escaping to heaven, than it is to talk about Jesus returning — as the return of God to Jerusalem?
TW: Because I think, like in one of my books, I have this riff on the Lord’s Prayer, and how most people, if they pray, probably are praying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. In the sense that when people start to pray, the thing they most want to say is, help get me out of this mess. So, “deliver us from evil” is where people sort of start. And then they realize they may be part of the evil. So “forgive us our trespasses”. And then they realize there’s a few things they need, so they work back to our daily bread. And if you’re lucky, you may get back to actually worshiping God as the beginning of the prayer.
But in the same way, the notion of salvation, of rescue, is so powerful, because all humans know in their bones that things are radically wrong with the world and with themselves. So, the idea of being rescued from what’s wrong is very powerful and very biblical. The Psalms are full of it. But, then, what will that rescue consist of? And the implied Platonic narrative is, “Well, this earth is not my home. I need to be rescued from it.”
Some years ago, I’ve often told this story, I decided to take with me on holiday some little volumes of Plutarch, the great first century Greek philosopher. And I like reading kind of wacky things on holiday. And I read Plutarch’s treatise on exile, where he says quite cheerfully that we have souls which are exiled from their true home in heaven and which are looking forward to going back there when they’re allowed, rather than the scruffy Old Earth. And when I read that, I thought most of my Christian friends think that that’s what Christianity is. Plutarch is a middle Platonist. He’s a pagan priest in the shrine of [Delphi]. He’s a philosopher, a biographer, etc. But what’s wrong with this picture? And the answer is, that’s the Platonic picture. It’s not the Christian picture. And so I’ve spent some of the best years of my recent life, as I slide into elderly age, trying to persuade people to get the story the right way up.
SM: Yes, that’s great. So, if the final goal is a physical New Earth, what is happening with all the people who have died but are yet waiting for resurrection? Do you address any of that?
TW: Yes, the last chapter in this book is very much about that, because I was starting to explore this in my last couple of years in St. Andrews and just bringing it into lectures. But it seems to me the missing piece of the jigsaw for many people is the work of the Holy Spirit. Because we’ve thought in terms of a soul, and the soul is going to heaven or maybe going through purgatory or whatever. Then what is the soul doing in between the one and the other? And the answer is, forget the soul. The Bible never uses the word “soul” the way that Platonism does. In fact, the Greek word psyche, translated as soul, actually refers to the Hebrew nephesh, which is, like the whole person.
Just a riff on that in the parable of the wicked, of the rich fool, when God says, “This night, your soul will be required of you”, people think, “Oh, there it is. God’s going to take his soul away.” But actually it means your life, your whole life. It means you’re going to die. Because immediately before, this guy who’s built his barns and stocked them, well, he says, “Soul, take your ease, eat and drink and enjoy yourself”. Now he doesn’t mean soul in the Platonic sense. He means “I’m going to have a good time. I’m going to be drinking and eating”, and that’s the soul. That’s the whole self anyway.
So now, if the Holy Spirit has indwelled somebody in the course of this life, inspiring faith and hope and love and enabling them to whatever measure, to reflect the love and purpose of God into the world and the love of Jesus, etc. Then when that person physically dies, it seems to me to make no sense that the Holy Spirit would say, “Well, that was an interesting experiment in sanctification. So we’ll just park that one over there somewhere, and when it’s time for the resurrection, I’ll come back and scoop them up again,” Because it’s clear that the Spirit is the agent of our future resurrection. Romans, 8, 9, 10, 11. “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then He who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also.” So what’s the Spirit doing in between?
And I think that’s where that line from the Psalms, “He holds our nephesh in life.” He holds our whole self in life. And when Paul says, “My desire is to depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better,” that’s Philippians chapter one. I think we can fill that out by saying that that is the Spirit in Romans, 8, 1 Corinthians 1-6, Paul talks about the fusion of the Holy Spirit with our spirit. That’s a very mysterious thing, and I don’t think we’ve often made enough of that. But then the person that we are is the person that the Spirit has enabled us to be. And if the Spirit has shaped us, then there’s a sense in which the Spirit also is shaped by the people that we have become. That’s an extraordinary idea.
But then, so, in the intermediate state, we are still indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We’re in the close, personal presence of Jesus. We are waiting for the time when the Father makes remakes the whole world. And now, that would be a complicated funeral sermon, and don’t try and preach this at a funeral, because people are not expecting that. Preach it during the rest of the year, so that when we come to the funeral, it’ll make more sense.
And here’s another important riff on that. I’ve been to a few funerals recently, including a family member and couple of friends, etc., and at good evangelical churches where the word “resurrection” is almost entirely absent—including one where the only place where the word resurrection came up was when the coffin was being brought in, and somebody read from John 11, “I am the resurrection and life’ says the Lord”. But the whole of the rest of the service was about going to heaven. And I came out thinking, these are good Bible Christians. What’s happened to the resurrection? And I think we have done ourselves and the Church and one another a serious disservice, by the way that we have taught some things and forgotten others.
SM: We’ve sort of become modern-day Sadducees, like just neglecting the resurrection. And Paul says, if there’s no resurrection, bodily resurrection, what’s the point? Our faith is worthless.
TW: Exactly, exactly. And modern-day Sadducees, in a sense, though I would reserve that particularly for the post enlightenment secularists. Because part of the Sadducees saying there’s no resurrection is a political point. They’re the guys in power. People who believe in a resurrection, there’s no knowing what they will do. They’re dangerous people to have around, because they will critique power. Because ultimately, resurrection is God’s answer to the power of the tyrant.
So the whole enlightenment world, which says—basically Epicurean—”God’s upstairs somewhere. He’s left us to run the world. So we’re going to run the world our way. We wield the Empire our way.” And so that the rejection of resurrection in post-enlightenment theology looks as though it’s saying, “Oh well, we have modern science, so we don’t believe in these things anymore.” Well, phooey to that. But in particular, it’s a power grab. It’s an imperial power grab. I think I articulate this a bit in my Gifford lectures, history in eschatology, and so that comes back to politics, actually. And we have to say, “No, the Christian who believes in the resurrection is somebody who, by the Spirit, has the vocation to speak the truth to power.”
SM: Right. The resurrection takes away the power of death, which is the main tool of the empire to wield their power and instill fear and control.
TW: Exactly. I don’t know if you know my big book on the resurrection of the Son of God, that big green book, there’s a quote at the beginning of one of the nearly at the end chapters, which is a quote from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Do you know this line where Herod Antipas hears a rumor about this person, Jesus, and the courtier says to him, “This man, Jesus, he’s going around healing the sick, and he’s making the blind see, and he’s raising the dead.”
And Herod suddenly says, “He’s raising the dead? This man must be found and stopped” and told him, “I don’t want anybody to raise the dead”, because, as you say, death is the last weapon of the tyrant. And Herod knows if he’s raising the dead, well we might get John the Baptist back for a start, but then who knows what else could happen? So I think I say in the Giffords that “Resurrection is undesirable for a Platonist, impossible for an Epicurean, nonsensical for a stoic and scary for a tyrant”.
SM: Yeah, that’s great. And a sort of corollary to that is: obviously this is a totally different conception of heaven, but what often goes hand in hand is a conversation about hell. How, if any, does this do you talk about hell in the book? Do you not?
TW: Not much in this book. In fact, I’m not sure; I’d have to go back to the Index. There’s one page reference, hell, 184, there you go. But when I wrote Surprised by Hope, the penultimate draft, somebody said to me, “Tom, you haven’t mentioned hell, what you’re going to do?” And, now, here we are. No, there’s no discussion of it here, but so there is a short section in Surprised by Hope. And the trouble is that when people say hell, they think of these medieval pictures of torture and little demons, which is actually a pagan picture. One of the reasons for the rise of Epicureanism a few centuries before Jesus was because many pagans had this terrible vision of hell, and Epicurus was saying, “No, no, it’s all just atoms bumping into each other. So when we die, we die. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Phew, okay, I don’t have to worry about hell anymore. It’s still a pretty bleak future, actually, just my atoms are going to dissolve, and that’s that guys.
But so we first have to disabuse people of that medieval picture in order then to say when God finally puts the world right, the way as he intends to. Because God has made us humans, not puppets. God actually wants to woo people into his love. But if people say, “Absolutely not, I am worshiping these gods or goddesses, and wherever they take me is where I’m going”, then I believe that ultimately, that is them voting against being a genuine image-bearing human—which is a very hard thing to say.
And part of the problem here is, I’m talking about people I know and love who seem at the moment to be saying, “Not in my life, thank you very much”. And actually I want to say, “Please see it differently, come in.” But it seems to me that part of the dignity of being human is to have the chance to say, “Actually, I do not want to reflect God into the world. I do not want to reflect the praises of the world back to God. I don’t want to be a royal priest. I don’t want to be an image bearer.” And how you then proceed from there is very difficult, because we’re into imagery, and how much of that means something on the surface, etc, but that there is a prospect of final loss in some way, shape or form, I think, is built into the fact that God is going to put the world right, and that humans do have the chance to worship the non-gods and to go that route.
And when you think back through the last century or two, I find it very, very difficult to say, “Oh, well, “God will give Adolf Hitler another chance and another chance and another chance, and maybe he’ll go through purgatory, and maybe he’ll make it in the end.” Well, who knows if, in the split second that Hitler committed suicide, maybe he did repent, and hallelujah if that was so. But I think we have the right and the duty to speak of people who seem, as we say, “hell-bent” on worshiping idols and living according to that, and dehumanizing and destroying everything in their path as a result.
SM: And it brings up the whole matter of God’s justice. If there’s no justice, you know, then, well…
TW: Exactly, exactly. And I mean, actually, faced with the world over the last 10 years, I find myself in fear and trembling being drawn back to some of those psalms which often churches miss out on. Because they are saying, “Let the wicked fall into the pit that they’ve dug for others” That’s now a prayer which I need to pray for the world.
SM: I love that. Now, I have another sort of provocative question. If all of creation is a temple, does that mean that taking care of the earth, and our bodies, for that matter, are equal forms of worship to God to any other—like praise, like obedience?
TW: It depends on what you mean by equal, they are certainly forms of worship, of honoring God. I mean Psalm 119 has that wonderful verse, “The earth Oh Lord, is full of your hesed, your lovingkindness.” So when we are looking after the earth, we’re looking after something which is already saturated with God’s lovingkindness. That God made this world not as kind of neutral rubbish, but as a world in which he is already present and doing stuff—and the world which he has promised ultimately to saturate with himself.
In a previous podcast I did, somebody quoted back at me, Isaiah 11:9. He said, “I think this is one of your favorite texts.” I said, “Too right it is!” It’s “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yahweh as the waters cover the sea.” And you may have heard me say before, how do the waters cover the sea? The waters are the sea. And so when we are working with the grain of God’s good creation, and working for the healing of creation, for the fruitfulness and the beauty of creation, we are enabling creation to worship God the way it really wants to, the way God intended it to. And I think that’s part of the priestly vocation, is to enable creation to praise God. But the danger with saying it the way you did would be that some people would say, “Well, okay, I’m digging in the garden. You can go off to church, and I don’t need to do that,” but I would say, “You probably do need to come to church as well and pull it together.”
But for me, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, morning prayer has a variety of categories you can choose, and one of them is the song of the three children in the burning, fiery furnace: “All you works of the Lord, bless you the Lord, praise him and magnify Him forever.” And it runs right through mountains and hills, seas and floods, whales and all that move in the waters, you beast and cattle. It’s a way of saying, “The whole lot of you, come on, praise the Lord.” And I’m articulating that—that’s become very, very important to me.
I’m sorry there wasn’t a chapter on ecology in this book. My dear friend Brian Walsh in Toronto read the draft of it. He said, “Tom, you need a chapter on ecology.” Now Brian, as well as being a theologian, is a farmer, so he’s read all this stuff—Wendell Berry, goodness knows what. He gave me a bibliography, and I looked at it. Sorry, the book’s already long; I just don’t have the expertise to do that. I’d happily hand that agenda over to anyone who can do it.
