N.T. Wright is the C.S. Lewis of our day, according to Robert Millet and with that comparison, he has such clout that religious scholars respect his word and Time magazine publishes his articles. Last December, he wrote a short essay titled, ‘The New Testament Doesn’t Say What Most People Think It Does About Heaven’. He calls out Plato, of whom Aristotle was a student, for creating the conventional Christian view of humanity dying and leaving this world to go up to heaven. He explains that such teachings are not found in the Bible.

To understand what the first followers of Jesus believed about what happens after death, we need to read the New Testament in its own world — the world of Jewish hope, of Roman imperialism and of Greek thought. … Rather than rescuing people from the latter in order to reach the former, the creator God would finally bring heaven and earth together in a great act of new creation, completing the original creative purpose by healing the entire cosmos of its ancient ills. They believed that God would then raise his people from the dead, to share in — and, indeed, to share his stewardship over — this rescued and renewed creation. And they believed all this because of Jesus.

They believed that with the resurrection of Jesus this new creation had already been launched. Jesus embodied in himself the perfect fusion of “heaven” and “earth.” In Jesus, therefore, the ancient Jewish hope had come true at last. The point was not for us to “go to heaven,” but for the life of heaven to arrive on earth. Jesus taught his followers to pray: “Thy kingdom come on earth as in heaven.” ¹

Studying the New Testament historically, in its own world (as opposed to squashing and chopping it to fit with our own expectations), shows that the first Christians believed not that they would “go to heaven when they died,” but that, in Jesus, God had come to live with them.

I find N.T. Wright’s commentary on the New Testament to be in line with LDS views on Zion and the redemption of the earth. He doesn’t quite push all the way to the truth that an embodied God is what represents perfection in the ‘renewed creation’ in the fact that ‘God had come to live ‘ with us. Maybe I am reading a physical God into his quotes. However, I do see him saying that God will exist and interact with us in a renewed and physical creation as He did in Jesus.

I found two other papers by N.T. Wright that push the glory of a renewed physicality in more detail. In Spirit, Soul, and Body he shares;

I want to propose a view of the human person which you might call eschatological integration. Just as the Pauline view of God’s ultimate future for the cosmos is the joining together in the Messiah of all things in heaven and earth, so I believe that Paul’s view of God’s ultimate future for the human person is the full integration of all that we are made to be. … I believe that by looking to the goal, the telos, we gain insight as to how to develop and sustain an appropriate Christian anthropology for the present. God, says Paul, will be ‘all in all’; and for Paul it is the body, not just the soul, the mind or the spirit, which is the temple of the living God. The body is meant for the Lord, he says, and the Lord for the body.

Then in Jesus and the identity of God. He details the current and historical perceptions of the word God and details how the Jews of Jesus’ day perceived God.

I believe in the God I see revealed in Jesus of Nazareth." What most people mean by “god” in late-modern western culture simply is not the mainstream Christian meaning. … What did first-century Jews, including Jesus and his first followers, mean by “god”? This is obviously the place to start. Their belief can be summed up in a single phrase: creational and covenantal monotheism. … This monotheism was never, in our period, an inner analysis of the being of the one God. It was always a way of saying, frequently at great risk: our God is the true God, and your gods are worthless idols.

With the above explanations, he gets to the meat of the argument.

Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breath is not, as has often been suggested, a category mistake. Of course, if you start with the Deist god and the reductionists’ Jesus, they will never fit, but then they were designed not to. Likewise, if you start with the New Age gods-from-below, or for that matter the gods of ancient paganism, and ask what would happen if such a god were to become human, you would end up with a figure very different from the one in the gospels. But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, of the Psalms, and ask what that God might be like, were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross. Start with the Deist God, and your historical Jesus study will only achieve incarnational Christology by sliding towards docetism. Start with the real historical earthly Jesus, and your God will come running down the road to meet you, deeply attractive, deeply preachable, deeply challenging in his transforming embrace. That, for me, is the theological significance of the earthly Jesus.

My proposal is not that we understand what the word “god” means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that. Instead, I suggest that we think historically about a young Jew, possessed of a desperately risky, indeed apparently crazy, vocation, riding into Jerusalem in tears, denouncing the Temple, and dying on a Roman cross—and that we somehow allow our meaning for the word “god” to be recentered around that point.

N.T. Wright is asking us to bypass the philosophical underpinnings of modern Christianity. To not let Socrates (435 BC), Plato (385 BC), Aristotle (335 BC), and Origen (180 AD)² define God. He is asking us to let the Jews, through the Bible, explain Him. The interesting point is that Origen stated as a general fact that ’the Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance.’ in his fight for the Christian God viewed through the ancient philosophical fathers. Plutarch sums up the social norm founded on Socrates and Plato, which is the standard of modern Christianity.

Socrates and Plato held that (God is) the One, the single self-existent nature, the monadic, the real Being, the good: and all this variety of names points immediately to mind. God therefore is mind, a separate species, that is to say what is purely immaterial and unconnected with anything passible [i.e., changeable].

While N.T. Wright doesn’t explicitly state that God has a physical body; I hear one of Christianity’s greatest modern theologians asking us to accept as our definition of God the reality of Jesus. All of Jesus is the starting point. His emotions, His sacrifice, His love, His body, and His position with us in time.

Christ’s reality as God is the great Christian message. Because of Him, we can know God the Father and learn how to be like them.

• attributes
• easter
• video