103
" Within biblical theology it remains the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming the goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. At its height, which according to Genesis 1 is the creation of humans, it was designed to reflect God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship. But this image-bearing capacity of humankind is not in itself the same thing as divinity. Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward a pantheism within which there is no way of understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of evil. Second, "
― N.T. Wright , Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
106
" The beauty of creation, to which art responds and which it tried to express, imitate, and highlight, is not simply the beauty it possesses in itself but the beauty it possesses in view of what is promised to it: back to the chalice, the violin, the engagement ring. We are committed to describing the world not just as it should be, not just as it is, but as—by God's grace alone!—one day it will be. And we should never forget that when Jesus rose from the dead, as the paradigm, first example, and generating power of the whole new creation, the marks of the nails were not just visible on his hands and his feet. They were the way he was to be identified. When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission. "
― N.T. Wright , Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
110
" And if God’s good creation—of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams—really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see the death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the (essentially non-Christian and non-Jewish) thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter! As we have seen, the whole of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is, however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs, reinforced not only in popular teaching but also in liturgies, public prayers, hymns, and homilies of every kind. "
― N.T. Wright , Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
111
" Time matters; it was part of the original good creation. Though it may well itself be transformed in ways we cannot at present even begin to imagine, we should not allow ourselves to be seduced by the language of eternity (as in the phrase 'eternal life,' which in the New Testament regularly refers not to a nontemporal future existence but to 'the life of the coming age') into imagining, as one old song puts it, that 'time shall be no more.' No: 'the old field of space, time, matter and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not. "
― N.T. Wright , Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
113
" The apostles are not offering people a new religious experience, though that will come as well. They are not telling them that they can now go to heaven when they die, though they will, if they believe, there to wait until the resurrection itself. Nor are they telling them that God has done an extraordinary miracle that shows how powerful he is, though he has. They are to go and tell the world that Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, is the world’s true Lord and to summon them to believing obedience. And that is exactly what they do. Notice "
― N.T. Wright , Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
120
" The Bible is not, in other words, simply a list of true doctrines or a collection of proper moral commands—though it includes plenty of both. The Bible is not simply the record of what various people thought as they struggled to know God and follow him, though it is that as well. It is not simply the record of past revelations, as though what mattered were to study such things in the hopes that one might have one for oneself. It is the book whose whole narrative is about new creation, that is, about resurrection, so that when each of the gospels ends with the raising of Jesus from the dead, and when Revelation ends with new heavens and new earth populated by God’s people risen from the dead, this should come not as a surprise but as the ultimate fulfillment of what the story had been about all along. "
― N.T. Wright , Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church