Good News: We Go to Heaven When We Die!

Yesterday I offered some preliminary comments on N.T. Wright’s Justification. Today I want to offer a critique by asking two of my four questions.

Question #1: Are the best parts of the New Perspective really lost on those who hold to the Old Perspective?

Wright frames his work as helping the sincere, but dim-witted Old Perspective folks realize that the earth orbits around the sun even though it looks like the sun travels around the earth. His point is to call Christians back to a theocentric view of reality where the story is all about God and not about how me, myself, and I get saved. Well, Amen to that. But who is the shadow boxing partner here. Surely not Piper. Who has done more in our generation to call the church to a God-entranced view of all things than Piper? Is he talking about his Reformed critics? If so, it seems like his framing story better fits seeker-sensitive types or the fundy with the revival tent.

Wright is at his persistent best in hammering away that Paul’s gospel is the story of God’s-single-plan-through-Israel-for the world. Three cheers for Wright’s attention to the redemptive-historical narrative. But again, is this lost on the Old Perspective? Wright claims, “In ways that the Western tradition, Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist–yes, and Anglican too!–has often failed to recognize, Scripture forms a massive and powerful story whose climax is the coming into the world of the unique Son of the one true Creator God, and, above all, his death for sins and his bodily resurrection from the dead” (250). I love Wright’s summary of the story, but I’m puzzled. Has the whole Western tradition missed this story? Really, we are just now seeing it by virtue of the Sanders revolution? Did Ridderbos miss this? Or Vos? Or Edwards with his massive history of redemption? Haven’t thousands of preachers for hundreds of years gone through Ephesians 2 and preached on justification by faith alone and the mysterious inclusion of the Gentiles? Much of the theology I read predates the New Perspective and it gets many of the same “discoveries.”

Piper, Carson, Westerholm, Luther, Hodge et. al don’t need me to come to their defense. But does Wright think they do not also believe and teach the grand meta-narrative of Scripture? They may want to go back to Adam and put Abraham and Israel in the broader context of fall and redemption, but surely they see the same God-through-Israel-for-the-world narrative without embracing the New Perspective.

Question #2: Can we still tell people the good news that if they believe in Jesus they will go to heaven when they die?

One of Wright’s pet peeves is reducing “salvation” to “going to heaven when you die” (10). This is a recurring theme in this book and every book I’ve read from Wright. He thinks Piper and others have not allowed the idea that God is rescuing the world to really permeate their thinking. I wholeheartedly agree that salvation is about more than being beamed up to heaven when we die, but the whole heaven thing is also pretty critical to folks when they come to die. They may find it encouraging to know that the whole cosmos is going to be renewed one night, but they really want to know where they will be if they choke on their mucus and stop breathing tonight.

Where we go when we die is one of the most important questions we as pastors have to answer. It isn’t enough to tell our people that they’ll live in a new world in the age to come. They want to know what tomorrow will be like? Will they be with Jesus today in paradise or not? Paul talked about his heavenly dwelling waiting for him once he died (2 Cor. 5:1-10) and the joy he would have to depart and be with Christ (Phil. 1:19-26), so we ought to have no shame in glorying, as the saints for two millennia have done, that we go to heaven when we die.

Wright argues that the Jews in the first century were not sitting around discussing how to go to heaven, and swapping views on the finer points of synergism and sanctification (55). Perhaps, but I’m willing to bet their discussions had much more to do with the afterlife and how people were saved and how people got holy than with relieving third world debt. The sword of rhetorical anachronism cuts both ways don’t you know.

Now, I’m sure Wright believes we go to heaven when we die. And I know he is trying to correct an imbalance in some wings of the church. But I wish he would do it in a different way and not undermine or minimize one of the most precious promises in all the Bible, that he who believes in Jesus will never die but has eternal life. I am simply jealous that in emphasizing cosmic renewal we don’t lose the precious hope of heaven that anchors the believer in hard times and is our sweet reward at the end of our days.