For years Christians have been asking, "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go?" It turns out that many believers have been giving the wrong answer. It is not heaven.
Award-winning author N. T. Wright outlines the present confusion about a Christian's future hope and shows how it is deeply intertwined with how we live today. Wright, who is one of today's premier Bible scholars, asserts that Christianity's most distinctive idea is bodily resurrection. He provides a magisterial defense for a literal resurrection of Jesus and shows how this became the cornerstone for the Christian community's hope in the bodily resurrection of all people at the end of the age. Wright then explores our expectation of "new heavens and a new earth," revealing what happens to the dead until then and what will happen with the "second coming" of Jesus. For many, including many Christians, all this will come as a great surprise.
Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus's resurrection—the church cannot stop at "saving souls" but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God's kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.
Lively and accessible, this book will surprise and excite all who are interested in the meaning of life, not only after death but before it.
N. T. Wright is one of the world's top biblical scholars, a prolific author, and the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England. His book, Jesus and the Victory of God, is widely regarded as one of the most significant studies on the historical Jesus. He has been featured on ABC News, Dateline, and Fresh Air. Wright taught New Testament studies for twenty years at Cambridge, McGill, and Oxford Universities. Among his many published works are Simply Christian, The Challenge of Jesus, The Meaning of Jesus (coauthored with Marcus Borg), and What Saint Paul Really Said.
352 pages
