Status Updates From Surprised by Hope: Rethinki...

Our task in the present – – of which this book, God willing, May, Form, part – – is to live as a resurrection people in between Easter, and the final day, with our Christian, life, corporate and individual, in both worship, and admission, as a sign of the first and four taste of the second.

What we say about death and resurrection give shape and color to everything else. If we are not careful, we will offer merely a “hope” that is no longer a surprise, no longer able to transform, lives and communities, and the present, no longer generated by the resurrection of Jesus himself, and looking forward to the promised new heavens and new Earth.

And when we come to the picture of the actual end and revelation, chapter 21–22, we find not random souls, making their way to a disembodied heaven, but rather than new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven to earth, United, the two in a lasting embrace.

Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future, Destiny, but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life – – God’s, dimension, if you like.
God made Heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and joining them together forever.

“God’s Kingdom” in the preaching of Jesus, refer not to post some more than Destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to go Sovereign rule coming “ on earth, as it is in heaven.”

We shall discover to be the central new testament belief: but I have the last, death will be not simply redefined, but defeated.
Gods intention is not to let death have it’s way with us. If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their immortal bodies, then death, still rules – – since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but simply of death itself.

In the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see, Christian Hope, in terms of. “ going to heaven,” a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated.

This book address is two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separate. But that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian, Hope? Second, what Hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present?