Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #435 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Released on: 2008-02-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Wright, one of the greatest, and certainly most prolific, Bible scholars in the world, will touch a nerve with this book. What happens when we die? How should we think about heaven, hell, purgatory and eternal life? Wright critiques the views of heaven that have become regnant in Western culture, especially the assumption of the continuance of the soul after death in a sort of blissful non-bodily existence. This is simply not Christian teaching, Wright insists. The New Testament's clear witness is to the resurrection of the body, not the migration of the soul. And not right away, but only when Jesus returns in judgment and glory. The "paradise," the experience of being "with Christ" spoken of occasionally in the scriptures, is a period of waiting for this return. But Christian teaching of life after death should really be an emphasis on "life after life after death"-the resurrection of the body, which is also the ground for all faithful political action, as the last part of this book argues. Wright's prose is as accessible as it is learned-an increasingly rare combination. No one can doubt his erudition or the greatness of the churchmanship of the Anglican Bishop of Durham. One wonders, however, at the regular citation of his own previous work. And no other scholar can get away so cleanly with continuing to propagate the "hellenization thesis," by which the early church is eventually polluted by contaminating Greek philosophical influence.
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Rob Bell, author of Velvet Elvis
"This book is N.T. Wright at his finest."

Phyllis Tickle, Beliefnet.com
A crystal-clear, powerful course-correction for all of us--Christian or otherwise. If you want to know what Easter is about, get yourself a copy of Surprised by Hope and hunker down for the read of a lifetime....literally.

Customer Reviews

Good for evangelists
The premise of this book is that most people, including most Christians, don't understand the revolutionary nature of the faith's core beliefs. Those beliefs being, Christ physically died, Christ was physically resurrected, and that Christ will come again to physically raise the dead, who will then live on a new earth that is cojoined to a new heaven.

The first part of the book attempts to prove -- without success -- that most Christians don't understand these core beliefs. The subsequent sections go through the historical and social context of the resurrection and how surprised the first believers were to be faced with these ideas. The final sections consider what believers today armed with the "full" revelation on life, death, and life after death is dead, should be doing in the world now as a result.

While the book has a few interesting sentences, most chapters could be reduced to a paragraph or two. Better editing would have been a plus. The author has a few peculiar theories, but does state they are his personal theories, and are without any foundation in scripture. Ditto his pet peeves.

Non-Christians may perhaps be surprised by the information in this book. But most Christians and denominations already know this information, in some form or variation, and are actively and appropriately engaged in the work Wright seems to think needs to be done. The latter fact, makes the book overall disappointing and made the final sections seem very out of touch.

The book is worth purchasing only if you are looking for detailed information on early Christianity and the resurrection. These sections could be a help to individuals who need a stronger, more scholarly foundation for their faith or for their evangelism. "You're a sinner and need to be saved to avoid Hell," while scripturally true is but a small part of the Christian faith. Wright's book will help you get the big parts back in play.

Good job on Darwin
N.T. Wright is a professor at Oxford and Cambridge and a highly respected New Testament scholar. This is one reason I picked up this book. Another reason is I wanted to read his views on Darwin. I was pleasantly surprised to find his coverage excellent. Wright notes that Darwin was not a so much a great new thinker but "rather the exact product of his times" (p. 83). He adds that evolution was in Darwin's day "already widely believed; it was a deeply convenient philosophy for those who wanted to justify ... everything from eugenics to war." He adds that "many Christian thinkers went along for the ride on this apparent incoming tide of progress." Even worse, many clergy "embraced Darwin's ideas as a way of solving... some of the problems they felt about the Old Testament. Many eagerly expounded social Darwinism as the way forward for the world, with some even encouraging the pursuit of war as the proper way to test who in the human species were the fittest and hence the most deserving of survival." p. 83. Clergy today condemn this behavior yet how many have climbed on the bandwagon to condemn those who correctly recognize that Darwinism does not explain how life got here nor does it explain the Origin of Species as Darwin claimed (actually we are often looking at genus level, since putative species crossing is now common, such as the Liger, a hybrid cross between a male lion and a female tiger). I predict that fifty years from now when Darwinism has gone the way of Freud and Marx, the church will also be condemned for getting in bed with the Darwinism pseudoscientific idea.

Surprised by Surprised by Hope
"Surprised by Hope" is a briliant study, it challenged me to rethink some important issues like Heaven, Resurrection and Life after Death. Bible speaks clearlly about NEW heaven and NEW Earth, and the topic that we will have NEW bodies is often negelected issue influenced by our dualistic Greeak heritage. Understood rightly those concepts (Heaven, Bodily Resurrection, Ascension, New Creation) are challenging the mission of the Church today. N.T. Wright brings NEW hope into the understanding and interpretation of the Hope! You might be surprised!