I imagine if N. T. Wright had his way, we might never again use the word heaven. In Wright’s view, for churches and believers to more deeply inhabit the biblical story, heaven must be put in its proper place. We must get our directions straight. No more talk of us going to heaven when we die, argues Wright. No more mistaking the intermediate state of heaven—the spirit of the faithful being with the Lord upon death (Phil. 1:23)—for our ultimate and final state (Rev. 21:2–3). Instead, we need to retrieve and receive the message of the Bible: The Triune God comes down to us in the ultimate homecoming. Wright’s latest book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal,is his rejoinder to fundamental mistakes he sees in the broader Western church. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Wright believes Christians have forgotten something serious.
This isn’t a new idea, and it isn’t new for Wright. God’s Homecoming is a recapitulation and extension of his previous work. Surprised by Hope (2007) and When God Became King (2012)—two of his popular-level books—have widely broadcast Wright’s recurrent insights: First, the resurrection of Jesus does not create the hope of a disembodied heaven but points toward life after life after death. Second, the Scriptures declare how Jesus is the world’s one true Lord whose reign is not delayed until his second coming but is present and inbreaking.
The first error is our proclivity to believe and imagine that “Jesus will come back to our world in order to take people away” to heaven. We exchange the truth of God’s homecoming for the life of an emergency extraction. The second error is the belief that Jesus “will only really become Lord of the world when he finally returns.” This too is an error of homecoming, the misbelief that Jesus “hasn’t really come home.” God’s Homecoming is Wright’s attempt at a biblical corrective for the masses, which is largely convincing, even if the supposed errors are overstated.
This homecoming motif is a fresh articulation of Wright’s well-known major themes with sharpened emphasis on the scriptural throughline of God dwelling with us. God’s Homecoming functions like a sequel to Surprised by Hope. Where Hope emphasized the new creation and bodily resurrection, Homecoming drills down into the same soil, mining scriptural truths to explain what it means for God to come home among us in that new creation, which is bursting forth among us even now. In true Wrightian fashion, this new book traverses the wide range of both testaments, working closely in specific texts read in light of the whole of Scripture, to explain and defend his perspective.
The book proceeds straightforwardly: After outlining the errors he surveys in the church—“Most people today imagine the point of Christianity is ‘to go to heaven when you die.’ … They are all wrong”—Wright makes a constructive case for the reunion of God with humanity in the renewed creation by starting in Genesis before moving into his first section: “Starting Points and Groundwork: The Biblical Promises.”
Even as he handles a myriad of biblical themes—creation, covenant, temple, glory, exile—through a close reading of biblical texts, Wright’s tight prose and steady voice prove a clear, lucid guide. I could give this book to my adult friend, newly converted to Christ and newly conversant with the Bible, and I’m confident he could follow Wright’s argument. It’s a rare feat for a scholar to make material accessible, and Wright has, once more, done just that.
Wright tackles objections that prioritize the prospect of heaven over the promises of homecoming. He asks the questions many think but never voice aloud. Here’s one: “If we consider the scriptures to be authoritative, what should we make of the fact that the Old Testament shows little interest in people going to heaven when they die?” Wright uses such questions to press us further into Scripture for answers.
Those who’ve read Wright will hear a familiar tune, though played in a slightly different key here: The Scriptures testify to God’s plan to reunite heaven and earth by coming to us and filling the whole earth with his glory, “resulting in nothing less than a renewed creation.” These promises that were anticipated in the temple in Jerusalem, seemingly lost in the tragedy of Israel’s idolatry and exile, are fulfilled in the “personal and visible return of YHWH” to his people in Jesus, who has tabernacled among us (John 1:18). The Lord has indeed rent the heavens and come down—a divine visitation and homecoming (Isa. 64:1–3; Mark 1:10–11). Wright plays the old hits, and because they are centered on God’s saving presence, the setlist is enjoyable as ever, even if it is at times familiar and predictable.
There are a few places where Wright’s argument feels thin, perhaps too tightly focused on driving home his thesis. Wright takes issue with the beatific vision, the classic Christian teaching that the best thing about heaven is, well, the view: beholding God face to face. For Wright, belief in the beatific vision necessitates embracing the fundamental errors he desires to rightly refute—heaven as our ultimate state, and a disembodied one at that.
Strangely, Wright does not mention that, for some significant Christian theologians—as wide ranging as the Roman Catholic Thomas Aquinas to the Puritan John Owen—the beatific vision is indeed embodied, tied to receiving and possessing a resurrected body. Wright seems to have missed an opportunity to integrate beholding the glory of the Lord, which Moses cannot do (Ex. 33:18–20), into beholding Jesus in the incarnation and to beholding God face to face in the embodied new creation as a result of the Resurrection (Rev. 22:4).
Wright says the beatific vision is “marginal” at best in the New Testament. That’s debatable. But it’s more than marginal in the Old Testament: African American Christians, for instance, have rightly prioritized a key text from Job 19:25–26:
I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God.
Far from negating his thesis, the importance of the beatific vision as an embodied reality tied to the Resurrection could have enabled a more thorough biblical and theological integration and thus feels like a missed opportunity.
Nevertheless, Wright’s work shines most in application. The second section of the book addresses the implications of God’s homecoming, showing that a response requires more than rearranging the cognitive furniture in our understanding of heaven. Rather, if God’s homecoming is past (through Jesus’ incarnation), continually present (by the Spirit), and a future reality (the fullness of God’s glory filling the inbreaking new creation), then what does this mean for our life with God here and now?
Readers familiar with Wright’s oeuvre will find the book offers its greatest rewards—and freshest material—in this second section. Wright articulates how God’s homecoming sheds light on faith practices that we might otherwise take as good but isolated activities. Prayer, for example, is not a long-distance conversation with the God who is far off. Rather, through the homecoming of Jesus in the incarnation and the sending of the Spirit, prayer is an exploration of the triune God who has come home toward us. When you kneel by your bedside at the end of a long Monday or say the Lord’s Prayer in the carpool line, you are drawn into God’s love and life. “All [prayers] can be framed within God’s past and future homecoming,” Wright says.
Most readers will not be surprised to see Wright’s treatment of worship, prayer, and evangelism as practices that flow from the hope of new creation. What feels new, here at least, is Wright’s attention to the sacraments. He voices frustration at disembodied tendencies within the Western church, often placing the blame at the feet of a somewhat reductionist view of Platonism.
But Wright is perceptive to connect the dots: It’s no surprise that belief in a disembodied heaven as the final state of salvation might align with a flattened and disembodied view of the sacraments. We might not think about heaven every day, but most churches receive Communion weekly or at least monthly. To contemplate Communion or the Lord’s Supper as a site of God’s homecoming toward his people is the launching point for a more sacramental and embodied view of God and the world.
For Wright, Communion must be understood as “central to Jesus’s intention, to his gospel message.” It is given to his followers to “celebrate both his achievement on the cross and his continuing presence with his people.” The God who comes home to us does not offer a proposition to declare he is with us. He feeds us a meal. The implications are myriad and marvelous. Where the world looks to progress for a sense of victory and hope, Christians look to a gathering centered upon embodied elements: a loaf of bread and a chalice of wine—sacramental signs of God’s presence and victory. This suggests the victory of God over evil is counterintuitive: It is the crucified Lord who reigns and the signs of his victory as creational— pointing then to the re-creation of all creation.
Wright views the Lord’s Table as “the nerve center of the gospel.” Thus, debating Communion is an act of human pride, but the infighting is also due to spiritual powers seeking to shift our focus from a meal that proclaims Christ to “how they do it” as opposed to “how we do it.” Wright here offers a brilliant insight that churches would do well to heed:
If the meal itself proclaims Jesus’ victory over evil, it was always likely (as Paul warned in Ephesians 6) that the principalities and powers would try to deflect this challenge to their rule, to distract attention, to stop people becoming gospel-people.
The Lord’s Table is a tangible homecoming, bringing together the Cross and new creation, because “the bread and wine can be seen as true gifts coming forward to us from God’s future.” This means weary Christians need to see the Lord’s Table as a homecoming and a hopeful foretaste of the world’s true future. Church leaders will be helped here not to fall for the bait of prideful comparisons in Communion practice, but to attend to the deeper work of helping their people regularly taste and see that the table points to the gospel truth of God making his home with us.
Wright makes these connections in his trademark fashion, deftly connecting New Testament realities to critical portions of Exodus and Isaiah and pointing out where most have gotten the story wrong. His fresh wisdom here is what Christians have long trusted and hoped: God is Immanuel not in theory but in reality—in the gospel, by the Spirit, and at his table. We may not have forgotten these truths quite as acutely as Wright argues, but we ought to give thanks to God for the reminder that his promise to be with us stands—and is breaking in among us even now.
Claude Atcho is pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville and author of Reading Black Books and Rhythms of Faith.
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