N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025; digital edition, 2026)
He understands as he mouths the words what’s happening here. He desperately wants to believe that his son still exists, still exists in some actual sense, not just as a memory, and what happened to him is somehow part of some larger plan or scheme and not just a meaningless single event. What these people believe seems to make that possible. He assumes that’s what drew his mother here or something like it. She has never shown any interest in this sort of thing until now, so he understands why she comes here and how it might help her. He also understands after a few weeks that it won’t be able to help him. He knows it’s not true. That’s the problem. He wants to believe that his son still exists, and his desire to believe that is almost enough to make him believe everything else that he needs to believe in order to make that possible, but not quite. The part of him that knows those things aren’t true is just too strong for him to overcome. David Szalay
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Understanding Hope
The quotation above is from David Szalay’s Booker Prize winning novel, Flesh. The words are like to break one’s heart. The he who longs for hope is István, a Hungarian emigré to England, a simple, mostly unreflective man. He wants something to hang on to, but the message he hears, from a preacher dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, does not reach him. It seems false, made-up. It doesn’t connect.
This is true not just for István but for many of our neighbors. They have become disconnected from the old sources of hope—the faith as it was long preached and practiced—and nothing has taken its place. What do we have to say to them? To those for whom the part of them that knows the old comforts aren’t true is just too strong for them to overcome.
One attempt to address the nature of Christian hope—to get it right—is a new book by the bestselling author, N. T. Wright. God’s Homecoming, is important both for its reach and its focus. Perhaps no other contemporary biblical scholar has the reach of N. T. Wright. If my experience in talking to pastors and theologically curious laity is any guide, he’s widely read and appreciated as someone who opens up the Bible in fresh ways. God’s Homecoming is likely to be read, if only by the already committed. It has reach.
More important is what Wright is trying to do in the book. His focus is on Christian hope. Picking up from his earlier Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008), God’s Homecoming confronts what Wright regards as a fundamental misunderstanding in contemporary Christianity: the idea that the faith is centrally about getting to heaven. In the American evangelical world, this idea is massively important. It’s often thought in such churches that the church exists to save souls. Anything else is a distraction. To this dominant take on Christianity, Wright proposes an alternative, if he is right, a more biblical alternative, a fundamental change in direction: not our going to heaven but God’s coming home to earth.
Along the way in this book, as in his many other books (some 80 or so), Wright is at turns brilliantly suggestive, stubbornly wrongheaded about many things biblical and theological, too sure he’s right, and, in a stunning turnabout, as fully willing to impose his theology on the Bible as are the theologians he roundly condemns for doing just that. It’s not a great book but it’s an interesting one, and in the last chapter (Chapter 14), when Wright at last turns to the questions we all ask about life after death, it’s well worth the price of admission. It may have something to say for the likes of István. I’ll come to all that below.
“Heaven” and “Soul”
But first, two key words, “heaven” and “soul,” each an important part of the church’s vocabulary. As Wright explains, neither of these words, in the sense that they have acquired for us, is actually biblical. The Bible does not mean by “heaven” what the church usually means by “heaven”: a place where you go after you die. And the Bible does not mean by “soul” a spiritual part of us that survives death and goes to heaven. In the way these words are commonly understood, their roots are more pagan than Christian.
Wright addresses these words and the commonly-held structure of Christian hope because he wants to reform the church. Despite his Anglican credentials (Anglicans often style themselves neither Catholic nor Protestant), Wright is at heart a Protestant preacher, a preacher of revival. The historian Peter Brown distinguishes Protestantism from Catholicism in terms of their governing narratives. For Catholics, “the master narrative emphasizes the slow blossoming through the ages of notions inherited from the very beginnings of Christianity.” In contrast, for Protestants “the master narrative takes the form of plotting, through the centuries, the loss of some original, reputedly more Christian, vision of death and the afterlife” (Brown, The Ransom of the Soul, p. 6). By these lights, God’s Homecoming is a very Protestant book. Wright is convinced that the church early on—already by the 3rd century—went badly wrong and has been trending wrong ever since. He wants to call it back to the original vision.
It’s this perspective that gives God’s Homecoming its sermonic tone. Wright wants change, wants the church to repent and start anew. And in true Protestant fashion, he believes that the way back is by means of the Bible.
The Abandoned Temple
As Wright sees it, the Bible tells a “central story.” The story is a temple story. The earth was created to be God’s temple. In Genesis 1 (as has been widely noted by biblical scholars), the creator God seems to be constructing a temple. As in ancient temples, in the position of honor, God carefully places his own living image—humans. In the course of things, the temple is damaged, spoiled. God can no longer be present in the same way. But in the end, God comes back, comes home at last. In the last book of the Bible, at the end of the story, John declares:
“I heard a loud voice from the throne saying:
See, the home of God is among mortals.He will live with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them and be their God. . .. (Revelation 21:1-3, NRSVue)
With that God comes home. The story is complete.
It’s rather more complicated than that, of course. In the central section of God’s Homecoming (chapters 2-5, pp. 25-113), Wright traces the story of God’s leaving and coming home through Old and New Testaments. For readers of Wright’s other books, this will be familiar ground. He’s told this story before. But his telling of the story raises a central issue, one that Wright never seems quite to address: what does it mean for God to come home? Where does God come from?
Heaven, one supposes, but where is heaven? “Heaven,” Wright observes in his 2nd chapter, sometimes just means “sky” in biblical Hebrew. Well, never “just.” Shāmayim, the Hebrew word for “heaven,” “sky,” is grammatically plural. Wright takes the plural as a “hint that the biblical writers are aware, in speaking of ‘the heavens,’ that they are gesturing toward the multilayered reality that on the one hand is emphatically the domain of the creator God and on the other hand is designed to exist in mutual relationship with “earth,” the abode of humans” (28; my italics). This is linguistic nonsense. “Heaven” is plural in most ancient Semitic languages for whatever reason. But it points to a difficulty that Wright never fully faces. “Heaven,” even when it means “sky,” has in mind a rather different concept of sky than the one we carry around with us. For us, sky is just the visible atmosphere. We know it to be porous, air. But for the ancient Hebrews (along with everyone else at the time), the blue dome was more substantial. In Exodus, to take one example, Moses and the elders of Israel ascend the holy mountain. At the top, stepping through the dome, they see the sky from the top side down. As one might expect, it’s paved with blue stone (sapphire or lapis lazuli). There they sit at table with God (Exodus 24:9-11).
Heaven-and-Earth Metaphysic
It’s hard to know how to take such passages. This small narrative is embedded in material that tells us that humans cannot see God and survive. Perhaps there were those among the intelligentsia in ancient times who regarded all such passages as metaphorical, but for many, heaven must have been located on the top side of the blue dome of the sky and God physically present there above the dome. This makes sense of passages like Genesis 11:5 in the Tower of Babel story, where God bends down to see what his humans were up to. And other passages in which God looks down or comes down. Wright, it seems to me, fails to acknowledge the differences between the thought world of the ancients and our own ways of thinking.
And because he does not do justice to the development of thought in the ancient world, he fails to understand how much of his reading of the Bible—especially the Old Testament—depends on his own ideas about how it hangs together. Wright jumps immediately from his critique of commonly-held ideas about heaven as a far-off paradise to what he calls “a heaven-and-earth metaphysic” (33). He suggests that heaven and earth represent two different “spheres” that are not “part of the same space-time continuum.” “[The heaven-and-earth metaphysic] assumes,” Wright says, “on the contrary, that the two spheres were made to overlap and interlock” (8). He doesn’t explain how the two spheres might differ from each other or how they “overlap and interlock.” He appears to assume that heaven and earth are in some sense different dimensions, but what precisely does this mean? How does it work?
My point is not to sort through what Wright intends by this “heaven-and-earth metaphysic,” but to point to two problems with what he is claiming. The first I’ve already named. Wright seemingly fails to recognize that he is imposing his own theological solution on the biblical material. It’s not that the theological solution is necessarily wrong. Perhaps it makes good theological sense to think of heaven and earth as interlocking spheres, as Wright has it, but it’s not the Bible.
Biblical Complexity
A second problem is Wright’s assumption, underlying almost everything in this book, that the Bible speaks with a single consistent voice. To say, as Wright frequently does, that “the Bible says” assumes that there is in the Bible a “central story,” a master narrative. That’s not entirely wrong. One can construct such a narrative, but it is always a construction, created by the interpreter, and when pushed, such narratives quickly begin to fall apart.
It’s better to think of the Bible as a conversation. The conversation circles around some central themes, but it is far richer and various than the single voice idea allows. Compare Wright’s view of the Bible with, say, Hindy Najman’s much more deeply informed characterization of Jewish thought (Scriptural Vitality: Rethinking Philology and Hermeneutics, 2025). For Najman the 2nd Temple period, the time when the Old Testament came together, was a time when Judaism was creatively finding its way as it confronted a new (Greek) culture and new ways of thinking.
The Old Testament itself participates in this intellectual and spiritual ferment. In books like Genesis and Exodus, different ways of thinking about God and heaven sit side-by-side with each other in uneasy but productive dialogue (see Benjamin Sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition, 2015). Later in 2nd temple period the apocalyptic perspective of Daniel emerges and the deep skepticism of Ecclesiastes. At the same time, you get books of biblical extension and interpretation like Enoch and Jubilees. And much more. In mashing this down into a single narrative, Wright loses the wonderful variety of the Bible itself, reducing it, as Protestantism has always done, into a single theology.
Whenever you have a single narrative approach to the Bible, you always have exceptions: passages that don’t fit the script. These need to be explained away. So, it’s not a surprise to find in Wright’s book a chapter entitled, “The Apparent Exceptions” (Chapter 6, 114-128). In his exceptions chapter, he lists nine passages, all from the New Testament, that appear to suggest, contrary to Wright’s claim, that souls do go to heaven, familiar passages like Jesus saying to the thief on the cross in Luke’s gospel, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (23:43). Or Paul’s comment in 2 Corinthians 5:8 that he “would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” Passages like that. Wright has his explanations for all of them, not always persuasive to my eyes, but he manages, as he must, to shoehorn them into his narrative. He might better, as I suggested above, to have simply acknowledged that the New Testament, like the Old, is more various than we have been taught to expect. Not every page of the New Testament is on the same page.
Platonism by the Back Door
All of which is to say that I wish that Wright had not tried so hard to cram a single narrative—the God’s homecoming narrative—down his reader’s throats. But despite all that, Wright’s book pays off in the end with an intriguing way of thinking about what we all think about, life beyond death—a way of thinking that has surprisingly little to do with God’s homecoming.
Allow me to set this up. For purposes of space, I’m skipping over Wright’s account of what went wrong with the church: his “Interlude: How Did We Miss the Point” chapter (147-171). He mostly blames Platonism, and thinks it all began to go south with Origen in the 3rd century. This history is far too rushed. Better to read Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul(2015), a far more nuanced account.
I’m also skipping over his mostly laudable attempts in the penultimate chapters (11-13) to push the church toward its mission on earth. In these chapters, he writes about worship, evangelism, prayer, the sacraments, and what he calls “polychrome church.” Occasionally, in these chapters, he takes cheap shots against a variety of presumed opponents—19th century German liberalism, “the laissez-faire Enlightenment doctrine of “tolerance,” or “who-cares easygoing relativism,” to name a few examples—but for the most part he is pushing the church to be more engaged with the world in which we live.
This leaves us with two chapters in which Wright develops his view of the afterlife, the first a rejection of what he regards as Platonism; the second his own view of Christian hope. In the first of these, Chapter 10 (190-215), he rejects the idea of the heavenward journey of the soul. In rejecting the heavenward journey—he calls the chapter, “The Imagined Goal and the Unnecessary Journey” (190-215)—he also rejects as unbiblical ideas about the purging of the soul, including recent Protestant moves in the direction of purgatory (think C.S. Lewis, Rob Bell).
It’s in this chapter that Wright’s lack of theological sympathy seems especially apparent. He opens the chapter by taking on Hans Boersma. Boersma, a self-professed “Christian Platonist,” is steeped in (the Roman Catholic) Nouvelle théologie and the early church fathers. For Boersma, the essential issue is the relationship between the eternal and the visible. He sees this issue as sacramental. In the Eucharist what we see is bread, but this bread is touched with eternity in ways we do not entirely understand. So too with the Bible. The Bible is a human book, assembled over a long period of time, with all the vagaries of ancient literature. We need to keep the ordinariness of the Bible in front of us. But we also testify that the Bible is touched by eternity, again in ways we do not entirely understand.
Wright is having none of this. He says in response to Boersma and others: “The first and sharpest thing to say is that Jesus and the earliest Christians appear to be innocent of the whole platonic construct. . ..” Well, I suppose. Jesus was no Platonist, although Platonism was all around in the 1st century. When the apostolic testimony emerged into the Roman world, the earliest Christian writers needed language to express what they saw in the gospel, and they used the language available to them, which was often influenced by platonic thought. Did that steer the church in directions that have had unintended consequences? Perhaps. But the questions remain, and Wright has not escaped them.
In his rejection of the tradition that Boersma, among others, represents, Wright is giving up a particular slant on the Bible. Take, for example, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, written sometime in the early 390s CE. Gregory reads the Moses story twice, once historically and a second time spiritually. In this second reading he takes the life of Moses as metaphor for the Christian life of contemplation of God. For him, this life is an ascent (like Moses up the mountain) toward knowledge, both, as he works it out, knowledge as light and knowledge as darkness—beyond light.
For Gregory (as for Origen before him), this way of thinking opens up aspects of the scriptures that otherwise would not be open. It’s a metaphor to live by, a metaphor to read scripture by. When Wright summarily rejects this way of reading the Bible—the ascent to the beatific vision—he loses a part of the Christian tradition that we can ill afford to lose. It’s not that the story of God’s homecoming is not important, a way of opening up scripture; it’s that it is not the only way. Like the Bible itself, interpretation must be multiple.
But there is another problem here. In trying to read the Bible naively, Wright slides over an important question. Actually, a whole lot of important questions, but perhaps it’s sufficient to focus on just one. Let me ask it this way: What precisely does it mean for God to come home to earth? Since early in its history, the church—its best theologians, at least—has concluded that God cannot be just another being in the universe. However God is here, it’s not in terms of space. God does not move from somewhere to somewhere else. The language about God coming down to reside on earth in, say, Revelation 21 is surely metaphorical, but what exactly is the metaphor? What does it mean for God to come home to earth? It’s with questions like this that theology begins. For the church, Platonic terminology gave it the necessary vocabulary to frame the questions raised by the Bible. Perhaps there are better ways to talk about the issues, but one cannot entirely avoid the questions.
A Way to Think about Life after Death
And in the end, Wright does not avoid them. He comes at last to a way of thinking about God and life after death borrowed from trinitarian theology and resembling more than a little the very theologies he has spent most of the book preaching against—those 3rd century and later Platonists.
Wright works this out in his last chapter in terms of Spirit and spirit, the divine Spirit and our spirits. Wright notes that biblically God appears to come home in two ways: “the personal return of YHWH to Zion” and the temple, which the New Testament is enacted in the life of Jesus, and the “the filling of all creation with the knowledge and glory of God,” which is marked by the pouring out of the Spirit (283). Note that this is nothing new; it’s quite simply the creed, the logosand Spirit, the one begotten by the Father and the other proceeding from the Father. In what follows, the first of these, the logos, Jesus, gets a bit lost, but with a little care, perhaps all that can be worked out.
Wright’s focus is on the second of these comings, the pouring out of the Spirit. His primary text, not only for this section but for the entire book, is Isaiah 11:9 (along with parallels in Numbers 14:21, Psalm 72:18, and Habakkuk 2:12-14): “They shall not hurt or destroy / on all my holy mountain, / for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord / as the waters cover the sea” (NRSVue). As the Spirit of Yhwh filled the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11), so the Spirit will one day fill all the earth with the knowledge (Habakkuk adds the “glory”) of God. Notice how important knowledge is in this pouring out of the Spirit. It’s in knowing that the world is transformed. This is not so different after all from Gregory’s ascent.
Wright develops this idea in terms of Genesis 2:7 and Ezekiel 37 (see also Psalm 104:29-30) and, from the New Testament, such texts as 1 Corinthians 2:11-14 and Romans 8:9-27. In these texts the Spirit brings life. In a future post, I will return to this point, but for the moment suffice it to say that our life is to be found in the relationship between God’s breath (Spirit) and our breath. We are what we are in the Spirit.
And if this is true for life, it’s true, Wright says, for death. He cites Colossians 3:3-4 “. . . you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (NRSVue). He adds, by way of commentary:
. . . how far-fetched it would be to suppose that God’s spirit might come and dwell within a person on a merely temporary basis, as a transient, passing phenomenon between their baptism (and coming to faith) and their bodily death. Rather, I suggest, what Paul says of the postbaptismal Christian applies equally to the postmortem Christian. . ..
And this for him points to a way of thinking about what happens to us when we die:
The mode of existence that may be predicated for believers between bodily death and bodily resurrection may then, I suggest, be seen in terms of sharing the inner life of the triune God—specifically, the life of the spirit. (288)
Wright is a bit slippery here. What exactly does it mean for us to share “the inner life of the triune God?” I think it means for him something of the same thing it means for the logos, the son of God, to be begotten by the Father. In the Father, we remain in relationship through the Spirit, and if we remain in relationship, we remain alive. Something like that.
Wright adds to this two important consequences for his view of life in God. The first is that death gets its due. When we die, we die. Death, Wright says, is the end of sin. There is not need for purgation because with our death, there is no longer any sin. We might think of this as our stepping out of the matrix of evil and its consequences. This has the ring of Pauline theology: in Christ we die. In contrast, Wright says, the Platonic soul never quite dies. Immortality lies not in God but the soul itself. In Wright’s own words:
Perhaps we could put it like this. Bodily death finishes off the old psychosomatic “you.” To cling to it, or to imagine a soul that is a personal possession, something other than the indwelling spirit, is to sidestep the co-crucifixion of which Paul speaks in Galatians 2:19–21. Perhaps it is even to cherish a little pride after all. However—to paraphrase 2 Corinthians 5:1–5: “When the spirit has indwelt someone, they become more truly the person God always intended them to be. That new humanity, that ‘real me’ or ‘real you,’ is already there in God’s heavenly purposes, waiting to become a heaven-and-earth reality at the resurrection. (295)
There is much that needs working out in this conception. Resurrection, for example, which I think Wright does not have entirely sorted. But the idea that death is death is a good beginning.
The second consequence for Wright’s proposal—this, I think, he borrows partly from Jurgen Moltmann, to whom he dedicates the book—is that in the relationship between the Spirit of God and our spirit, alters not only us but God. He fetchingly notes in this regard that Jesus was surely shaped by his relationships with his friends; so, too, God is shaped in relationship with us (290-1). Again, Wright:
We have so often spoken of the effects of the spirit’s work on the believer that we have not usually stopped to think of the effects of that work on the spirit’s own self. With all due allowance for divine foreknowledge, and for the fact that God has “prepared good works ahead of time” as the road his people must travel (Ephesians 1:10), we may still speak of the effects on the spirit of the filling of this or that person. That is why the eventual promise of God’s presence filling the whole creation, with the present filling of the church as its anticipation, enables the spirit-filled church to “abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). (291)
Wright has made a start here on a theology of life after death that depends not on an immortal soul or an external paradise but on relationship, the relationship between who we are and the eternal Spirit of God. How does this all work? In a future post, I will try to sort this out a bit better, but for the moment, I’ll leave it here, with the question with which I began: is there in all this a way to talk to the likes of István mourning his son? And if there is, how would you begin?
Clay