God’s Homecoming

Last week I published a rather long review of a popular book by N. T. Wright, God’s Homecoming (2025). I spent some time with the book because I think it raises important issues. In it, Wright attempts to redefine what it means to be human—what it means to live and to die apart from two concepts commonly held in the church: an immortal soul and heaven as a place where Christians go after they die. Wright contends that these ideas were imported into Christianity from the outside, mostly from Greek thought and especially the Platonic tradition. Instead of the concept of an immortal soul, Wright defines the lasting part of us in relational terms as a communion between the Spirit of God and human spirits. What is required in this way of thinking is not a soul but God’s faithfulness. We survive death because we have a place in God. And instead of our going to heaven, according to Wright, the proper biblical story is of God coming to earth and dwelling among humans, and in that way bringing us home. 

These are consequential revisions to what might be called the “Protestant consensus.” The Protestant consensus is the default theology held not only by people who go to church but by many who don’t go to church. And it’s Protestant not because everyone who holds to it belongs to a Protestant church (or even knows what “Protestant” means) but because it has its origins in the Protestant Reformation. In the Protestant consensus church is about saving souls. It may do many other things, but saving souls is the primary business of the church. And “saving souls” in this theology means ensuring that those being saved end up in heaven and not the alternative. So, as Wright has it in God’s Homecoming, if neither soul nor heaven are biblical, then a radical rethinking of what the faith is all about would seem in order. What does it mean in Christian terms for us to live and to die?

I have lately been asking questions about just this sort of thing in the light of what seems to me and many others to be a crisis in the life of the church. I recently listened to a short book by Norma Komeloku Wong called When No Thing Works(2024). In the book, she asks us to not focus on the apocalyptic moment we find ourselves in but to look beyond toward what we would like to become. What will we carry across the apocalyptic line into the future?

In God’s Homecoming, Wright is asking just such questions. What should a biblically responsible Christian faith look like in the 21^st century, if it is to be a faith that honors its biblical roots? In his reimagining the church, it’s no longer about individual souls getting into heaven but about God coming home to earth.

Responding to God’s Homecoming

This seems to me a welcome change. On finishing my review, two responses to Wright’s book came immediately to mind. One was to pick up Wright’s view of Christian hope as he works it out in his last chapter in God’s Homecoming and to sort through it with an eye to extending what he has to say in new directions. A promising place to begin this inquiry is Wright’s view of death in the Bible, especially in the Pauline literature. Death, he says, is really death:

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. (God’s Homecoming, 295)

That’s pretty stark: “Bodily death finishes off the old psychosomatic “you.” No more you. And, in my opinion, fully biblical. And if this is true of death, then we need to think differently about both sides of death: this life and the resurrected life. 

I’m eager to get to all that, and in subsequent posts, I will.  But first, I need to address my other, less happy response to God’s Homecoming: the way Wright continues to assume a theology of the Bible that vitiates his positive theological work. For all his considerable credentials as a biblical scholar, Wright seems to me to get the Bible wrong in fundamental ways, and in getting the Bible wrong, he fails to see aspects of biblical truth that he otherwise might see.

A Bit of Biography

So first the Bible and how to read it. I struggled with how to approach this subject. I have frequently brought it up in my (many) posts. I’ll come later in this post to some of what I’ve said before, but perhaps on this occasion I should start not with the Bible or with Wright’s reading of the Bible but with a bit of my own story.

I began with the Bible. I began with Bible, that is, after I had lost my faith. Don’t make too much of the losing of my faith. At the time I lost my faith I was a sophomore in college, and sophomores in college are inclined to lose their faith. Like many others at my college, I had come from an insular faith community. In my community—the part of it I knew at the time—everyone and everything were Christian Reformed. The public school kids who went to the local Reformed Church in America were on the far fringe. The Americans who went to other sorts of churches were outside the pale. 

To find yourself in this sort of community, you have to step away, away from the implicit assumptions that have to that point defined you. This is college sophomore work. You can do it at other times, of course. We do some such work throughout our lives. But for many, including me, the work began when you first gained distance from home. For me and perhaps for others of my readers, that was my sophomore year.

My way back to faith is a longer story. I’ll not tell it here, except to say that it began with the Bible. I had made it to a theological seminary, not because I particularly wanted to become a pastor, but I had long been headed in that direction and I liked school, any school. It was my first year in seminary. We had learned a little Hebrew, and now we were in our first Old Testament class, Former Prophets. The Former Prophets in the Jewish canon are the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Early in the course, the professor asked us to write a short paper on the literary structure of Joshua. 

This was new to me. I had not considered that Joshua—or any other biblical book—might have a literary structure. The Bible was, well, Bible. But with the assignment in mind, I read through Joshua, and I noticed stones—rocks—everywhere. The Israelites were dragging them up from the Jordan, piling them on top of their enemies, making altars with them, even praying that they come tumbling down. I was intrigued. Something—something apparently literary—was going on here in, of all places, the book of Joshua.

I had stepped off into a new world, the intriguing, complicated, delightful literary world of the Bible, especially its first testament. I finished seminary, went to graduate school, and became a pastor—another story—and through it all stuck with the Bible. Not the Bible as it had been taught me, the Bible filtered through Reformed theology, but the Bible as it appears on the page, with its variety, its humor, its antiquity, its literary effects.

Bible Trouble

And it—the Bible—got me in trouble. Another longer story, but when at last I approached my denomination for ordination, they asked me about the early chapters of Genesis. They wanted me to affirm the standard Reformed interpretation of those chapters—the theology of creation and fall—but that’s not what I saw in the text. What I saw was not a story that fit neatly into the creation—fall—salvation paradigm at the heart of their orthodoxy but a story about what it means to be human and how humans fit into the world. It was, I thought, the Bible against theology, and in this contest, for me at least, theology was the loser.

This perspective of course was not mine alone. I was not in any sense original in this way of thinking. The perspective was that of modern biblical studies. Theology wants a global perspective; biblical studies want specifics. Theology wants the Bible to tell a single canonical story; biblical studies want to distinguish the perspectives of the Deuteronomic history from Chronicles, the prophets from the wisdom books, the Hebrew Bible from the New Testament, Mark from John, and so forth. Theology—I’m speaking here mostly of the conservative theology of the sort I was taught—wants each text to mean one thing and one thing only, to tie the Bible down; biblical studies want to explore how meanings morph and multiply as contexts shift and change. Theology wants to nail things down to a definable truth; biblical studies wants to play.

As I said, I began with the Bible, and I stuck with it. I insisted that the Bible was not the sort of book that theology wanted. And so I said and wrote over much of my career. Until. Until slowly and in a variety of ways I came to see that I had been wrong. Not wrong about the Bible but about theology. Or, better, about how the Bible and theology relate. I began, again slowly and over several years, to see that you needed both the Bible and theology. To see that the church had always required both. That it had found it necessary to read the Bible twice, in two different ways, and that it was in the interplay between these two different ways of reading the Bible that truth emerged. 

Reading Twice

Let me tell a bit of that story. In the tradition in which I grew up—perhaps you, too—the story that was told about the church was that the church over the course of centuries had departed from the Bible and instead substituted its own mistaken theology. But in the 16^th century, men like Martin Luther and John Calvin had come along to call the church back to the Bible. From then on right-thinking Christians insisted that all theological truth must be biblical first of all. The slogan was sola scriptura, “by the Bible alone.” 

This story is seriously mistaken on at least two counts. First, it’s mistaken about what Luther and Calvin and others were actually doing in their reading of the Bible. I return to that below. And second, it’s mistaken about the role of the Bible in the early church (and in other parts of Christianity, including Eastern Christianity, which we never talked about at all). 

We tend to think that early means simple and unsophisticated, but this is not true of the early church. The early church was a sophisticated interpretative community set in the midst of a broader discussion about interpretation. Questions we are still asking about texts, not just in biblical studies but in literary studies in general, were already under discussion at the time the Bible emerged into the ancient world. The early church, beginning already in the 2^nd century with Irenaeus of Lyon and especially with Origen of Alexandria in the 3^rd century, realized that the Bible required two complementary readings, if it were to guide the church: one to hear what the text says and a second to hear what the Spirit is saying. These are not precisely the same, but they also cannot be separated. 

Let me bring this into our own time. What the early church regarded as the first reading—they called it historia—in our time is the arena of biblical studies. It’s far more advanced than it was in antiquity. We have a much stronger sense of history than did the ancient world. We have better tools for understanding the text and for understanding how the text was put together. But by the nature of this kind of study, it will not lead one to the divine voice. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive. We need a second reading.

The second reading—the early church called this by many names—is listening for the Spirit, for what the Spirit is saying to the church. It involves both what the Spirit says and what the Spirit doesn’t say. This is often called “ruled reading.” One approaches the Bible with a theological perspective in mind, a sense of who God is and how God works in the world. It’s a sort of theological “hypothesis” (the early church actually used the word “hypothesis”) about where God speaks in the Bible and where God doesn’t speak. As believer, you know, for example, that the law in the Old Testament about stoning a rebellious child to death is not word of God in the same sense as is the command to love one another in the New Testament. Our theological “hypothesis” allows us to discriminate between what is of God from what is not of God.

These two ways of reading the Bible work together. Biblical studies can be many things: playful, historical, academic, and more, but it doesn’t get you to “Thus says the Lord.” Theology, our hypothesis about God, is always inadequate, too thin. We need both.

How Not to Interpret the Bible

Allow me an example. Recently Peter Hegseth, the woeful Secretary of Defense (he prefers “Secretary of War”), invited Franklin Graham to preach at a Pentagon prayer service. In his sermon, Graham said, “We know God loves. But do you know that God also hates? Do you know that God is a God of war?” (quoted from Suzy Hansen, “Made in the USA,” The New York Review of Books, June 11, 2026, page 12). Graham went on to cite I Samuel 15:3: “Now go and attack Amalekand utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” 

Graham was picking up on the rhetoric of Benjamin Netayahu, who uses the Amalek references in the Bible to justify the killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Most of us understand at a gut level that this is wrong. God is not a god of hate. How do we know this? Because we live and worship in Christian communities that have long preached the opposite of this. In our worship and life together, we learn from the Spirit that God is a god of love. This in the sense the early church gives to the word is our theological “hypothesis.” We might better say, “the gospel.” And this understanding of the gospel we bring to the Bible, and so when we read about Amalek, we understand that these texts bear a complicated relationship to divine truth. They are not to be taken as divine directives for us. What Graham was doing in his sermon was wrong, a violation of divine truth. It was anti-Christian.

The Bible Does Not “Say”

With this example in mind, let me wrap this up by returning to Wright’s use of scripture in God’s Homecoming. What Wright is proposing in his book is a new “hypothesis” about the Christian faith. He is proposing that it’s better to read the Bible as the story of God coming home to earth rather than the story of our souls going to heaven. His reading, he claims, resonates with more of the Bible than does the soul to heaven reading. I think he is right about that. Where he is wrong is in thinking that his “hypothesis” is tout court what the Bible says. It’s one way to grasp the Bible, but not the only way. It’s a theological frame through which to understand the Bible (and a heuristic device to help bring together different parts of the Bible), but it’s not the Bible in the sense that he insists it is. He is fond of saying, “The Bible says” this or that when he should be saying that this is one fruitful way to approach the Bible, but not the only way.

The Bible remains and must remain elusive. It is still the book I discovered all those many years ago. literary, filled with surprises, not easily nailed down. Perhaps God gave us such a book precisely so that we could not assume that we know all of God’s truth because we humans don’t do well when we think we have God’s truth in our pocket. And so my distress that Wright in God’s Homecoming seems to double down on the idea that the Bible speaks always and everywhere with one voice and that he has heard that voice. His book would be stronger if allowed the Bible more room to breathe.

With that in mind, if you are willing to come with me, let’s turn to those matters of life and death that God’s Homecomingraises and see what we and the Bible in all its diversity might make of them.

Until then,

Clay