Reflection for May 8

N. T. Wright recently argued that any thought that Christian hope is about “going to heaven” is biblically unsupported, theologically bankrupt and ethically corrosive. Jesus scholar Marcus Borg once told an audience, “If I were to make a list of Christianity’s ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would be popular Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife.”

All the more welcome, then [is] Christopher Morse’s superb and profound new monograph, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News. Morse combs meticulously through the biblical evidence, observing that in the Gospels heaven is mainly “not about blue skies or life only after death.” Rather, heaven is the life that is now coming toward us from God, the life “of the world to come,” a life that overcomes our present age. The opposite of heaven is not hell, but instead the “world that is passing away” (Thomas G. Long, “Heaven comes to us,” Christian Century, May 3, 2011).