Tonight, along with my pastor Tom and his wife Cheryl, my friend Matthew, his pastor, Pete, and another guy from his church, George, I joined a packed audience to hear N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, speak at a church here in Nashville about his new book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I don’t read that much theology, but of what I have read, N.T. Wright is my favorite. I’m a big fan of his book The Meaning of Jesus that he co-authored with Marcus Borg – I blogged about it here and have recommended it to a lot of friends.

Five years ago, N.T. Wright wrote The Resurrection of the Son of God, a book that ended up being seven hundred and forty pages long. He addressed the issue of heaven and the misconceptions people have in one section of that, but decided he needed something more accessible that talked about heaven and what the mission of the church is supposed to be. Enter Surprised by Hope, published in February of this year. TIME magazine did an interview with him when the book came out, provocatively titled Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop.

He began his talk tonight by saying that “for most people, the name of the game is simply that you go to heaven when you die.” But “the New Testament,” he said, “is not particularly interested in what happens to people right after they die.” “Resurrection is not life after death, it is life after life after death.”

(Side note – you know you’re in a group of theology nerds when the speaker comments on a particular view of salvation and says “a fairly low-grade view of soteriology, that,” and people chuckle.)

A good summation of Bishop Wright’s message came when he said “the message of Easter is not that Christ has been raised, so we are going to heaven. It is that Christ is raised, and God has ushered in a new world, and now we have a job to do.”

He quoted a friend of his, to laughter from the audience, saying “Heaven is important, but it is not the end of the world.”

He mentioned that “the idea that we are leaving these bodes comes not from Scripture but from Plato.” “Human bodies are good… God does not make junk.”

He spent a good deal of time talking about how “a great deal of Christian theology over the last century has colluded with death,” and how the dualism that forms the basis for a lot of Christian thought (not to mention songs like “this world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through”) is not sustained by the New Testament.

And here is my favorite thing he said all evening: “Heaven and earth are the over-locking and inter-lapping parts of God’s creation,” he told us, “and sometimes the curtain becomes translucent. That is what Christian theology is all about.”