"Bishop: Christians don't go to heaven - Anglican challenges widespread belief, says believers asleep until God returns" - WorldNetDaily, 2/10/08.
It's remarkable what WND does with this original TIME interview. This idea cannot be directly attributed to Wright:
Instead, deceased believers are in a sleep-like state until God comes back to Earth.I'm not the only one who thinks this.
After the original poster is redirected from the WND write-up to the TIME interview, there's this reaction:
it shows that the WND article is overly sensationalistic if not downright misleading.A key paragraph in the TIME interview is missing from the WND report but it sheds considerable light on Wright's point:
Reading the WND article does leave that impression, and maybe the person who wrote the article simply didn't understand what soul sleep is.
It appears that whoever wrote it may have focused in on the following statement and heard "soul sleep" when Wright says "asleep."
TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?
(i.e., Luke 23; Rev. 4 & 5)
Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek.
The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally.
But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.
8 comments:
'But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies.'
As Paul, a Greek-speaking Christian said, 'Who will rescue me from this body of death?'
Wright has an interesting article on how Jews saw the sea as evil at the evilness of the material world
Paul's cry of helplessness is not the same as gnosticism because later in Romans, Paul teaches a resurrection of the body:
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
The WND makes Wright sound as if he's teaching "soul sleep" and he isn't.
Yeah, I get that the sea is evil, chaos mythology. But God is the Lord of heaven and earth and sea.
Try to read with context in mind.
Paul thought the spirit of God was dwelling in the mortal bodies of Christians.
He was talking about the present.
What does the verse before say? 'But if Christ in in you, though the body is DEAD because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.'
It is simply confirmation that the body , as such, was a dead thing.
He is talking about the here and now.
Paul thinks people without the spirit are in dead bodies.
But if they have the spirit, their *already* dead bodies will have life in them ( although they will still be *mortal* bodies)
In Colossians 2, Paul confirms that this life is something Christians have now - '....when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God.... And when you were dead in trespasses..., God made you alive together with him.'
Romans 8:11 is not talking about the resurrection at all.
It is talking about dead bodies having a life-giving spirit in them.
Paul,of course, teaches the destruction of the body (which is why he wanted to be rescued from it)
2 Corinthians 5 'For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.'
if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
Paul,of course, teaches the destruction of the body
I infer otherwise from the Gospels' description of Christ's resurrected body.
It is very clever of you to use the Gospels for a description of the resurrected body.
Paul, of course, was way too dumb to use any of those stories when he was trying to explain what a resurrected body was like.
Either that, or nobody had made them up at the time Paul was writing.
It isn't clever.
Back to Paul, then,
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
How economical is it make a Christian a "new creation" and destroy the flesh?
when Paul was writing? Not also where Paul was writing? (Not Jerusalem).
WND grossly distorted Bishop Wright's words.
Kenith
That's the point of my original post.
I was grateful to be able to locate the original interview and get a clearer message of Bishop Wright's teaching.
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