Summary of N. T. Wright's On Earth as in Heaven

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, because we don’t know when it will arrive and because at present we only have images and metaphors for it.

#2 Without Easter, the Christian faith would not exist. The movement that arose around Jesus would not have been about good news, but rather good advice. People were waiting for the great day to dawn, not celebrating its arrival.

#3 Christmas has now become the main celebratory event of the Christian year, while Easter has been pushed to the margins. Easter should be the center of the Christian year, but we rarely have enough energy left for it except for the first night and day.

#4 The challenge of new creation is the challenge of history and science as much as it is for the Christian or the theologian. Jesus’s resurrection isn’t an odd event within the world as it is but the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822542341

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Insights on N. T. Wright's On Earth as in Heaven

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 15

Insights from Chapter 16

Insights from Chapter 17

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. The ultimate future hope remains a surprise, because we don’t know when it will arrive and because at present we only have images and metaphors for it.

#2

Without Easter, the Christian faith would not exist. The movement that arose around Jesus would not have been about good news, but rather good advice. People were waiting for the great day to dawn, not celebrating its arrival.

#3

Christmas has now become the main celebratory event of the Christian year, while Easter has been pushed to the margins. Easter should be the center of the Christian year, but we rarely have enough energy left for it except for the first night and day.

#4

The challenge of new creation is the challenge of history and science as much as it is for the Christian or the theologian. Jesus’s resurrection isn’t an odd event within the world as it is but the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.

#5

The ancients believed in life after death, but they did not believe in resurrection. Resurrection referred specifically to something that happened to the body, and everyone knew about ghosts, spirits, visions, and hallucinations.

#6

When we turn to Paul, the verse that has always struck me is 1 Corinthians 15:58. Paul wrote the longest and densest chapter in any of his letters, discussing the future resurrection of the body in great detail. He said, Therefore, my beloved ones, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

#7

The Enlightenment philosophy tells the story of the world as having reached its destiny with the rise of scientific and democratic modernism. But this cannot be true, because it would undermine the Resurrection’s claim that world history has been renewed.

#8

The Easter stories in the gospels never mention the Christian hope of a future resurrection. They simply state that Jesus has been raised, and that God’s new creation has begun. We, his followers, must announce his lordship to the entire world.

#9

Paul’s point is that there will be a new mode of physicality, which stands in relation to our present body as our present body does to a ghost. It will be as much more real, more solid, and more bodily than our present body as our present body is more substantial than a disembodied spirit.

#10

The promise of new creation is not simply about straightening out ideas about life after death. It is about the mission of the church. We must reshape our ideas of mission itself, and consider it not as an extra but as the central and shaping dynamic of the church’s life.

#11

The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ, and that you’re now invited to belong to it. And precisely because the resurrection was and is bodily, the power of Easter to transform and heal the present world must be put into effect both at the macrolevel and the intimate details of our daily lives.

#12

The resurrection is about the present bodily life not being valueless just because it will die. God will raise it to new life. What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it.

#13

The author brings history and faith together in a rush, saying, My Lord, and my God. This is not an antihistorical statement. The new creation is the new creation, and it is open to the work of human beings.

#14

The best explanation for the rise of Christianity is that Jesus really did reappear, not as a battered, bleeding survivor, but as a living, bodily human being. His body was different, and it could appear and disappear.

#15

Resurrection was a central belief in early Christianity, and it was one of the two things that drove the pagans in Lyons to butcher