Many Western Christians misunderstand the aim of religion, says NT Wright

Many Christians within the West, NT Wright believes, have a fundamental misunderstanding of the very goal of their faith. 

Instead of seeing Christianity because the story of God renewing the entire cosmos — Heaven and Earth united — they’ve been taught to think about salvation primarily as a non-public escape plan: the soul departing for Heaven when the body dies. 

The result, based on the 77-year-old New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop, is just not only a skewed theology of the afterlife, but a distorted understanding of the whole lot from End Times prophecy to spiritual warfare.

“The problem is that almost all Western Christians today think that the entire point of Christianity is for our souls to go to Heaven once we die, whereas the New Testament concentrates on God coming to dwell with us,” Wright told The Christian Post in an interview about his latest book, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God.

“The direction of travel is unsuitable, and the result’s unsuitable, and the intermediate stages are unsuitable.”

That misdirection has shaped how generations of believers have read and misunderstood Scripture, based on Wright. In the traditional world into which Christianity emerged, the concept of the soul floating away into Heaven was already common, he said. 

“These were the people we now call the center Platonists, people like Philo of Alexandria, or Plutarch. … They talk happily about their souls going to Heaven. The early Christians really don’t,” Wright said.

Instead, the New Testament proclaims something vastly different; not human departure to Heaven, but divine arrival on Earth. 

The former bishop of Durham pointed to the ultimate chapters of Revelation, where “the dwelling of God is with humans,” and Ephesians 1:10, where Paul says God’s everlasting purpose is “to sum up within the Messiah all things in heaven and on earth.”

“But you’d have thought that God’s plan from the start was to enable us to go away Earth and go to a spot called Heaven as an alternative,” Wright said. “That’s simply not what Ephesians, or indeed, the remainder of the New Testament, is all about.”

The misunderstanding extends even into Bible translations, he emphasized. The Greek word “psuche,” often rendered “soul,” is rooted within the Hebrew “nephesh,” which doesn’t denote an immortal, disembodied essence but the entire living person.

“A nefesh is one’s whole self; a greater translation will probably be ‘person,'” Wright explained. Passages which have fueled Platonic readings, akin to Jesus telling the thief on the cross, “Today you will probably be with me in Paradise,” are often oversimplified.

“Jesus goes to be back in a few days’ time … because He’s going to be raised from the dead,” Wright said. “There are many passages which routinely get misread.”

What has occurred, he believes, is a “Western vision” that has shrouded biblical Christianity with Greek philosophy. 

“You can money out of Platonism in other ways, but that is principally what’s been happening for a whole bunch of years,” he said. 

According to Wright, the idea that the essential religious query is “How does my soul get to Heaven?” has governed Christian teaching even for the reason that Reformation. That query, he said, Reformers answered in another way than the medieval Church, however it was rarely challenged at its root.

In his book, Wright contends that Ephesians challenges the query itself. Paul’s opening prayer, Ephesians 1:3–14, he said, is steeped in Jewish creation and Exodus imagery and culminates within the declaration that God’s goal has all the time been the unity of Heaven and Earth under Christ. 

“Ephesians 1:10 gives you this sense. This is where it’s all going. This is what the aim was from the start,” Wright said. “And so the remainder of the book sort of fleshes that out.”

That theological reframing has direct implications for what many Western Christians call the “End Times,” a phrase Wright claimed is “very American.”

He traced its prominence to dispensationalism, a theology that popularized the rapture, timelines of prophetic achievement and expectations of an apocalyptic sequence culminating in Armageddon. 

“The whole dispensationalist movement … generated this concept of a selected time which we are able to call the ‘End Times,'” he said, adding that, in his opinion, the New Testament offers no support for this framework. The theologian added that, though diminishing amongst biblical scholars, dispensationalism continues to flourish at a well-liked level.

“I and others have written … showing that the New Testament does simply not validate or sustain anything like this mixture of rapture, Armageddon, etc. These are misreadings.”

Psychologically, Wright said, its appeal is comprehensible. “It has enabled people … to have a way that regardless that the world is completely crazy, we type of have the within track. We know that there is a secret truth which goes to emerge,” he said. “We love conspiracy theories … the whisper of, ‘I do know something you do not.'”

There can also be the allure of drama, he said, comparing bestselling End-Times fiction, just like the Left Behind series and Frank Peretti’s books, to a Christian version of Harry Potter, allowing believers to assume themselves in a heroic cosmic narrative. 

“I’d much, much quite people got here in by any door that is there … quite than they shunned the entire thing and all became atheists,” Wright said. “But it’s deeply misleading.”

More troubling, he added, is when that theology becomes entangled with real-world politics and warfare. Wright recalled the years following 9/11, when some Christian groups framed Middle Eastern conflict in apocalyptic terms, viewing military engagement as hastening prophetic achievement.

“The remainder of us from around the globe, we take a look at it and think, please, I hope you guys can get your act together,” he said, “since the world is just too dangerous a spot to have essentially the most powerful country on Earth being taken over by this.”

In his book, Wright returns to what he sees because the New Testament’s central message: in Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, God has already inaugurated the promised recent creation.

“God has done what He said he would do, and He is doing it now until the time when Jesus does return,” he said, citing 1 Corinthians 15, which describes Christ reigning until all enemies are subdued.

Ephesians, he added, frames the Church’s role inside that ongoing renewal. “The Church is known as to be … the small working model of recent creation,” Wright said, a community animated by the Spirit that bears witness to God’s future by living it now.

This perspective also frames the best way Wright explains “spiritual warfare,” one other concept he believes has been badly distorted in popular Christianity.

Ephesians 6 famously exhorts believers to placed on the “armor of God,” but Wright places that passage alongside Ephesians 1 and 2, which say believers are already “seated within the heavenly places in Christ.” 

“The heavenly places is where the battle is happening at once,” he explained. “God has won the battle in Jesus.” The armor, he notes, is nearly entirely defensive, “aside from the sword of the Spirit.”

The real danger is just not demonic forces alone however the misidentification of enemies, Wright stressed.

“Paul, like Jesus Himself, says … our battle is just not against flesh and blood.”

Humans may “instantiate evil,” he acknowledged, but to demonize whole groups or nations is itself a part of the spiritual problem. 

“If you’re thinking that you may fight this battle by fighting particular people or groups of individuals or ethnic groups, then that itself becomes a part of the demonic problem, quite than the Christian solution.”

Wright warned against subscribing to either extreme: theological skepticism that dismisses spiritual evil entirely and what he calls the tendency to see demons “behind every bush.” 

“As C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, ‘There’s two equal and opposite errors. On the one hand, individuals who say that that is all just medieval mumbo-jumbo. On the opposite hand, individuals who see demons behind every bush,'” he said.

During his tenure as bishop of Durham, Wright said he supervised a discreet deliverance ministry that handled real cases of spiritual disturbance. 

“They would pray with them and do what you can fastidiously call an exorcism,” he said. “It’s just very nasty, dirty, messy … and you find yourself feeling desperately sorry for people who find themselves caught up in it.”

Still, he said, dramatizing every setback as demonic breeds confusion and spiritual irresponsibility. He recalled watching the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. 

“The television cameras focused on a girl who was sitting in a corner praying and saying, ‘angels are coming, angels are coming.’ I saw that and thought, ‘you are living in a Left Behind novel,'” he said. “It was obvious that [she] was radically deluded.”

He added, “One of the worst demonic delusions is the concept the whole lot you don’t love is a demonic delusion.”

For Wright, the Christian response must be continued faithfulness to Scripture, the “saying of the Lord’s Prayer, the weekly attendance on the Lord’s Supper.”

“These are what we now have to do daily, week by week, with the intention to ensure that that we’re not being lured away into false visions of the warfare,” he said. 

At the guts of Ephesians, he emphasized, is a communal vision many churches have yet to completely embrace. 

“All those that imagine in Jesus belong in the identical family and at the identical table,” he said, adding that Ephesians 2 shows God’s intention to unite Jew and Gentile, symbolically healing humanity’s deepest divides.

“When Judean and Gentile … come together in Christ, that’s the sign of that recent creation.” The Church, in that unified diversity, becomes “the brand new temple where God dwells by the Spirit.”

Modern congregations, nonetheless, often accept ethnic and cultural separation as normal. “Now we now have black churches, white churches, Chinese churches, this, that, the opposite, and we do not think that matters,” Wright said. “Paul could be absolutely horrified.”

That vision, he emphasized, has nothing to do with political agendas. “Watch my lips. I’m one in every of the least woke people you can meet,” he said. The early Christian Church, Wright said, was history’s first truly multinational, multiethnic family and the visible proof that Jesus, not the “principalities and powers,” is Lord.

“Our task now,” Wright said, “is so to imagine within the God of the Gospel that really we are able to grow churches that exemplify this concept of the small working model of recent creation.”

© The Christian Post