N.T. Wright: Rethinking Salvation and the Future of Creation
By Ed Stetzer
For centuries, many Christians have assumed the Bible’s ultimate promise is our escape from earth to heaven—but what if that story has it backward? In this wide-ranging conversation with Outreach magazine Editor-in-Chief Ed Stetzer, renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright discusses new creation theology; challenges the deeply ingrained, Platonic assumptions that have shaped Christian imagination; and invites Christians to rediscover the Bible’s grand, earth-affirming vision.
Drawing from his latest book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal, Wright reframes salvation, resurrection, heaven and the kingdom of God as parts of one coherent story: God’s long-promised return to dwell with his people and renew all creation. The result is a bracing, pastorally grounded vision of Christian hope—one that reshapes how leaders preach, disciple and engage the world today.
What We’ve Gotten Wrong About Heaven
Ed Stetzer: Your new book, God’s Homecoming, is intriguing. What’s the big thesis? What have we been getting wrong?
N.T. Wright: I think what we’ve gotten wrong for a long time is that we’ve been trying to read the Old Testament through the lens of Platonic theology. That is to say, we’ve been assuming that the Old Testament is a book of allegories and figures that are really talking about how we go to heaven, even when they appear to be talking about how we go to Jerusalem, or something like that.
There are two main strands of the theme of God’s homecoming in the Old Testament. One is this promise that the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, or the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. God wants to do to the whole creation what he did proleptically in the tabernacle or the temple. That is the ultimate homecoming of God.
The other strand is that when the Babylonians destroyed the temple, the prophets speak of God abandoning it—and crucially, no one ever says that the divine glory comes back during the second-temple period. Isaiah says it will. Zechariah says it will. Malachi says it will. But no one says, “We’ve seen it.”
The New Testament takes precisely those promises and applies them to Jesus. “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” The story is not about humans leaving earth to go to heaven, but about heaven and earth coming together, and God dwelling in the midst of them.
