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Response to Reza Shah-Kazemi N. T. WRIGHT Iam grateful both for Dr. Shah-Kazemi’s sensitive and probing response and for the chance of a brief counterresponse. As often in theology, it is a matter of balance. I eagerly agree that the promise of final bodily resurrection, as part of the new Creation, should not detract from the promise, to all believers, of finding themselves immediately after death in the presence of Jesus himself. That, as St. Paul says, will be ‘‘far better’’ (Phil. 1:23). Shah-Kazemi implies at one point that this will itself be a form of ‘‘resurrection,’’ but the New Testament does not and would not say that. Resurrection will be part of the ultimate new Creation, which is why Jesus’s own resurrection, the climax of all four gospels, is so explosive: God’s promised future bursting in upon our unprepared present time. If we take ‘‘heaven’’ to denote ‘‘the place where God is,’’ or ‘‘the state in which people enjoy God’s immediate presence,’’ then I agree that ‘‘going to heaven’’ (or, if you prefer, ‘‘Paradise’’) is indeed a strong part of Christian teaching. The reason I regularly find it necessary to stress that this is only the first stage of a two-stage reality is because many modern Western Christians have not even heard of this, leaving them to assume that ‘‘resurrection’’ is simply a fancy metaphor for ‘‘going to heaven when we die.’’ This undermines the resurrection’s radical reaffirmation of the goodness of Creation, distorts the nature of Christian mission, and risks colluding with death itself. Thus, ‘‘dying and going to heaven’’ cannot be the Christian’s ultimate aim but only the penultimate one. Likewise, I eagerly agree that in the teaching of Jesus himself, as of the whole New Testament, heaven and earth do indeed overlap and interlock, and that through the presence, teaching, and, above all, the death and resurrection of Jesus, this overlap can become a present reality in the lives of believers. This idea translates the ancient Temple theology into Christian categories, providing the groundwork of both Christian spirituality and sacramental theology. However , most scholars would not read Luke 17:21 to mean that. The Greek phrase 23 24 Surveys in question (‘‘the kingdom of God is entos hymōn’’) does not denote an internal or ‘‘spiritual’’ reality, but rather has an active sense: not only ‘‘the kingdom of God is ‘in your midst,’’’ but also something like ‘‘and it’s up to you what you do about it.’’ What is more, the saying in John 18:36 should not be translated ‘‘my kingdom is not of this world,’’ as though to imply that the ‘‘kingdom’’ is a detached, other-worldly reality. The Greek and the context together make it clear. ‘‘My kingdom,’’ says Jesus, ‘‘is not from this world’’; in other words, his kingdom comes from somewhere else, but it remains emphatically for this world (‘‘on earth as in heaven,’’ you might say). Jesus contrasts his sort of kingdom-forthe -world, which comes through suffering love, with other kinds. ‘‘If my kingdom was from this world,’’ he continues at once, ‘‘my servants would fight.’’ I welcome, of course, the stress on Jesus’s teaching. But his teaching about the renewal of the heart, and about fresh inner illumination, cannot be detached from the larger context of his announcement of God’s inbreaking kingdom; and this, as he steadily makes clear, will come about only through his death and resurrection. That is Jesus’s ‘‘revealed message’’ in all four gospels. Whatever one makes of the Transfiguration, it is not linked explicitly to questions of ‘‘life after death,’’ which is why, writing on those topics, I did not mention it. The idea that it might reveal an Eckhartian ‘‘archetypal body’’ that ‘‘all of us have’’ is, I think, foreign to the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament. This is not to deny the constant promise of transformation by the Spirit, already in the present and ultimately (in the resurrection) in the future. And of course, to reemphasize, I fully and enthusiastically agree that part of the whole point of the New Testament is that what we are promised in the ultimate future has come rushing forward into the present in Jesus himself and in the gift of his Spirit. Balancing out the ‘‘already’’ and the ‘‘not yet’’ of all that is a much-loved pastime of Christian theologians, and it is good to share that delicate...

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