SURPRISED BY HOPE by Tom Wright (Books, 4 April 2008) reminded readers that death was not to be evaded but defeated; that the object of creation was fully the object of redemption; that the resurrection of the body was the ultimate horizon of Christian expectation. God’s Homecoming, styled that earlier book’s sequel in this volume’s opening pages, addresses an even more fundamental question: What is the ultimate destination of God himself?
Unlike the earlier book, God’s Homecoming answers with a sweeping, if necessarily whistle-stop, biblical theology. “The Bible speaks with one voice of God coming to live with humans. Of God coming to be at home with us humans” (emphasis original). These pages are saturated with quotations of scripture, and particularly the Old Testament, something that those familiar with the styles of both Tom and his alter ego N. T. Wright will recognise and appreciate. Readers are borne along on the currents of prophecy and promise, gathering steam as the story of Israel’s God coming to dwell with his people rolls toward a climactic fulfilment.
The book’s primary thesis is that this fulfilment has now taken place in the “coming home” of God in Jesus, the human face of God, and the Holy Spirit, the pledge of the world’s suffusion with divine presence. The Kingdom does not merely wait for a future return of Christ, but has already been powerfully inaugurated.
Thus, the arrival of God on earth and not the soul’s arrival in heaven is central; living with God in a renewed creation rather than beholding God in the beatific vision is primary. Texts that seem to complicate this picture (“apparent exceptions”) are judged, in a regrettably brief discussion, as marginal or misunderstood if taken to support a larger role for “heaven” within Christian hope (see 2 Corinthians 5.1-6; 2 Timothy 4.18). Nevertheless, readers will be glad finally to learn at page 296 that the intermediate state prior to the resurrection “will be a genuine time of conscious delight” in the Triune God’s presence.
The lens of “God’s homecoming” allows the author to reframe the whole of Christian life: worship, evangelism, and prayer; the sacraments of baptism and eucharist; the “polychrome” witness of the Church. All these mark the coming of God to this world.
One question worth pressing concerns the relative weight given to the second coming of Jesus alongside the author’s central claim that he has already “come home”. Given the book’s explicit “double coming” scaffolding, why should “too much focus on that ultimate hope” occlude the Gospels’ central themes and support the “going-to-heaven story”? Much may depend on whether the “return of YHWH to Zion” occurs only once, with Jesus’s second coming chiefly coinciding with the fuller filling of earth with divine glory, or whether the second coming completes the return of Israel’s Lord to Zion (as seems clearly stated at page 298). On the latter reading, the two “comings” are inextricable and always mutually interpretative.
The book’s opening Advent framing seems best understood to point in just this direction: the coming of Israel’s Lord is staged in two parts, first in humility and then in power, first in rejection and then with welcome in Zion (Matthew 23.39; Luke 13.35; Roman 11.26-27).
The book is warmly recommended.
Dr J. Tyler Brown is Junior Research Fellow in New Testament Studies at Keble College, Oxford.
God’s Homecoming: The forgotten promise of future renewal
Tom Wright
SPCK £24.99
(978-0-281-08915-4)
Church Times Bookshop £22.49