N.T. Wright Asks: Have We Gotten Heaven All Wrong?
At Religion News Service, John Murawski talks with N.T. Wright about his latest attempt to set Christianity straight. In How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, Wright, a former Anglican bishop who currently teaches early Christianity and New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland), places Christianity’s concept of the afterlife in its original, Biblical-era environment. Wright told Murawski, “Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consonant with what we find in the New Testament … A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in.”