Curtis Chang, fellow Covenant pastor, and host of The Good Faith Podcast, has a great episode that is well worth your time. One goal of mine at Kingdom Harbor is to point people to other Biblically grounded, Jesus-shaped resources and perspectives. This is a good example. Here’s Curtis:
I grew up in a conservative Christian culture that was tinged with its fair share of fire and brimstone teaching about the Final Judgment. This culture instilled in me a particular vision of what would happen when I died: my disembodied soul would ascend into heaven to face a rather stern God. He would play on a giant celestial screen a sort of “final footage” of all my life’s sinful actions. In my anxious imagination, all the other souls would act like an ethereal jury, viewing this footage (and especially shaking their heads at the sins I had committed in secret.)
My theology has improved considerably since then (thank goodness!). I now believe that the Bible actually teaches that our final destiny is to live in resurrected physical bodies (not as disembodied souls) here on a fully redeemed earth (not an ethereal heaven “out there”). If this understanding of Scripture is new to you, I encourage you to listen to this Good Faith episode with N.T. Wright.
Heaven isn’t the point of the gospel—and N.T. Wright challenges the “accept Jesus and escape earth” narrative of Christianity. Curtis Chang talks with Wright, leading theologian and prolific author, about New Creation and his latest book God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal, asking whether the Bible’s promise is the Kingdom of God on earth—or simply going to heaven when you die. They examine the “royal priesthood” calling, what this means for life after death and suffering now, and the true purpose of Christian faith.
Jeremy Berg 