'Glory doesn't mean going to Heaven' but rather 'becoming fully human,' says NT Wright
DALLAS — For renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, the “glory” promised in the Bible doesn't primarily mean “going to Heaven,” but the restoration of humanity’s role as God’s image-bearing agents in a renewed creation.
Wright, a retired Anglican bishop and one of the world’s leading interpreters of Paul, told attendees of that coming glory at “The Fresh Challenge of Romans,” a four-day conference at Park Cities Baptist Church. The expositional study, organized in partnership with N.T. Wright Online/Admirato, focused on Romans 5, where Wright stressed that the chapter’s themes of justification, peace, hope and glory point toward vocation rather than escape from the world.
“Let’s be quite clear: glory does not mean going to Heaven,” Wright said. “It means becoming fully human, to share God’s redemptive rule.”
He linked the hope of glory in Romans 5:2 to the human destiny described in Psalm 8, where humans are made “a little lower than the heavenly beings” and crowned with glory and honor to exercise dominion over creation.
This same truth, Wright explained, can be found described throughout the Old Testament, including Psalm 8, where “God places His image bearers into His creation, to be His agents in making this world flourish. That is their glorious task. That is who they’re supposed to be.”
That glory, bartered away through idolatry, is restored in Christ so that believers will “reign in life,” Wright said, echoing Romans 5:17.
In addition to Scripture, Wright cited St. Irenaeus of Lyons, the second-century Church father who wrote in his treatise Against Heresies that the glory of God is a “human being fully alive.”
Wright said Paul is getting at that exact sentiment in Romans 5. “Being human is not a bad shabby old thing,” he added. “We make it that, but being human is itself the way in which God wants to be reflected into His created order.”
He explained that, just as in Romans, Hebrews 2, Revelation 5 and other New Testament passages, Jesus’ “faithful people are promised they will share this truly human status.”
This glorious truth, Wright added, is often overlooked.
“We humans, if we are in Christ, and by the Spirit, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians almost casually to the Christian Church, ‘Don't you know that we are to judge angels?’” said Wright. “And I imagine the group would say, ‘No, Paul, we didn’t know that.’”
Paul’s phrase “the hope of glory” is a New Testament reference to a passage in Isaiah 40:5, which Wright quoted: “Then the glory of Yahweh will be revealed, And all flesh will see it together; For the mouth of Yahweh has spoken.”
Wright said both the Old and New Testaments bear witness to a singular, majestic promise.
“This is the human destiny,” he said, “to be under God and over the world.”
Just as Isaiah prophesied, said Wright, the Old Testament concept of the “hope of glory” points not merely to a heavenly existence, but one in which the God of Israel returns to His people to take His throne.
“Yahweh’s coming back, having abandoned the temple of the people of the nation at the time of the exile,” Wright explained. “He's promised to come back. That is the hope of the glorious vision of Yahweh.”
Ian M. Giatti is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ian.giatti@christianpost.com.
