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Many Christians in the West, N. T. Wright believes, have a fundamental misunderstanding of the very goal of their faith.
Instead of seeing Christianity as the story of God renewing the whole cosmos — Heaven and earth united — they have been taught to think of salvation primarily as a private escape plan: the soul departing for Heaven when the body dies.
The result, according to the 77-year-old New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop, is not just a skewed theology of the afterlife, but a distorted understanding of everything from End Times prophecy to spiritual warfare.
“The problem is that most Western Christians today think that the whole point of Christianity is for our souls to go to Heaven when we die, whereas the New Testament concentrates on God coming to dwell with us,” Wright told The Christian Post in an interview about his latest book, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God.
“The direction of travel is wrong, and the result is wrong, and the intermediate stages are wrong.”
That misdirection has shaped how generations of believers have read and misunderstood Scripture, according to Wright. In the ancient world into which Christianity emerged, the idea of the soul floating away into Heaven was already common, he said.
“These were the people we now call the middle Platonists, people like Philo of Alexandria, or Plutarch. … They talk happily about their souls going to Heaven. The early Christians really don’t,” Wright said.
Instead, the New Testament proclaims something vastly different; not human departure to Heaven, but divine arrival on earth.
The former bishop of Durham pointed to the final chapters of Revelation, where “the dwelling of God is with humans,” and Ephesians 1:10, where Paul says God’s eternal purpose is “to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on earth.”
“But you’d have thought that God’s plan from the beginning was to enable us to leave Earth and go to a place called Heaven instead,” Wright said. “That’s simply not what Ephesians, or indeed, the rest of the New Testament, is all about.”
The misunderstanding extends even into Bible translations, he emphasized. The Greek word “psuche,” often rendered “soul,” is rooted in the Hebrew “nephesh,” which does not denote an immortal, disembodied essence but the whole living person.
“A nefesh is one’s whole self, a better translation will be ‘person,'” Wright explained. Passages that have fueled Platonic readings, such as Jesus telling the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” are frequently oversimplified.
“Jesus is going to be back in a couple of days’ time … because He’s going to be raised from the dead,” Wright said. “There are many passages which routinely get misread.”
What has occurred, he believes, is a “Western vision” that has shrouded biblical Christianity with Greek philosophy.
“You can cash out of Platonism in different ways, but that’s basically what’s been going on for hundreds of years,” he said.
According to Wright, the assumption that the essential religious question is “How does my soul get to Heaven?” has governed Christian teaching even since the Reformation. That question, he said, Reformers answered differently than the medieval Church, but it was rarely challenged at its root.
In his book, Wright contends that Ephesians challenges the question itself. Paul’s opening prayer, Ephesians 1:3–14, he said, is steeped in Jewish creation and Exodus imagery and culminates in the declaration that God’s goal has always been the unity of Heaven and earth under Christ.
“Ephesians 1:10 gives you this sense. This is where it’s all going. This is what the purpose was from the beginning,” Wright said. “And so the rest of the book kind of fleshes that out.”
That theological reframing has direct implications for what many Western Christians call the “End Times,” a phrase Wright stressed is “very American.”
He traced its prominence to dispensationalism, a theology that popularized the rapture, timelines of prophetic fulfillment and expectations of an apocalyptic sequence culminating in Armageddon.
“The whole dispensationalist movement … generated this idea of a particular time which we can call the ‘End Times,'” he said, adding that the New Testament offers no support for this framework. The theologian added that, though diminishing among biblical scholars, dispensationalism continues to flourish at a popular level.
“I and others have written … showing that the New Testament does simply not validate or sustain anything like this combination of rapture, Armageddon, etc. These are misreadings.”
Psychologically, Wright said, its appeal is understandable. “It has enabled people … to have a sense that even though the world is totally crazy, we sort of have the inside track. We know that there’s a secret truth which is going to emerge,” he said. “We love conspiracy theories … the whisper of, ‘I know something you don’t.'”
There is also the allure of drama, he said, comparing bestselling End-Times fiction, like the Left Behind series and Frank Peretti’s books, to a Christian version of Harry Potter, allowing believers to imagine themselves in a heroic cosmic narrative.
“I’d much, much rather people came in by any door that’s there … rather than they shunned the whole thing and all became atheists,” Wright said. “But it is deeply misleading.”
More troubling, he added, is when that theology becomes entangled with real-world politics and warfare. Wright recalled the years following 9/11, when some Christian groups framed Middle Eastern conflict in apocalyptic terms, viewing military engagement as hastening prophetic fulfillment.
“The rest of us from around the world, we look at it and think, please, I hope you guys can get your act together,” he said, “because the world is too dangerous a place to have the most powerful country on earth being taken over by this.”
In his book, Wright returns to what he sees as the New Testament’s central message: in Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, God has already inaugurated the promised new creation.
“God has done what he said he would do, and he is doing it now until the time when Jesus does return,” he said, citing 1 Corinthians 15, which describes Christ reigning until all enemies are subdued.
Ephesians, he added, frames the Church’s role within that ongoing renewal. “The Church is called to be … the small working model of new creation,” Wright said, a community animated by the Spirit that bears witness to God’s future by living it now.
This perspective also frames the way Wright explains “spiritual warfare,” another concept he believes has been badly distorted in popular Christianity.
Ephesians 6 famously exhorts believers to put on the “armor of God,” but Wright places that passage alongside Ephesians 1 and 2, which say believers are already “seated in the heavenly places in Christ.”
“The heavenly places is where the battle is going on right now,” he explained. “God has won the battle in Jesus.” The armor, he notes, is almost entirely defensive, “apart from the sword of the Spirit.”
The real danger is not demonic forces alone but the misidentification of enemies, Wright stressed.
“Paul, like Jesus Himself, says … our battle is not against flesh and blood.”
Humans may “instantiate evil,” he acknowledged, but to demonize whole groups or nations is itself part of the spiritual problem.
“If you think you can fight this battle by fighting particular people or groups of people or ethnic groups, then that itself becomes part of the demonic problem, rather than the Christian solution.”
Wright warned against subscribing to either extreme: theological skepticism that dismisses spiritual evil entirely and what he calls the tendency to see demons “behind every bush.”
“As C.S. Lewis said in The Screwtape Letters, ‘There’s two equal and opposite errors. On the one hand, people who say that that’s all just medieval mumbo-jumbo. On the other hand, people who see demons behind every bush,'” he said.
During his tenure as Bishop of Durham, Wright said he supervised a discreet deliverance ministry that dealt with genuine cases of spiritual disturbance.
“They would pray with them and do what you could carefully call an exorcism,” he said. “It’s just very nasty, dirty, messy … and you end up feeling desperately sorry for people who are caught up in it.”
Still, he said, dramatizing every setback as demonic breeds confusion and spiritual irresponsibility. He recalled watching the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.
“The television cameras focused on a woman who was sitting in a corner praying and saying, ‘angels are coming, angels are coming.’ I saw that and thought, ‘you’re living in a Left Behind novel,'” he said. “It was obvious that [she] was radically deluded.”
He added, “One of the worst demonic delusions is the idea that everything you don’t like is a demonic delusion.”
For Wright, the Christian response should be continued faithfulness to Scripture, the “saying of the Lord’s Prayer, the weekly attendance at the Lord’s Supper.”
“These are what we have to do day by day, week by week, in order to make sure that we’re not being lured away into false visions of the warfare,” he said.
At the heart of Ephesians, he emphasized, is a communal vision many churches have yet to fully embrace.
“All those who believe in Jesus belong in the same family and at the same table,” he said, adding that Ephesians 2 shows God’s intention to unite Jew and Gentile, symbolically healing humanity’s deepest divides.
“When Judean and Gentile … come together in Christ, that is the sign of that new creation.” The Church, in that unified diversity, becomes “the new temple where God dwells by the Spirit.”
Modern congregations, however, often accept ethnic and cultural separation as normal. “Now we have black churches, white churches, Chinese churches, this, that, the other, and we don’t think that matters,” Wright said. “Paul would be absolutely horrified.”
That vision, he emphasized, has nothing to do with political agendas. “Watch my lips. I’m one of the least woke people you could meet,” he said. The early Christian Church, Wright said, was history’s first truly multinational, multiethnic family and the visible proof that Jesus, not the “principalities and powers,” is Lord.
“Our task now,” Wright said, “is so to believe in the God of the Gospel that actually we can grow churches that exemplify this idea of the small working model of new creation.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
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