If you grew up around Christian culture, you probably absorbed the goal without ever being handed a syllabus: stay faithful, stay out of trouble and one day you get to go to heaven. Everything else is extra credit.
N.T. Wright thinks that’s a misunderstanding that has quietly reshaped what Christians think they are for. And it’s why his new book God’s Homecoming lands like a theological correction notice for the modern Church.
Wright’s claim is simple enough to say out loud and difficult enough to actually live: the Christian story is not about escaping earth. It is about God coming home to renew it.
That emphasis has been the drumbeat of Wright’s work for years, but God’s Homecoming pushes it further, tracing the “homecoming promise” of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation and insisting that the Bible’s future hope is not evacuation but renewal.
“Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative think that the whole point is for my soul to go to heaven,” Wright told RELEVANT. “Jesus’ whole point was for the kingdom of God to come on earth as in heaven. And Paul carries that right on.”
If the main purpose of faith is personal afterlife security, then the “real” work of Christianity becomes internal: private holiness, private assurance, private comfort. Church becomes a spiritual gas station for the long drive out of here.
But if Jesus taught His followers to pray “your kingdom come” and meant it, then faith is not a waiting room. It is a calling.
Wright says one reason Christians miss this is because the Church spent centuries translating the New Testament into an older philosophical framework.
“What’s happened in many church traditions, really from the fourth and fifth centuries onwards, is that some of the great early teachers of the Church were very much into the philosophy of Plato. And for Plato what mattered was the soul finding its way into heaven.”
Over time, that “soul going up” storyline became the air many Christians breathed. “Kingdom of heaven” was interpreted as a place you go when you die rather than God’s reign arriving, taking root, pushing back darkness and remaking what is broken. For Wright, that shift doesn’t just distort theology. It shrinks mission.
“This world is God’s world. He’s made it, He’s going to renew it, He wants to fill it with himself. So what are you doing running off somewhere else?”
Plenty of Christians already believe they should care about their neighbors, fight injustice, love the vulnerable, pray for healing and build communities that look like Jesus. The problem is that many have been taught to see those things as secondary to the “main point.” Wright is saying the main point is bigger than we’ve been told.
He calls Ephesians “the poster child” for this larger vision, because it starts with a cosmic claim: God’s purpose is “to unite in Christ all things in heaven and on earth.” That doesn’t read like a book trying to help you get out of here. It reads like a manifesto for what God is doing here, right now, through a people learning to live as a preview of the world to come.
Wright described the Church as a kind of working prototype of new creation, meant to show the world what God intends for everything.
“It’s as though the Church is being summoned to be the people who are as like that as possible in the present so that the world around can see that’s God’s aim for creation.”
That’s a radically different job description than “hang on until you die.” It also makes the New Testament’s obsession with Church unity make sense — if the Church is supposed to be a sign of God’s future, a fractured Church doesn’t just have bad vibes. It misrepresents the message.
Wright treats unity less like a nice idea and more like spiritual warfare.
“When Paul says we are seated in heavenly places, he doesn’t mean we are sitting back with our feet up with nothing more to do. He means we are now recruited to be part of this battle. So get your armor ready, guys.”
The modern world is excellent at forming Christians into consumers — faith safely privatized, spirituality curated around personal comfort, church as lifestyle brand. A “get me to heaven” gospel fits that instinct perfectly. It’s individualized, easy to measure and asks almost nothing of you structurally.
A “God is coming to renew the world” gospel asks a harder question: What kind of people would make sense if that were true? What kind of spending, voting, building and truth-telling would make sense?
Wright doesn’t pretend this is a small tweak. He calls it “a huge shift of perspective” — which means it’s worth sitting with how much of American Christianity has been organized around the smaller story. We’ve made “getting to heaven” the main point, then wondered why discipleship feels thin, why community feels optional, why justice gets treated like an extracurricular.
Scripture, Wright argues, has been telling a bigger story the whole time. The Bible’s end is not a disembodied escape. It is God dwelling with His people, making His home with them and renewing what He made.
