Book Review: God’s Homecoming
N.T. Wright, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. HarperOne, 2026. 368 pp.
Most people today imagine that the point of Christianity is ‘to go to heaven when you die.’ That’s what most believers believe. It’s what most unbelievers unbelieve. . . They are all wrong.
So begins N. T. Wright in his new book God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. Knives out? One wonders.
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Wright, the former bishop of Durham and a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, has spent much of his scholarly career urging Christians to reconsider what the Bible actually says about the future. That means pushing back against the dispensationalist interpretation of the End Times made popular in America by the Left Behind series, medieval conceptions of the afterlife that owe more to Plato than to Scripture, and other seemingly Christian beliefs popularized by Hollywood, such as the notion that humans become angels. In that spirit, Wright does not break entirely new ground, but he returns to it with characteristic boldness.
A Redeemed Creation
Readers familiar with his Surprised by Hope will recognize the argument immediately. In that earlier work, Wright challenged the common assumption that Christianity’s ultimate hope is escape from the world. God’s Homecoming reads almost like a sequel: more focused, more insistent, and more confrontational.
Wright’s central claim is straightforward: the biblical story does not culminate in human beings leaving earth for heaven, but in God coming to dwell with his people in a renewed creation. From beginning to end, he argues, Scripture presents a consistent trajectory. God was on earth with man in the Garden of Eden, in the tabernacle, in the temple, in the second temple, in the Incarnation, and at Pentecost—and he will be on earth with man again at Jesus’s second coming, God’s homecoming. Then he will be all in all; his glory will fill not just a Garden, tabernacle, temple, or person, but all creation: a redeemed creation, a “New Jerusalem,” a “new heaven and a new earth.” The climactic promise is not human ascent but divine arrival.
Arrival, Not Ascent
This theme is especially clear in Wright’s reading of the Book of Revelation. In the final vision of Scripture, he notes, the redeemed see God’s face “not because they have gone to dwell with God but because he has come to make his home with them.” The “new Jerusalem” descends; God’s dwelling comes to earth. The entire biblical drama, Wright insists, points toward this moment: “Unless we see that this has been the goal of the entire biblical story, we will never understand that story as a whole.”
Accordingly, Wright presses a provocative linguistic and theological observation: the New Testament, he argues, never uses the word heaven to describe the final destination of God’s people. Rather than souls departing to a disembodied heaven, the biblical hope looks to resurrection and a renewed creation—a new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21:1-4), into which God’s dwelling descends, and to bodily resurrection patterned on Christ’s own (1 Corinthians 15:20-23; Philippians 3:20-21). Even Jesus’s promise to the dying thief (Luke 23:43) and Paul’s longing to “depart and be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23), Wright maintains, describe an intermediate state rather than the final destination.
Assumptions vs. Biblical Foundations
Likewise, Wright contends that popular Christian language about the soul owes more to later philosophy than to Scripture itself. “The New Testament never uses the word ‘soul’ to talk about either the real inner human identity, or the final postmortem state, of God’s people,” he writes. Much common Christian speech, he suggests, reflects inherited assumptions rather than biblical foundations.
The same corrective appears in Wright’s reading of The Epistle to the Romans, particularly chapter 8. There, St. Paul celebrates the future inheritance awaiting God’s people, but Wright stresses that the inheritance is not heaven. It is the whole renewed creation. “The going-to-heaven story is not in the Romans text,” he writes, “it has to be read into the text.” When interpreters import that assumption, he argues, they obscure “the vital passage about the rescue and renewal of all creation.”
Following the Patriarchs (Not Plato)
Wright extends this argument backward into the Old Testament narrative. The patriarchal and national stories, from Abraham to David, do not focus on souls leaving earth but on God establishing his presence among his people. The covenant promise is that God will dwell with Israel and be their God (Exodus 29:45-46; Leviticus 26:11-12). Israel’s scriptures, he notes, say remarkably little about anyone “going to heaven when they die.” Instead, they consistently promise that the Creator will one day fill the entire earth with his glory (Numbers 14:21; Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14)—the same glory that filled the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34-35) and later the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11). Wright tells us,
From Genesis to Malachi, the dangerous but life-giving promise is that the creator God will come to dwell with humans. . . . He will do for ‘all the earth’ what he did in filling the tabernacle, and then the temple, with his glory.
More Than a Realm of Shadows
In Wright’s account, the common Christian picture of salvation as souls escaping the body for a heavenly realm owes less to the Bible than to Plato, for whom the material world was a realm of shadows and the soul a divine essence imprisoned in the body, awaiting release into a purer, immaterial existence. This framework, at odds with the Hebrew scriptures’ affirmation of creation’s goodness and renewal, gradually reshaped Christian imagination as the faith spread through the Greco-Roman world, shifting the emphasis from bodily resurrection to the immortality of the soul.
By the medieval period, this framework had hardened into a system: Aquinas synthesized theology with these inherited philosophical categories, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its mapped geography of hell, purgatory, and paradise, gave it lasting imaginative form. The result, Wright argues, eclipsed the New Testament’s hope of renewed creation and bodily resurrection and led most Christians to imagine their ultimate destiny on foundations more philosophical than biblical.
What has resulted is a truncated gospel. When salvation is reduced to the rescue of souls for heaven, earthly life becomes spiritually secondary. The social, political, and cultural dimensions of Christian faith lose their urgency. If the ultimate goal is escape from the world, then the transformation of the world naturally appears less important. Wright believes the biblical story pushes in the opposite direction: God intends to renew creation itself.
On Earth as it is in Heaven
In this light, familiar biblical passages take on renewed significance. When Jesus says that the meek will inherit the earth, Wright observes, he is not speaking metaphorically about heaven. When Christians pray, “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven,” they ask precisely for the future Wright describes. Yet many who pray those words, he suggests, have never fully considered their meaning. “How many Christians have prayed that prayer while failing to realize that it meant what it said.”
Whether one finds Wright’s argument persuasive in every detail, God’s Homecoming performs an important service. It forces readers to examine how much of their theology comes directly from Scripture and how much from inherited traditions that answer questions the Bible is not asking. Wright’s style—part scholarly synthesis, part pastoral provocation—keeps the discussion lively even when the subject becomes technical.
Thy Kingdom Come
For Anglicans, Wright’s vision is not merely academic but deeply practical, touching the rhythms of weekly worship and daily discipleship. Every Sunday, congregants pray the words Wright highlights—“thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”—and his book invites them to take them more fully to heart, recognizing that the petition anticipates God’s renewal of creation rather than an escape from it. The Eucharist itself, in which heaven and earth meet at the Table, becomes a foretaste of God’s homecoming, a regular rehearsal of the day when his presence fills all things.
Wright’s emphasis on bodily resurrection should also shape how the faithful regard their final resting place: the burial of the body is not the discarding of a husk but the sowing of a seed (1 Corinthians 15), and Christian funerals, gravesides, and churchyards bear witness to resurrection hope, not mere departure. And if creation is to be renewed rather than abandoned, then stewardship of the earth—from caring for the land to maintaining local parishes—ceases to be a peripheral concern and becomes an expression of the gospel itself. Wright offers Anglicans a framework that dignifies the ordinary work of Christian living as participation, however partial, in the world God is even now preparing to make his home.
God Coming Home
In the end, Wright’s thesis comes down to a single contrast. The gospel, the good news, he argues, is not primarily about human beings finding their way to heaven. It is about God coming home to earth. The biblical story begins with God dwelling with humanity and ends with that same presence filling the entire renewed creation. For Wright, recovering that vision is not a minor doctrinal adjustment but a rediscovery of the Bible’s central hope.
Image: God’s Homecoming © 2026 HarperOne.
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