God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal
By N.T. Wright
Harper One, 368 pages
Published February 17, 2026
Whether we were introduced to N.T. Wright through a more academic work or his practical “for everyone” commentaries, many have benefited from his accessible Christian scholarship. His writing is just as engaging and useful for the seminary-trained as it is for the Sunday school teacher or small group leader. God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal is more of the same, and that’s a good thing. It aims to correct a very consequential misreading of the Bible on the matter of what happens to us when we die, namely that we (hopefully) will “go to heaven.”
“The point of Christianity,” Wright declares on page one, “is not that we should go to heaven … heaven should come to us.” For anyone raised in the shadow of Western Christendom, this assertion invokes a number of thorny questions: what happens to the dead before God comes to us, that is, before the eschaton? If our souls don’t fly away to be with God in heaven, then … what?
The answer, Wright believes, is “hiding in plain sight” (though it takes most of the book’s 300 pages to share it). By differentiating between the platonic soul and the Biblical conception of the spirit, he understands that “the spirit who dwells within us in the present will continue to sustain us between death and resurrection.” This, alongside the Biblical vision of heaven as the coming realm of God, will not satisfy all readers, yet Wright makes a compelling case. He establishes early and often that our understanding of the soul distinct from the body is “basically platonic” and foreign to Scripture. This is undoubtedly correct, though undermining this belief in church is tricky, as I recently learned when a congregant responded to my attempt to do just that by inviting me to re-read my Milton!
“The point of Christianity,” Wright declares on page one, “is not that we should go to heaven … heaven should come to us.” For anyone raised in the shadow of Western Christendom, this assertion invokes a number of thorny questions…
The Bible’s take on heaven is grounded, Wright argues, in the Hebrew Scriptures’ temple imagery and in the gospel writers’ appropriation of that image to describe Jesus. He even includes a chapter on “apparent exceptions,” such as Jesus telling the bandit in Luke 23:43: “Today you will be with me in paradise” (“paradise,” an old Persian word for garden, does not by itself convey the idea of an afterlife with God). In addition, Wright traces the history of this thought, concluding that 16th-century reformers “broadly shared the medieval view that the aim of Christianity was for the soul to get to heaven.” Wright thinks they were mistaken.
Wright aims to do more than score points in a scholarly debate; he thoughtfully leads us to the vocation of the church, suggesting ways in which ecclesiological elements like worship (pointing to the promised reality of God coming to us) and evangelism (inviting all people to participate in the promised new creation right now) change when we understand heaven and the soul less platonically and more Biblically.
God’s Homecoming will be useful to a broad audience, though some may be irritated by Wright’s habit of frequently referring to things he’s written in other books and his way of dismissing “theologians” without critically engaging with individual theologians or their work. Although the book effectively establishes its thesis quite early (and readers may believe a shorter work would have sufficed), Wright is a breezy and engaging writer, and surprising insights lie hidden throughout the book.
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