42 Wright, Surprised by Hope, 161. Wright's teacher, G. B. Caird, makes a similar point: "Too often evangelical Christianity has treated the souls of men as brands plucked from the burning and the world in general as a grim vale of soul-making. It has been content to see the splendour of the created universe, together with all the brilliant achievements of human labour, skill, and thought, as nothing more than the expendable backdrop for the drama of redemption. One of the reasons why men of our generation have turned against conventional Christianity is that they think it involves writing off the solid joys of this present life for the doubtful acquisition of some less substantial treasure. . . . The whole point of the resurrection of the body is that the life of the world to come is to be lived on a renewed earth. . . . Everything of real worth in the old heaven and earth, including the achievements of man's inventive, artistic, and intellectual prowess, will find a place in the eternal order." Caird, "The Christological Basis of Christian Hope," in Caird et al., The Christian Hope (London: SPCK, 1970), 22-24. Cf. Jacob Neusner's point that for rabbinic Judaism, the redeemed people of God "lives in the material world of marketplace and farm, and engages in the material and physical transactions of farming and love." Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism: The Theological System (Boston: Brill Academic, 2002), 256. See also Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp.
Notes to pp. 9-10 • 137
43 Cf. Grace M. Jantzen, "Do We Need Immortality?," Modern Theology 1 (1984): 25-44, and the response by Charles Taliaferro, "Why We Need Immortality," Modern Theology 6 (1990): 367-77.
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