N.T. Wright on the Day the Revolution Began

I’ve interviewed Tom Wright about his forthcoming volume The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’ Death, which will hopefully be published with CT sometime soon, but here’s one quotation from Tom that I have to share in advance:

We have swapped our biblical heritage of new heavens and new earth for a form of Platonism (‘going to heaven’ – which you find in the first century in Plutarch, not in Paul!); we have swapped the biblical vocation of humans (to be ‘a kingdom and priests’) for a moral contract in which the most important thing is whether or not we’ve passed the moral exam, and if we haven’t what can be done about it; and we have therefore swapped the rich biblical account of what Jesus’ death achieved for a slimmed-down version which can easily be ‘heard’ to say that an angry God took out his bad temper on his own son . . . which is the sort of thing a pagan religion might say. So, as I say in the book, we have platonized our eschatology, as a result of which we have moralized our anthropology, and have therefore been in danger of paganizing our soteriology. Fortunately, the Bible itself will help us get back on track.