Beatific vision and resurrection

N. T. Wright has recently been telling people they’ve got personal eschatology wrong. Heaven is not the final destination for the saints, but they will be raised in transfigured bodies to inhabit a newly united heaven-and-earth.

That this causes jaw-dropping astonishment is itself jaw-droppingly astonishing. Hasn’t anyone ever read the Apostles’ Creed? “Life everlasting” comes after “resurrection of the body.”

But then you pick up a book by a traditionalist Catholic who celebrates the beatific vision with such (often moving) mystical energy that the resurrection fades to the background, and you realize that Wright ain’t tilting at windmills after all.