Understanding Redemption

Redemption doesn't mean scrapping what's there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved." N.T. Wright, in Surprised by Hope

Thanks to the new pastor of the church in my hometown (way to go, Troy), I have started reading a book by New Testament scholar N.T. Wright that deals with the Christian concept of hope and eternal life and "heaven" and all of that.  The book is called Surprised by Hope and it is already causing me great discomfort as it challenges everything I've ever thought about the future of the world.

I grew up learning that Heaven was a place completely separate from earth where all the good Christians would go when God destroyed earth at the day of judgment.  Further, the understanding of heaven was that it was a place where my "soul" would go, and that the heavenly "body" would somehow be spiritual and not physical.

Here's the problem - how can that kind of heaven and that understanding of the end of earth be called redemption at all?  Wright is certainly correct when he says that redemption cannot simply mean the destruction of the old, for then all we are left with is re-creation.

The very concept of redemption involves somehow taking the defective, corrupted old and making it new.  Rather than destroying the old earth completely, God will somehow transform and cleanse the old earth and make it into the new earth - and while it will be noticeably different from the old earth, it will still be similar to it in the same way that Jesus' resurrection body was transformed from old into new but was still recognizable to the disciples.

In the same way, there will be a day when our bodies - our current physical existence - will be raised by God and transformed into a redeemed physicality.  What God did for Jesus was not the end of actual resurrection, but its beginning - it was not the end of a great battle but a harbinger of things to come.

I wish I could be more clear on this and I wish I could understand all the implications, but I can't and I don't.  All I know is that, in order for it to be truly redemption, it cannot involve the destruction of all that is old.