ONE of the most senior bishops in the Church of England has argued that people do not have immortal souls and that after death they go to a form of “restful happiness” rather than the Heaven depicted in much of Christian tradition.

The Bishop of Durham, the Right Rev Tom Wright, will say in a new book that this “restful happiness” is a temporary condition that is the prelude to the “real New Testament hope” of bodily resurrection within God’s new creation.

Dr Wright, the fourth most senior bishop after Canterbury, York and London, who is due to be enthroned at Durham a week on Sunday, believes that “God’s people will get new bodies in God’s new creation”.

Until then, the Christian departed go to “rest with Christ” and while in this condition they remain conscious but peaceful. Dr Wright argues from the writings of St Paul that this state is not a traditional Heaven and is not the final destination, which is instead a newly embodied life.

He also dismisses purgatory as a myth and says that there are no special saints, but that all dead Christians from the Virgin Mary down are of equal status as they await their bodily resurrection.

In his book, For All The Saints?, to be published this month to mark the Anglican celebration of All Saints and All Souls on November 1 and 2, Dr Wright says that Anglicans have drifted into a “muddle and a mess” over what happens to people after they die. They have put together “bits and pieces” of traditions, ideas and practices and created a “fudge” around the eschatological concepts of death, judgment, Heaven and Hell, he says.

Dr Wright, the country’s leading evangelical theologian, says that the concept of the soul as a pre-existent and immortal entity has little basis in the New Testament and is instead derived from the teachings of Plato.

He does not believe that every human being comes equipped with an immortal soul. “Immortality is a gift of God in Christ, not an innate human capacity,” he writes.

He argues that “souls” should be omitted from concluding prayer said by some clergy at the end of services. Instead of: “And may the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace”, it should read: “May the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace and rise in glory.”

He writes that in the Middle Ages it was believed that, after death, people went either to Heaven or Hell. “Heaven was thought of as the kingdom where God reigned supreme and where the righteous, the blessed, the saved, the saints were already with him in glory.” Saints were thought to go to Heaven immediately after death, and the Virgin Mary was so completely without sin that she was taken up bodily into Heaven like Jesus, although, unlike Him, she did not have to pass through death first.

The late-medieval period witnessed “the flowering of Purgatory”, where Christians were thought to be punished and cleansed before going on to Heaven.

The Protestant Reformation abolished Purgatory but left Heaven and Hell unchallenged, Dr Wright says. And if there is a Purgatory, St Paul makes it clear that it is the present.

“The sufferings of the present time, not of some post-mortem state, are the valley we have to pass through in order to reach the glorious future. The present life is bad enough from time to time, goodness knows, without imagining doom and gloom after death as well,” he writes.

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