Wright brings up some interesting things and does offer helpful corrections but his analysis ignores the impact of Enoch and Elijah’s bodily translation into heaven in the OT as well as the Transfiguration where both Moses and Elijah appear bodily with Christ (n.b., Jude 9 where Michael the archangel and Satan debated about the body of Moses). As well, careful attention should be paid to Luke 16:19ff, where apparently both Lazarus and the rich man are experiencing life after death, bodily, before the end of the age (note the rich man wants Lazarus to go to his brothers and warn them, vv. 27-28–something not possible in the eternal state of the new heavens and new earth). Wright also assumes Christ’s promise to the thief on the Cross wasn’t fulfilled bodily because Christ wasn’t resurrected yet. But the text doesn’t say He couldn’t have gone bodily to Paradise. The only thing we know for sure is that He didn’t proceed from the grave in His resurrection body until the 3rd day. One should also keep in mind that ‘sleep’ as a metaphor for a Christian’s death doesn’t necessarily imply the intermediate state Wright describes. All we know for sure is it describes the period of earthly inactivity the Christian’s body experiences before his/her resurrection transformation.

Bottom line is: There’s a mystery as to the timing of all this that probably can’t be defined as neatly as Wright wishes.

Dostoevsky discussed (via his characters in “The Brothers Karamazov”) that some people can’t accept a God that allows evil, even as a means to a better world. Heaven doesn’t justify suffering of innocents. These people see a creation that allows evil and suffering to be an evil itself. Personally, I have a lot of sympathy with those folks and was happy to see Keller’s apologetic for suffering include a discussion of heaven. I hope you will get the book and read it. Keller explains, using a quote from The Lord of the Rings, “Sam Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandolf was not dead, but alive. He cries ‘I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself! Is everything sad going to come untrue?’ The answer of Christianity to that question is — yes. Everything sad will become untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost. . . It promises that we will get the life we most longed for, but it will be an infinitely more glorious world than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifice or salvation.”

Wow. That is so much better than floating around on clouds!