In a post-September 11 world where the Aids epidemic and credit crisis are ailing millions, "why should we try to make a difference at all?" he asked. "Why should we try to do good ... to create good things out there in the world when in fact all the hope that our society has lived on seems to be imploding all around us?"
Ultimately, it is the belief and hope that the world will be good and ordered as it was in the beginning.
"The point of creation in the Bible is that the world as we have it is essentially a good place," Bishop Wright said. "One of the worrying things about some creationists is that having said the world was created in [six] days, that's all they're really interested in, and then the name of the game is to leave the world behind ... and let it go to hell while we go off somewhere else called heaven. If you were a genuine creationist, you shouldn't be thinking like that. The point of the stories in Genesis is not the chronology of how it was done but the 'why' that it was done."
Wright was speaking at a recent evangelistic outreach at the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event was sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a nationwide evangelical campus organisation, which aimed to engage students and faculty in dialogue on questions regarding life's ultimate purposes and Christianity's claims regarding hope.
Contrary to popular belief, heaven is not the end of the world or the ultimate goal, Bishop Wright stated. It is just phase one. There is, he continued, a "new heaven and new earth" – in other words, a renewal or recreation of the cosmos. He called it a "world put to rights".
And humans are a part of that remaking.
