New Testament scholar N.T. Wright recently responded to a question on his podcast, “Ask N.T. Wright Anything,” where he discussed whether or not there would be marriage in Heaven. A caller spoke to Wright about what the repercussions are of remarriage on earth after a spouse has died and whether that would make things “awkward” when the spouse was reunited with his new spouse and past spouse.

Wright began his response by pointing the caller to Matthew 22:23-33, when Jesus addresses a question from the Sadducees, who ask him whose wife a woman will be if she has been remarried several times. “Jesus says, you got it wrong. That’s not what the new creation is like. In the new creation, they’re neither married nor are given in marriage,” said Wright. Wright discussed how things in Heaven will be radically different from what they are like on earth, particularly with the idea of sex, as part of sex involves the need for propagation, which will not exist in Heaven. “But when God has already given people the full New Life, which is out the other side of death, which is now immortal, there will be no need for propagation,” he said.

Wright referred to a quote from CS Lewis where Lewis dealt with the question of sex in Heaven and compared it to how a boy views chocolate. In the quote, Lewis compares to a boy asking whether having sexual relations is like having chocolate, which in his mind is the greatest human pleasure he can imagine because he has no concept of sexual relations. “The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it,” stated Lewis. Wright stated that our desires and pleasures will be similarly different in a way we can’t imagine now.

Wright also pointed out that scripture refers to marriage as being while we are alive, with couples not being considered “spiritually married” after one dies and remarriage is allowed. He stated that such an allowance wouldn’t make things “awkward” in Heaven. “Whatever the new creation is going to be like … I don’t think there’s any question that that will be, in the words of our correspondent, awkward,” Wright said. “I think the new creation will be a time of celebration at all sorts of levels … and that awkwardness just doesn’t seem to occur.”

Wright addressed the concept of sex and marriage in Heaven in a previous Q&A where he pointed out how the issue has been a source of confusion for even church fathers. “The early Church fathers speculated about whether there will be an equivalent of what we currently know as sexual relations, or whether that will be something we won’t actually want or delight in as we now do. But we’re not given a definitive answer in the Bible,” he said. He then drew a comparison to what Heaven will be like with music, sharing that music allows people to enter into other imaginative possibilities. “We need all those imaginative resources when we consider God’s new age – not that we can then draw an exact picture of what it’s going to be like, but so that we can be assured that God, having made us, loved us and redeemed us in Christ, is not going to make us anonymous and unrecognisable — far from it,” he said. “We’re going to be more vividly ourselves than ever before.”