Article one sets out glorification's place in the Protestant order of salvation and its grounding in Paul. A significant strand of recent theology has argued that ordinary Christian piety lost hold of what the doctrine actually claims, replacing it with a picture the New Testament does not teach.
N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope (2007) argued at length that much popular Western Christianity has substituted "going to heaven when you die," understood as a disembodied, non-physical destination, for the New Testament's own claim, which is bodily resurrection into a renewed physical creation. On Wright's reading, the language of glorification and of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15 describes a transformed but genuinely material future, not an escape from materiality, and he treats the popular substitution as a serious and consequential distortion rather than a harmless simplification, since it changes what Christians expect is finally to be redeemed, the body and the world along with the soul, or only the soul.
The argument has proved influential well beyond Wright's own tradition and has fed directly into contemporary debate about Christian environmental responsibility: if the created world itself is to be renewed and glorified rather than discarded once souls are extracted from it, as several theologians working in Wright's wake have argued, the case for present ecological care follows from eschatology rather than sitting alongside it as a separate ethical add-on. Critics of the emphasis reply that it risks losing sight of the intermediate state, what happens to a person between death and the general resurrection, a question Wright addresses but which not all readers of his popular work have absorbed with the same care he gives it.