I've recently been listening to the audio book version Tom Wright's Surprised By Hope, and I can say pretty confidently that I think Wright would argue vehemently that not only is Christianity not a religion of no, but it is the religion of yes.
It is the yes to justice, the yes to hope, the yes to creation, the yes to mercy.
For Wright (and anyone more-or-less familiar with him likely knows already) that the modern Church's failure to rightly and clearly confess its ancient and historic hope, and instead substituting that with a very lousy theology of people being whisked away into heaven to escape the world has had the effect of drastically changing how Christians live and act in relation toward the world.
A theology that says this world does not matter, that the Christian life is about a life of spiritual purity and aiming for the bright shining prize of Platonic disembodied eternal bliss is a theology that is thoroughly unconcerned with real life. And, of course, that theology is not only wrong, but is properly speaking, actual heresy.
A theology thoroughly unconcerned with real life is a theology that really doesn't have anything to say at all. For one, it provides absolutely no challenge to the status quo of society--after all what does it matter what is happening in our society, we just keep our noses down, and then we get to leave it all behind. So sure, things are bad, and things will continue to be bad, why bother doing anything about it?
Not only is it thoroughly un-hopeful, it's nihilistic.
But if God's word to creation is actually yes, and that yes means hope, justice, and actually living; and the Christian Gospel is precisely that very thing--Christ is risen, and what God has done for Jesus He is going to do for the whole world--and we have the opportunity to behold the glimmer of that, cherishing that is hope, and then bring that back with us right here and now--that means actually living, doing, and saying something.
A theology of escapist fantasy and nihilism is a theology in collusion with death. Where true theology of hope and resurrection is a theology that stands against death.
And, it should not be ignored that we see this shift in theology away from the historic Christian confession stretching back to the first century, at just around the same time that the West entered into a period of affluent and political ascendancy. We are, generally speaking, remarkably removed from suffering. Which is why it's been said that only in wealthy, comfortable, affluent America could something like the doctrine of the Rapture gain such widespread support in the modern era--because the notion that one might actually suffer substantially in this world is a distant nightmare, not a lived-in reality as it is for hundreds of millions of others around the world.
And because of all that, such a massive gulf between these two theologies means very different kinds of ethea. An ethos that stresses cultural and moral purity for the sake of "the soul" on the one hand; and an ethos that stresses justice for the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the orphan on the other.
-CryptoLutheran