Here's a pretty insightful blog with an amazing final quote from Spurgeon and a great Seinfeld episode reference as it deals with a significant theological issue in our day...
If we ignore the reality of hell, we make one of Jesus' frequent teachings a mere metaphor.
Clocking in at 55 minutes, I nearly broke my personal record for the longest sermon I've ever preached. It was "Hell."
In our series called "Hot Theology," the topics were determined from surveys of the congregation. The most common question: "Would a loving God send people to hell?" That's hard to cover in 35 minutes.
The subject of hell and judgment is all over the New Testament. Still, we don't hear much about hell today, at least not from the church. We tend to cover other subjects repeatedly, but ignore one that Jesus talks about all the time. There are some exceptions, but the preachers yelling "turn or burn" on street corners are rare.
There is an episode of Seinfeld where Elaine's boyfriend, Puddy, becomes a Christian. He starts listening to Christian music and begins badgering Elaine about going to hell. At one point he asks her to steal the neighbor's newspaper for him because she's "the one going to hell, so [she] might as well steal it." Elaine explodes, starts whacking him with the newspaper, and screams, "If I am going to hell, you should care that I'm going to hell!"
I think Elaine has the right perspective. We cannot approach the subject of hell merely as a doctrine and ignore the human impact. Teaching on hell is not for the sake of knowing Christian trivia or to satisfy theological curiosity. If we believe in hell, and if we believe people created in God's image will either experience eternity in communion with him or apart from him, then we should be communicating the gospel, both the good news and the bad news.
Of course, this calls for balance. Christians have often been guilty of making hell the primary motivation for salvation. I believe this is an alteration of the holistic gospel found in 1 Corinthians 15. But if we completely ignore the reality of hell and judgment, we are forced to make one of Jesus' frequent teachings little more than an obscure metaphor.
Because of the church's tendency to be unbalanced about hell, and because of our cultural assumptions about the afterlife, I began my sermon by having the congregation read aloud every single New Testament passage about hell. The exercise took several minutes but it got people participating and thinking. We compared these passages with popular portrayals of hell—from The Far Side cartoons to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell"—to see how we've had our beliefs shaped by pop culture, the red devil with horns and a pitchfork, and all that.
Then we looked at concepts of the afterlife from other cultures and religions. Christians aren't the only ones who believe in a "hell." Despite our culture's growing discomfort with eternal judgment, we shouldn't be embarrassed by a belief that's been almost universally held throughout history and still is today.
I led the congregation through a study of the words translated "hell" in English: Jesus described Gehenna, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem where bodies were thrown, where worms ate flesh, and where fires continually burned.
Finally, we returned to Elaine on Seinfeld and what matters most—the mission.
As Charles Spurgeon said, "If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to Hell over our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms around their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for."
Dan Kimball is the pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California
Friday, February 22, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
The Devil’s Gauntlet by Tullian Tchividjian from New City Church Blog
Here's a great blog that was forwarded to me by Ben Euler...I think it is very interesting in light of the conversation raised by Jeff Klein, in many of our Bible classes, and in the evangelical community today concerning the church's role in our culture and bringing redemption to people's lives...
John Piper once said, when asked what books have influenced him the most, “Before I answer that question, let me make one important observation: books don’t change people; sentences do.” Well, as much of a book lover as I am, I totally agree with Piper.
There have been a number of sentences that God has used in my life to mold and shape the way I think about Him, me, and this world we live in. One of those key sentences come from a little known booklet entitled The Devil’s Gauntlet, by Os Guinness (you’d be thanking me until Jesus came back if you bought it and read it).
On the last page he sums up the necessary strategy that the church must employ if we are ever going to faithfully engage our culture for the glory of God. He says, “The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society is the church’s engagement with God.”
It is this sentence which led me to write this years later for a book entitled The Younger Evangelicals, by Robert Webber:
I was blessed to grow up in a solid Christian home. The middle of seven children (4 brothers and 2 sisters), I was raised in an environment where authentic faith was lived out before my very eyes. I have always known who God is and I have always known that He sent His Son to die on a cross for sinners like me. As far back as I can trace, strong Christian conviction and devotion to Jesus Christ have been defining marks of my family heritage. My dad, who was born and reared in Switzerland, is a well-known and respected psychologist who has always put his family before anybody or anything. My mom, the eldest daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham, is an award-winning author and speaker whose commitment to discipling her children surpassed any other competing ambition. Growing up, my other brothers and sisters walked the straight and narrow, for the most part, rarely giving my parents any real trouble. Then there was me… different story!
It’s certainly not an excuse, but I found it difficult growing up as a middle child. At times I was bunched with the “older ones”, and at other times I was bunched with the “younger ones”. I ended up, it seemed, bearing the responsibilities of both and enjoying the privileges of neither. I wasn’t sure where I fit in (still don’t at times), and I wanted to be heard, to be distinct. But instead of “casting all of my anxiety on Him”, I turned to the world. At sixteen I dropped out of high school, was kicked out of my house (actually escorted off of our property by the police), and began living in a manner I thought would satisfy. I craved freedom more than anything. So, committing myself to a lifestyle with “no boundaries”, I became a promiscuous, drug-using, club-hopper living in South Florida, who pursued pleasure harder than most. It wasn’t, however, until after I had lived this way for six years that I began to realize my so-called freedom had made me a slave to desires and habits that were quickly destroying me. I had been seeking satisfaction so vigorously that I was unconscious of just how unsatisfied I had become. I was hungrier for meaning at 21 than I had been as a teenager. I found that while the modern world offers so much “this side of the ceiling”, it could not offer me what I longed for the most, namely, purpose. The world had not satisfied me the way it had promised, the way I had anticipated. The world’s message and the world’s methods had hung me out to dry. I hungered desperately for something, Someone, “out of this world.” Broken and longing for something transcendent, I began going back to church with my parents.
I was very thankful that I walked into a church that was different : A church where the distinctiveness of God was sensed immediately. In the music, in the message, and in the mingling afterward, it was clear that God was the guest of honor there, not I. I had suffered the consequences of the modern world’s emphasis on the individual, and I was unbelievably refreshed to discover a place that took the focus off me and put it on Him. He was the one being “lifted up for all men to see”, not the pastor or the musicians. He was the difference I longed for, not some carefully orchestrated performance that, believe me, I would have been able to see right through. He was not communicated in the distasteful ways, whether stylistically or otherwise, of which I had grown weary. Whether or not I understood everything the preacher said that morning didn’t matter. I was the recipient of something more powerful, more dynamic, more jolting, than a “user-friendly” service with its “seeker-sensitive” sermon. I was observing the people of God honoring God as God, and I was drawn in by the glorious mystery of it all. I was being evangelized, not by a man-centered show, but by a God-centered atmosphere. I was experiencing what Dr. Ed Clowney calls “Doxological Evangelism”. It was, quite literally, out of this world!
“The world”, says Richard John Neuhaus, “desperately needs the Church to be the Church”, not to do church differently. The difference that people are longing for, in other words, is a difference in being, not doing. So while many church “strategists” are locating reformation and revival in structural renovation, we must remember that the deepest needs of the Church today are spiritual, not structural. And yet, we are told that the Church’s cultural relevance depends ultimately on its ability to keep up with the changing structures, on its ability to do church differently.
I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this type of pressure: We don’t have to keep up the way we think we do; the world doesn’t want us to! So how do we compete? We don’t! We must come to see that God has established His Church as an “alternative society”, not to compete with this world, but rather to offer a home to those who realize the homelessness of life in this world without Him. It is the calling and the privilege of the Church to be “against the world for the world”. We should be encouraged and challenged by the historical reminder that the Church has always served the world best when it has been most counter cultural, most distinctively different from the world.
My fear, however, is that the modern church’s emphasis on “structural renovation” and “doing church”, is inadvertently communicating to our culture that we have nothing unique to offer them, nothing that is deeply spiritual and profoundly otherworldly. And as a result, they are looking elsewhere. We are so busy emphasizing the modern notion of doing (techniques, methods, programs, marketing strategies, etc.), that we are missing the opportunity to be who we are called to be. “Bigger is better and newer is truer” seems to be the banner under which church-growth conferences all over the country are organized and advertised. We have mastered the program, while eclipsing altogether the Master Himself. Our focus on doing church has certainly overshadowed the biblical focus of being church, and this comes at a time when our culture is growing weary of slick production, while growing hungry for authentic presence. They do not want entertainment from the Church; they want engagement by the Church: engagement with historical and cultural solidity that facilitates meaningful interaction with transcendent reality. It is ironic that just when our culture is getting vertical, the Church is spending most of its time and energy getting horizontal. Just when our culture is yearning for difference from the world, the Church is looking for creative ways to develop similarities to the world. Just when our culture is looking to the past, the Church is pronouncing the “irrelevance” of the past.
In order for the Church to establish its voice in our postmodern culture we must remember who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We must avoid the modern tendency towards “chronological snobbery”, believing that our time is the most important time while expressing little regard for history, tradition, and all those who have gone before us. We must remember that we are the people of the future, formed by the past, and living in the present. We must remember that our citizenship lies in “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”, not man. We must remember that while “contemporary only” people operate with their heads fixed frontwards, never looking over their shoulder at the stock from which they have come, and “traditional only” people operate with their heads on backwards, romanticizing about the past and always wanting to go back, the Church, in contrast from both extremes, is called upon to be a people with swiveling heads: learning from the past, living in the present, and looking to the future. We must remember that it is our unique privilege and responsibility to remind our culture that this world is not all there is, and that they are not left to the resources of this world to satisfy their otherworldly longings. For, as Lauren Winner notes, “[People today] are not so much wary of institutions as they are wary of institutions that don’t do what they’re supposed to do.”
As the Church, we are supposed to provide this world with that transcendent difference they long for because only the Christian Gospel offers a true spirituality, an otherworldliness, that is grounded in reality and history. It is only our story, the Christian story, that fuses past, present, and future with meaning from above and beyond, and we are supposed to tell it.
The old saying that we should “not be so heavenly-minded that we are of no earthly good” is true, as far as it goes. But it seems that in the modern world our earthly good depends on our heavenly-mindedness. In our present cultural climate, it becomes necessary for the Church to remember the words of C.S. Lewis who maintained that Christians who “did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought the most of the next” . Or as John Seel has put it, “The timeless is finally that which is most relevant, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance”. All good and wise reminders that we have been entrusted with a timeless truth that can transform any weary culture and open their eyes to a world beyond their own: the story of a simple Jew who made a difference because He was different.
John Piper once said, when asked what books have influenced him the most, “Before I answer that question, let me make one important observation: books don’t change people; sentences do.” Well, as much of a book lover as I am, I totally agree with Piper.
There have been a number of sentences that God has used in my life to mold and shape the way I think about Him, me, and this world we live in. One of those key sentences come from a little known booklet entitled The Devil’s Gauntlet, by Os Guinness (you’d be thanking me until Jesus came back if you bought it and read it).
On the last page he sums up the necessary strategy that the church must employ if we are ever going to faithfully engage our culture for the glory of God. He says, “The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society is the church’s engagement with God.”
It is this sentence which led me to write this years later for a book entitled The Younger Evangelicals, by Robert Webber:
I was blessed to grow up in a solid Christian home. The middle of seven children (4 brothers and 2 sisters), I was raised in an environment where authentic faith was lived out before my very eyes. I have always known who God is and I have always known that He sent His Son to die on a cross for sinners like me. As far back as I can trace, strong Christian conviction and devotion to Jesus Christ have been defining marks of my family heritage. My dad, who was born and reared in Switzerland, is a well-known and respected psychologist who has always put his family before anybody or anything. My mom, the eldest daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham, is an award-winning author and speaker whose commitment to discipling her children surpassed any other competing ambition. Growing up, my other brothers and sisters walked the straight and narrow, for the most part, rarely giving my parents any real trouble. Then there was me… different story!
It’s certainly not an excuse, but I found it difficult growing up as a middle child. At times I was bunched with the “older ones”, and at other times I was bunched with the “younger ones”. I ended up, it seemed, bearing the responsibilities of both and enjoying the privileges of neither. I wasn’t sure where I fit in (still don’t at times), and I wanted to be heard, to be distinct. But instead of “casting all of my anxiety on Him”, I turned to the world. At sixteen I dropped out of high school, was kicked out of my house (actually escorted off of our property by the police), and began living in a manner I thought would satisfy. I craved freedom more than anything. So, committing myself to a lifestyle with “no boundaries”, I became a promiscuous, drug-using, club-hopper living in South Florida, who pursued pleasure harder than most. It wasn’t, however, until after I had lived this way for six years that I began to realize my so-called freedom had made me a slave to desires and habits that were quickly destroying me. I had been seeking satisfaction so vigorously that I was unconscious of just how unsatisfied I had become. I was hungrier for meaning at 21 than I had been as a teenager. I found that while the modern world offers so much “this side of the ceiling”, it could not offer me what I longed for the most, namely, purpose. The world had not satisfied me the way it had promised, the way I had anticipated. The world’s message and the world’s methods had hung me out to dry. I hungered desperately for something, Someone, “out of this world.” Broken and longing for something transcendent, I began going back to church with my parents.
I was very thankful that I walked into a church that was different : A church where the distinctiveness of God was sensed immediately. In the music, in the message, and in the mingling afterward, it was clear that God was the guest of honor there, not I. I had suffered the consequences of the modern world’s emphasis on the individual, and I was unbelievably refreshed to discover a place that took the focus off me and put it on Him. He was the one being “lifted up for all men to see”, not the pastor or the musicians. He was the difference I longed for, not some carefully orchestrated performance that, believe me, I would have been able to see right through. He was not communicated in the distasteful ways, whether stylistically or otherwise, of which I had grown weary. Whether or not I understood everything the preacher said that morning didn’t matter. I was the recipient of something more powerful, more dynamic, more jolting, than a “user-friendly” service with its “seeker-sensitive” sermon. I was observing the people of God honoring God as God, and I was drawn in by the glorious mystery of it all. I was being evangelized, not by a man-centered show, but by a God-centered atmosphere. I was experiencing what Dr. Ed Clowney calls “Doxological Evangelism”. It was, quite literally, out of this world!
“The world”, says Richard John Neuhaus, “desperately needs the Church to be the Church”, not to do church differently. The difference that people are longing for, in other words, is a difference in being, not doing. So while many church “strategists” are locating reformation and revival in structural renovation, we must remember that the deepest needs of the Church today are spiritual, not structural. And yet, we are told that the Church’s cultural relevance depends ultimately on its ability to keep up with the changing structures, on its ability to do church differently.
I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this type of pressure: We don’t have to keep up the way we think we do; the world doesn’t want us to! So how do we compete? We don’t! We must come to see that God has established His Church as an “alternative society”, not to compete with this world, but rather to offer a home to those who realize the homelessness of life in this world without Him. It is the calling and the privilege of the Church to be “against the world for the world”. We should be encouraged and challenged by the historical reminder that the Church has always served the world best when it has been most counter cultural, most distinctively different from the world.
My fear, however, is that the modern church’s emphasis on “structural renovation” and “doing church”, is inadvertently communicating to our culture that we have nothing unique to offer them, nothing that is deeply spiritual and profoundly otherworldly. And as a result, they are looking elsewhere. We are so busy emphasizing the modern notion of doing (techniques, methods, programs, marketing strategies, etc.), that we are missing the opportunity to be who we are called to be. “Bigger is better and newer is truer” seems to be the banner under which church-growth conferences all over the country are organized and advertised. We have mastered the program, while eclipsing altogether the Master Himself. Our focus on doing church has certainly overshadowed the biblical focus of being church, and this comes at a time when our culture is growing weary of slick production, while growing hungry for authentic presence. They do not want entertainment from the Church; they want engagement by the Church: engagement with historical and cultural solidity that facilitates meaningful interaction with transcendent reality. It is ironic that just when our culture is getting vertical, the Church is spending most of its time and energy getting horizontal. Just when our culture is yearning for difference from the world, the Church is looking for creative ways to develop similarities to the world. Just when our culture is looking to the past, the Church is pronouncing the “irrelevance” of the past.
In order for the Church to establish its voice in our postmodern culture we must remember who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We must avoid the modern tendency towards “chronological snobbery”, believing that our time is the most important time while expressing little regard for history, tradition, and all those who have gone before us. We must remember that we are the people of the future, formed by the past, and living in the present. We must remember that our citizenship lies in “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”, not man. We must remember that while “contemporary only” people operate with their heads fixed frontwards, never looking over their shoulder at the stock from which they have come, and “traditional only” people operate with their heads on backwards, romanticizing about the past and always wanting to go back, the Church, in contrast from both extremes, is called upon to be a people with swiveling heads: learning from the past, living in the present, and looking to the future. We must remember that it is our unique privilege and responsibility to remind our culture that this world is not all there is, and that they are not left to the resources of this world to satisfy their otherworldly longings. For, as Lauren Winner notes, “[People today] are not so much wary of institutions as they are wary of institutions that don’t do what they’re supposed to do.”
As the Church, we are supposed to provide this world with that transcendent difference they long for because only the Christian Gospel offers a true spirituality, an otherworldliness, that is grounded in reality and history. It is only our story, the Christian story, that fuses past, present, and future with meaning from above and beyond, and we are supposed to tell it.
The old saying that we should “not be so heavenly-minded that we are of no earthly good” is true, as far as it goes. But it seems that in the modern world our earthly good depends on our heavenly-mindedness. In our present cultural climate, it becomes necessary for the Church to remember the words of C.S. Lewis who maintained that Christians who “did the most for the present world were precisely those who thought the most of the next” . Or as John Seel has put it, “The timeless is finally that which is most relevant, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance”. All good and wise reminders that we have been entrusted with a timeless truth that can transform any weary culture and open their eyes to a world beyond their own: the story of a simple Jew who made a difference because He was different.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop...By David Van Biema in Time Magazine
So here's the first real content post, wrestling with the question of what heaven really is and what it will be like...do you agree with NT Wright's assertion that the biblical description of heaven nay ultimately be much different than many of the ideas we have grown up with or read about in so many books? Check out this interview from the latest edition of TIME magazine below...
N.T. "Tom" Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.
It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term. In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children's book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What's Heaven, which describes it as "a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk... If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]... When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him." That, says Wright is a good example of "what not to say." The Biblical truth, he continues, "is very, very different."
Wright, 58, talked by phone with TIME's David Van Biema.
TIME: At one point you call the common view of heaven a "distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope."
Wright: It really is. I've often heard people say, "I'm going to heaven soon, and I won't need this stupid body there, thank goodness.' That's a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.
TIME: How so? It seems like a typical sentiment.
Wright: There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.
TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?
Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.
TIME: But it's not where the real action is, so to speak?
Wright: No. Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.
TIME: That is rather different from the common understanding. Did some Biblical verse contribute to our confusion?
Wright: There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so "paradise" cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state. And chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, where there is a vision of worship in heaven that people imagine describes our worship at the end of time. In fact it's describing the worship that's going on right now. If you read the book through, you see that at the end we don't have a description of heaven, but, as I said, of the new heavens and the new earth joined together.
TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?
Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.
TIME: Can you give some historical examples?
Wright: Two obvious ones are Dante's great poetry, which sets up a Heaven, Purgatory and Hell immediately after death, and Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel, which portrays heaven and hell as equal and opposite last destinations. Both had enormous influence on Western culture, so much so that many Christians think that is Christianity.
TIME: But it's not.
Wright: Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.
TIME: That sounds a lot like... work.
Wright: It's more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.
TIME: And it ties in to what you've written about this all having a moral dimension.
Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.
TIME: That's very different from, say, the vision put out in the Left Behind books.
Wright: Yes. If there's going to be an Armageddon, and we'll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn't matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.
TIME: Has anyone you've talked to expressed disappointment at the loss of the old view?
Wright: Yes, you might get disappointment in the case where somebody has recently gone through the death of somebody they love and they are wanting simply to be with them. And I'd say that's understandable. But the end of Revelation describes a marvelous human participation in God's plan. And in almost all cases, when I've explained this to people, there's a sense of excitement and a sense of, "Why haven't we been told this before?"
N.T. "Tom" Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.
It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term. In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children's book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What's Heaven, which describes it as "a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk... If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]... When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him." That, says Wright is a good example of "what not to say." The Biblical truth, he continues, "is very, very different."
Wright, 58, talked by phone with TIME's David Van Biema.
TIME: At one point you call the common view of heaven a "distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope."
Wright: It really is. I've often heard people say, "I'm going to heaven soon, and I won't need this stupid body there, thank goodness.' That's a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.
TIME: How so? It seems like a typical sentiment.
Wright: There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.
TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?
Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.
TIME: But it's not where the real action is, so to speak?
Wright: No. Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.
TIME: That is rather different from the common understanding. Did some Biblical verse contribute to our confusion?
Wright: There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so "paradise" cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state. And chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, where there is a vision of worship in heaven that people imagine describes our worship at the end of time. In fact it's describing the worship that's going on right now. If you read the book through, you see that at the end we don't have a description of heaven, but, as I said, of the new heavens and the new earth joined together.
TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?
Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.
TIME: Can you give some historical examples?
Wright: Two obvious ones are Dante's great poetry, which sets up a Heaven, Purgatory and Hell immediately after death, and Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel, which portrays heaven and hell as equal and opposite last destinations. Both had enormous influence on Western culture, so much so that many Christians think that is Christianity.
TIME: But it's not.
Wright: Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.
TIME: That sounds a lot like... work.
Wright: It's more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.
TIME: And it ties in to what you've written about this all having a moral dimension.
Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.
TIME: That's very different from, say, the vision put out in the Left Behind books.
Wright: Yes. If there's going to be an Armageddon, and we'll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn't matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.
TIME: Has anyone you've talked to expressed disappointment at the loss of the old view?
Wright: Yes, you might get disappointment in the case where somebody has recently gone through the death of somebody they love and they are wanting simply to be with them. And I'd say that's understandable. But the end of Revelation describes a marvelous human participation in God's plan. And in almost all cases, when I've explained this to people, there's a sense of excitement and a sense of, "Why haven't we been told this before?"
Saturday, February 9, 2008
The Bible Dept at WA Has Created a Blog!
Well, the 4 boys of Bible at WA are jumping into the blog world...the plan is to write occasionally about things we are wrestling with and try to make some of the ideas and truths and questions come across available for fellow faculty members, alumni, and most of all our students...
There will be a focus on theology, social issues, the church, and what it means to live out our faith as the body of Christ in our culture...we are hoping this will provide some food for deeper thinking and the opportunity for dialogue and conversation...we are excited about it being an extension and continuation of the classroom and our study of the themes and principles of God's Word...
Look forward to reading your thoughts and ideas along with ours...we even want students to take on the posting role at some points...Mr. Huber, Mr. Underwood, Mr. Bowling, and Mr. Brooke
There will be a focus on theology, social issues, the church, and what it means to live out our faith as the body of Christ in our culture...we are hoping this will provide some food for deeper thinking and the opportunity for dialogue and conversation...we are excited about it being an extension and continuation of the classroom and our study of the themes and principles of God's Word...
Look forward to reading your thoughts and ideas along with ours...we even want students to take on the posting role at some points...Mr. Huber, Mr. Underwood, Mr. Bowling, and Mr. Brooke
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