This is a response to a comment made by a friend on FB (an actual friend, not just a FB "friend"). I wanted to post this publicly for various reasons (it's not worth getting in to at the moment). This is a story of my journey on some ideas/thoughts and does not necessarily reflect my wife's position or her personal journey. I also want to make it clear that because I am settled on this subject for the moment in no way suggests this is what I will think ten years hence. I also want to say that this is not a treatise on the topic, but merely an outline of how my thinking has developed. Comments are welcome, but I expect everyone to practice appropriate decorum; uncivil or denigrating comments will be deleted.
My friend made the comment: "I literally can't remember the last time I heard one [gospel presentation] that referred to heaven and hell." The context was a discussion about his concern that 'the church' has been negatively influenced by certain selfish elements of current secular culture. I could respond along various threads from an observation on how woefully the church has bought into various cultural component throughout all of her history to a treatise on how negative vestiges in the church negatively affect culture (throughout history). But I won't; my goal is not to make a response. My goal is to discuss my own journey a bit, specifically with regards to Heaven and Hell, to use this as an opportunity to articulate where I am. This post will deal with Heaven, and the fact that I don't believe in it, at least not the way Christianity presents it. The point of discussing my journey is to iterate that it isn't secular culture that has led me to this point (not directly, at least), and to suggest that perhaps (although I cannot speak for all the other 'gospel presentations' my friend has heard recently) the reason many are not talking about Heaven and Hell is a theological development apart from cultural influence (at least in some of the thinking circles in which I run).
So, my response to my friend's comment: That may be because heaven and hell have nothing to do with the gospel.
I know that turns most Christians' worldview on its head. I understand. This conclusion for me has been ten years in development and was entirely unexpected and undesired. Nobody likes to have his or her major assumptions about reality, purpose, existence called into question and upturned. So I don't hope to convince anyone. That's not my goal. I hope to show that seeking truth and arriving at unexpected answers is not the same as cultural assimilation.
It has been about 13 years since I first read N. T. Wright. The first book I read by him was kind of lost on me and I didn't read anything else by him for at least another year. A little while after that, I began frequenting an online forum (Open Source Theology, link no longer available) whose moderator would later become extremely influential for me. There was a lot of dialogue on that site about Scripture, interpretation, cultural assumptions, historical Christianity, etc. The discussions were initially intriguing, but somewhat opaque to me. Andrew's perspective seemed so foreign. But what I did get was a re-introduction to N. T. Wright through a series of lectures he had given for that group (Christian Associates? I can't recall).
Through N. T. Wright I was introduced to an approach to reading Scripture that took what pastors are taught should be important for exegesis (grammatical-historical context) and applied it with a level of rigor and integrity I had not experienced, but craved (for the epistemological reasons for which he developed it he dubbed it critical realism). I wanted truth, no matter what that meant about how I might have to change my own assumptions, beliefs, doctrines, politics, etc.
One night, while arguing (on the forum described above) for a traditional protestant position—that 'preaching the gospel' obviously entailed an explanation substitutionary atonement—I took the evening to re-read Acts and try to summarize all the 'announcement' or 'preaching' events; it was an attempt to get at what Luke considered important to convey about 'the gospel'—what was important to preach. The results shook my world and began an uncomfortable unwinding. I had been wrong about a pretty major issue my whole life. Briefly, a summary of the proclamation events is that when Paul (or Peter or whoever) was speaking to Jews he warned them of a soon coming judgment to be meted out by the one they had crucified but who has now been vindicated as the true king (messiah) in his resurrection, and when he spoke to Gentiles or Greeks the announcement was that the one true God had made himself known through a Jewish King who had been crucified as a pretender but had subsequently been raised from the dead this—King was now Lord (contra Augustus; you had all better side with this God before it's too late). So the earliest and most complete record of sermons we have from the early Christians NEVER contains anything like a 'sinner's prayer,' the 'four spiritual laws,' accepting Jesus as Savior in some privately pietistic way. There was no discussion of "Jesus died for your sins so you can go to Heaven when you die." In fact, a post-mortem Heaven is strangely absent. That seemed pretty significant to me. For something that carries so much existential weight in Christian thought and practice, why was it so hard to find in the New Testament? That would become a recurring theme for other doctrines/dogma in the years to come. (I will be the first to admit I have oversimplified Acts and I didn't recognize then nuances I would recognize now, but this is how the journey was traveled.)
So I reworked for myself (aided by Wright's prolificness) what the gospel is in the NT. What were Jesus' listeners hearing when he announced the gospel of the Kingdom? What were Paul's listeners hearing when he announced the gospel of God in Jesus? Two main streams of thought seem to converge here. 1) Jewish expectations were that at least one chosen figure (messiah means anointed and refers to the designation and approval of a king or priest) would arrive to deliver Israel from the Roman oppressors, set up a kingdom that would conquer the world, rebuild the Temple (or cleanse the one built by Herod, who was building the Temple to build his own legitimacy), etc. Isaiah said this was the gospel—the good news: the announcement that Israel's long suffering and expulsion from the land was coming to an end. 2) The greco-roman understanding of the word was the announcement of the ascension to the throne of a new ruler, or of his birthday. So the gospel, while nuanced in each context, was first the announcement by Jesus that YHWH was about to judge Israel and become King again in the sense of #1 above, and later the announcement by those who came after Jesus that Jesus had been made King over Israel and Lord over the empire. The gospel is not (however true these things may be), for the second Temple audience (leave John out of it for the time being; I'm talking about the early generation of Jesus followers and not the later developed theologies), the announcement that all have sinned and deserve death (i.e., eternal punishment in Hell), that Jesus took each sinners place in his crucifixion and now, for those who accept him as their personal Lord and Savior, can have eternal life.
So I began asking how these stories we tell ourselves came to be. The answer I found, briefly, was that the hellenization of the church happened rapidly. Talk about negative effects of the culture on church thought, a formerly holistic and very jewish frame of reference was quickly replaced by a dualistic greek/platonic one. There is an immortal soul in each individual that needs to escape this sinful, dirty world and live in perfection in . . . Heaven, where God is. The problem is, that's not what first century Judaism(s) offered and it is not what the NT says (except by extracting a few verses entirely out of context and starting with the assumption that the platonic frame of reference is true). One has to believe it already in order to find it there, and that seems unlikely to be a solid rational basis for something that is so popular in contemporary preaching (although largely absent in the last decade, according to my friend, to whom I defer on this point). You may be able to find a proof-text, but it's simply not the story being told.
What is being told is a story about a faithless covenant people who had calculated Daniel's predictions to realize the time was ripe for God's promises about land habitation and a renewed covenant with YHWH to come to pass. Many claimed to be the messiah through which this would happen by leading the revolts. They all ended the same. A man named Jesus made the same claim but said the path through to that new day was not by revolt or by ritual purity and withdrawing from the community but through faithfulness to the most important matters of the covenant document (mercy, love, etc.) which can only happen through radical engagement with the community and the powers in a display of apparent weakness and the narrow path of martyrdom. He took Israel's judgment on himself and bought a generation's worth of time for repentance. He was raised from the dead as vindication and confirmation that he is, indeed, the messiah (despite apparent failure of crucifixion). But other messiahs came and led more revolts. Judgment came and the Temple was destroyed, ushering in the new age. God created both light and dark, and they are both good, but the night is ending and the day is dawning. Israel's Messiah will also be the Empire's Lord, so everyone everywhere needs to turn from idols and worship the one true God who has put an end to sacrifice.
So, the absence of hell and heaven preaching is not necessarily due to compromise with the culture. It might also be the result of an open-hearted/minded investigation into biblical narrative. (Perhaps another post should discuss how the current personal Savior for sinners narrative is a result of cultural forces.)
Addendum
I knew I forgot something. I entirely left out the VERY IMPORTANT moments where I realized resurrection, and not disembodied bliss in heaven, is the hope put forward in the NT, and how that impacts the above journey. Sorry. I have to go to bed.
My friend made the comment: "I literally can't remember the last time I heard one [gospel presentation] that referred to heaven and hell." The context was a discussion about his concern that 'the church' has been negatively influenced by certain selfish elements of current secular culture. I could respond along various threads from an observation on how woefully the church has bought into various cultural component throughout all of her history to a treatise on how negative vestiges in the church negatively affect culture (throughout history). But I won't; my goal is not to make a response. My goal is to discuss my own journey a bit, specifically with regards to Heaven and Hell, to use this as an opportunity to articulate where I am. This post will deal with Heaven, and the fact that I don't believe in it, at least not the way Christianity presents it. The point of discussing my journey is to iterate that it isn't secular culture that has led me to this point (not directly, at least), and to suggest that perhaps (although I cannot speak for all the other 'gospel presentations' my friend has heard recently) the reason many are not talking about Heaven and Hell is a theological development apart from cultural influence (at least in some of the thinking circles in which I run).
So, my response to my friend's comment: That may be because heaven and hell have nothing to do with the gospel.
I know that turns most Christians' worldview on its head. I understand. This conclusion for me has been ten years in development and was entirely unexpected and undesired. Nobody likes to have his or her major assumptions about reality, purpose, existence called into question and upturned. So I don't hope to convince anyone. That's not my goal. I hope to show that seeking truth and arriving at unexpected answers is not the same as cultural assimilation.
It has been about 13 years since I first read N. T. Wright. The first book I read by him was kind of lost on me and I didn't read anything else by him for at least another year. A little while after that, I began frequenting an online forum (Open Source Theology, link no longer available) whose moderator would later become extremely influential for me. There was a lot of dialogue on that site about Scripture, interpretation, cultural assumptions, historical Christianity, etc. The discussions were initially intriguing, but somewhat opaque to me. Andrew's perspective seemed so foreign. But what I did get was a re-introduction to N. T. Wright through a series of lectures he had given for that group (Christian Associates? I can't recall).
Through N. T. Wright I was introduced to an approach to reading Scripture that took what pastors are taught should be important for exegesis (grammatical-historical context) and applied it with a level of rigor and integrity I had not experienced, but craved (for the epistemological reasons for which he developed it he dubbed it critical realism). I wanted truth, no matter what that meant about how I might have to change my own assumptions, beliefs, doctrines, politics, etc.
One night, while arguing (on the forum described above) for a traditional protestant position—that 'preaching the gospel' obviously entailed an explanation substitutionary atonement—I took the evening to re-read Acts and try to summarize all the 'announcement' or 'preaching' events; it was an attempt to get at what Luke considered important to convey about 'the gospel'—what was important to preach. The results shook my world and began an uncomfortable unwinding. I had been wrong about a pretty major issue my whole life. Briefly, a summary of the proclamation events is that when Paul (or Peter or whoever) was speaking to Jews he warned them of a soon coming judgment to be meted out by the one they had crucified but who has now been vindicated as the true king (messiah) in his resurrection, and when he spoke to Gentiles or Greeks the announcement was that the one true God had made himself known through a Jewish King who had been crucified as a pretender but had subsequently been raised from the dead this—King was now Lord (contra Augustus; you had all better side with this God before it's too late). So the earliest and most complete record of sermons we have from the early Christians NEVER contains anything like a 'sinner's prayer,' the 'four spiritual laws,' accepting Jesus as Savior in some privately pietistic way. There was no discussion of "Jesus died for your sins so you can go to Heaven when you die." In fact, a post-mortem Heaven is strangely absent. That seemed pretty significant to me. For something that carries so much existential weight in Christian thought and practice, why was it so hard to find in the New Testament? That would become a recurring theme for other doctrines/dogma in the years to come. (I will be the first to admit I have oversimplified Acts and I didn't recognize then nuances I would recognize now, but this is how the journey was traveled.)
So I reworked for myself (aided by Wright's prolificness) what the gospel is in the NT. What were Jesus' listeners hearing when he announced the gospel of the Kingdom? What were Paul's listeners hearing when he announced the gospel of God in Jesus? Two main streams of thought seem to converge here. 1) Jewish expectations were that at least one chosen figure (messiah means anointed and refers to the designation and approval of a king or priest) would arrive to deliver Israel from the Roman oppressors, set up a kingdom that would conquer the world, rebuild the Temple (or cleanse the one built by Herod, who was building the Temple to build his own legitimacy), etc. Isaiah said this was the gospel—the good news: the announcement that Israel's long suffering and expulsion from the land was coming to an end. 2) The greco-roman understanding of the word was the announcement of the ascension to the throne of a new ruler, or of his birthday. So the gospel, while nuanced in each context, was first the announcement by Jesus that YHWH was about to judge Israel and become King again in the sense of #1 above, and later the announcement by those who came after Jesus that Jesus had been made King over Israel and Lord over the empire. The gospel is not (however true these things may be), for the second Temple audience (leave John out of it for the time being; I'm talking about the early generation of Jesus followers and not the later developed theologies), the announcement that all have sinned and deserve death (i.e., eternal punishment in Hell), that Jesus took each sinners place in his crucifixion and now, for those who accept him as their personal Lord and Savior, can have eternal life.
So I began asking how these stories we tell ourselves came to be. The answer I found, briefly, was that the hellenization of the church happened rapidly. Talk about negative effects of the culture on church thought, a formerly holistic and very jewish frame of reference was quickly replaced by a dualistic greek/platonic one. There is an immortal soul in each individual that needs to escape this sinful, dirty world and live in perfection in . . . Heaven, where God is. The problem is, that's not what first century Judaism(s) offered and it is not what the NT says (except by extracting a few verses entirely out of context and starting with the assumption that the platonic frame of reference is true). One has to believe it already in order to find it there, and that seems unlikely to be a solid rational basis for something that is so popular in contemporary preaching (although largely absent in the last decade, according to my friend, to whom I defer on this point). You may be able to find a proof-text, but it's simply not the story being told.
What is being told is a story about a faithless covenant people who had calculated Daniel's predictions to realize the time was ripe for God's promises about land habitation and a renewed covenant with YHWH to come to pass. Many claimed to be the messiah through which this would happen by leading the revolts. They all ended the same. A man named Jesus made the same claim but said the path through to that new day was not by revolt or by ritual purity and withdrawing from the community but through faithfulness to the most important matters of the covenant document (mercy, love, etc.) which can only happen through radical engagement with the community and the powers in a display of apparent weakness and the narrow path of martyrdom. He took Israel's judgment on himself and bought a generation's worth of time for repentance. He was raised from the dead as vindication and confirmation that he is, indeed, the messiah (despite apparent failure of crucifixion). But other messiahs came and led more revolts. Judgment came and the Temple was destroyed, ushering in the new age. God created both light and dark, and they are both good, but the night is ending and the day is dawning. Israel's Messiah will also be the Empire's Lord, so everyone everywhere needs to turn from idols and worship the one true God who has put an end to sacrifice.
So, the absence of hell and heaven preaching is not necessarily due to compromise with the culture. It might also be the result of an open-hearted/minded investigation into biblical narrative. (Perhaps another post should discuss how the current personal Savior for sinners narrative is a result of cultural forces.)
Addendum
I knew I forgot something. I entirely left out the VERY IMPORTANT moments where I realized resurrection, and not disembodied bliss in heaven, is the hope put forward in the NT, and how that impacts the above journey. Sorry. I have to go to bed.
2 comments:
Eric, Thanks for posting this. Very thought-provoking. I am challenged by your commitment to find the truth regardless of how comfortable, or not, it is. I actually agree with much of what you've said although I don't think I go as far as you do. I've also been struck by the nature of the preaching I see in Acts, and how different it is from what I see today. I think much of traditional evangelicalism is rooted in the reformers theology as much or more than scripture (I know many would argue that those are the same, and I'm not trying to pick a fight here).
However, what do you do with Paul & Romans (for example)? Paul gives a pretty detailed explanation and defense of the gospel, which seems more in line with the "traditional view" than you are allowing for. Things like the Roman road and the sinner's prayer are simply ways to summarize truths and/or train people in how to present them. I don't think anyone would say you can literally find them somewhere in the Bible. But Paul does seem to outline some basic truths about our sinfulness, grace, forgiveness, etc and eternal life. And he says in Galatians that he checked out his message with the apostles to make sure he was getting it right, so I have to think there was some consistency with what they understood, and therefore with what Jesus taught.
I hope you are right that the change in the way preaching has evolved is a result of honest theological investigation, but frankly I am pessimistic about that. It may be just in some circles that I've had more exposure to the last few years, but I do see a shift to a man-centered paradigm, where God loves us so much that he wants to fulfill our dreams (b/c what is important to us is important to him). I fear that shift, frankly, because there is a lot of truth in it, and it resonates with a self-centered culture, so it is hard to identify the error, yet the foundation, being man-centered, is dangerously off.
Hi Dave.
* Thanks for engaging honestly and open-mindedly with the post.
*As stated initially in the post, this was not a treatise on my thoughts, but an attempt to share the journey, summarized, of how I got here. And it has been a LONG journey. My reading of Romans was particularly fraught with fits and stops. But in the end I feel like my current understanding of it is much more coherent and integrated than what I had previously. I think it would be too much to get into a detailed analysis here. However, I will say that the Reformation and other traditional lenses came off in stages. Usually it revolved around definitions of words used in Paul and infused with alternative meanings during the Reformation, etc. Some of these words: death, life, eternal life, justification, salvation. The big one is justify/righteousness and their cognates. On that topic I would refer you to Wright (I can give specific text ref later, if you like). For me, the breath of fresh air came when I was able to read 'death' as 'death' and not have to read into it: spiritual death, which means separation from God, which means Hell (as I was trained). A text you should get is *The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom* by Andrew Perriman. I may attempt to do something like (without as much detail) he did for Romans for a shorter Pauline letter on my upcoming vacation. But right now the work week begins again.
*You are probably right about some of the broader trends in the Church. I would say that trend is there, and I agree with you. But I think it is a minority trend. I used to be concerned about that perspective A LOT, but other trends concern me more currently.
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