How about one more video for your Saturday night…one which also continues the hell dialogue.
The major difference between this view of hell and the “medieval view” (as Wright argues), is one of relationship. The, what might be considered, traditional view of hell which many of us who grew up in church were taught, was a picture of a mean God who will send you to burn forever if you don’t make the right choice. So many, then, “followed God” out of, not love, but fear of hell. They don’t love God and never did, they merely want to secure a nice eternity – how American. It had nothing to do with relationship. It had nothing to do with abandoning our self, our desires, our comfort and following Christ as the crucified Lord and Savior. It had to do with a nice mansion in the sky.
On the other hand, a more Biblical understanding of the Gospel drives us to love God, not out of fear of hell but out of…well…love for God. A pastor I recently met in Waldorf said, “We all say ‘I love God because___’. It’s only when God takes away all of those ‘becauses’ that we simply begin to love him, period. We don’t love him because____; we just love him.”
Thoughts?
(HT: Sean)
3 Comments
November 8, 2009 at 10:49 am
thanks for the repost!
November 16, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Ok, you asked for thoughts…so here we go.
1. He bases his comments on the historical view of Hell, not on the biblical concept.
2. He states that the Bible does not support the “Western” view of Christianity, yet he does not mention how the biblical words support his own theory.
3. Seriously, if given the choice, would you rather burn for all eternity (Rev. 20:15), or undergo a “progressive shrinking”?
4. His characterization of the orthodox position on Hell is quite dishonest.
5. Back to the “progressive shrinking” thing: what biblical text does he get that from?
6. I thought the comments about how he would “like to be a universalist” were quite revealing. Of course he would, as it would fit into his “nice-guy God” theology. Unfortunately there are some pesky verses he has to deal with. Thus he hangs on to his wobbly concept of “our choices on earth matter” while trying to emasculate Hell.
These next observations are about the comments, not Wright’s video:
1. If you were taught that God is mean, then I am sorry. What the Bible teaches is that God is just, and cannot abide evil. It also teaches that God is love. Thus the epitome God’s love and his justice are found in substitutionary death of Christ on the cross. (Use the words “substitutionary atonement” around your emergent friends and watch them lose their lunch).
2. You cannot exalt one aspect of God’s nature at the expense of the other. Thus the same God who says “come unto me all you who are weary, and I will give you rest” also implores “flee the wrath to come”.
3. Have you ever studied Christ’s references to Gehenna? You cannot come away from them without getting the impression that he was using the most terrible place the Jews could imagine to describe a something infinitely worse. How do you get “shrinking humanity” from those references?
November 16, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for the thoughts. I was hoping that video would create some dialogue.
1) First of all we have to remember that this is a three minute and sixteen second answer to a question on which he and others have written chapters and even books. To believe that a black and white theology of hell (if it can be communicated at all) can be communicated under four minutes, footnotes and all, is to oversimplify an issue which is a bit more complicated.
2) Do you believe that there are literal flames in hell?
3) It’s interesting to me that you see this view of hell as “emasculated.” I find it a terribly horrifying thought that one would choose to not worship God and completely become something inhuman – with no imago dei. Sure, this may bring into question a literal flame but no less a horrifying alternative to true worship and love of the Creator.
4) On Gehenna, yes, I have studied Jesus’ references. It’s important to remember that “a fire which never goes out”, “weeping and gnashing of teeth”, and even “lake of fire” are all references to the literal Gehenna which was, of course, the former site of child sacrifice, the city dump in which a fire constantly burned, known as the lake of fire, and, as Ray Vanderlaan points out, a place where dogs ravaged the corpes of dead animals (gnashing of teeth). I am not going to say that Jesus was not referring to a literal parallel (but I agree with you that he was probably referring to something infinitely worse). With these references alone, we have to stop and realize that most of Jesus comments on hell were not literal but a picture. And yes, a picture of something terrible. Fire, in ancient times, was used to disintegrate. The very fact Jesus uses fire as the picture of hell refers to a disintegration, possibly call it “shrinking humanity” if you’d like.