An interesting short discussion.
The first two articles of the Together for the Gospel statement relate to the Bible. I’m going to deal primarily with the first article in this short essay. The article reads: I find myself so fundamentally in disagreement with this article that practically every word requires some sort of response. Since I have written fairly…
In a post a few weeks ago I commented that science could not study the supernatural. Regular commenter Lifewish, who blogs at Metasyntactic, brought up the expected and proper question in a comment: Please insert the usual question here about why precisely it is that supernatural effects wouldnt be subject to science. Are we using…
I’ve been planning to create some short notes on John, discussions of topics about which I’ve gotten a number of questions. I recorded the first of these today, and here’s the embedded YouTube video: Tonight I’ve decided that I will focus much more on the trial of Jesus and the relationship between ritual, symbol, and…
From Reframing a Relevant Faith, forthcoming by C. Drew Smith: When Jesus comes upon these fishermen they are doing what they normally do on any given day; they are fishing. Indeed, this was their life; this was their existence. Fishing was what was routine and comfortable for them. While their occupation as fishermen was hard…
… at Fish and Cans. At least I think it’s 311.
In a comment, Kris asks: Hi! Can someone tell me if I can start another post rather than comment on someone else’s post? If so, how do I do that? I would like to discuss the question of Holy Ghost tongues and whether we should pray in an unknown language as Christians or if it…
That is an interesting video/discussion. But that leads me to the question — if God does not really mean literally what He said about His description of hell, we’re in a whole heap of trouble in trying to figure out what really is factual and what is not.
p.s. I would love this guy to be right — I just don’t think he is.
I would make two points. First, I’m not sure exactly what he is saying that hell is, though I have an idea. I would need to hear more to be certain. Second, if what I think he is saying is correct, then I don’t think it’s any more pleasant of an idea than a fiery hell.
But while I have read a great deal of what N. T. Wright has written, I haven’t paid any great attention to his views of hell before this, so I’m not certain.
Yeah, I too was not quite what he was saying as to what hell is. And to be honest, it’s not something that I’m comfortable thinking about so I try not to but it’s real. But I got to say, salvation is — well, to come to salvation, we have to know what we’re being saved from. Jesus died to save us from something and the price He paid was unbelievable. If he’s saying it is something different that what we understand it to be, I would like to see his reasoning. But I have no reason to think it’s other than what Jesus described. Even if the story of Lazarus is a story but not a factual event that Jesus is relaying, it still lines up with the rest of scripture’s description of the unsaved.
oops on my typos! 🙁
Briefly, Wright is well intentioned. Considered in the light of Jesus and the witness of the New Testament, he is wrong.
Once again, N.T. Wright gets it right.
Scripture is vague on hell, with only a few references, each referring to places or conditions that are not clearly identical. It might feel good to proclaim certainty as to whether Wright is correct or not, but such certainty is a condition of the mind. The text offers us no such clarity.
And why should we expect to understand hell any better than we understand the notion of heaven? As Wright has pointed out, scripture gives us little indication that there is a heaven in the sense that it is typically imagined.
If clarity and understanding of these constructs mattered, one would expect that they would have been far more prominent in scripture, with far less left to fantasy. Maybe that’s the point. Except when speaking in the broadest sense, why would we even assume that condition after death is identical from one person to the next, any more than we would assume that the joys and the sufferings of any two human beings must be identical.