An interesting short discussion.
In my previous entry on this topic I listed several proposed method of testing prophets, specifically how does one respond when someone claims to speak for God? This assumes, of course, that one believes anyone can speak for God in any way. The second test I listed as “godliness,” but this is just a shorthand…
On February 21 I was priveleged to attend the Spirit of Women awards sponsored by the Sacred Heart Health System. My wife, Jody Neufeld, was one of the nominees, 113 women who were nominated for their service to the community. Only three of those could be recognized with awards, but I was impressed that the…
John at Locusts and Honey called my attention to Mike Lamson’s post Getting rid of “missionary”. Many of my liberal and non-Christian friends are very surprised to discover that I’m not willing to abandon terms like “mission,” “missionary,” and “evangelism.” I think there are two potential problems with simply changing our terminology. First, we can…
Recently Rosa Parks passed away. Many people mourn her passing, and rightly so. She made a major difference in American life. But in another sense, the attention paid to her is strange–not “bad” strange, but “good” strange. We tend to notice people who do the big things, the spectacular things, the very public things. We…
Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear [1 John 4:18]. But so do several other things — ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night” Lewis took this in another direction, but I like the words to point out that, in certain circumstances fear can be a very good thing,…
Sometimes choosing a pew Bible is a kind of afterthought. I grew up in churches that didn’t even have pew Bibles. It was expected that all the church members would have their own and would bring them to church. But for many churches the pew Bible can have a major impact both on worship and…
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.