An interesting short discussion.
A friend of mine drew my attention to a blog entry about spiritual gifts and I think it provides some interesting fodder for thinking about gifts. The entry is Adventism, the Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts, written by Paul Whiting. He was surprised, and perhaps dismayed that his class was largely unable to identify their…
You know, John Piper has come on my radar on women’s ministry issues, and some of my comments have been pretty negative. But this article on his DesiringGod.org web site is something that resonates completely with me. For my skeptical friends, no, this is not the evidence you keep hoping I’ll provide. It’s simply an…
Mike, at The Creation of an Evolutionist, calls attention to an article by Dinesh D’Souza on Townhall.com, in which D’Souza replies to an argument by Christopher Hitchens. Mike says this is worth thinking about, and I agree, but I’ve got some bones to pick with D’Souza’s approach. Hitchens’ argument is essentially that God has been…
It’s the day after Christmas and what a mess! I bet that’s what many are saying, anyhow. Our Christmas has been very quiet this year. That’s because my wife ended up taking all the traditional holidays working, and our grandchildren don’t arrive until the end of the week. We’ve done a little bit, but the…
My brother, Dr. Robert Neufeld, preserved a recording of our father preaching, something he did not do all that often. Dr. Raymond D. Neufeld spent his life in service as a doctor. He didn’t talk about it a great deal. He just kept doing what he believed was right. In this recording, the final 2…
Or I could say, I think we trust the Gospel (God’s plan), less than we trust the government. Yesterday I posted something from Dave Black to Energion.net (with permission), and e-mailed several of my friends (and Energion authors) to see if they might have a comment on it. As I’ve been thinking about the post,…
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.