An interesting short discussion.
The Christian Alliance for Progress has been reporting a particularly egregious case of religious intolerance in the school system. There is now a petition drive, and you can get involved here. To be honest, I’m not terribly optimistic about the value of this type of petition campaign, but I would imagine it can’t hurt.
It’s the evening of Good Friday and I find myself a bit too tired to blog coherently or to come up with some uplifting words. I generally try not to write when I feel this way. No use spreading the weariness around. But of course Good Friday was a day that made something like my…
… and with that pretentious title. Actually, last night I talked on the Energion Tuesday Night Hangout (I’ll embed the video at the end as well) about Christian education and how one might go about choosing curriculum. My sister, Betty Rae, asked me a question via e-mail this morning, and I thought it was so…
You will find more infographics at Statista Interesting! It used to be said that if the habit is established while they’re young, they won’t lose it later. I don’t know how true that might have been, but it doesn’t appear to work in this chart.
I thought of this quote as I was preparing for my study on John tonight: Philosophers sometimes appear to talk in obscure ways. They do so because they take into consideration what people often overlook. If a poet (Longfellow) can say, ‘things are not what they seem’, the philosopher will give reasons why. The fact…
I really like this: Why do I like it? Because besides collecting some help for folks in need, this gives kids a taste of the experience of others. Hopefully it will stimulate their thinking and result in many new ideas as the years go by. We need to harness the imagination and energy of the…
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.