An interesting short discussion.
. . . oh, and pardon me for stopping by to read and enjoying the blog! (HT: 42) For a break from white male Christianity, try Renita Weems’ blog Something Within, subtitled “For Thinking Women of Faith about matters of church, race, gender, sex, values, culture, justice, spirituality, and, oh yeah, God.” I particularly enjoyed…
Well, no, I don’t think so, but in one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how not to argue, that is a view attributed to others by writer Andrew Wilson on the New Frontiers Theology Matters blog (HT: 42). Within evangelicalism, four main lines of interpretation can be discerned. (Outside of evangelicalism, the response…
Jim West has brought back the Biblical Studies Carnival. (HT: TCOJC)
“Look at how large a fire can be kindled by just a small flame.” — James 3:5. James is talking about the bad things that can be done by our tongues, and indeed he is right to do so. We normally regard physical damage as the more dangerous issue. We use the saying, “Sticks and…
My pastor (First United Methodist Church, Pensacola) today caught my attention in a special way two different times. The first was when he announced the reading for his sermon. We had already read the gospel lesson, and the Psalm was included in the call to worship. He then said that we needed to take the…
In my Eschatology study last Thursday (Oct. 15, 2015) I tried to answer an audience question. Here it is: Is the sense of the presence of Jesus today dependent on the historical Jesus surviving death? Or, is it more like the presence of a departed parent that lingers after death? And here’s the video, set…
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.