An interesting short discussion.
One of the experiences that shaped my approach to Biblical languages and Biblical studies occurred late in my first year of Greek. The teacher was Lucille Knapp at Walla Walla College (now Walla Walla University), and she really enjoyed Greek and was quite expressive. She kept us on our toes. I was translating a verse…
Bruce Alderman has written a post that is making me think. That’s a good thing! He thinks that we are misusing the word “doubts” when we suggest that believers may have doubts. To quote: Questions can and do lead to a more mature faith. Genuine doubts do not. Hmm! I must say that I have…
The new, young associate pastor was praying, and in her prayer she referred to God as “Father-Mother God.” Silence settled over the congregation as mental gasps replaced “Amens.” The associate pastor had transgressed the unofficial line. You can represent God as vengeful or loving, gentle or angry, gracious or demanding, present or distant, but don’t…
My wife said some important things in her devotional yesterday, First Century Church Wanted. If I might summarize, many of us want what the early church had, but we don’t want to do what the early church did.
Well, I’m not responding. I found someone who wrote a better response than I could manage. That is J. R. Daniel Kirk. The payoff quote: When Jesus came and showed us what Christian manhood was all about, he did not conquer, but allowed himself to be conquered; he did not pierce, but allowed himself to…
I have frequently observed that if we were to understand the way authority works in the Kingdom of God, we would have less arguments about who gets what title. Maybe we’d drop as many titles as possible. Dave Black comments on this, and quotes Markus Barth today. I think he has a point.
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.