An interesting short discussion.
I got this link through a comment on my previous post on the minimum wage, but I want to make sure to call everyone’s attention to it. David Prenatt, Jr., on his blog Net Esquire, made a number of posts on the minimum wage debate, and particularly on the Earned Income Tax Credit as an…
So declare the Catholic bishops of Vietnam. I find it hard to see why, but that’s because I don’t think books that teach doctrine different from my own “dangerous.” I would call a couple of paragraphs in Barclay less than fully accurate, but there are some paragraphs that are positively brilliant, which is all one…
"Church" has become an organization that devours time and resources rather than a way of living that structures and empowers everything. — Henry Neufeld (@hneufeld) July 25, 2016
John Meunier asks if he can be replaced by a video screen. It’s a good question, considering the number of megachurches that are broadcasting a sermon to multiple locations. I have several objections to the idea of a broadcast sermon: I think our worship services are already too far from the idea of active participation….
Allan Bevere reviews L. Daniel Hawk’s new book The Violence of the Biblical God. Learn More I cannot resist calling attention to a much earlier book by my undergraduate advisor and mentor Alden Thompson, which it happens I publish! It’s Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?. Learn More
This is a topic where I tend to make just about everyone uncomfortable. Long time readers may recall a previous discussion of speaking in tongues, and my own experience of it. Those who expect me to be intellectually oriented and rational are uncomfortable with mystical experiences, and many who are comfortable with the mystical experiences…
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.