An interesting short discussion.
Robert Reich exposes some myths about immigration. I’d have a couple of quibbles (I wish “myth” weren’t used in this way, for one thing), but they wouldn’t change the overall result. This is why I don’t worry about immigration. In fact, our paranoia about immigration costs more than immigration, in my view. I favor treating…
In a previous post in my series on Christian view on origins, Biblical Doctrine of Creation, I listed six elements of a Biblical doctrine of creation. I need to specify this more precisely as a Biblical doctrine of creation based on the Christian Bible and on one or another Christian approach to Biblical interpretation. Excursus…
In my experience, Hebrews has provided a wealth of texts for sermons that call for works and human effort. Pride of place, perhaps, should be held by the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection, for which one of the central texts is Hebrews 6:1. No matter how many times Wesley affirmed Christian perfection as a gift…
I was mentioned by Ed Brayton (blogs at Dispatches from the Culture Wars) in a comment to a post on Facebook, and made a couple of comments myself. Here’s the Facebook post: There are two things here that interest me. First is the claim that moderates and liberals don’t take their faith seriously. This is…
Shane Raynor is again stirring things up with a post on a Toolkit for Radical Methodists. He has proposed the idea of preaching faith until you have it, rather than waiting for faith. Since I recently posted some about doubt, I was interested in his phrase “wearing [your] doubt as a straitjacket.” I wonder if…
No, President Obama’s approval rating; the poll that I have in the right hand sidebar. It has been there for more than 18 months, and surprisingly enough is still generating interest. The last comment is dated December 19, 2009 and there have been quite a number. You can see the results here. Who does God…
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.