I think some Christians overemphasize heaven at the expense of life in the here and now but I think in response to that some might swing back in the opposite direction too far. The here but not yet kingdom.
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Heaven is innately selfish. It is our personal vision of perfection and happiness. As such, to dwell on it is self indulgent. As I see it, our participation is beyond our control so there is little point in worrying one way or the other. When we die, it happens. Finito.
Richard
According to some people everything is “selfish” even serving others because we are placating our sense and need to do what is right. I don’t buy into any of this. Scripture speaks of heaven so I speak of heaven, regardless of how some people try to (mis)construe it.
Is dwelling on the forgiveness, love and grace of God in my life also indulgent? I understand it’s fashionable to decry heaven now because of those pesky “pie in the sky” Christians but I’m not really interested in trading one extremist position for another.
A lot of people never really look up the word selfish.
I see nothing selfish about thinking or talking about heaven because I don’t see where the disregard for others comes into play. That is just not true. If you use heaven as an excuse to not do good here it becomes selfish. The hope of heaven is not selfish. That is just angry theo-babble. Jesus tells us to store our treasures in heaven. I will follow his lead, not yours.
Vinnie
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I was probably one of them. I mentioned once in Bible study that “playing harps in heaven forever sounds like eternal conscious torment.” For me I see heaven as being a continuation of our life here but also something radically different. I tend to think there will be growth or levels and we will experience time in a different fashion. Beyond my hope of it as gleaned through scripture, I can’t say much more.
In that case the hope of heaven and embrace of Jesus is far more important than our doctrines about sin and what not. God is our Father and he knows what each person’s needs and what cards they were dealt in life. Jesus doesn’t fit in our boxes.
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Neither do I. It’s certainly very popular on social media to turn everything into some kind of immoral acts - even things like following certain sports or buying essential items (!!!). And imagine being called selfish, or worse, after you let a refugee stay in your home (!!!)
Besides, I don’t believe that Heaven will be a strife-free zone. Sure, I don’t expect total disasters and catastrophies like we see around us right now, but there will be still plenty of room for heartbreak rather than some kind of “eternal lobotomy bliss”. So definitely not a selfish vision of Heaven.
Also, even if someone imagines Heaven as this perfect place of endless pleasure and happiness, presumably they don’t want it just for themselves, but also at the very least for people they love. So definitely not selfish.
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Who said anything about hope?
Did I say anything against this either?
If it were just for the people we love it would still be self centred but heaven is for those we don’t love as well.
The point is that the life to come is basically beyond both our control and our understanding so dwelling on it is pointless. Amassing brownie points (storing up treasures in Heaven) would seem to impy that we can influence God, at least, that is how you have used it. but, that was not the pont of His words. The point was against earthly values more than accruing brownie points.
If our motivation is Heaven (reward) then it is tainted. Our motivation should be intrinsic, as in, it is the right thing to do. Jesus also said
“We are only doing our duty” in the context of: there is no extra reward for diligence.
The workers hired in the last hour get the same wages as those who worked all day.
Richard.
My understanding of Paul’s phrase “this life” in this context is that it must be referring to our pre-transformed lives. Paul doesn’t see any hope in any of that. But our re-generated selves after we are born anew - we are to invest all our hopes in God’s work toward that. Now … whether that is limited to only after my own physical death and resurrection, or whether that includes God’s transforming work begun in me/us already now … that is a good matter for discussion. Lately I’m more inclined to understand it the latter way. Death and resurrection still play significant parts, of course. But the new testament doesn’t seem to allow us to just think of this entire physical life as a merely disposable obstacle, a few isolated verses here or there notwithstanding - except in that we are to be willing to “dispose of ourselves” sacrificially for the sake of others. But that is … to spend something of value on someone’s behalf - we aren’t just giving away a piece of trash despite how we may begin to feel about out bodies when aches, pains and ravages of hard life wear away at us (…“how much more valuable is the body than clothing?”). So when we read of a “new heavens and new earth” replacing the old, I take that to mean a transformed creation (including us!) that has been redeemed and set free from sin. It’s sin and its works that will have been destroyed, not all of physical creation. Somehow - all the goodness of God’s creation as it has been from the beginning has continuity with what is to come when the fullness of the Kingdom is finally complete. Even if we can’t understand how.
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My own naive, outsider take on this is that when we die physically we are reunited in God. But if we imagine God as some great cosmic cloud (not that I do), it won’t be as if I in my quirkiness will be looking at everyone else in their quirkiness in that great cloud. We will all simply be part of that cloud again seeing, knowing and feeling as God does, and not as a person apart. But knowing God in this life from our limited perspective we have the opportunity to live and act from that perspective recognizing everyone and every creature as a sibling and rejoicing when all of God’s creation is happy and striving to alleviate suffering where possible.
Heaven as the better here-after club where individual souls will abide apart from and indifferent to the suffering on earth is absurd. The earth/cosmos and all its inhabitants is God’s creation and chief concern. When we rejoin with God it will be ours too but recognizing that now, we can hope to serve God’s intent here where we can actually be of more use.
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No, this life is not a disposable obstacle and neither is heaven a happy side-effect. Both are extremist positions. Paul’s entire belief system and every comment he makes is largely driven by his belief, as a Pharisee, that Jesus’s resurrection was the first-fruits of the general resurrection of the dead. Paul expected to be a part of that and he transformed his whole life and understanding of Judaism on account of it.
As Paul said in 1 Cor 15: “19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
It is a false dichotomy that looking forward to heaven makes this life disposable. It could cause you to do what Paul did and devote your whole life to serving God and the gospel. I mean, if we truly think we have life ever after in heaven, what is stoping us. Maybe Paul was the very first pie in the sky Christian. This didn’t cause him to neglect his duties but simply perform them as passionately and vigorously as possible. It is fashionable to criticize Christians for looking towards heaven yet there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with this. If they use it as an excuse to ignore social justice or doing right, criticize them for that.
I’m not sure how to take this. Science tells me this creation is red in tooth and claw and has been so since the beginning. Creation not only needs to be set free from sin but radically changed to remove all the natural pain, death and suffering (I’m not sure how we don’t call that evil). It needs to be set free from itself which creates some friction with Genesis 1. Life is predicated on the suffering, death and destruction of other life. It’s a bizarre and painful system for those of us who know the lion wasn’t snuggling with a lamb in the garden of Eden until two humans ate a fruit as the suggestion of a talking snake. The world seems broken to me on a number of levels and science indicates it’s been broken in some ways since the very beginning. I’ve seen arguments of it being designed for soul building and that is my best guess and that would make it “good” philosophically (for God’s intended purposes)but experientially it’s not what I would expect as “good.” I certainly hope I don’t have to watch people slowly die in heaven from cancer so I can “grow” more and hear a bunch of transformed theologians tell me how “good” that is. So I’m very much looking forward to a transformed and better creation free of both moral and natural evil.
I’m not criticizing Christians over heaven. This world is clearly broken in a lot of ways. But we still have a job to do and I have loved ones to take care of. Our relationship with Jesus and hope of heaven should empower us to perform these tasks just like it did Paul.
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That makes two of us. I obviously don’t have it figured out myself … Which hasn’t stopped me from thinking out loud, or at least thinking I recognize some things as not being the answer.
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Sure. What’s being done that is landing me in hell?
If you are a scientist and not an observer you would see and know that this world is finely tuned and balanced. It is neither sick or in pain. If you were to remove death and suffering the world would collapse in less than a week. Even humanity needs some controls in terms of death or longevity. The more we tinker the greater strain we put on the ecological balance.
There comes a point where idealism loses its sense of reality. If / when Christ returns it will literally be the end of this world.
Richard
My gut reaction is that the missionary was poorly trained.
This should have been foreseen!
In many cultures polygamy is actually a form of social welfare: it is common to have more women than men in tribal societies, so allowing multiple wives means the excess women can be cared for. In fact when one of my grand-uncles was in the British Mandate during WWI he was with some tribes where it was considered the duty of wealthy men to take additional wives so every woman would belong to a household.
Interesting claim: he wrote that when such men went anywhere during the war several wives preceded them, the least-favored wife leading, so in case there were mines the wife considered of least value to the household would be killed, not someone of more importance. I never knew whether to take that seriously or not!
When the Gospel is packaged with the culture of the missionary, yes. This is why missionaries are still hated by much of the native population of Hawaii – that and the fact that many of them effectively conspired with wealthy businessmen to seize large tracts of land, which contributed to destroying native culture.
Sometimes. I once read a novel, called The Keys of the Kingdom as I recall, that contrasted two missions in China, one that provided various material benefits to those who joined the church and one where the missionary lived in the same level of poverty as the people. The second missionary took over from someone who had competed with the other mission in providing material benefits, with the result that when those benefits were cut off almost all the mission’s congregation melted away.
The second missionary made changes such as teaching the people they didn’t have to adopt Western clothing, Western marriage rituals, or anything else not demanded by the Gospel, and that rather than expect wealth to flow to them they should rely on each other in need. He was criticized heavily by superiors back home for having such a small flock, right up until a war swept across the land: when war came to the city with these missions, only his flock stood fast, not fleeing with what they could carry but instead using what they had to care for people made homeless along with soldiers and civilians wounded in the fighting (and it was at that point that the missionary accepted resources from home, not in material goods like his predecessor or ‘competitor’, but food, clothes, bedding, bandages, antibiotics and other medical supplies, and some funds to buy building materials to construct housing and a medical clinic. This situation made his superiors back home recognize that his flock was made of real Christians and not pew-sitters bribed to be there.
And as the war passed by, his flock grew immensely, first due to people seeing that there was something different (and to be desired) about his parishioners, second due to ‘bribed’ Christians recognizing that there was something real behind the message.
I tell this because while the book was a novel it was based on real events. The book shocked me because I’d never conceived that some missionaries would essentially bribe people into joining their church!
Which is what the second missionary in that book did: he lived as Christ to his community – the essence of priesthood!
I almost got into it with some youngsters from a local church who had reduced the Gospel to that legal transaction. They were outside a bar on St. Patrick’s Day, confronting people and telling them that drinking alcohol was sinful and they were headed for Hell. I didn’t get confronted, I did my own confronting, pointing out that Jesus turned water to wine when the guests were already ‘wasted’, that Proverbs and Psalms say good things about wine (and beer!). I was about to point out that alcohol is only bad if it leads one astray when a friend pulled me away.
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I have noticed a similar reasoning when it comes to objections to the idea that Hell is actually not the place of torture that Medieval depictions suggest. The argument I have heard is that Hell needs to be as unpleasant as possible so that people will convert out of fear. Besides the obvious issue of fear becoming a motivation to convert to Christianity, another problem is that it assumes that the point of Christianity is to save people from Hell in the same way that the missionary paradox is seems to assume that the point of Christianity is to get people into Heaven. In reality, as has been said, the point of Christianity is, well, Christ and being in right relationship with him.
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I often think of getting to heaven as something like reaching the event horizon of a black hole: those arriving experience it as just a normal flow of time, but to those who are distant those arriving never actually get there. In this view there is no “abid[ing] apart from and indifferent to the suffering on earth” because no matter when one dies and comes to the event horizon we will find that we will all cross it together.
The thought of looking towards heaven brings to mind a song:
I first heard that song when I was flat on my back in the campus clinic due to a mental and physical collapse from trying to do too much for too many people. A counselor had tried to get me to see that I needed to let go of all the things people wanted from me and of my need to say “yes” to them all, but it was this song that got through to me. This line is where I “broke” and let go:
And the strength you once were feelin’, isn’t there no more
– a perfect description of my condition then!
I could wish for a little more power; three breakdowns in my life are three too many.
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A classmate commented that the “hell” depicted in some Greek writings would be far worse than anything Dante described because it would be dark, damp, sleepless, and boring as boredom can be – whereas at least Dante’s version would be far from boring!
There’s a song Don’t Pay the Ferryman (Chris deBurgh, 1982) that I liked for two reasons: it was based on the Greek myth of Charon that I’d read in the original, and it struck me as how many people view Christianity as just making a payment to get into Heaven.
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If I remember rightly it was not to pay until you reached the other side… I am not sure that quite works with Christianity. It is closer to Devilment whereby the promise is not fulfilled.
A better view of the Devil is in Bedazzled. I sort of prefer the original Peter Cook and Dudley Moore version. Especially when Cook sits on the top of a pillar box and tells Dudley to worship him. After a few minutes Dudley says, “I’ve had enough, let me have a go up there” which gets the response “precisely”
Richard
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Sounds like you agree with what I said. Ecological balance just describes a system where life requires the destruction of other life to grow and survive.
Yes, life is adapted to its environment but that fine tuning and balanced order depends on life feeding off the suffering and death of other life. We can dress it up but a rose by any other name…
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Come up with an alternative?
If you want to be free to live, you have to be free to die. If there are births there have to be deaths. Remove the carnivores and Rabbits (et al) breed to extinction of all else. Remove the bacteria and carrion eaters and you have a world piled high with dead bodies. Remove suffering? Then any damage is fatal, there is no time to heal because that would involve suffering.
There is no alternative. Your rose has thorns.
Richard
First of all, what does it mean - “to not be saved”? In the Gospels, Jesus has repeatedly described it as being left outside while God celebrates with the faithful. In other words, it is to remain eternally divorced from divine love. But to get in touch with divine love, one must be somehow invited to approach it. Missionaries are to transmit this invitation.
The missionary - I mean, the true missionary, the brother of the true Scotsman - transmits the story of Jesus; this missionary claims that Jesus of Nazareth is the epitome of divine love for everyone, even for those who reject God, and, at the same time, the embodied pattern of the creative activity that makes and supports the entire world.
That is to say, divine love undergirds the world wherein we live, and Jesus Christ is the image of this love.
To hear this breathtaking claim and accept it in earnest would drastically change one’s perception of everything: of the world, of the other people, of one’s own self, and so forth. To feel connected to divine love even in this life, here and now, is great; moreover, it entails a hope of remaining in communion with God forever.
I’m not saying that there are absolutely no ways to get acquainted with divine love apart from Christian sermon; surely, God may communicate with people in many unpredictable ways. Nonetheless, the story of Jesus is a direct and powerful way to point at divine love, to invite the people, who may otherwise overlook it, to “come and see” it.
The bottom line is that to preach the Gospel is not to put an additional burden on the people but to propose them a thrilling opportunity.
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