If you have followed this blog or my preaching for any time, you may have heard me express my annoyance at attending supposed-Christian funerals where you don't even hear the word "resurrection." These funerals always focus on "heaven," and do so in a way that I've found to be pagan. A few years ago, after a particularly annoying funeral, I preached a sermon entitled "The Christian Response to Death."
An article in the Washington Post discusses the growing public awareness that contemporary Christian theologians on the right and the left have debunked the conventional myth of heaven. On one hand, I don't think this is news. I'm always surprised at how people are unaware of pretty common basic teachings that we receive in the university and seminary, but they are.
The occassion was a new book by N. T. Wright, no radical liberal, but a strong scholar and thoughtful theologian. Wright debunks the conventional heaven myth and recovers what he considers to be the original New Testament idea, rooted in first century Jewish understanding.
He even takes on the very popular John 3:16:
Other clues have been obscured by sloppy translations, such as the popular John 3:16, which says God so loved the world he gave his only son so that people could have “eternal life.”
Wright offers a translation that radically recasts the message and shows how the passage would have been heard in the first century. To hear it today is to experience the shock of the new: God gave his son “so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.”
“And so it’s not a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught,” Wright said. “It is very definitely that there will come a time when God will utterly transform this world — that will be the age to come.”
I very much like this translation, though I'm also okay with "eternal life" as opposed to "everlasting life." The latter is a very mistaken notion. "Eternal" simply means "timeless" or "outside time" and describes a quality of present existence, not a length of time or an afterlife. Jurgen Moltmann's discussion of eternal life in In the End, the Beginning: The Life of Faith was instrumental in changing my understanding of term.
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