Posted by Helen on: 03.18.2008 /
In his new book, Surprised by Hope, NT Wright (Bishop of Durham, England) says what some Christians believe about heaven is quite different from what’s in the Bible.
In a recent interview with TIME NT Wright explains that beliefs about heaven matter because they affect how we live and what we care about.
If people think “my physical body doesn’t matter very much,” then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn’t matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of “traditional” Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won’t be going up there to him, he’ll be coming down here.
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If there’s going to be an Armageddon, and we’ll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn’t matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.
Comment by: karen
1 03/18/08 1:41 PM | Comment Link |Yup, that pretty much sums up the main message of the conservative, End Times churches I used to attend. I can remember one pastor, in particular, who denigrated the environmental movement and anyone committed to it with the comment “It’s all gonna burn!”
I never went back to that church. Even though I was “rapture ready” myself at the time, that attitude offended me.
Comment by: benjamin ady
2 03/18/08 7:14 PM | Comment Link |Thankyou for posting. This made me smile hugely (Cause I’m a sicko, I guess). Sounds like a toast. I’ll drink to that. =)
Comment by: Helen
3 03/19/08 4:41 AM | Comment Link |Karen, when I hear things like that it makes me hope there IS a God who is going to call people to account for such ridiculous attitudes.
I don’t think the churches I went to went as far as criticizing people who cared about the environment. Certainly the main focus was on saving souls and they did teach this theology. Along with that they emphasized that the world is getting worse (which is part of the theology). The ‘evidence’ of that is such things as greater acceptance of gay marriage. However I see that as evidence the world is getting better because it means people are becoming less irrationally intolerant of people different from them.
Comment by: Mike Clawson
4 03/21/08 8:44 AM | Comment Link |Yep Karen, that was the attitude of the churches I grew up in as well. “It’s all gonna burn anyway” was often given as a reason why we should ignore those liberal environmentalists.