“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 2

Perriman's "Missio Dei" articles (Parts 1, 2, 3) seem to me a good example of what a "whole bible meta-narrative" might look like as we enter into this postmodern age of "grand storytelling" (not in the mythic sense, but in a true historic sense). It proposes what seems legitimate origins, plots, storylines, conflicts, resolutions, and conclusions to the purposes of God in this world utilizing biblical covenants, themes, salvific events and progress, personal/tribal/national narratives, redemptive histories, eschatological hope, apocalytic progress, and secular human history as supports for its arguments. Old and New Testament Introductions and thematic Biblical-Theological Studies have said as much and I would expect yet more contextualized "Grand Narratives" to come forward as theologians revisit church and world movements post-Messiah (or pre-Parousia!).

To this I question Barth's claimed influence, Constantinople's "Christianized" empire, or Europe's "Christianizing" cultures beyond anything more than gross acclamations among other critiques. But Perriman's overall theme and concluding thoughts show themselves to be a good working propostion, in that the world has now heard the gospel of Jesus and that the church is in the early postmodernistic stages of expanding the Creator God's rule and reign over all aspects of human culture and civilization. It is then, a narrative theology that restuctures the church's mission, and one that could align itself with the propositions and practices of the newly arising "emergent church culture."

Overall, we should not be suprised that popular church movements bear some relationship to the worldly culture that we know and to grand propagandized themes (in a positive sense) "reforming" its at-large enterprise or activities. For Christian movements are just that, and hopefully, if they are reflective of the "better themes of the bible" (like grace, forgiveness, peace, harmony) we can find personal identification with them and with past historical truths that previous church ages have uncovered, testified of, and submitted to. This then keeps such a movement from being overtly "sectarian" or altogether "cultic" and misleading.

R.E. Slater

June 9, 2011

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 2

http://www.postost.net/2011/01/missio-dei-historical-perspectives-part-2

Andrew Perriman

Tuesday 11 January 2011

In The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative Chris Wright follows David Bosch’s analysis and comes to the same basic conclusion—that the phrase missio Dei remains valuable because it expresses a major biblical truth: “The God revealed in the Scriptures is personal, purposeful and goal-orientated” (63). He sums up the overarching mission of God in these terms:

…from the great promise of God to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 we know this God to be totally, covenantally and eternally committed to the mission of blessing the nations through the agency of the people of Abraham.

This commitment of the missional God may then be located within a biblical metanarrative that moves from creation, through human rebellion, to the extensive “story of God’s redemptive purposes being worked out on the stage of human history”, culminating beyond history “with the eschatological hope of a new creation” (63-64). In other words, the mission of God from Genesis 11 through to the end of history is the blessing of the nations, by which is meant the redemption of humanity.

The problem with this conventional construction is that not only the bulk of the biblical narrative but also, in effect, the whole of human history is placed under the single heading of “redemption”. There are two assumptions entailed here that do not normally come up for discussion in missiological conversations. The first is that the mission of God never changes—that the living, dynamic God of history always engages with humanity with fundamentally the same objective in mind. The second is that this unchanging objective is always and simply to be understood as a work of redemption.

Neither assumption is simply false, but as far as the interpretation of scripture is concerned, both are overstated—they have been inflated to the level of absolute and total definition, and in the process a narrative theme of critical historical, theological and, I would argue, canonical significance has been squeezed out.

It is correct to state i) that the mission of God in scripture is worked out, as Chris Wright says, under the rubric of the blessing of the nations through the agency of the family of Abraham, and ii) that this mission at a certain juncture and in a certain sense included the “salvation” of both Jews and Gentiles. But there is a thick, but neglected, narrative seam running right through scripture, which needs to be written back into our missiology and our account of the mission of God—and, for that matter, into our understanding of the authority of scripture. This narrative determines in an unexpected way the conditions under which the promise to Abraham would be fulfilled; it also contains within itself the core biblical argument about salvation. But as a historical narrative it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; and this opens up the possibility that subsequently the missio Dei may need to be stated in different forms under different circumstances.

Every knee shall bow: the victory of YHWH over the nations

The main storyline in scripture, I would argue—the storyline that best accounts for the shape of scripture, that best holds its disparate materials together—is not the redemptive one. It is rather the story of the conflict between YHWH and the gods of the nations, which is concretely a conflict between the people of YHWH and the nations, culminating in the acknowledgment of the rightness of Israel’s God throughout the pagan world. According to this storyline the missio Dei would be the struggle of Israel’s God—that is, of the one good creator God—to establish his sovereignty over the nations. It is grounded in the intention to bless the nations, and it includes the “salvation” of people from the nations; but it is constitutive of the biblical narrative in a way which these other elements are not.

The story begins with the response of God to the presumption of the builders of Babel, which is a precursor of Babylon: first, judgment on the large-scale self-aggrandizement of humanity, then the calling of Abraham to be the father of a new creation. Israel emerges as a nation by way of an intense conflict with the gods of Egypt. The rivalry between YHWH and the Canaanite and other regional deities escalates throughout the period of the kingdoms, and reaches its climax in the Babylonian invasion and the exile as YHWH’s judgment on an idolatrous people. Isaiah expresses the hope that Israel will be restored, but more importantly this act of salvation will be a demonstration to the nations that “there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Saviour”. “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance” (Is. 45:22-23).

So Paul’s argument in Philippians 2:6-11 is that it is through the faithfulness and obedience of Jesus that this conversion of the pagan world will come about: “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”. I made the point in The Coming of the Son of Man that the parousia motif, the symbolic account of Jesus’ “coming”, is a prophetic statement regarding the final vindication of Jesus and of those “in him” in the context of the church’s struggle with Greek-Roman paganism. It defines the moment when Jesus will defeat the “man of lawlessness”—the arrogant and blasphemous pagan ruler who makes himself equal with God—and will deliver the church from its afflictions (cf. 2 Thess. 2:1-12). Finally, we have the account of divine judgment on Rome in Revelation, when the “kingdom of the world” becomes the “kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15).

As soon as we begin to ask how this language works historically, it becomes apparent that the core biblical story, the story that determines the missio Dei, is not open-ended. It is contingent, it is constrained, it is contextualized. It unfolds between the judgment of God against Babel which was Babylon to the overthrow of “Babylon” which was Rome. The background or overarching story of creation and the renewal of creation shows through in places, but in the foreground is the drawn-out conflict between YHWH and the gods of the nations.

This narrative, however, is enacted not at a mythical or metaphysical level. It is enacted in the historical existence of a people, which is where the salvation motif comes into play. Plan A for Israel was that it would keep the Law, that it would be blessed by YHWH, that its prosperity and political integrity would be safeguarded, that it would be a model of righteousness, a blessing to the nations, a light to the Gentiles, and that YHWH would be acknowledged amongst Israel’s powerful neighbours as the one true God.

Plan A failed because Israel proved to be as much the helpless slave of sin as the rest of humanity, so Plan B came into effect. Plan B was that the victory of YHWH over the gods of the nations would have to be achieved by way of a protracted narrative of failure, judgment and suffering—a theme that runs at least from the Song of Moses (Deut. 32), through Isaiah 53, Daniel 7 (and the stories of the Maccabean martyrs), through the cross of Jesus, the crisis of second temple Judaism, to the sufferings of the apostles and of the churches persecuted by Rome.

So what is actually achieved in the biblical story—from the first emergence of Babylonian-style empire to the victory of the suffering people of God over the “Babylon” which was Rome—was the acknowledgment of YHWH as the one good creator God. A crucial part of this story, of course, is told by the writers of the New Testament prospectively or prophetically—the New Testament is a work of eschatological hope. But it is told in a way which makes it clear, I think, that this foundational missio Dei comes to an end in history; and this naturally raises the question of what comes next....

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 3

Perriman's "Missio Dei" articles (Parts 1, 2, 3) seem to me a good example of what a "whole bible meta-narrative" might look like as we enter into this postmodern age of "grand storytelling" (not in the mythic sense, but in a true historic sense). It proposes what seems legitimate origins, plots, storylines, conflicts, resolutions, and conclusions to the purposes of God in this world utilizing biblical covenants, themes, salvific events and progress, personal/tribal/national narratives, redemptive histories, eschatological hope, apocalytic progress, and secular human history as supports for its arguments. Old and New Testament Introductions and thematic Biblical-Theological Studies have said as much and I would expect yet more contextualized "Grand Narratives" to come forward as theologians revisit church and world movements post-Messiah (or pre-Parousia!).

To this I question Barth's claimed influence, Constantinople's "Christianized" empire, or Europe's "Christianizing" cultures beyond anything more than gross acclamations among other critiques. But Perriman's overall theme and concluding thoughts show themselves to be a good working propostion, in that the world has now heard the gospel of Jesus and that the church is in the early postmodernistic stages of expanding the Creator God's rule and reign over all aspects of human culture and civilization. It is then, a narrative theology that restuctures the church's mission, and one that could align itself with the propositions and practices of the newly arising "emergent church culture."

Overall, we should not be suprised that popular church movements bear some relationship to the worldly culture that we know and to grand propagandized themes (in a positive sense) "reforming" its at-large enterprise or activities. For Christian movements are just that, and hopefully, if they are reflective of the "better themes of the bible" (like grace, forgiveness, peace, harmony) we can find personal identification with them and with past historical truths that previous church ages have uncovered, testified of, and submitted to. This then keeps such a movement from being overtly "sectarian" or altogether "cultic" and misleading.

R.E. Slater

June 9, 2011

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 3

http://www.postost.net/2011/01/missio-dei-historical-perspectives-part-3

Andrew Perriman

Friday 14 January 2011

I started out with a brief history of the missio Dei concept from its origins in Karl Barth’s argument that mission is essentially an attribute of the Triune God, not an activity of the church, to the appropriation of the term by the missional church movement. I then suggested that as a matter of biblical interpretation it makes more sense to understand the mission of God in terms of the escalating conflict between the one good creator God of Israel and the gods of the nations that routinely threatened the political and religious integrity of the people of God, culminating symbolically in the parousia event of the victory of the suffering churches over the “Babylon” which was Rome. So then what?

The Christendom narrative

Historically speaking, the victory of Israel’s God over the pagan world through the faithfulness of Jesus and of those in him was the conversion of the empire under Constantine and Theodosius. This, I think, brings the driving narrative of scripture to an end. There remains a sketchy outer narrative about the continuing witness of the descendants of Abraham to the renewal of creation as the basis for the blessing of the nations. But the core narrative of how this people came to inherit the world (cf. Rom. 4:13), with all its crises of judgment and salvation, has been told (keeping in mind that a significant part of it has been told prophetically).

So what happened to the missio Dei under Christendom? I would suggest that in effect it took the form of the creation of a European Christian society, a politically underpinned assertion of the lordship or “kingdom” established at the end of the biblical narrative, with a coherent, rational and universalized Christian worldview, that would eventually be exported to the rest of the world, held accountable internally (as ancient Israel had been) by movements of dissent and renewal.

That may not be how we would now choose to characterize the mission of God during that period; and I would not want to suggest that the New Testament foresaw how the success of the witness of the early church would turn out. But I think it represents roughly how the European church from Constantine onwards would have formulated its understanding of the missio Dei.

Missio Dei after Christendom

Here is what we have so far. As a biblical people we must frame everything with a story of the God who created and who will re-create. Within that frame we have the response of YHWH to the rebellion of humanity in the form of the calling of Abraham to be the progenitor of a new humanity through which the original blessing of creation would be recovered. But that calling already has the seeds of the central biblical story about the defeat of the gods of “Babylon” in the end through the experience of redemptive suffering.

This dominant biblical narrative is then followed by the story of the development, expansion, and eventual decline of the European church—the troubled and glorious story of western Christendom. It is not a finished story, and there may be some pages, perhaps even chapters, still to be written. But I think that just as Rome put an end to second temple Judaism, so modern secular rationalism has put an end to the Christendom paradigm, and the people of God finds itself again in a wilderness of transition.

So how do we reformulate the missio Dei? How do we now speak about the engagement of the one good creator God with his creation through the family of Abraham, which is called always to be a new creation, renewed through the Spirit and under Christ as Lord? It seems to me that we have to take these three factors into consideration:

• The fundamental responsibility to acknowledge and worship the one good creator God and to affirm the created nature of all things;

• The seminal vocation of the family of Abraham to recover the original blessing of creation and be the means by which the nations are blessed;

• The large-scale historical narratives that have brought us to the present situation of the church: the biblical narrative of the victory of the marginal God of Abraham over pagan empire; and the post-biblical narrative of the rise and fall of western Christendom.

The good news that we have in this time of eschatological transition is that in different ways the creator God, who made all things through and for Jesus, is still active in the world—that there are abundant signs of reformation and transformation, that the churches are beginning to rediscover the scope of their new creational mandate, that a vision is emerging of a concrete alternative existence, in dynamic relation to the creator, which will function credibly as a prophetic counterpoint to the weighty distortions and injustices of contemporary global society. A new story is beginning to be told.

The advantage of relativizing the missio Dei in this way is that it forces the church to think much more deeply and contextually about its present condition and the opportunities and challenges that this presents. For the most part we have no wish to reinstate the imperializing “mission” of the Christendom era—that is now history, and we may be happy to see the back of it. But by the same token, we are not now engaged in the drawn out and painful contest between the seemingly inconsequential God of Israel and the powerful gods of the Greek-Roman oikoumenē.

I suggest that the missio Dei for the church in the age to come will have to be increasingly defined in creational terms as a response to the globalization of the challenges confronting humanity: damage to the environment, food and energy shortages, population growth, the struggle of incompatible cultures to co-exist in shrinking and depleted social spaces, and so on. It is now the creator God and the Son who is firstborn of all creation, through whom and for whom all things were made, and the re-creative, inventive Spirit who send the church into the world to embody—both actually and prophetically—the possibility of renewed humanity in the midst of the peoples of the earth.

Nurturing Grace in Our Lives

When grace is just a doctrine

http://rachelheldevans.com/grace-doctrine

by Rachel (GRACE!) Held Evans

posted June 09, 2011

Grace is my middle name.

Literally.

I was born Rachel Grace Held—named after my great-grandmother, Grace Burleson, who taught school in rural Appalachia during the Depression and who, when I was young and she was old, used to pull me onto her lap to tell me stories about the ghost that lived in the hen house at the old farm.

Grace is a good name, a gentle name, one I’d like to pass down to my own daughter someday.

In addition to that, grace is something that Christians really like to talk about. Indeed one could argue that grace is the thing that separates Christianity from all other faiths. This idea that God does not withhold his love from us, that he gives it freely in spite of our sin and rebellion, that it is ours to receive without condition or merit is indeed very good news.

And yet Christians have a bad habit of letting grace get stuck in our heads. It becomes a doctrine we defend rather than a virtue we exhibit; an idea around which we rally rather than the animating force behind how we live. Interestingly enough, Elizabeth Gilbert gets the essence of grace just right in Eat, Pray, Love when she describes a conversation she had with her sister:

A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.

I realized when I read this just how rarely I thought about grace as way of life, and how tragic it is that grace is often reduced to a proposition, a mere religious idea.

Now we could get into a rather ungraceful argument about the true meaning of grace, but as I see it, grace is about giving without expecting anything in return. It’s about cutting ourselves and one another some slack. It’s about letting go of grudges and extending love when it is not deserved. It’s about acknowledging all the brokenness within us and around us…and loving in spite of it.

The ultimate denial of grace, then, is not to misunderstand it theologically, but to withhold it. The minute we withhold grace because of some prejudice or fear on our part, it becomes nothing more than a doctrine.

Grace is just a doctrine when we withhold it from ourselves.

Grace is just a doctrine when we withhold it from one another.

Grace is just a doctrine when we withhold it from the world.

When I look ahead to my thirties, the quality I most want to nurture is grace—for myself, for the people around me, and for this planet I call home. I want to be less judgmental and more open. I want to be quicker to forgive myself when I make a mistake. I want to look for the divine under every stone, down every forgotten street, and in every puddle of rain. I want to give others the benefit of the doubt. I want to make more casseroles and give more time. I want to listen better to those who live differently than me. I want to forgive. I want to let go. I want to relax a little and let my guard down and not take things quite so seriously.

I want grace to move from my head into my heart and my hands, so that I live up to my name.

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Rachel's Best Reader Comment

Graham Smith wrote: Have you ever read Franny & Zooey? It's my favorite Salinger book, the one I return to the most frequently…This post on grace reminded me of the climax of that book, the epiphany at the end when Zooey, exasperatedly and lovingly and full of all spiritual wisdom points out to Franny that Seymour's Fat Lady is Jesus Christ. And all the other idiots and hypocrites and insufferable clods she meets in her life, they're all Jesus Christ. The chicken noodle soup Franny's mom brings her is sacred soup. When I read your post it clicked in my head, grace is being able to see Christ in all these people and grace is treating them accordingly; it's being able to see the sacred when we eat, drink, walk down the street, whenever, in whatsoever things we do. 'There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady...And don't you know--listen to me, now--don't you know who that Fat Lady really is?...Ah, buddy. Ah buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.' It still gives me chills when I read that passage. Thanks for the reminder.

What Is Fundamentalism?

From time to time I find it important to know our roots, and in the case of Evangelicalism, its outgrowth from late nineteenth and early twentieth Century Fundamentalism, as Roger Olson submits his review of Evangelicalism's progenitor. That said, I also found it reflective of how judgementalism is never very far away from our fears and uncertainties as a society and as individuals. May the Lord use this review to humble our hearts to be better human beings to one another and better servants of Christ our Lord. 

skinhead

********** 

A wonderful new book about Fundamentalism

http://www.patheos.com/community/rogereolson/2011/06/08/a-wonderful-new-book-about-fundamentalism/

By Roger Olson

June 8, 2011

I capitalize “Fundamentalism” because here I’m talking about the movement. Increasingly I am adopting the practice of distinguishing between two senses of religious labels: the movement of that name and the ethos described by that label. For example, evangelicalism is an ethos shared by people in virtually every denomination. Evangelicalism (with a capital E) is the post-WW2, post-fundamentalist movement initially led by Billy Graham, Harold John Ockenga, Carl F. H. Henry, et al.

The wonderful new book that I highly recommend to you is The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family by Andrew Himes (foreword by Parker J. Palmer) (Seattle: Chiara Press, 2011): http://www.amazon.com/Sword-Lord-Fundamentalism-American-Family/dp/1453843752. Himes is the grandson of John R. Rice, one of the leaders of the Fundamentalist movement in the 20th century. This is the biography of a family that, through that family’s history, traces the origin and evolution of Fundamentalism in America. It is gripping, vivid, insightful, mostly accurate (I have a few quibbles with details) and especially emotionally moving to those of us who grew up in this religious milieu.

A few months ago here I engaged in conversation about “fundamentalism” and “Fundamentalism” with some folks. One challenged me to read this book and I agreed if he would send me a complimentary copy. I received it and read it in a few days. (I want to thank that person for sending it to me gratis, but I don’t want to name him here although he’s welcome to identify himself if he wishes.)

The book jumps around some, so at times it’s hard to follow the chronology, but it begins with the distant ancestors of the author and his grandfather John R. Rice, publisher and editor of The Sword of the Lord magazine who died in 1980 and age 85. His life, recounted in detail in the book (although it is not strictly speaking his biography), was inextricably entwined with 20th century Fundamentalism of which he was, with Bob Jones and Carl McIntire (unfortunately not mentioned in the book) one of the notable leaders.

Himes’ book alternates between vignettes of the lives of his ancestors and their fundamentalist friends and associates and mini-essays about American and especially Southern evangelical Christianity. It also contains chapters about Himes’ own life without being his autobiography.

My own interest in this subject and what kept me reading almost non-stop is more than my interest as a historical theologian especially interested in the history and theology of American evangelicalism (and Evangelicalism). Primarily it was the similarity between Himes’ family and faith community and my own growing up. (Himes left it as did I without it leaving us!) I grew up in Pentecostalism and many Fundamentalists rejected us, but we shared with this genre of American Christianity most of its ethos. (Movement Fundamentalists rejected us because of our belief in and practice of speaking in tongues, divine healing through the “gift of healings,” prophecy, etc. We rejected them because of their outspoken criticism of us AND because we were not as seperatistic as they. I grew up surrounded by adherents of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches [GARBC] and we did not get along even though we shared a great deal in common.)

I was almost moved to tears by some of Himes’ memories about growing up in a church where he often didn’t feel completely comfortable–especially in his later teen years. But more of that later.

Himes’ book begins with the “Scots-Irish” immigration to the colonies and migration into the Appalachian region. His distant ancestors were mountain men and women whose descendents moved to Texas. Himes recounts in vivid detail, based on intimate research (family records, memories and journalistic records), his ancestors’ social and religious contexts in the South including their [regrettable] memberships in the Ku Klux Klan. (His great-grandfather was a member who also served for a time in the Texas legislature. His grandfather, John R. Rice, was not a member or sympathizer of the KKK.)

One theme running throughout The Sword of the Lord (the book under review here, not the magazine) is the close connection between early Fundamentalism and racism including anti-semitism. Himes tells in vivid details and with many quotations from journals, diaries and sermons about lynchings and hate speech aimed by fundamentalists against blacks, Catholics, Jews and other minorities. A theme of the book is that Fundamentalism, including his own beloved grandfather, did not do enough to counter that current of hate among its ranks. One could easily draw the conclusion from the book that Himes believes Fundamentalism (at least until recently) was inseparable from ultra-conservative social attitudes that embraced and fostered racism. He provides quotations from his grandfather’s and his grandfather’s Fundamentalist associates demonstrating conclusively that, if they did not personally hate blacks and Jews, they did not sympathize with their struggles for equality. John R. Rice believed in the equality of all people, but he harshly criticized the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s and especially Martin Luther King, Jr. (who he called an infidel and socialist, etc.).

According to Himes, the Fundamentalist movement was riddled with ironies and inconsistencies. Many of its leaders were the most loving, gentle and kind people to everyone around them (including in his grandfather’s case, blacks) while at the same time spewing vicious epithets and rhetoric of exclusion against everyone who disagreed with them. Especially interesting are his insider’s accounts of his grandfather’s falling out with Billy Graham in the 1950s and then his grandfather’s falling out with Bob Jones in the 1960s. One thing is clear about that. Himes believes that John R. Rice’s rejection of Billy Graham, with whom he was very good friends, was NOT only over the latter’s inclusion of “modernists” in his crusades beginning with his New York crusade in 1957. It was ALSO over Graham’s [racial] integration of his crusades even though Rice did not state that publicly as a reason for their parting of the ways. Apparently Rice believed in the principle of “separate but equal” but was not entirely consistent in his own practice because he invited black church choirs to sing at some of his own evangelistic crusades.

This book is not a scholarly examination of Fundamentalism; it is a family history written from an insider’s perspective relying on lots of good research to fill in the details. The one major problem I have with the book is the absence of Carl McIntire. McIntire was a major leading of American Fundamentalism along with John R. Rice and Bob Jones and others mentioned in the book. I don’t see how it is possible to give a 300 plus page account of American Fundamentalism and not even mention him. One reason that’s an oversight is that, unlike Rice, McIntire separated from the “neo-evangelicalism” of Ockenga right at its beginning in the 1940s. It took Rice and Jones and others until the 1950s and 1960s to separate from, for example, the National Association of Evangelicals.

One thing this book rightly makes clear is the key, cornerstone, distinctive doctrine and practice of Fundamentalism that separates it from Evangelicalism is “biblical separation.” Rice and other Fundamentalist leaders believed it wrong for evangelicals to have Christian fellowship with heretics and people living unholy lives (as they defined holiness). Jones and Rice fell out over the doctrine and practice of “secondary separation” with Jones emphatically advocating it and Rice being much less enthusiastic about it. Secondary separation is the refusal of fellowship with fellow Christians who are having fellowship with heretics, modernists, unholy people, etc. (I can remember overhearing debates about this among GARBC people in a Christian bookstore in the midwestern city where I grew up.)

I could go on singing the praises of this book, but instead I’ll just recommend that you buy it and read it. It’s well worth it if you have any interest in American Christian history and especially Evangelicalism including Fundamentalism. The material about J. Frank Norris and William Bell Riley alone is worth the price! (They were early associates of Rice’s and warhorses of the Fundamentalist movement in the 1920s and afterwords. Norris, pastor of Fort Worth’s First Baptist Church, pulled a pistol out of his church office desk drawer and shot an unarmed visitor to death! He was acquitted by a jury and lauded as a great hero by his followers!)

So, finally, a few words about why I resonate so strongly with this book. I didn’t grow up in the thick of THIS Fundamentalism, but my childhood religious milieu resembled it a lot. We did not think Catholics were Christians. We disliked blacks except the few we knew personally. (Our Pentecostal church had one black member and somehow she was always the exception to everything bad my parents said about African-Americans. “Sister Willa Jones” was viewed by my parents and our church members as not really “negro”–at least not like others. How ironic.) We viewed all “worldly entertainment” with suspicion. I remember when the Grand Ol’ Opry came to our city in the 1950s and my parents condemned it because it contained characters pretending to be drunk. My parents singled out young women in our church for special “counseling” when their skirts got too high (i.e., anywhere near the knee!). My stepmother didn’t wear pants until she was in her 50s and then only very reluctantly. We used the King James Bible only (in the 1950s, anyway) and the Scofield Reference Bible was considered authoritative (except for the footnotes dealing with the cessation of the gifts of the Spirit!). We didn’t participate in politics which was considered dirty and the playground of the devil. (I sometimes describe us as “urban Amish.”) Anyone who drove a big, expensive car was harshly criticized for “conspicuous consumption.” Tithing or even double tithing (with a tenth going to world missions) was expected. I remember my stepmother saying we would eat only popcorn if necessary to pay our tithes! (Thankfully it never quite came to that.) We took the Bible as literally as possible, believed in the immanent rapture, were anti-evolution and anti-communist. We were anti-Catholic and didn’t celebrate when President Kennedy was assassinated but neither did we cry over it.) We considered Martin Luther King, Jr. a false prophet stirring up violence unnecessarily and were not upset when he was killed. We regarded “mainline Christians” as false Christians unless they inexplicably came out openly and publicly as against their own denominations. My parents spent many hours trying to steal sheep from mainline Protestant churches and criticizing their pastors as “liberal” and “social gospel” which was about as bad as being communist. (I remember them singling out one Baptist pastor in town for special criticism because he was allegedly liberal. Years later I got to know him and I still have a special relationship with him in his 90s. He’s one of the most warm-hearted evangelical men I’ve ever known!) When the charismatic movement began my parents regarded it with great suspicion because its leaders (mostly Catholics and mainline Protestants) didn’t leave their churches and often continued to drink and sometimes smoke after being allegedly Spirit-filled. (Later, in the 1970s my parents embraced the charismatic movement cautiously.)

Enough said. My Christian childhood and youth was much like Himes’. But whereas Himes, by his own admission, fled as far from Fundamentalism as he could (to return part way in later life), I was rescued from both my fundamentalist religious upbringing and over reaction to it by my evangelical seminary professors (including strangely enough James Montgomery Boice who was my professor of homiletics!) and by my involvement in Youth for Christ (which was very ecumenical in the 1960s).

Although my childhood and youth were in a different kind of fundamentalism than Himes’ I resonated with his reminiscences and love-hate relationship with it. To this day, I cry when I watch a Bill Gaither Homecoming Video/DVD–especially if it includes the “old timers” of Southern Gospel Music. The songs of Albert Brumley, Jr., Ira Stanphill, Rusty Goodman, Stuart Hamblin, et al., still move me to tears when sung by groups such as The Speer Family who often came to our town for concerts at the Nazarene Campground or by the Goodmans or groups like that. Theirs was the only music allowed in our home and I loved it and still do. (Although, as a teenager I had my secret transistor radio that I kept under my bed so that I could listen to rock music at night and I still think the pop music of the 1960s has never been matched!)

Get the book; you’ll enjoy it if you have any interest in American Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism.

Kevin DeYoung - Why Evangelicals Think They Need Hell

Kevin DeYoung, Rob Bell, and the argument about hell

http://www.postost.net/2011/02/kevin-deyoung-rob-bell-argument-about-hell

Andrew Perriman
Monday 28 February 2011

I said that I would come back to what Kevin DeYoung has to say about Rob Bell and hell. To his credit, DeYoung refrains from commenting on Rob Bell’s unpublished book Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and promises not to pick a fight over it when it eventually comes out. But he takes the opportunity, in the meantime, to remind us why we need a doctrine of divine wrath and eternal punishment. The eight-part argument he puts forward is excerpted from the book that he wrote with Ted Kluck, Why We’re Not Emergent. I think he’s wrong, one way or another, on every point. I’ve listed the headings below with brief commentary.

“First, we need God’s wrath to keep us honest about evangelism.”

When Paul reasoned with the Roman governor Felix “about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment” (Acts 24:25), he no doubt meant to impart a sense of urgency to his message, but this “coming judgment” cannot be equated with our notion of “hell”. It is likely that at the forefront of Paul’s mind was the coming judgment on Israel, and perhaps beyond that the thought of a judgment on the Greek-Roman world. Even if we suppose that he is thinking of a resurrection of all the dead and a final judgment such as we find in Revelation 20:4-6, there is no basis for introducing a doctrine of eternal punishment into the argument.

“Second, we need God’s wrath in order to forgive our enemies.”

The “wrath” of God in scripture always—I repeat, always—refers to some historical event or process by which a people or a nation or a civilization is “judged”. It is how the creator God puts matters to right amongst the nations. In Romans 12:19 the quotation “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” comes from the Song of Moses, where it speaks of a day when God will vindicate his people and defeat their enemies (Deut. 32:35-36). Paul’s argument is the same: there will be a day—not an end of days—when God will vindicate the suffering Roman churches and defeat their enemies (see my book, The Future of the People of God, 146). It is also worth noting that Paul does not speak here about forgiving their enemies, though no doubt he would have urged that; he speaks of not taking revenge against their enemies.

“Third, we need God’s wrath in order to risk our lives for Jesus’ sake.”

This one DeYoung gets basically right—at least as far as the outlook of the New Testament is concerned: “The radical devotion necessary to suffer for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus comes, in part, from the assurance we have that God will vindicate us in the end.” But we have to insist that “wrath” is not a final and absolute judgment against all humanity. It has to be contextualized historically, it has to be located in the real world; and I think that there must be some doubt about how we do this—and even whether we should do it—beyond the eschatological horizon of the judgment of the pagan world that is so climactic for the New Testament.

“Fourth, we need God’s wrath in order to live holy lives.”

Again, wrath is not a final judgment, and the final judgment in the New Testament does not consign people to eternal conscious suffering. The final judgment on human sinfulness is death or destruction. The doctrine of hell as eternal punishment is simply wrong—exegetically wrong—and should be expunged from our vocabulary. That is not to say, however, that we should not be motivated by the prospect of being excluded from the renewal of creation on account of the things we have either done or not done.

“Fifth, we need God’s wrath in order to understand what mercy means.”

The catastrophic judgment on Israel in AD 70 may well have helped some Jews, prospectively or retrospectively, to learn the meaning of mercy—it sounds a little perverse, but it is a very biblical idea. In the same way the general wretchedness and futility of human existence may help us to grasp the significance of the mercy of God towards those who turn their backs on the old creation in order to belong to the new. But if we are to say that people today are “objects of wrath”, it can only be because we are convinced, prophetically, that our culture or civilization faces a coming catastrophe analogous to the overthrow of Babylon or of pagan Rome. That may well be the case, but it has nothing to do with hell.

“Sixth, we need God’s wrath in order to grasp how wonderful heaven will be.”

The proper antithesis to invoke here is not the one between hell and heaven but the one between death and life, between destruction and the renewal of creation. Hell, as popularly understood, is simply a misconception; scripture does oppose heaven and hell in this way, as final metaphysical alternatives. What we need is a sense of the awfulness of sin, corruption, decay, and death in order to grasp how wonderful God’s new heavens and new earth will be.

“Seventh, we need the wrath of God in order to be motivated to care for our impoverished brothers and sisters.”

DeYoung offers here a fundamental misreading of Matthew 25:31-46, which describes a judgment of the nations according to how they react to the presence of Jesus’ suffering disciples in their midst, not a judgment of believers according to how they have treated the poor, as DeYoung assumes. There are plenty of good biblical ways to motivate Christian action towards social justice without waving the sub-biblical and unethical myth of eternal conscious torment in our faces.

“Eighth, we need God’s wrath in order to be ready for the Lord’s return.”

This only really restates the gist of most of the previous points: we need the fear of hell for motivational reasons. My view is that such motifs as “wrath of God”, “coming of the Son of man”, and the return of a master to his household have reference to historical realities in the relevant and foreseeable future of the early church. They speak of a judgment on the enemies of Jesus’ followers that will constitute the ending of persecution and the decisive vindication of their faith in Jesus. In addition, the motivational argument is spurious, both theologically and morally—in reality, I suspect that the young, reckless and Reformed movement needs to generate a fear of losing the doctrine of hell in order to prevent people wandering into dangerous emergent territory.

Tim Keller gets a lot right but gets hell badly wrong

http://www.postost.net/2011/03/tim-keller-gets-lot-right-gets-hell-badly-wrong

Andrew Perriman

Wednesday 02 March 2011

Among the many responses to Kurt Willems’ defence of Rob Bell was a link to an undated article by Tim Keller on “The Importance of Hell” (thank you, Jake). Tim Keller is an outstanding pastor, but his argument about hell seems to be wrong in so many ways—exegetically, logically, theologically, psychologically, possibly even morally… but mainly exegetically. Much of the argument has been covered in recent posts, so I have kept matters reasonably concise and provided links to the relevant material. This is, admittedly, an overworked topic, and I apologize for repeating myself. But it is a good test case for the debate between Reformed and New Perspective theologies, raising important questions about the use of language and the relevance of historical context.

1. Jesus does not teach “hell” if by that we mean a place of unending torment after death

What Matthew 25:31-46 describes is a symbolic judgment of the nations, at a time when the Son of Man will be publicly vindicated, on the basis of how they reacted to the presence of Jesus’ disciples (“the least of these my brothers”) in their midst. It is not a judgment of the dead—that is simply an assumption that we have typically read into the passage. Both “life” and “punishment”, therefore, must be interpreted in socio-political terms, with reference to the continuing existence of the nations following the vindication of the Son of Man and of the early martyr church. There will be those Gentiles who will in some manner share in the “life” of the coming age; there will be others who will be destroyed in the fire of the God’s judgment of the pagan world (cf. Dan. 7:10-11), punished, or excluded from the kingdom.

The “fire of gehenna” (Matt. 5:22; 18:8-9) refers not to a universal hell but to the judgment that Jesus believed was coming upon Israel. It is an image of the massive destruction of life that would result from the Roman invasion of Judea and assault on Jerusalem (cf. Jer. 7:30-33; 19:6-8). Matthew 10:28 addresses the fears of the disciples in the same eschatological context. The image in Mark 9:48 of corpses being consumed in gehenna by worms that do not die and a fire that cannot be quenched derives from Isaiah 66:24. The dead bodies of those who rebelled against YHWH serve as a perpetual reminder to the nations and to the returning exiles of the judgment on Israel. But corpses, of course, do not feel pain. Jesus uses the image to similar effect: it forms part of his warning to the Jews of an analogous judgment to come. Keller’s suggestion that he is speaking of the “‘totaled’ human soul” (italics added) is a fundamental misreading of Jesus’ language.

The image of an “outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth” describes the exclusion of rebellious Israel from the renewed people of God. The point in Matthew 25:30 is that “worthless” disciples will find themselves in the same category when Jesus is eventually vindicated.
Keller is right to draw attention to the frequency and prominence of these motifs in Jesus’ teaching. And if we changed the unbiblical word “hell” for “Hades” or gehenna or the “desolation” of Jerusalem or such like, and made some other contextual adjustments, his concluding paragraph would make reasonably good sense:

We must come to grips with the fact that Jesus said more about hell than Daniel, Isaiah, Paul, John, Peter put together. Before we dismiss this, we have to realize we are saying to Jesus, the pre-eminent teacher of love and grace in history, “I am less barbaric than you, Jesus—I am more compassionate and wiser than you.” Surely that should give us pause! Indeed, upon reflection, it is because of the doctrine of judgment and hell that Jesus’ proclamations of grace and love are so astounding.

2. We don’t need an unbiblical doctrine of hell to show us that we are dependent on God for everything

To be apart from God in scripture is not to be consigned to hell but to be excluded from the people of God—from that community which has recovered something of the original blessing of creation, in which the creator dwells through his Spirit. It is quite possible to argue that there is no “life” that is truly human away from the presence of God without invoking the threat of eternal torment after death. Death itself is the ultimate banishment from the presence of the life-giving creator.

What Paul describes in 2 Thessalonians 1:5-12 is specifically, I would argue, a judgment on the persecutors of the early church: “God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you” (1:6). It is, therefore, a restatement of Jesus judgment of the sheep and the goats. It results in the destruction of a culture, the exclusion of violent paganism—and of violent pagans—from the presence of God. The language is apocalyptic, but the thought is entirely in keeping with Old Testament texts which speak of YHWH’s preservation of his people and the defeat of their enemies.

3. The argument that hell is self-chosen is fallacious

Keller constructs an antithesis between choosing God as master and choosing autonomy. Those who choose to be “their own Saviors and Masters” are really choosing all the psychological evils that come from being “self-centered, self-absorbed, self-pitying, and self-justifying”—and therefore, so the argument goes, they are choosing hell as a final destination. But people who choose not to submit themselves to Jesus as Lord and Saviour are not choosing hell—you cannot choose something that you don’t believe in. Paul argues in Romans 1:18-32 that idolatry—we might perhaps include self-idolatry—leads to sexual immorality and wickedness, but he does not suggest that pagans thereby choose the wrath of God. In any case, the wrath of God is not what we mean by hell. It refers to some “historical event or process by which a people or a nation or a civilization is ‘judged’” (see Kevin DeYoung, Rob Bell, and the argument about hell).

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus addresses the precarious condition of wealthy Jews facing eschatological judgment. In context it does not speak to the whole of humanity, though it has a conventional moral core to it and can easily be recycled. Jesus asserts that it is the poor and marginalized in Israel who will be restored to the “bosom of Abraham”; the wealthy scribes and Pharisees, who have turned a deaf ear to the Law and the Prophets, will suffer the punishment of the gehenna of fire. In the end, it is only a parable. It is no more an argument for hell than the parable of the treasure in the field is an argument for buying metal detectors.

4. The doctrine of hell is not “the only way to know how much Jesus loved us and how much he did for us”

Jesus took upon himself the punishment that was Israel’s. That punishment was death or destruction on a Roman cross, prefiguring the horrendous slaughter and destruction that the nation would suffer at the hands of the Romans. Jesus did not suffer the post-mortem torments of hell, whether for Israel for anyone else. It is purely speculative—actually it is purely unbiblical—to suggest that when Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46; Mk. 15:34), “he was experiencing hell itself”, unless Keller means that metaphorically, which I doubt. Jesus invokes Psalm 22, which tells quite a different story about the anguish of Israel’s king when encompassed by his enemies. Keller’s argument about the metaphysics of extreme suffering is worthy of Mel Gibson and is quite unnecessary. We know that Jesus loved us because he died for us. Death is quite bad enough, thank you.

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Addendum: I still understand Jesus' statement on God's forsaking him in terms of hell, but when possible we can explore this subject some further. The point that Perriman is making here is the necessity for hermenuetical re-contextualization, or re-framing, of all (systematic) theologies into non-evangelic terms, including the evangelic teachings on hell itself, which I heartily support.... And by association, we may expand this concept to any Christian denomination, sect, or movement's de-framing of centric doctrines to their "faith" beliefs, thus limiting any proper understanding of biblical doctrines "lost in relativized interpretation".

skinhead

The Biblical Doctrine of Hell 2

In Perriman's first article, The Biblical Doctrine of Hell 1 (http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/06/biblical-doctrine-of-hell.html), he argues for the understanding of hell in terms of "immediate and final destruction" of body, soul, spirit from its life-giving Creator God and thus, as final and complete destruction, etc (see my introductory review for further observations)....

...To this I would like to add that I appreciate Perriman's further arguement below for separating God's eschatological-apocalyptic judgments from the natural order of decay and ruin found in a world under the influence of sin as seen in natural and man-made events. (As described in Kyle Roberts article on divine providence, http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/03/tsunamis-or-why-im-no-longer-calvinist.html). Creation has an imbued sin problem that is its own judgment.

As well as Perriman's association of the people of God (the church) as God's newest salvific era recepients who are protected by God's grace and from divine apocalyptic judgments to be delivered to a wicked world "un-renewed" by Jesus. (Perhaps not from the effects of the Tribulation, dependent upon one's eschatological order of events - and in keeping with Perriman's OT analogies - but from very hell itself, is certain).

And so, I think he makes an important distinction between OT v. NT corporate salvific entities while realising that the people of God  I would call "God's remnant" are ever preserved from the death of hell, which is its own judgment upon the wicked (cf. my introductory observations in http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-comparison-to-timothy-kellers-very.html).

skinhead

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Hell on earth and the problems of evangelical dualism (among other things)

http://www.postost.net/2011/06/hell-earth-problems-evangelical-dualism-among-other-things

Andrew Perriman

Friday 03 June 2011

In a comment on my Hell, the unbiblical doctrine of post Steve makes two substantial criticisms of my general approach. The first is that it is a mistake to assume a continuity of words and concepts between the Old Testament and the New Testament:

The Old Testament was physically oriented, while the New Testament was spiritually oriented. The OT physical emphasis on the temple, priesthood, sacrifices, feasts, etc. Foreshadowed the NT spiritual realities of those things. Same words, different application.

The second is roughly that we get into all sorts of moral and theological difficulties if we extend the argument about “hell on earth” and try to interpret “violent and destructive events like wars, famines, and perhaps natural disasters” today as acts of divine judgment.

The first argument I disagree with because it presupposes a dualism that is alien to biblical thought. There is some force to the second, but I’m not sure that we are theologically obliged to extrapolate from the particular biblical narrative about judgment and salvation.

It is certainly true that Jesus translated much of the symbolism of Israel’s political-religious existence into other terms. At a time of eschatological crisis he reconfigured Israel around himself and his own exceptional vocation rather than around the temple in Jerusalem and the hope of an earthly Davidic dynasty. But I would argue, nevertheless, that it is a standard mistake of modern theologies—such as much current evangelical theology—to think that the physical structures of the Old Testament are simply and comprehensively spiritualized in the New Testament.

The a-historical dualism implicit in this argument lies at the heart of many of the shortcomings of modern evangelicalism—not least the difficulty that it has in integrating social justice into its life and witness.

The New Testament does not spiritualize the physical temple. It puts forward a replacement for it and to some extent constructs that replacement typologically. Why was a replacement needed? Because God was about to destroy the temple and Jerusalem as an act of final judgment against a rebellious nation. Would this be a pleasant experience? No, it would be accompanied by the full horrors of invasion, siege, disease, famine, and slaughter. The Jews, in Jesus’ opinion, would do better to tear out an eye or cut off a limb than suffer this terrible fate—when thousands of corpses would be thrown into the valleys around Jerusalem for want of space to bury them in the besieged city.

This is still an outworking of the Old Testament story, which is why the Old Testament language and conceptuality remain directly relevant. What Jeremiah predicted for sixth century Jerusalem Jesus predicted for first century Jerusalem—and Josephus relates that this was exactly the outcome of the siege:

Now the seditious at first gave orders that the dead should be buried out of the public treasury, as not enduring the stench of their dead bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them cast down from the walls into the valleys beneath. (Jos. War 5.518)

So given the fact that Jesus was not less than a Jewish prophet, that he spoke of judgment against Jerusalem in language taken from the Old Testament prophets, and that 40 years later Jerusalem fell to the armies of Rome in exactly the same manner that it had fallen to the Babylonian armies 600 years earlier, it seems to me that the onus lies with modern interpreters to show that he intended his words to be understood spiritually or metaphysically—that is, in a manner quite out of keeping with Jewish thought—and not with reference to the fate of historical Israel.

At the heart of the story that is being told is the concrete historical existence of a people, and there is always a political dimension to the existence of a people, despite the best attempts of modern rationalistic theology to eliminate this aspect.

What Jesus does through his death and resurrection is ensure, in the first place, the survival of a people descended from Abraham. The means of salvation has changed—through faithfulness, suffering and death, rather than through loyalty to torah or through political or military strength; and because the means of salvation has changed, the make-up of the community has changed—a people called to the same faithfulness in the power of the Spirit. But the physical arena of the church’s existence in relation to the nations remains the same.

Moreover, the political narrative does not stop there. This renewed and transformed people finds itself profoundly at odds with the pagan world, which it challenges with its message of a coming “judgment”. I think that the New Testament—Paul in particular—continues to draw on Old Testament language and conceptuality in order to construct a hopeful eschatological narrative for the suffering churches scattered across the Greek-Roman oikoumenē or “empire”. The martyrs of the early church died as a result of political disobedience.

It seems to me that this is all a very natural and coherent outworking of the Old Testament narrative, which, historically speaking, aims at the eventual victory of Israel’s God over the gods of the surrounding empires (Is. 45; Phil. 2:6-11; Rev. 19). God judges Jerusalem through the agency of a pagan oppressor; he restores and renews his people through Jesus; and he “judges” the pagan world against the benchmark of a righteous alternative humanity in Christ.

But that is a particular and limited narrative trajectory. It does not mean that all catastrophic events, man-made or otherwise, count as particular judgments of God, beyond the very general notion that destruction, decay and disintegration are consequences of human rebellion.

I rather think that the church should learn how to warn contemporary society about the consequences of its idolatries, of its obsessions. The emphasis there has to be on learning—I think we still fall some way short of the imagination and integrity required to bear credible corporate witness to a socio-political alternative to Western consumerist secularism.

But the biblical pattern of judgment on the people of God followed by judgment on the enemies of the people of God (wrath against the Jew, then wrath against the Greek), has been broken by the fact that the church is no longer under the condemnation of the Law. God’s people will not again be “destroyed” in the way that first century Jerusalem was “destroyed”, because we are subject to grace and not to Law.

The Biblical Doctrine of Hell 1

Perriman argues for the understanding of hell in terms of "immediate and final destruction" of body, soul, spirit from its life-giving Creator God and thus, as final and complete destruction. However, I also sense that he may be willing to forego its "immediacy" in place of a "holding state of action" up until the final judgement by the divine in the Lake of Fire event which then interjects this very same idea of complete and immediate destruction (annihilation) of body, soul and spirit, if I understand him aright. 

I like his argument for corporate (vs. individual) societal judgement - and for locating this societal judgement firstly within history (the OT era under the prophets, and the later-NT era under Jesus as a NT prophet re Jerusalem's later destruction). And then by apocalyptic analogy to a later, larger, entire-world judgment in the parasouia (second coming) and rule of Jesus up to and through the Lake of Fire event, where he then posits a complete annihilation of all things not-God.

So firstly, he understands hell as a historical corporate/societal judgment; and then secondly, as an immediate destruction, or as a incomplete destruction made complete in the Lake of Fire event. It is a different understanding than the traditional or evangelic understandings and I thought to include it thusly.

skinhead

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http://www.postost.net/lexicon/hell-unbiblical-doctrine#comment-1139

Andrew Perriman
Sunday 17 April 2011

I set out a while back to write a general piece on the unbiblical doctrine of “hell” as part of a glossary or lexicon of key concepts but got side-tracked. Since then the brouhaha over Rob Bell’s book has prompted extensive reflection on the matter, and it now seems worth providing a rough summary of the position that I have argued for in a number of recent posts. Unfortunately, it has turned out rather longer than intended, but hopefully it will be the last word on the subject of “hell” for a while.

The approach I will take is to differentiate between a baseline position and the three eschatological horizons which, to my mind, provide the forward-looking frame of reference for New Testament thought. This approach reflects an important hermeneutical assumption. The New Testament primarily addresses the condition of peoples and cultures within history rather than the destiny of individuals beyond history. If we approach the New Testament with concerns about the moral or theological rightness of a doctrine of “hell” as “eternal conscious torment” at the forefront of our minds, we are likely to misunderstand what is said about judgment, wrath, punishment, and affliction. Ask the wrong questions and you will get the wrong answers.

The baseline

The starting point is to affirm that there is a baseline of divine—or even existential—judgment on unrighteous and rebellious humanity. It takes the simple but decisive form of destruction, which is a serious enough business. For individuals this is the destruction of death—as Paul puts it, the “wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). For the first generations of humanity, which had “corrupted their way on earth” by violence, it was the destruction of the flood: ‘And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth”’ (Gen. 6:13). The regeneration of humanity that followed the flood could only be described in terms of a new creation: ‘And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”’ (Gen. 9:1).

For societies that defied the creator—at least as far as the Biblical narrative extends—judgment was likely to come, sooner or later, in the form of corporate destruction: famine, disease, war, slaughter, and the devastation of land and cities. The climactic moment in the Old Testament narrative is the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Babylonians and the subsequent exile, from which the nation never really recovered. This event is understood not as an accident of history but as an expression of God’s anger against his people because of their incorrigible idolatry and unrighteousness. But it is only a matter of time before the godless and ferocious empire of the Babylonians will be brought to nothing in its turn (cf. Hab. 2:6-20).

The vivid prophetic language in which these events are described already foreshadows the visions of impending judgment that we find in the New Testament. But in Daniel’s symbolic account of the judgment of the fourth beast that makes war against the saints of the Most High and of the transfer of kingdom and authority to “one like a son of man” (Dan. 7), we have an anticipation of the heightened apocalypticism that will give New Testament eschatology its distinctive contours. The point to stress is that in the Old Testament this language always has reference to historical events, seen from the perspective of Israel’s unique existence. It has to be unequivocally demonstrated, therefore, and not merely assumed, that the authors of the New Testament used this language in a fundamentally different sense to speak of post-historical or metaphysical realities. In my view this cannot be demonstrated. The New Testament is as much focused on the historical existence of the people of God as the Old Testament.

The first horizon of the Jewish War

The language and imagery used to describe the intense suffering that will attend divine judgment in the synoptic Gospels has reference to the foreseen disaster of the Jewish War. Jesus’ essential warning to the Jews is that unless they repent they will perish, either struck down by Roman soldiers or crushed under the ruins of Jerusalem (cf. Lk. 13:1-5). But the theological significance of this impending catastrophe is brought out largely through the reworking of Old Testament motifs.

The judgment of gehenna is meant to evoke Jeremiah’s horrifying vision of the dead thrown from the walls of the city into the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem (Jer. 7:30-33; 19:6-8). Other images have the same frame of reference: the burning of the weeds by fire at the close of the age (Matt. 13:24-30, 36-43); the discarding of the bad fish (Matt. 13:47-50). The bodies of the unrighteous that are perpetually consumed by worms and fire (Mk. 9:48) are not the dead being consciously tormented in “hell”. They are the unconscious corpses of those who rebelled against YHWH, which remain unburied outside the city as a sign to all of the stark reality of God’s judgment against his people (cf. Is. 66:24).

The “outer darkness”, where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”, is an image of the exclusion of rebellious Israel from the kingdom of God, from the celebration of the restoration of Israel, from the life of the age to come (cf. Matt. 8:11-12; Matt. 13:47). “Wailing” typically connotes the pained response to judgment (cf. Mic. 7:4 LXX; Is. 30:19; 65:19; Bar. 4:11); the “gnashing of teeth” suggests anger and resentment directed towards the righteous Jew (Ps. 36:12; 34:15-16; 111:9-10 LXX; Sir. 51:3; Acts 7:54).

The story of the rich man who is tormented in Hades while the beggar Lazarus is carried to the bosom of Abraham (Lk. 16:19-31) is best understood as a parable of the reversal of fortune that would accompany the coming crisis of judgment and restoration, when “the hungry will be filled with good things and the rich sent empty away” (Lk. 1:53). Other than in this passage, hadēs is simply the grave or the place of the dead; in effect, it is a figure for death. When Jesus says that “the gates of Hades” will not prevail against his church, he means that it will not be overcome by death—there is no reference to a “hell” teeming with demons, as in the mythology of much spiritual warfare teaching (Matt. 16:18). The judgment on Capernaum, that it will be brought down to Hades, is simply that it’s population will be destroyed—as, for example, at the time of the Roman invasion (Matt. 11:23).

The second horizon of judgment on the hostile pagan world

While the first horizon of the Jewish War is rather sharply imagined (cf. “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near”: Lk. 21:20), the more distant second horizon is less well defined. Nevertheless, judgment on the “Greek” is not less concretely and historically conceived than judgment on the “Jew”.

In general terms, the Greek-Roman world will be judged—and will experience “tribulation and distress”—on account of its idolatry, immorality, and unjust behaviour (cf. Rom. 2:6-10). This takes an especially intense form in Revelation 14:9-11, where an angel announces that those who worship the beast of an aggressive pagan imperialism will be “tormented with fire and sulphur”. The symbolic language brings to mind Old Testament accounts of the destruction of corrupt cities and nations. Whatever personal torment is experienced must be understood in the context of a decisive judgment on pagan Rome.

The more specific argument in relation to this second horizon is that those who persecuted the churches, prior to the victory of Christ over the pagan gods, will be punished. When God brings the afflictions of these “saints” to an end, he will “repay with affliction those who afflict you”; they will suffer the “punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9). This is not envisaged as a final judgment but as a day within history when Jesus will be revealed as the one who judges the pagan world and his followers vindicated and rewarded for having patiently endured suffering.

When Jesus as Son of Man—as representative of suffering Israel—is publicly vindicated, the nations which failed to attend to the needs of his persecuted disciples will be judged and consigned to the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41, 46). Like the “stream of fire” that issued from the throne of the ancient of days (Dan. 7:10-11), this is a fire that destroys empires and cultures which defy the creator God. Individuals will, of course, suffer the consequences of what happens to their society, but this is not the level at which the apocalyptic story is told.

The third horizon and a final destruction

It is simply a recognition of the force of historical perspective to say that the authors of the New Testament were far more preoccupied with the first two horizons than with the third. Nevertheless, the storyline of the creator who persistently re-creates, which begins with the blessing of Noah, culminates in John’s exceptional vision of a new heaven and new earth. At this moment we also come across a final iteration of the baseline argument—that the inescapable consequence of sin is death. Death and Hades are thrown into the “lake of fire”, which is the “second death”; those whose names are not written in the book of life are thrown into the lake of fire; and “as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death” (Rev. 20:14-15; 21:8). This is not a place of torment, merely of incineration. It is a final destruction of everything that is contrary to the goodness of creation.

Whatever happened to the People of God?

http://www.postost.net/2011/05/whatever-happened-people-god

Andrew Perriman
Sunday 29 May 2011

One of the ways in which emerging theologies have attempted to correct the individualistic bias of much modern Reformed and evangelical theology has been to stress the cosmic dimension to salvation. So, for example, J.R. Woodward, whom I greatly regret having missed when he passed through Dubai last year, started off a recent post on the “key elements of personal salvation” with the words: “While the Good News of Jesus Christ is both personal and cosmic in nature….”

This emphasis on the cosmic dimension, which relies principally on a few New Testament texts that speak of the final transformation of all creation (cf. Rom. 8:20-22; Rev. 21:1-4), is a substantial improvement on soteriologies that are narrowly focused on the journey that a person makes from conversion to his or her eventual arrival in heaven. There is much social and ethical good that can be drawn from the vision of a world made new. In Love Wins Rob Bell speaks of the essentially earthy and humane vision of the life of the age to come that is found in the Old Testament prophets:

…Jesus and the prophets lived with an awareness that God has been looking for partners since the beginning, people who will take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways. They centered their hopes in the God who simply does not give up on creation and the people who inhabit it. The God who is the source of all life, who works from within creation to make something new.

But in both J.R. Woodward’s opening clause and in Rob Bell’s rich account of the life of the age to come a crucial biblical component has gone missing. The biblical story does not say that “God has been looking for partners since the beginning”. It says that God chose a people in Abraham to be a “new creation”. Bell’s characterization of this people as partners who would “take seriously their divine responsibility to care for the earth and each other in loving, sustainable ways” is conceptually anachronistic in the first place, but we may let that pass. The more significant problem is that it gives the impression that God was looking for well-disposed, eco-sensitive volunteers. That seems to me rather badly to misrepresent the place of a people bound by covenant to the creator in the biblical story.

This has a bearing, moreover, on how we understand the “good news” of Jesus Christ and the locus of salvation in the biblical story—and I think it helps us to see how emerging theologies and New Perspective approaches to the New Testament still fail to connect. You would think that the personal-cosmic spectrum would encompass pretty much everything that needs to be said about salvation. In fact, it collapses—perhaps unintentionally—the structure of a biblical theology by circumventing the role of a chosen people.

So we have Rob Bell’s God looking for individuals to participate in the work of creational renewal, and we have a “good news” of salvation that has no reference to the community to which it was originally proclaimed, namely first-century Israel. There was a similar oversight in Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change.

Jesus did not come to save people from their sins. He came to save his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). The gospel was a public and political announcement to a nation. That is a very different type of story with a very different type of outcome. The story of salvation in the New Testament is, at its heart, the story of the salvation of a people from the “final” destruction of the impending Jewish War—a salvation which, through the over-abounding grace of God, led to the inclusion of Gentiles in the community and the eventual victory of the church over its pagan enemies.

This national-level narrative provides the basis for—and certainly the starting-point for—whatever we want to say about both personal salvation and cosmic salvation. On the one hand, individuals, in different ways, participate in the story of the people of God. On the other, the story of the people of God generates the hope that in the end all creation will be renewed.

The problem here is not merely exegetical. By disregarding the corporate dimension, the emerging model excludes, or at least greatly reduces, the difficult sphere of practised justice. A significant layer of cosmic and humanitarian concern is added to the outlook of the individual, legitimizing the engagement of Christians in social action. But this does not fundamentally change the structure of things: we still have a very “modern” theology organized around the needs and potentials of individual participants in secular society.

We can understand the emerging church’s reluctance, on the one hand, to perpetuate the failings of the old institutional church, and the desire, on the other, to recover some degree public credibility, some ethical integrity. But this cannot be achieved at the expense of diminishing the concrete life and witness of the church as community—indeed, as a place where “new creation” is practised and not merely talked about.

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Addendum: Knowing Rob Bell and being acquainted with both his ministry and teaching I wish to add that Bell does teach the concepts of "community" or rather, "participatory communities" in the message and ministry of God in the reformation of the world and mankind. And, as a new investigator/acquirer of the message of emergent Christianity (or as someone who would like to make its updated message mine own in some way), it is my understanding that though we live in an age of individualism, the bible is first and foremost a community message that must be participated in as a community (unlike our current age's focus). However, I imagine a good sociologist will tell you that it takes both/and - that is, its takes an individual to lead a community, but it takes a community to enrich an individual.  Thus, kudos to Andrew Perriman is his similar assessments based upon his world travels and the worldly communities that he has participated in.

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