Hell

Over at Logan Atone, there is a recent post on passages from the Bible dealing with the reality of hell and its nature. I am posting this here and as a comment over there because hell is a topic that I have planned on addressing for a while.

When we look at passages in the Bible dealing with hell, we need to be careful because so much of our mental imagery of hell owes more to popular culture and Dante than to anything found in the Bible. We need to be careful not to take these passages out of context and meaning (something that Christians have probably been more guilty of than any other).

The Old Testament word that sometimes get rendered "hell" is "Sheol" which is sometimes rendered "Hades" which is simply the place of the dead. The Old Testament is largely silent on what this is like and often implies that is the destination of everyone, good or wicked.

The New Testament word rendered hell is "gehenna" and this refers to an actual physical location: the valley of Hinnom. To take the entry from Funk and Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia:

"GEHENNA (Gr. Geenna; Heb. Ge Hinnom), Valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where Solomon, king of Israel, built “an high place,” or place of worship, for the gods Chemosh and Moloch, according to 1 Kings 11:7. Because some of the Israelites are supposed to have sacrificed their children to Moloch there (see 2 Kings 23:10), the valley came to be regarded as a place of abomination. In a later period it was made a refuse dump, and perpetual fires were maintained there to prevent pestilence. Thus, in the New Testament, Gehenna became synonymous with hell."

Also, a similar summary can be found in the Wikipedia entry on Gehenna which also contains a helpful list of the occurrences of this word in the New Testament (12 times total, and only once outside of the Synoptic Gospels).

N.T. Wright has some interesting thoughts in his recent book Surprised by Hope on Gehenna/hell that bear quoting at length:

The point is that when Jesus was warning his hearers about Gehenna, he was not as a general rule, telling that them unless they repented in this life they would burn in the next one. As with God's kingdom, so with its opposite: it is on earth that things matter, not somewhere else. His message to his contemporaries was stark and (as we would say today) political. Unless they turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God's kingdom in their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy, and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries . . . It is there only by extension, and with difficulty that we can extrapolate from the many gospel sayings that articulate this urgent, immediate warning to a deeper question of a warning about what may happen after death. The two parables that appear to address this question directly are, we should remember, parables, not actual descriptions of the afterlife. They use stock imagery from ancient Judaism, such as "Abraham's bosom," not to teach about what happens after death but to insist on justice and mercy within the present life. This is not to say that Jesus would have dissented from their implied picture of postmortem realities. It is, rather, to point out that to take the scene of Abraham, the Rich Man, and Lazarus literally is about as sensible as trying to find out the name of the Prodigal Son. (176-177).

As Wright alludes to, it is interesting to note that most of Jesus' sayings involving Gehenna are when he is talking with his disciples. If hell was such a pressing matter, then one would think Jesus might have included it more often in his more public teachings. The centrality of the kingdom of God to Jesus' mission and message should never be forgotten when we consider the words of Jesus.

This does not mean that there is no judgment or consequences for those who choose to live in wickedness through their dehumanizing behavior. I think there is much to C.S. Lewis' famous observation that if the doors of hell are locked, it is from the inside. However, we need to realize how little focus on hell (or heaven for that matter) Jesus provides in his teachings, and the danger of trying to read too much of anything into the passages. The word "hell" is full of all sorts of connotations and implications, and it takes some work to try to peel these accretions away and go back once more to the world of Sheol and Gehenna.

The Lost History of Christianity

I finished reading Philip Jenkins' excellent recent book The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Gold Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died last week, and was very favorably impressed by it. Jenkins, who teaches at Penn State and has written other works on the subject on religious history and global Christianity, presents a facet of Christian history that too often gets overlooked by a view of Christianity that sees it primarily as an European/North American/Western religion long since divorced from its Semitic roots.

These roots remained strong for far longer than the story of the Western Church would lead one to believe, and Jenkins shows how the history of Eastern Christianity (such as the Coptic Church, Nestorians, or Jacobites) provides a balance to many assumptions about the nature of Christian history. The growth of the Church to the East, its flourishing, its existence well past the emergence of Islam all paint a different view of Christianity, which is often assumed to be a majority faith closely allied with governments based on the course it took in the West. Jenkins' work shows that the course of Western Christianity is only one possible route, and indeed, is only one way in which it developed historically. He provides a balanced analysis of religious persecution, noting the extensive periods of peaceful toleration and coexistence under Islamic rule while also noting that periods of intense persecution and violence that did take place as well.

Jenkins' also discusses why faiths die in various regions, and what lessons this reality might hold for the faithful in those regions and followers of the faith observing it from afar. The idea that Christianity could be driven out of areas of the world that it had inhabited and flourished in for centuries is something that is deeply unsettling for believers, and The Lost History of Christianity forced me to grapple with this uncomfortable truth. However, this book also has much that is hopeful for a Christian, showing that Christianity can be practiced anywhere in the world without forcing Western culture as a part of it. Indeed, the ways in which the Eastern churches presented Christianity in ways that connected and fit with the cultures it encountered is an important lesson for 21st century Christianity, which once again is making major inroads in places like China and is growing at a torrid place in many parts of Africa. The re-Christianization of these lands that once before had important Christian centers is a reminder that the end of Christianity in a place is not the final word on the matter, as history has shown time and again.

Indeed, an understanding of this is key to beginning to grapple with the fact that Christianity died out (actually was killed, as Jenkins' shows. It was violence and persecution that brought an end to these churches). If we as Christians seriously believe that God's sense of time is different than hours and that there is any truth to be found in the simile "with the Lord a thousand years is as a day" then we must recognize that in view of God's time what we may see as a irreversible setback may be nothing more than a small shift. This doesn't mean that this is the end of all grappling with why Christianity may die or be killed in certain areas, and I think we should take seriously the need to develop what Jenkins' calls a "theology of extinction."

The history of Christianity in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia is a huge part of Christian history that gets overlooked and is a powerful antidote to a Eurocentric view of Christianity that leads to all sort of assumptions about Christianity that are often more to do with Western culture than anything inherent to Christianity. To give just one example, Jenkins' points out how knowledge of the history of the Church in the East can offer a valuable contribution to debates in Biblical studies:

The Syriac Bible was a conservative text, to a degree that demands our attention. In recent years, accounts of the early church claim that scriptures and gospels were very numerous, until the mainstream Christian church suppressed most of them in the fourth century. This alleged purge followed the Christian conversion of the Emperor Constantine, at a time when the church supposedly wanted to ally with the empire in the interests of promoting order, orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authority. According to modern legend, the suppressed works included many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminist leanings.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity iwth the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians or Jacobites were under an coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho'dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins (87-88).

This is just one way in which knowledge of the broader history of Christianity has important ramifications for how we understand the faith today, and I appreciative of people like Jenkins' interested in telling this story in a way that is both academically rigorous and popularly accessible, sharing with a wider readership what has been circulating in scholarly circles for a long time. I am grateful for the way this book has helped me to appreciate the fuller history of the church and is continuing to make me grapple with why the faith has spread and contracted in different ways and different places throughout history.

A New Project for Me

My dialog with Harlan Quinn through QuIRP and the Logan Cres blog has turned into a new blog. It is a collaboration between us on the logical structure of the atonement. This will serve as an educational resource for things related to the atonement. It is not intended to be a debate blog, but comments and thoughts are strongly encouraged. We are interested in seeing some stimulating dialogue on the atonement! I am happy to be able to participate in this kind of dialog between a Christian and an atheist.

I have already posted two fairly substantial posts related to the issues of sin and law. You can view them here:

Sin and Community

Jesus and the Law

I don't want to post redundant content here and there, but these posts contain some thoughts that I think are important to the atonement and to gaining a better understanding of the Bible and Christianity in general, so I wanted to make links to them available here. A permanent link to Logan Atone is now available on the side, so feel free to check it out and see what is going on over there.

Isaiah 45:7

In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, I have seen references to Isaiah 45:7 popping up frequently. The passage reads (in the NIV):

I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the LORD, do all these things. link

The reason this passage has garnered recent attention, obviously is the fact that it seems to claim that God creates disasters (the NASB translates it as "calamity.") This has only fueled debate over things like Pat Robertson's comments on the cause of the earthquake. While there are plenty of Christian apologetic sites that will point out that the Hebrew word translated disaster here refers to natural disasters and not moral evil, this does not make the passage any less troubling.

I don't think that every difficult passage in the Bible can be harmonized or given an explanation that is satisfying to 21st century ethics, however I don't think it is never legitimate to try to explain a passage that may seem to be troubling. In the case of this passage, however, there is perhaps a greater need to offer comment on it because it seems to refer to more than God simply punishing people for evil (which would just lead to debates over whether or not God's punishments are just or not), but for God being the source of all natural disasters.

In doing some reflecting and research on the passage, I came across an interesting article by Michael Deroche from a 1992 issue of Vetus Testamentum entitled "Isaiah XLV 7 and the Creation of Chaos?" In the article, Deroche in passing makes an interesting analysis that provides a compelling way of understanding this passage. This is all the more interesting because Deroche is not seeking to grapple with the ethical implications of the passage or seeking to explain it away, but is instead weighing in on a debate about the doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the Hebrew creation account.

In looking at the verse, Deroche comments:

The four elements that Yahweh claims to create are not listed in a random fashion. They appear in two groups of two, each group containing a pair of terms normally thought of as opposites. This form of expression is called a merism, a figure in which two opposite terms are used together to refer to a totality

This idea of opposites used to express a totality is elaborated upon later in the article:

I would argue that Isa. xlv 7 reflects the same notion that the created world is comprised of sets of binary opposites. In this case, the two pairs reflect the two dimensions of human existence: light and darkness reflect the physical world, while well-being and evil stand for the ethical world. Of course, since light and darkness can be metaphors for good and evil, the distinction is by no means absolute, and reflects the Hebrew notion that the physical and ethical realms are intertwined. The last stich of the verse summarizes in a more succinct manner the point of the first two: Yahweh is the creator of everything!

What this merism expresses is God's supremacy over the physical and ethical realms of the universe, which is a pretty uncontroversial claim for a Christian. If we view this as a literary technique that uses binary opposites to express a totality, what we have isn't an affirmation of God's role in sending disasters upon people, but in affirming God's role as Lord of all of creation.

This sort of affirmation would stop short of attributing divine agency to everything that takes place in the universe, but instead only asserts that God is the creator of a universe in which such things take place. This obviously can raise the question of why God would create a universe in such disasters are able to take place at all, which is a legitimate question. But this is not the same thing as ascribing responsibility to God for disasters (anyone with children will recognize that you can create something that can do things that you are not morally responsible for). This little bit of exegesis doesn't provide an answer to the problem of evil, but it does provide a plausible interpretation of the verse that avoids the conclusion that God is the author of all natural disasters. Whether such a claim can be made from the Bible is up for debate, but I don't think Isaiah 45:7 will be able to establish this on its own.

Whose Interpretation?

I may be a little late to weigh in on the recent controversy surrounding Richard Dawkin's recent article on Pat Robertson's controversial remarks about the earthquake in Haiti, but I felt I needed to say something about an issue that is deeply connected with it. Many Christians were quick to criticize Robertson for implying that the earthquake was a sort of divine punishment, but Dawkins insists that Robertson is the real Christian here for affirming a belief in a God who seeks to send disaster and punishment on those who disobey Him, which is the God that the Bible reveals. Dawkins' view has been affirmed by other atheists (over at Debunking Christianity there has been some recent bickering about it), who argue that Christians may very well want to disagree with Robertson, but in doing so they are being unfaithful to the tradition that they claim to represent.

The issue that I find troubling here is the presumption of people like Dawkins to tell Christians how they should interpret the Bible and Christian tradition. This is by no means the first time that people have argued that the Christian Church has misunderstood the Bible, going back to the earliest decades and centuries after the death and resurrection of Christ. As Craig Allert notes in A High View of Scripture? the early Church fathers argued against heresies that sought to appropriate scripture, by claiming that the Bible is the Church's book and it is the Church's privilege and responsibility to interpret it. While I don't think this means that only Christians are allowed to weigh in on issues of Biblical interpretation, I think that this is a very important point. Those outside the Church may have their opinions about the Bible ought to be interpreted, but they should not presume to claim the authority to tell the faith community who possesses these scriptures that they have the proper interpretation and that other Christians have it all wrong.

I realize this raises the issue of the fact that many different Christians have varying views of how to read the Bible and often take issue with the way that other Christians read it. This is true and important, but I do not think decisive over the issue of who can presume to tell another how to interpret a sacred text. I believe there is an important distinction that needs to be made between in-house debates and those with "outsiders." Debates within Christianity are carried out within a larger shared context of faith and belief that makes it distinct from other debates. In the same way, it would be inappropriate for a young earth creationist to tell evolutionary biologists which view of evolution is the proper understanding of it (no doubt with the aim of showing that this view is untenable or unethical). If someone rejects evolution then they probably should not presume to tell those who accept it how best to interpret it. That matter of interpretation is best left in the hands of those in the community that affirm it, which in this example is obviously the community of other evolutionary biologists. They may disagree with one another over how evolution ought to be interpreted, but surely someone who rejects evolution altogether has little standing in such a debate.

This is not a problem unique to only Christian-atheist debates. I have read Christian apologists seeking to convert Muslims who argue that if Muslims take the Koran seriously they must believe such and such (inevitably unsavory) belief. The problem I have with this is that we as Christians have no right to tell Muslims how they must or should interpret their own holy writings. We may disagree with these writings and may not accept them as authentic or complete revelation, but that does not mean that we get to tell them how to interpret them. That privilege lies with the community that affirms it. Obviously a Christian who becomes a scholar of Middle Eastern religion would have a bit more authority to speak to such matters, but she still has no right to tell that faith community that they are wrong in their interpretation of their own work.

I am not trying to say that only Christians can weigh in on Biblical debates and interpretation. There are many competent and excellent scholars in the field who are not Christians who have important perspectives to offer on the Bible, but even they do not really have any say in telling Christians now that they are "wrong" in how they read the Bible now. Clearly many Christians reject Robertson's (and Dawkins') interpretation of parts of the Bible, and do so for reasons that are just as much rooted in the history and tradition of Christianity and the words of the Bible, and it is wrong to say that we are misunderstanding our own tradition when we do so.

More Thoughts on Morality

Awhile ago, I wrote something on how an argument from morality doesn't give a Christian, or anyone else, a free pass to say that moral principles are ontologically grounded. I want to expand on some of the thoughts I have on the issue of morality, because I think Christianity has an important role to play in it, even if it is a little bit different than what is often put forth by other Christians.

In reflecting on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, I began to think about the moral impact that Christianity has left in its wake. In this work, Nietzshe provides a searing indictment of Christian morality as "slave morality" that sought to enshrine its own powerlessness and impotence through a redefinition of "good" and "bad" to make signs of powerlessness moral goods (like "humility," "forgiveness," "submission,", turning the other cheek, etc.). He criticizes those who seek to locate the source of these values as being simply evolutionarily advantageous, arguing that this view is merely seeking a justification for holding to principles of Christian morality that are now untenable in the wake of the death of God. What struck me during this particular reflection on the Genealogy was the way that Nietzsche asserts that Christianity has pulled off a moral coup, redefining moral concepts along new lines and replacing an older model.

The reason I find this to be so interesting is that so often it is assumed that moral principles that have been enshrined in Western Europe/Anglophone world are somehow moral universals for all humans, when in fact they reflect a particular cultural moral legacy, a cultural moral legacy that has been profoundly influenced by Christianity. Even if these values are no longer necessarily seen as originating in Christianity, it does not change the way in which the Christian Church has dramatically shaped the moral world of the West. To paraphrase Lesslie Newbigin, you cannot live with the Christian God for a thousand years and then simply cut ties. The influence still remains.

This is not to say that terrible things have never been done under the banner of Christianity, or that no other religion has expounded powerful moral principles. This does not "prove" that Christian moral principles are derived from divine authority or that no one other than Christians has any access to these kind of moral thoughts. I'm not making any such claim. What I am saying is that it is interesting how many moral principles that we treat as "obvious" are not at all obvious in the light of history or in the light of the experiences of the vast majority of people throughout the world. To say that moral principles are good because they reflect a basically human feature that makes us beings who want to show compassion and who empathize with the sufferings of others is a nice sentiment (and one that I encountered in one particular book on atheism) , but it does not sit well at all with most of human experience.

While the moral teachings of Christianity have not been employed perfectly and many who claim the name of Jesus still do terrible things in his name (something that I attribute to what Paul Hiebert calls "Christo-paganism"), it is interesting to see how moral principles that are derived in many ways from the Western worlds encounter with the God of Christianity are assumed to be universal and derivable from nature or sociology or history, when it is not at all clear and it appears that very different views of morality are possible and still exist. We're still living in the wake of the moral redefinition that Nietzsche saw, and it raises many interesting things to reflect upon about the nature of morality if we reject the source, not in the sense of not being able to have moral principles at all, but in the intellectual consistency of holding on to moral principles based on a belief that is rejected. Just a little food for thought. We'll see what I think in another couple of months:-)

Suffering

In the wake of the terrible devastation that hit Haiti last week, my thoughts have been drawn increasingly to thinking about suffering. It is difficult to comprehend that while I live in such relative wealth and luxury, hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in the world (and certainly the poorest period in the Americas) suffer a terrible blow when their lives are already extremely difficult. I wrestled with these thoughts even more since in the past week I have received several unanticipated and extremely generous gifts. Here I am, already with so many things and blessings receiving even more when people who have nothing to begin with experience utter devastation. It tears my heart in two. On the one hand, I want to praise God for the things that have taken place in my life, while on the other hand I question God and ask why such a thing would happen.

This is a difficult question and one that makes me deeply uncomfortable. While I don’t think the logical problem of evil is a problem for God, the emotional and intuitive problem is deeply troubling. It is obviously possible that God has a reason unknown to us for allowing such things to happen, but in the wake of the suffering that comes from evil such a thought seems hollow and mercilessly ad hoc. It is interesting to me that throughout the Bible, there never is an answer given as to the purpose or why of suffering.

Just looking at the life of Jesus is almost shocking in regard to suffering. We have a man who for probably 30 years lived an invisible life in Nazareth. For 30 years people died, endured sickness and oppression, experienced injustice, and the Son of God remained silent. This isn’t even God in heaven appearing silent, this is God incarnate dwelling as an unknown among us for three decades before beginning his ministry and began healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and raising the dead. If Jesus really can do such things, why didn’t he do them sooner? Even when he did perform these miracles, Jesus acknowledged that there were others who were sick and did not receive healing. This seems shocking and immoral. If this is the great physician and he is aware of the need, then why doesn’t he go and meet it?

Instead of bringing an end to suffering, Jesus’ response is much different. He enters into it. He suffers alongside. He experiences injustice, scorn, pain, abandonment, and ultimately an excruciating death. God’s response to suffering is not to end it but to humbly dwell in it along with us. The response is not to end pain, but to experience it. It is a response of empathy and humility and gives us a different picture of God than what we are used to. Instead, we are confronted with a God who suffers. As seems to be the case so often throughout scripture, our propositional and existential questioning is met only with the person of God. This is so strange and frankly often seems deeply unsatisfying. Still, I must admit I do find comfort in a God who suffers and understands suffering. Perhaps evil may be a metaphysically irreducible feature of existence; I don’t know, and God seems silent on this question. It’s something that I grapple with and find on the one hand incredibly frustrating and on the other incredibly beautiful.