As mentioned in the previous post, at least one of the reviewers commented NT Wright's lack of mention on hell/sinning in his new book. I have a bit more on it today.
There's one chapter in Surprised by Hope on "Purgatory, Paradise, Hell". Sin was mentioned and NT Wright proposed a view on hell which is those who persist in sinning will end up in their dehumanization as they lost the image of God.
After he wrote about his proposed "hell", he did continue to say, "I am well aware that I have now wandered into territory that no one can claim to have mapped... The last I want is for anyone to supposed that I (or anyone else) know very much all about this. Nor do I want anyone to supposed I enjoy speculating in this manner... I should be glad to be proved wrong but not at the cost of the foundational claims that this world is the good creation of the one true God and that he will at the end bring about that judgment at which the whole creation will rejoice."
I think this is a reasonable proposal and he offered it in a humble way.
I do love the way he ended this chapter.
"But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion... is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major central framing question that centuries of theological tradition have supposed. The New testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major central framing question is that of God's purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context-- not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role within that larger picture and purpose. And that in turn makes us realise that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the altenatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question. The question ought to be, How will God's new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world?...
Maybe we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all."
I think this is a rather good answer to the question I asked.
No comments:
Post a Comment