“That is a great reason to believe in God, Clara,” a lady at church told me after my baptism. At 13 years of age, I had no other testimony than to say I was avoiding burning up in hell. Baptism was the next step to demonstrate this alleged “faith” in front of 100 people, as my parents gently instructed me. As a dutiful daughter, I thought I better come up with something to say quickly, knowing that nothing terrible or interesting had happened to me. I had not been a criminal, I had not been in a serious accident and I had not fallen prostrate to the ground because of the Holy Spirit smacking the infantile heresy out of me like Paul or my Pastor Brad.
All I knew was that my Baptist Awanas teacher said hell was a place where people who are unrepentant and only 99.9% sure of their faith go. I honestly did not know what else to say, and I was too shy to say it too, so I tasked my dad with reading this testimony to the crowd before I was dunked. As I stood beside him in my knee-length polyester camouflage shorts and t-shirt, I remember feeling self-conscious and wondering if this was all there was to it— proving that you are worthy of heaven out of fear of eternal damnation. Did baptism really need to happen as soon as possible in case I accidentally died as slighly-less-than-committed-to-Jesus? What was all the rush for?
Controversies about baptismal doctrine aside, my story is an example of the inaccurate language used to describe what heaven and hell are and what they mean for our earthly lives. For example, the song “One Day” by Matt Redman misinterprets our primary Christian purpose as reaching a golden place to inhabit and break free from earthly responsibility. Heaven is not a place. Heaven is the God-dimension which has different space-time constructs where Jesus reigns as Lord until the new creation. Hell is another kettle of Pandora’s Boxes that can wait to be fleshed out in a different article, along with questions surrounding universalism and judgement.
The four different ways of understanding the new creation are plotted on a spectrum. The first extreme posits that one day Christians will float up to heaven (as a place) with trumpet fanfare in the background to escape the intrinsically evil and dung-ridden world they claim we live in. The fourth is another extreme subsuming the Corinthians’ argument that claims heaven is partnering and merging with earth now; therefore, we can do whatever we want with our bodies. The second says heaven will dramatically break into earth in the final resurrection and borders on dualism (“we don’t have to prepare our bodies or take responsibility”). The third says the heavenly dimension will meet the earthly dimension and our time now should be used to build for the kingdom, while God builds the kingdom itself.
Prominent scholars N.T. Wright and J. Richard Middleton tend to lean towards the third biblical interpretation. Wright centers his book “Surprised by Hope” around Christ’s resurrection: “’God’s kingdom’ … refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’” Middleton takes a more complex approach by explaining the final resurrection with the relationship between God and his people that comes from the long-term grace of creation and the law that guides us towards that freedom.
Building for the kingdom means good, true and beautiful artistic and intellectual endeavors are worthwhile. The Christian life should not be motivated by fear and avoidance but by our earthly participation in life after life after death. Finally, hope is a slow, creational rebellion against earthly time in anticipation of heavenly time. It is a tiny, sown seed taking its time in the vast context of things.
