We have noted in previous articles that in order to find a firm, biblical basis for church involvement in society we need to adopt a holistic gospel of the Kingdom of God, abandon the notion of a “great escape” from this world, and catch a vision of the cosmic redemption that permeates the teaching of the New Testament.
In other words, I am suggesting that it is time for the church to “reboot” the Good News, to use a computer analogy. We must erase non-biblical notions and re-discover how first-century Christians understood, proclaimed and lived out the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
For millions of believers the Christian message is basically a bad news – good news – bad news sequence. First they proclaim that every human being is bound for hell, there to be tortured for eternity for the evil they have done – bad news. However, if you pray the right prayer to accept Jesus into your heart, you can escape this wrath to come – good news. But most will not do so, either because they choose not to, or because they have never heard that they should – bad news.
I have always had difficulty accepting this three-part message. I remember a missionary reporting in our church, when I was a lad of about 12 years, that when he had brought the Good News to a distant village many had received it gladly. One of the new believers, he said, had asked him what would happen to his father who had died shortly before the missionary had arrived. He was certain that his father too would have accepted the Good News. But the missionary had told the anguished young man that his father would be suffering in hell for all eternity.
How could this be? I thought. Either someone had misunderstood God, the News of the Gospel, or both. Now, half century later, I think it was both.
How did we get to this place? Doesn’t it seem that we have mostly proclaimed bad news for many years, especially when you do the math? Is there not a more positive story line that emerges from the biblical text? Must we really believe that all the cosmic redemption passages will be incinerated along with the world that God once created and called good? That the best we can hope for in the end is a draw between God and Satan, with Satan getting most of the booty?
These questions have set me on a search for answers. And I am discovering that just underneath the surface of proper, pious decorum there are many others who are searching along with me. And I am increasingly confident that our common search will in fact produce a better version of the Good News that is both biblically accurate as well as consistent with the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ.
A question that haunts me is this: If the Good News is what I have described above, why is that message not found front and center in the biblical text? Let’s start with the Book of Acts, for example. One would think that the first preachers of the gospel could be trusted above all others to have caught the right focus of the gospel message, especially after having been endowed with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, wouldn’t you think?
But when we survey the messages of Peter, Stephen, Philip and Paul we just don’t find the popular version of the Good News. We find instead a consistently focused assertion: “The resurrected Jesus is both Lord and Christ and you should believe this and follow in his way.” With no reference to hell-fire and brimstone, they were, nevertheless, amazingly effective evangelists.
What if we go back to the Old Testament, the Scriptures of both Jesus and the early church? We do have reference to the place of the dead, known as either “Sheol” in Hebrew or “Hades” in Greek. But we search in vain for an Old Testament description of this place as an eternal torture chamber, similar to popular notions of hell today.
How then, if neither the Old Testament nor first-century apostolic preaching viewed hell as central to the biblical message, did such a view get into Christian thinking? It turns out that the notion of a literal hell actually appears first in pagan religions going back over 4000 years. Somehow it found its way into the Apocrypha and from there into the world-view of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.
Of course the big question was what Jesus would do with this teaching. Would he affirm the Pharisee’s idea of hell and adopt it as central to his message? A quick survey of the Gospels reveals that for Jesus the Good News was that the Kingdom of God had arrived. You can’t miss it! On a few occasions Jesus refers to the Old Testament notion of “Sheol” or alternately the word “Gehenna,” the name of the ever-burning garbage dump south of Jerusalem. The context is usually one in which he is emphasizing the seriousness of an offense, but are we to think that he envisioned persons literally being thrown on to this garbage dump?
It took till the fourth century until a famous theologian, Augustine, began to describe hell as an eternal torture chamber and make it a central tenet of the Christian faith. Augustine’s big project was to re-write Christian theology to fit the new church/state synthesis that was underway.
So the question is whether we are bound to keep Augustine’s vision of hell or are we free to explore how first-century Christians constructed the substance of the Good News? I think we should choose the latter, and I trust that as we continue to search the Scriptures we will open the door to a much more comprehensive and powerful motivator for being fully engaged in God’s world.
What has your search revealed to you?
