Beginning at the Beginning 2

One of my blogs earlier this month was about the importance of beginning at the beginning when it comes to trying to understand God's story with us. It wasn’t a very good blog I don’t think- not very clear. This, however, is a good example of the danger I was trying to point out when we begin the Bible in Genesis 3, and forget about the first two chapter:


‘Mention salvation, and almost all Western Christians assume that you mean going to heaven when you die. But a moment’s thought, in the light of all we have said so far, reveals that this simply cannot be right. Salvation means, of course, rescue. But what are we ultimately rescued from? The obvious answer is death. But if, when we die, all that happens is that our bodies decompose while our souls (or whatever word we want to use for our continuous existence) go elsewhere, this doesn’t mean we’ve been rescued from death.


It simply means that we’ve died.’


'And if God’s good creation- of the world, of life as we know it, of our glorious and remarkable bodies, brains, and bloodstreams- really is good, and if God wants to reaffirm that goodness in a wonderful act of new creation at the last, then to see death of the body and the escape of the soul as salvation is not simply slightly off course, in need of a few subtle alterations and modifications. It is totally and utterly wrong. It is colluding with death. It is conniving at death’s destruction of God’s good, image-bearing human creatures while consoling ourselves with the thought that the really important bit of ourselves is saved from this wicked, nasty body and this sad, dark world of space, time, and matter!


As we have seen, the whole of the bible, from Genesis to Revelation, speaks out against such nonsense. It is however, what most Western Christians, including most Bible Christians of whatever sort, actually believe. This is a serious state of affairs reinforced not only in popular teaching but also in liturgies, public prayers hymns and homilies of every kind.


Another difficulty I have with so many theologies and lifestyles that begin their world in Genesis 3, is that it teaches us (at least subconsciously) that God’s original plan failed, that we are a Plan B of sorts:


‘To snatch souls away to a disembodied heaven would destroy the whole point. God is to become king of the whole world at last. And he will do this not by declaring that the inner dynamic of creation (that is to be ruled by humans) was a mistake, nor by declaring that the inner dynamic of his covenant (that Israel would be the means of saving the nations) was a failure, but rather by fulfilling them both. That is more or less what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about’


‘The point is this. When God saves people in this life, by working through his Spirit to bring them to faith and by leading them to follow Jesus in discipleship, prayer, holiness, hope, and love, such people are designed- it isn’t too strong a word- to be a sign and foretaste of what God wants to do for the entire cosmos. What’s more, such people are not just to be a sign and foretaste of that ultimate salvation, they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.’