The last word...and the word after that

‘But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, 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 NT, true to its OT 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 with 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 part of being saved saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role within the larger picture and purpose.


And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alternatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question.

To insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question- to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world- maybe to make a mistake similar to the one made by the Jewish people in the 1st Century, the mistake that both Jesus and Paul addressed. Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescue Israel?


What the Gospel of Jesus revealed however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? ’