Hi Friend,

There’s a new book on the market.  There always is but this one is a reexamination of the traditional teaching of “going to heaven” when you die.  A former Anglican Bishop who now teaches at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews says, “The Bible doesn’t teach what churches say it does.”

“Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consistent with what we find in the New Testament,” says N.T. Wright in his book “How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels”.   He writes, “A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in.”

Many Christian scholars from a variety of backgrounds are questioning the accuracy of the traditional teachings of both heaven and hell.

In an article in the Washington Post, writer John Mulwalski says Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. “He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths. Wright takes his creeds very seriously and has even written an 800-plus-page megaton study setting out to prove the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.”

But Wright isn’t the only serious theologian to challenge what churches are teaching.  Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York says, “This is a very current issue—that what the church, or what the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies.”  Dr. Morse then makes this startling claim, “The end times are not the end of the world—they are the beginning of the real world—in biblical understanding.”

On top of this, a recent cover story in Time magazine suggests that putting the “heaven-myth-to-rest movement is gaining currency beyond the academy.” Wright and Morse say they have both made presentations on heaven research at local churches and have been surprised by the public interest and acceptance.

“An awful lot of ordinary church-going Christians are simply millions of miles away from understanding any of this,” Wright said.

Wright and Morse work independently of each other and in very different ideological settings, but their work shows a remarkable convergence on key points. In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God’s Kingdom—a restored Eden where redeemed human beings would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.

“This represents an instance of two top scholars who have apparently grown tired of talk of heaven on the part of Christians that is neither consistent with the New Testament nor theologically coherent,” said Trevor Eppehimer of Hood Theological Seminary in North Carolina. “The majority of Christian theologians today would recognize that Wright and Morse’s views on heaven represent, for the most part, the basic New Testament perspective on heaven.”

According to these scholars, what we have here is a failure to communicate—the truth contained in The Bible.  So, there’s a need to go back to the earliest teachings of the Church to straighten out misrepresentations that crept in over the years.

“It’s the recovery of the Jewish basis of the Gospels that enables us to say this,” Wright said. “We are so fortunate in this generation that we understand more about first-century Judaism than Christian scholarship has for a very long time. And when you do that, you realize just how much was forgotten quite soon in the early church, certainly in the first three or four centuries.”

There is hope for Christianity!  Some scholars are seeing through the fog of denominational bias and connecting to the Real Jesus who will return to establish the Kingdom of God on earth!

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien