This is a blog about heaven and hell. That might sound a strange subject to blog about but I am fascinated both by the subject itself and by the way our ideas of heaven and hell have been shaped by history and culture (especially the medieval era). I believe that most of what most Christians believe about heaven and hell owes more to Dante, Milton, Giotto and Michelangelo than to the bible. I am fascinated by what the bible itself actually says about salvation and hope, and by the ways the church incorporated pagan ideas about the afterlife into its theology.
The main argument of this blog is that the biblical christian hope is that God is in the business of redeeming and renewing the whole of creation and that we (followers of Christ) are taught to look forward to bodily resurrection (like Christ's) and life in or on the new earth that God will bring into being. I believe that the now traditional christian hope of "going to heaven when you die" and the pervasive belief that the ungodly are punished after death in a fiery place of torment lorded over by Satan and his minions (demons) are not only unbiblical but anti-christian. They serve to diminish the power of the gospel and the life of the church.
In the Hebrew bible (the christian Old Testament) there is little or no suggestion of an active meaningful "afterlife". The emphasis of nearly all the Hebrew texts is on living a fulfilling and blessed life in the community, in obedience to God's Law and in fellowship with others. The human being is seen as a unity, not divided into body and soul which was a later, Greek idea. When someone died, their essential being stopped. This idea is usually captured in the Hebrew bible by the concept of Sheol, the realm of the dead. Everyone who died went "down" to Sheol which was thought to lie under the earth. Although writers differed in the extent to which they believed God was known or active in Sheol, they all agreed that it was a "lifeless", dark and gloomy place.
The main hope for the Hebrews was to live a long and full life and to go to their death in peace. In some places however there are references to a hope of resurrection from the dead. These are sometimes expressed in terms of national and communal resurrection (i.e Israel will be resurrected) and sometimes in personal terms (i.e. each individual can look forward to a personal resurrection). These texts, I believe, laid the groundwork for what became the central Christian hope - bodily resurrection following the pattern of Jesus Christ and participation in the new earth (to go with the new "heavens") which God will bring into being at the "end".
In light of this, I believe that the bible does not teach that heaven is the "final destination" of believers. Nowhere are Christian believers promised that their eternal home lies in heaven, but rather they are promised the earth as their inheritance. Despite the fact that by the time the New Testament was coming into being the Greek dualism of body and spirit (or soul) was prevalent in Jewish thought, there is very little (if any) emphasis on any kind of hope for a disembodied existence after death. Rather, believers are encouraged to look forward to the renewal of the entire cosmos and their own renewal (in body and soul) as part of that. The idea of "going to heaven when you die" is fundamentally foreign to the New Testament, as it is to the Hebrew bible.
In the same way there is nothing in either the Hebrew bible or the New Testament that corresponds to the popular conception of hell. I would go so far as to say that hell doesn't exist in the bible. Sheol in the Hebrew bible is simply the realm of the dead, and the New Testament gehenna, the fiery apocalyptic judgement of the unrighteous, is vastly different from the ideas of hell which most of us have inherited from medieval writing and painting. Gehenna is not something experienced at the end of life but at the end of history, nor is it not the domain of Satan or populated by tormenting demons. Gehenna is, I believe, picture language for the belief that everything opposed to God will ultimately be destroyed. It is God's great incinerator.
Of course things are more complicated than this brief summary would suggest. In the bible there are suggestions of disembodied existence, there are indications that the wicked are punished and the righteous rewarded after death, and there are hints that our "souls" rise to be with God somewhere "up there". But these are only suggestions, indications and hints. They reflect the complex background of ideas that fed the biblical writers. But the overwhelming weight of evidence points to the hope that this world, these bodies and this life form the basis, the raw material, for all the new things that God is doing.
I believe that only by getting rid of the traditional notions of heaven and hell can we begin to make sense of the biblical Christian hope. And only then I think will we be able to live our lives as God intended, wholly engaged with the reality of this world and these embodied lives, in the sure and certain expectation that God loves, cares for and will ultimately redeem them. I think that if we could live in this way, we would be a lot more relevant and a lot more redemptive. My hope is that this blog might help to move us in that direction.
You may wish to know that I am a man in my mid 50s. I grew up in London in the United Kingdom but I now live in Sweden where I work as a carer and spend my spare time looking after my son and trying to educate myself properly! I studied Pyschology at St Andrews University and then theology at Regents Park College, Oxford. Neither institution, nor the many fine teachers who taught me there, are responsible for the silly comments and mistakes you may find here. They did their best!
You may also wish to know that the picture which forms the header for each page is Paradise by Marc Chagall.