Thanks to my colleague Rusty for the use of this photo. No pastors were raptured in the making of this macro.
A couple months ago, there was a big media stink about a small sect of Christians claiming that the end is near, and we would be raptured in the spring or summer of this year. When nobody was actually raptured, rapturologists reported that they had been misinformed and the rapture would actually take place a few months later. It may not terribly surprise you that nobody was raptured that day either. A quick search of the internet yields results claiming the rapture will occur anywhere from a few years from now to a few days from now, with each site claiming to have deciphered God's secret message for the end of the days.
It can be pretty hard to take these claims seriously, but at the same time, doesn't the Bible reference the end times? People of faith often have a hard time sifting out truth from theological fiction. People who don't share our beliefs just kind of shake their heads and laugh, if they're polite. But the fact is, these questions matter to us. The study of the end times is called eschatology, and I'll spare you my long-winded explanation and let Wikipedia fill you in on the basics. One way or another, a lot of Christian theology is geared toward sussing out what happens when we die, what happens during the "last days," and what happens when Jesus returns, because knowing where we're headed shapes how we get there.
I'm going to be honest here: I don't know what to think about heaven or hell. It's something that's of huge concern to most people, especially people who are dying or have lost a loved one. Maybe it's simply because of a lack of serious tragedy in my own life, but to me it's okay if there is no heaven or hell, or if there is. The Bible is actually pretty ambiguous on this matter. If you want some discussion of how vague this really is, check out Rob Bell's book on the topic. You might not agree with him, but he shows you how open a lot of this really is to interpretation. For example, the Greek is the word we translate as heaven is οὐρανός, which we take to mean a place where there are angels and a council and God lives, but really can kind of just mean the sky. Also, the place we refer to as hell (devil with pitch fork, lake of fire, nine circles, etc) may have actually referred to a physical place known as Gehenna which was pretty much just a bad news bears place to end up. Basically, the texts might not be talking about what we think they're talking about.
And yet it's still a matter of concern for us. If you're mortal, it's probably something you've thought about, at least in passing. If you've been seriously ill or lost somebody, it's probably something you think about a little more deeply. The idea of death being a gateway to something better is pretty appealing. My fiance has remarked that the idea of staying here or coming back here kind of sucks, after all, there's a lot of suffering here, and a lot of crap has gone wrong. I have to agree--it does kind of suck here sometimes, and there's real comfort in the idea that the people we've lost are waiting for us. When I think about losing people I love, whether through their death or my own, the the idea of never having those relationships again is terrifying. Never speaking to my parents, siblings, fiance, friends again? It chills me. I want to believe that when we die we go to a lovely holding area where we will be together, but unfortunately the implications can be problematic.
The first implication of this heaven/hell-bound theology is that our destination is contingent upon our behavior. When we read verses saying things like "no one is righteous, no, not one." (Rom 3:10) and "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23), it leaves us with the idea that maybe we're all kind of screwed. If you keep reading, we hear the good news: we are justified freely. That's great. So then we're saying if you are justified, you go to heaven, but if you're a sinner and you're not justified, you go to hell, right? How are you justified? By faith! Wait, isn't faith something you do? Uh oh. My little Lutheran heart bristles at works-righteousness, even if that work is belief. So then we're saying that if you believe right, you get to go to heaven, but if you don't, you go to hell. Sounds like a super loving God to me. Yikes. The next implication is that if it's NOT contingent on works, some people may be elected for salvation and others not, and this gets even messier. What kind of God is it that would damn some and save others arbitrarily? Finally, I think all the focus on being sure of our own salvation (e.g. getting into heaven) can shift our attention from where the gospel clearly calls us to making sure we're scoring enough points or believing the right thing, so our focus becomes me me me me. That's a huge problem for discipleship and the church.
So what do you do with this ambiguity? Is it necessary to have a firmly defined eschatology to be a Christian? Here are three thoughts about how I handle this, which maybe will be helpful for you.
1.) It's okay to not know. There are a lot of things we just can't know for sure. We can't know God's reasoning behind a lot of what has happened in scripture. We can speculate. We can't know why things happen in our lives. We speculate. We have little evidence to build a systematic theology of heaven and hell, and that's okay! Often, Christians think that not being sure about something means they either haven't thought about it enough or aren't faithful enough to just believe what they've been told. This is outright not true. In my opinion, it takes more courage and maturity to be open to the possibilities than to dig in behind a particular stance. Being able to say "I just can't be sure" doesn't mean you can't make up your mind, or don't believe, it just means you're open to the possibility that your interpretation may not be correct or complete. That leads me to number two...
2.) Not knowing doesn't mean not caring. When I was in graduate school at Kansas State, I spun my wheels over the free will/predestination problem for months. I would finally settle on some opinion and then another thought or idea would occur to me that would make my carefully crafted theology crumble. Finally, I had to say I just didn't have a way to know it, and actually felt a lot of relief. I care deeply about this issue, because it impacts how we teach people about God's love and salvation and choice and sin... but ultimately, the Bible is unclear on this topic, too. Using the Bible as a rule book to draft a set of guidelines by which we live is, in my opinion, a gross misuse of scripture. The Bible is a living text, which shows us the many ways in which God relates to us. Using it to cram our beliefs into a brick wall that we must defend moves our focus from a faith that's about love to a faith about rules. Ultimately, I believe that to call of the Christian is to demonstrate our relationship with God by how we live out our call in the world. Does knowing about heaven or hell change how we love? If our eschatology is a stumbling block, we need to reconsider it, which leads me to my last point.
3.) Shifting our focus can help us be better disciples. As I mentioned before, it's easy to get tied up in checking our own salvation status, or the salvation status of others (judging them by their works, for example, to see if they are "bearing fruit"). It's just a small slip from saying we hope for heaven to saying we are Christians for heaven. What does that say about who we are right now? God didn't put us here so we could live a pointless life and then die and live our real lives in heaven, did s/he? In the gospels, Jesus speaks again and again about ushering the kingdom of heaven here, about changing and repairing the broken system we already have, not tossing it out the window, saying 'this world is garbage' and waiting to get zipped somewhere else. God created this world... and it was GOOD! Surely goodness still exists underneath the brokenness. God calls us to follow these two commands: "Love God, and love one another." In doing the first, you do the second. In doing the second, you usher in a little piece of the essence of God (love) to this world. If we're living only for what's to come, we're missing out on all the gifts God has given us here, like wonderful friendships, spouses, children, the beauty of the earth, animals, joy, and growth.
If nothing else, I believe that heaven and hell exist here simultaneously, and that, to quote Steven Paulson: "The difference between heaven and hell is a moment in time." I believe that regardless of what happens next, we have a God who mends relationships, we have the here and now, and we have the hope for the resurrection. We don't know how that will happen, and I don't think that matters, because we have a promise of reconciliation made by one who always keeps promises. That's more than enough for me.
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