An interesting post over at Out of Ur in a series on Heaven and Hell. Here, New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright, talks about hell.
One poignant quip in the comments section:
“It’s a shame that Jesus didn’t have N.T. Wright around 2000 years ago to help Him express what He really meant about hell.
Then Jesus wouldn’t have had to grope around and use figures of speech like weeping and gnashing of teeth, unquenchable fire, torment in flame, broad and narrow ways, judgement and the like when apparently He really meant to talk about people declining to be part of God’s new creation.”
I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on the intricacies of the doctrines of heaven and hell, but I have a hard time reconciling Wright’s (seemingly) watered down version of hell with my own readings of the scriptures.
What do you think: Is this because of my culturally western-stained mind (as Wright would claim), or because Wright’s account bypass the scriptures for a more philosophical explanation?
NT Wright is a phenomenal mind. His problem is he is so ingrained in English post enlightenment, post modernism, post fundamentalism, and post colonialism that he has gone post biblical.
Thanks for the post Jake. I’ll agree with Will. Although hell is an uncomfortable topic Jesus warned about it.. I’ll go with Jesus rather than Wright. In this case I think Wright is wrong.
Leadership Freak,
Dan Rockwell
I can’t believe we watched the same video. Nowhere does Wright reject the idea of hell. He simply is letting us know that over the centuries we have pasted a platonic-Greco conception over what Jesus was really warning about.
I get so infuriated with Evangelicals who can cover their willful ignorance of competent scholarship with a bunch of silly “post-” labels and then claim the high ground by labeling themselves “biblical.”
Mark, I don’t know if anyone is claiming that Wright rejects the doctrine of hell. The issue is one of interpretation, as you rightly point out in your second sentence.
Speaking for myself, I legitimately have a hard time reconciling how Wright describes hell in this clip with some of the strong wording in the scriptural account.
I read Surprised by Hope and still felt mystified by Wright’s exploration of the subject. I haven’t heard an explanation of Jesus’s language on hell and how it meshes with the kind of withering away as a human Wright describes.
Mark: you are right that Tom doesn’t reject hell. What it maddening that Wright reduces hell into something that is so man centered glorification i.e. “man chooses to continue dehumanize themselves rather than be a part of God’s new creation” instead of what hell is really about…
That God’s glory and grace is completely absent from your life. That you are truly separated from God that not even his common grace, which you continuously experienced while you were “living” on the earth”, is with you. In other words, you are truly forsaken and forgotten by God.
The more I think about Christ’s descriptions on hell and the utter torment and pain Christ went through in the garden, I am fully convinced that Christ was not in agony over the impending torture and death upon the cross. I am know that Christ was in sheer agony over what he had to endure for His people: that is, be forsaken by the Father and the Spirit. Even for such a temporary time, being forgotten by God is the worst thing to end all worst things that you and I as believers in Christ as Lord and Savior will never have to experience.
Since non-believers cannot possible wrap their minds around being forsaken by God, Christ gave further surface descriptions of what Hell is like.
Pushback, comments, etc. welcomed.
I see two problems.
My first problem with Wright in that clip is that he does desire to be all the post while trying desperately to cling to Christ and living the resurrection in practical and not only abstract or future terms. Wright in many ways is a excellent contemporary example of Lewis and MacDonald. As I said Wright is a phenomenal mind. He is very right that segments of contemporary 21st Christianity and it’s immediate predecessor of middle ages Christendom had a obsession with hell. I would even add a idolic fear of it. I agree with the lotus of what Wright is saying.
My second problem is my prior response in a attempt to be partially witty I did not clarify Wright’s error of being post biblical. When Jesus spoke of hell he framed it in visual liguistic images that were meant to literally scare the hell in to you. His message was that he as God would indeed judge people and he had the ability, right, and responsibility to do so and that he would send people to such a awful place. Let me be clear I think the reality of hell is a thousand times more dire than even Jesus graphic visual image. Yet to be biblical we must exegete and then apply the text or we run the risk of being post biblical.
We minimize hell in most of our context. In part because for many of those of us who were exposed early in life to fundamentalism were drowned in the doctrine and the reciprocal to live a moralistic Christianity. It is a doctrine that many of us don’t want to wrestle with. We give post biblical answers that have may have truth but it still does not absolve the reality that we do not want to deal with the text as it is.
Wright in the unenviable goal of a three minute segment basically affirms the horror of hell but does not deal or really wrestle with the text. He side steps it in that he forgoes dealing with those thorny issues like weeping, gnashing off teeth, and unquenchable fire and lays that as archaic beliefs held by literalist i.e. fundamentalist of a bygone era. I believe Wright intentionally misses it on this issue to avoid the thorny implications.
I should have backed my thoughts with more than a catchy punch line. Good push back Mark. Time to go back to painting.
seems to me that Keller and CS Lewis have expressed similar views on the subject of hell. Rather than the literal instant damnation, it is the continuation of rejection into an infinite dehumanization. I hear everything of wright’s view that is the absence of God’s presence and would certainly lend itself to the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I will say that his position seems to be perfecrly in step with his views on resurrection and restoration. The dude is freakin brilliant which makes me hesitant to dismiss him so quickly.
Trey – As a push back, there are equally brilliant men and women who disagree with Wright.
That being said, I don’t have a problem necessarily with Wright’s conception of hell as a dehumanization and continual removal from God. The absence of God is of course the worst thing that can possibly happen to a person. We see this in Christ’s absolute despair on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The reality is that we have no concrete conception of what hell is actually like since it is only spoken of in metaphor. But as Will rightly points out, those metaphors are terribly frightening. Whatever Jesus refers to by everlasting and unquenchable fire, by gnashing of teeth, and so forth, he clearly means to speak of some kind of existence that is absolutely horrendous and tormenting–and one that is everlasting.
I’m wondering if maybe Wright’s teachings on hell are not so much wrong as is his delivery on hell. I find his description to be tepid, and indeed a possible comfort to those who already don’t care about God and reject him. A shrinking of human life, as Wright describes it, does not do justice to Christ’s words, “And these will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt 25:46).
To be sure, I find the doctrine of Hell extremely hard and distasteful. I’d love nothing more than to speak of it terms that are easier to swallow, as a I believe Wright does, and so comfort unbelievers. But I’m not sure we can do that and still be faithful to Christ’s intent in speaking of hell.
Thoughts?
> I’m wondering if maybe Wright’s teachings on hell are not so much wrong as is his delivery on hell. I find his description to be tepid, and indeed a possible comfort to those who already don’t care about God and reject him.
I think that is the problem I have with it. However, in Wright’s defense, isn’t that we are trying to show the goodness and majesty of God for His name sake alone and not to scare people away from hell?
I am not denying the doctrine of hell at all. I will preach on it but it will not be the centrality of my teachings. That place alone is reserved for the gospel of God and Christ crucified. To use this imperfect analogy,
do you not cheat on your wife because of the temporal ramifications of having an adulterous affair or do you not cheat on your wife because you so love her, you get to be with her and you get to enjoy her and she is so lovely?
I guess what I am don’t weaken the doctrine of hell. Call a spade a spade. But don’t let hell be our focal point either.
Jake,
agree w/ the first statement, for clarification, i would list Wright as, probably, the most important scholarly theologian alive today. That’s where my “brilliant” statement comes in, it’s brilliance in measure with the good work that he’s done, not just because he’s smart…and has the queen’s english!
Ok, that being said (which I’m sure I’ll need to qualify later), I don’t agree lockstep with everything he says, but at the same time, I know that I have a tendency to read in to what a lot of people say. I remember Piper sharing a story that he took like 6 weeks to carefully read through Wrights position on Paul and write out a 10 page response asking for clarification and gaining understanding to his different terms…something like 3 hours later he got a 6 page response from Wright explaining and clarifying what Piper was asking. That’s for entertainment, further proof of his brilliance, but more importantly to add to the discussion that there is a lot of clarification and assumption that has to go on when dealing with Wright.
Wright can appeal to the purely scholarly – Resurrection of the Son of God, and equally the masses – Surprised by Hope. I’ve listened to many of his lectures especially when it comes to his position on the resurrection and restoration. And how else do you explain that but to say that the Bible never talks about a disembodied future and always talks about Heaven/kingdom coming down…and yet for most of my adult life I never saw it! In my western, platonic thought I just assumed that Jesus was coming to get us the hell out of here! Now, it makes so much more sense. It’s clear in Scripture – the kingdom is HERE, the resurrection was HERE, the promise to Noah was about God’s creation and making it new, not trashing it. For the first time I didn’t look back at my nightmares as a kid regarding Jesus coming as a thief in the night and taking my mom and dad and me waking up in some post-rapture existence. It completes missiology for me. It makes evangelism so much more than “believe in Jesus so you can go to heaven when you die.” it makes Jesus’ declaration of the “good news of the Kingdom” and even the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount so much more fulfilling. But, my impression was still that if I was dealing with NT Wright that I was moving toward liberal theology, evangelistic heresy, etc… Just to clarify, I think he’s wrong on Paul.
Ok, so there’s probably more background than you needed, but this is why i suck at writing blogs and responses to blogs and just don’t do it very often:)
I don’t really think that Wright is that concerned with dramatizing hell, speaking to his delivery. I think his view on restoration (to me and probably to him as well) is SO amazing, all consuming, appealing, desiring, reaching to the very core of the imago dei, that to suggest anything other than being caught up in that is travesty. Jesus gives descriptions of what this will be like (literal or figurative…we can debate, but hopefully we’ll never know:). Wright’s greater emphasis, which has to be informed by his understandings mentioned previously, is that just as all the pain and hurt and mourning will be made new for the believer, just as the return of Christ will set the world to rights and all creation will be as it should at the conclusion of the grand narrative, to that extent it would be just as painful and wretched to not be a part of that. I don’t think he’s trying to handle hell casually, I think, even his quote about “wanting to be universalist if he could” is that he is so much more about the restoration that the thought of anything other is simply horrifying and moving further and further away from that would be even worse than immediate “worst scenario imaginable.”
does that even make sense? I’m a verbal communicator so if this sucks, let me know.
I agree that Wright’s teachings and writings on the New Heaven and New Earth are amazing and compelling. In fact, I loved Surprised by Hope. And I agree with you and with Joseph that the main focus should be on God, His glory, and His goodness. Probably the biggest issue here is that Wright speaks academically about something that Jesus spoke about passionately. And while Jesus’ focus was not on hell per se, when he did speak of it, it was with the intention of, as Will points out, “scaring the hell” out of people.
Is that what draws us to God? No. Perfect love casts out fear. We know this. But I think Wright would be more well-served speaking of hell in terms like Jesus did. Tough call for a guy who speaks to academics mostly.
Also, thanks for the background and clarification on your brilliant comment. I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling him the most important theologian, but he’s certainly up there.
The word “reality” is an interesting term to throw into this discussion. It seems to me that the Bible clearly expresses something intensely painful and intensely fearful. I don’t believe the language clarifies a pristine picture of the precise nature of pain, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual. However, language like “dehumanization” and “absence of God’s presence and common grace” does little more to really describe the nature of things because man has never seen or experienced those either. The language both Biblically and exegetically are suggestive metaphor. That puts an exact understanding of the “reality” somewhat out of reach. I appreciate his conclusion though, and agree that either way this means that the choices we make here on earth really matter.
Thanks to everyone for your great and insightful comments. I’m really impressed by the thought and time put into them.
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I’m really late on this one, but I don’t believe Wright is minimizing hell at all. I think he’s trying to describe hell to the audience in terms we can understand. We’ve heard “weeping and gnashing of teeth” so much that we’ve either forgotten what that means or we’ve lost “the fear”, if you know what I mean.
I believe that Jesus’ description of hell was meant for that audience over 2000 years ago and it worked. Today, those words have become too familiar, misunderstood and even underappreciated. We can dismiss this “fanciful” version of hell because it doesn’t sound real to us anymore. So why should we believe we’re going there if we can’t even believe in it?
Wright, very simply and precisely addresses this issue by “reinterpreting” hell and who it is meant for. Even as a Christian I welcome any help in interpreting scripture passages on tough issues like this one.