On making hell on earth

Recently, I was challenged again about why I speak so frequently of ecological degradation when people are going to heaven or hell. On reflection, I could have given a number of answers.

I could have said that Christ is Lord of all of life and so all of life is worth talking about. I could have pointed out that it would not be odd to find a doctor spending a lot of their time talking about health, or a lawyer spending a lot of their time talking about legal matters, so why find it odd to hear an ecological ethicist talking frequently about ecological ethics? I could have said that the dichotomy between evangelism and loving our neighbours is ultimately a false one that misunderstands the gospel as a cerebral message requiring assent and assumes a zero-sum game in a context where things are far more complementary. I could have illustrated the previous point from my own experience, where after having spent many years employed as an evangelist and evangelism trainer for at least part of my job, I find myself today having more gospel conversations flowing naturally from my activities related to ecological ethics than I think I've ever had before. I could have pointed to the numerous places in Scripture where verbal witness and practical love are assumed to go hand in hand.

But instead, I went with this:

In the final judgement, God will destroy the destroyers of the earth. Those who knowingly and wilfully persist in harming their neighbour are living in ongoing rebellion against their Creator, whom they disrespect by participating in de-creation. Those who steal from future generations and cause little ones to stumble are denying the gospel of grace and the power of the resurrection. Those who seek to uphold the power of the powerful in their oppressive ways face a God who will humble them. Those who cause suffering through their own foolishness should expect no reward for it. Those who are found to have burned all their oil when the master returns will be cast out. Those who fail to adorn the gospel in lives of kindness place barriers in the path of future evangelists. Those who pretend they are not dust, co-creatures with all life that received God's original blessing deny their humanity. Those who dissolve the bonds of life re-crucify the one in whom all things hold together.

I believe in life before death.

And in the resurrection of the body.

Therefore, matter matters.

Jesus loves you

How many people have heard the good news about Jesus and think it goes something like this? How many Christians have tried to explain it and ended up saying this?

Finitude is a gift

Faced with ecological threats of various kinds, many people would rather not think about them. They retreat into denial, or a security based in the possibility of technological advances or the allegedly inevitable forces of the free market. The broad popularity of reaching for hope in the market or technological fixes can be seen in the frequency with which politicians draw upon these themes. We are comfortable and our inertia draws us to answers that require little thought and less change. We trust that the explosive economic growth of the last few hundred years is now the normal trajectory, able to be extrapolated into the foreseeable future.

Wendell Berry has written an excellent article titled "Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits" reflecting upon our collective obsession with the myth of infinite growth. He argues that the pursuit of limitless consumption, unbounded knowledge and endless control is not only a dangerous illusion destroying our planet, but an attack on our very humanity. We will ultimately lose not just the planet, but also our soul. He rediscovers a life-giving alternative (though he doesn't say so explicitly) in a Christian conception of creatureliness. Here is a taste of the essay's opening:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such 'biofuels' as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that 'science will find an answer.' The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

"This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)"

The full article is not short (approx. 4,000 words), but well worth reading and re-reading. H/T Roberto.

Seasoned with salt: grace-filled conversations II

Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.     - Colossians 4.6.

Last month I started a new series to explore how to participate in genuine conversations. My last question generated many thoughtful responses.

Situation: Here's an old chestnut - in an email exchange with a believing friend you've known for some time, she admits to doubts. "I struggle to believe that God would send many (most?) people to Hell for not believing in him. After all, apart from personal epiphanies, he chooses only to reveal himself in the form of a book which was written, collated and interpreted by fallible humans."

How might you respond with grace, seasoned with salt?

Remember, since these posts are based on actual situations (sometimes with some key details changed), it's possible that the interlocutor might be a reader of this blog and follow the discussion. If not, others in a similar position might be reading.

Moltmann on the end of the world

"Some people think that the Bible has to do with the terrors of the apocalypse, and that the apocalypse is 'the end of the world'. The end, they believe, will see the divine 'final solution' of all the unsolved problems in personal life, in world history, and in the cosmos. Apocalyptic fantasy has always painted God's great final Judgement on the Last Day with flaming passion: the good people will go to heaven, the wicked will go to hell, and the world will be annihilated in a storm of fire. We are all familiar, too, with images of the final struggle between God and Satan, Christ and the Antichrist, Good and Evil in the valley of Armageddon - images which can be employed so usefully in political friend-enemy thinking.

"These images are apocalyptic, but are they also Christian? No, they are not; for Christian expectation of the future has nothing whatsoever to do with the end, whether it be the end of life, the end of history, or the end of the world. Christian expectation is about the beginning: the beginning of true life, the beginning of God's kingdom, and the beginning of the new creation of all things into their enduring form. The ancient wisdom of hope says: 'The last things are as the first.' So God's great promise in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, is: 'Behold, I make all things new' (21.5). In the light of this ultimate horizon we read the Bible as the book of God's promises and the hopes of men and women - indeed the hopes of everything created; and from the remembrances of their future we find energies for the new beginning. [...] If the last is not the end but the new beginning, we have no need to stare fascinated at the end of life."

- Jürgen Moltmann, In the end - the beginning: the life of hope
(Fortress, 2004), ix-x.

I will be very interested to read the rest of this little book. Moltmann can be so inspiring, though sometimes his language is a little over the top. "Christian hope has nothing whatsoever to do with the end"? What about the end of death? The end of crying and mourning and pain? The end of endings?

Worse than death? V

You have died

Whom have I in heaven but you?
   And there is nothing on earth I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
   but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

- Psalm 73.25-26

Death is the last (though not greatest) enemy of humanity and God. The Christian, however, has already died: for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory (Colossians 3.3-4). The worst is over: one has died for all; therefore all have died (2 Corinthians 5.14). Notice that the logic is not that Jesus died for us so that we might not die (strict substitution), but that in him, we have already died. He is our representative. What he did is for us, applies to us, is true for us, indeed is true for 'all': he tasted death for everyone (Hebrews 2.9).

But what does it mean that we have died, since we're still breathing? Is this a legal fiction? A pious way of speaking of the end of an old selfish way of life? Or something else? To understand ourselves and our own story aright, it is necessary for this to be situated correctly within God's story as its proper context. And in particular, we need to hear our story being told as part of the story of Christ. Our life is hid with his. The true meaning of our lives will be revealed when he is. The true and full meaning of our death is likewise hidden with Christ. However, since the resurrected Christ is both present and absent, having been seen by many, yet now not seen for a little while, our knowledge of this meaning is also somewhat ambiguous. We are neither in the dark, nor yet confronted irrefutably face to face with it. So while we can say something of what it means to be somehow already dead, we mightn't be able to express it all.

I take it that at the very least, to be already dead with Christ is to be free from fear of the worst, since the worst has already happened to Christ, and already happened to us in Christ. This worst wasn't death itself, but was being abandoned by God, being godforsaken. Whatever we are to make of Jesus' heartwrenching and mysterious cry from the cross - my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?* - that this one was the one that God subsequently raised means that even the experience of godforsakenness is now transformed. No matter how bad things get for the Christian, Christ has been there first and remains with us, as Immanuel, through it now. Whatever our situation, the worst is already over. Christ has suffered the hell of godforsakenness for us.
*Volumes can and have been written on this cry, a quote from Psalm 22. I will not add to those volumes at this point.

Although Christians still suffer an end to life, and many even have horrible and painful experiences as they do so, nonetheless, there is a difference between all these experiences and Jesus' death on the cross. Every Christian passes their final breath under the pattern and so the promise of Christ's experience: vindication from out of shame, new life from out of death.

‘I saw the Lord always before me,
   for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken;
therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
   moreover my flesh will live in hope.
For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
   or let your Holy One experience corruption.
You have made known to me the ways of life;
   you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’

- Acts 2.25-28 (Psalm 16.8-11; LXX 15.8-11)
H/T Cyberpastor, who suggested this passage here.

Series: I, II, III, IV, V, VI.

Lewis on vulnerability

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven* where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960), 138-39

I thought this quote was apt to follow the ones from Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard recently posted. All three invoke the necessity of engagement and the impossibility of cool detachment as our basic stance towards life.
*Of course, Lewis's reference to 'Heaven' needs to be taken with the same grain of salt that this passage advises us to take regarding Augustine's advice about not loving anything except God too much lest our hearts be broken. For a fuller discussion, see this post with some of my thoughts on heaven..

Augustine on love and fear

He, then, is an enemy to righteousness who refrains from sin only through fear of punishment; but he will become the friend of righteousness if through love of it he avoids sin, for then he will be really afraid of sin. For the person who only fears the flames of hell is afraid not of sinning but of burning...

Augustine, Epistulae 145.4

Augustine argues that fear of punishment is only ever a first step in moral learning. Although a young child may refrain from hitting his brother because he fears a spanking,* there is a step forward when he fears disappointing his parents, and then another step when he fears hurting his brother. Also involved in the maturation process is coming to fear both the damage done to oneself and the affront to God when one wrongs a neighbour. To be a friend of righteousness is to hate evil because it is evil, not simply because God will judge the evildoer.

*More discussion of spanking here and here.

Augustine on coffee breaks in Hell

It is quite in vain, then, that some—indeed very many—yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be. Not that they would go counter to divine Scripture—but, yielding to their own human feelings, they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express the literal truth. "God will not forget," they say, "to show mercy, nor in his anger will he shut up his mercy." This is, in fact, the text of a holy psalm. (Cf. Ps 77:9). But there is no doubt that it is to be interpreted to refer to those who are called "vessels of mercy," (Rom 9:23) those who are freed from misery not by their own merits but through God's mercy. Even so, if they suppose that the text applies to all men, there is no ground for them further to suppose that there can be an end for those of whom it is said, "Thus these shall go into everlasting punishment." (Matt 25:46). Otherwise, it can as well be thought that there will also be an end to the happiness of those of whom the antithesis was said: "But the righteous into life eternal."

But let them suppose, if it pleases them, that, for certain intervals of time, the punishments of the damned are somewhat mitigated. Even so, the wrath of God must be understood as still resting on them. And this is damnation—for this anger, which is not a violent passion in the divine mind, is called "wrath" in God. Yet even in his wrath—his wrath resting on them—he does not "shut up his mercy." This is not to put an end to their eternal afflictions, but rather to apply or interpose some little respite in their torments. For the psalm does not say, "To put an end to his wrath," or, "After his wrath," but, "In his wrath." Now, if this wrath were all there is [in man's damnation], and even if it were present only in the slightest degree conceivable—still, to be lost out of the Kingdom of God, to be an exile from the City of God, to be estranged from the life of God, to suffer loss of the great abundance of God's blessings which he has hidden for those who fear him and prepared for those who hope in him (Cf. Ps 31:19) —this would be a punishment so great that, if it be eternal, no torments that we know could be compared to it, no matter how many ages they continued.

113. The eternal death of the damned—that is, their estrangement from the life of God—will therefore abide without end, and it will be common to them all, no matter what some people, moved by their human feelings, may wish to think about gradations of punishment, or the relief or intermission of their misery. In the same way, the eternal life of the saints will abide forever, and also be common to all of them no matter how different the grades of rank and honor in which they shine forth in their effulgent harmony.

- Augustine, Enchiridion, §§112-13.

Barth on universalism as doctrine hope and prayer

There is no good reason why we should forbid ourselves, or be forbidden, openness to the possibility that in the reality of God and man in Jesus Christ there is contained ... the supremely unexpected withdrawal of the final threat ... If for a moment we accept the unfalsified truth of the reality which even now so forcefully limits the perverted human situation, does it not point plainly in the direction of a truly eternal divine patience and deliverance and therefore of a ... universal reconciliation? If we are forbidden to count on this ... we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for this. - CD IV/3, 478

This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before. - The Humanity of God (1961), 60.

Man can certainly flee from God ... but he cannot escape him. He can certainly hate God and be hateful to God, but he cannot change into its opposite the eternal love of God which triumphs even in his hate. [Reference?]

Thoughts? Reflections? Hate-mail?
UPDATE: Here are Augustine's thoughts on the matter.
Ten points for the first to name three controversial Sydney landmarks in this picture. Another five for naming the Sydney landmark upon which I'm standing to take this shot.

Laugh at the devil and he will flee from you...

“How can we make clear the victory of Christ? In this way: when speaking of sin, demons, darkness, by not speaking of them in too tragic a manner—like the German theologians, all so serious! The further north you go in Germany, the more they are concerned with the realm of darkness. And if you move to the Scandinavian countries, all is darkness: God against Satan, and vice versa! ... It is not wise to be too serious.”

—Karl Barth’s Table Talk, ed. John D. Godsey (Edinburgh: 1963), pp. 16-17.

I am particularly frustrated at the moment by Christians who find a demon behind every bush - and in every book or exercise of the imagination! The 'Christian' opposition to the fantasy genre holus-bolus is a grave mistake and an attenuation of both Christ's victory over the evil one and the God who delights in his creative creation - a creation that itself brings forth new things (e.g. Gen 1.11: not all of creation is ex nihilo...). Reading Lewis doesn't lead to the occult!