Jesus Creed
I will begin these discussions of Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, with a prayer. I am asking that you pause quietly and slow down enough to pray this prayer as the way to approach this entire series:
O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing:
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift,
which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue,
without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.
Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever. Amen.†
The title for Rob Bell’s second chapter — Here is the New There — not only sums up the chapter (and book) but also a burgeoning movement in the evangelical world, and it is one inspired by N.T. Wright’s stuff on eschatology and — to be perfectly honest right up front — sometimes some of Tom’s readers make distortions of what Tom is actually saying. Tom has said over and over that Jesus didn’t save us in order to get us to heaven, but he saved us so that heaven and earth could meet in the New Heavens and New Earth. His emphasis on New Heavens and New Earth is right.
It is that theology that is at work in Bell’s second chapter, and we’ll see if his approach fits the NT.
His repeated words here is that heaven is understood by many as “somewhere else.” Salvation is a story of movement from here to somewhere else and somewhere out there. The Christian story has focused, and he’s surely right here, on heaven and almost as surely that heaven is somewhere else — it’s out there, up there, and somewhere else. And many in the church emphasize who will be there and who will not be there, and he’s surely right about that too.
In your church, is “heaven” somewhere else — ethereal and out there and beyond etc — or is it more earthy? How “New Heavens/New Earth-y” is the kingdom/heaven in your church? When people say “heaven” what do they mean?
The rich man approaches Jesus and asks, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” Jesus’ response is “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.” This is from Matthew 19:16.
A summary. Jesus’ response surprises many Christians because he doesn’t give the man the plan of salvation but tells him to do the commandments and to give his money away to the poor. Rob says the issue was the question, and the question the man asked was how to get eternal life… but that didn’t mean to him to be a question about where he would go (to heaven) when he died. Rob says the man’s question was about how to enter into the kingdom life in the here and now. That’s where Rob camps in this chapter, and that is why he focuses on heaven beginning now. Thus, the here is the new there. [The old “there” was somewhere else, heaven in the skies, etc.]
I’ll get to something we need to interact with in a moment, but Bell observes that The Age to Come, or heaven on earth, is for everybody [developed later in his book], it is earthy, and that life will not be all new. There’s lots in The Age to Come that is not new. But it will be the world as God designed it — no more war, all peace and love and joy and justice. Injustices will be made right, our angers will be justified. It will be a “restored, renewed and redeemed” earth. This is typical Judaism and pervasively NT-like.
The way to enter into The Age to Come is to live the commandments. Here’s his theme of continuity: do now what will happen then and you will be ready and prepared. Back to the rich man… Jesus gave five commands, and it bugs me that Rob missed the love your neighbor from the Jesus Creed here, but I’ll forgive him. The rich man was greedy and greed will have no place in The Age to Come.
So Jesus takes the man’s question about his life then and makes it about the kind of life he’s living now. But the odd thing here is that Rob hereby flattens his eschatology, while I think Rob has a both-and in his theology, and I suspect that man did too, and I suspect Jesus did too. What happens now continues into the life of The Age to Come. That means it is not just now but both now and then. So I agree that what we do now is of immense (and eternal) value. If there is an afterlife or a “heaven,” and if it is eternal, then it an act of colossal foolishness not to live now in light of then.
And I agree that heaven will have lots of surprises. He seems to suggest that it is character that gets a person into heaven (on p. 53). Then this piece of poetic language: “heaven is as far away as that day when heaven and earth become one again and as close as a few hours” (55). He seems to be getting at heaven being super reality of the current reality.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that aion means “intensity of experience that transcends time” (57). I’m thinking it could come from something like John 10:10 where Jesus said he came to bring life to its utter fullness. But I don’t think the Greek term means that except by associations with ideas connected to The Age to Come.
And I agree on the eternal life that is something now and through and beyond death. We are now playing the piano while wearing oven mitts. Nice one. But that very point lands Rob right back where he began, and it cuts against the theme of his aversion to the “somewhere else” idea for heaven, which is part of biblical faith from the time of Daniel 12:1-3 on (resurrection to judgment or salvation; shine like stars).
This response has to be a little long so I’ve put the main points in bold. Just read those lines if you want to see the big picture.
Three points that deserve some scrutiny... the big point I will make is this: Rob sets up an either-or (heaven is out there vs. heaven is here) and pushes hard on Jesus talking not about an endless eternity but about the present, but closer inspection shows that Bell operates (correctly) with a both-and (heaven is both here and there, both now and then, both continuous and discontinuous). In the language of the scholars: he operates with an inaugurated eschatology but seems to overdo the realized dimension. Or he operates with a realized eschatology but also has a bit of an inaugurated eschatology at work.
First. There’s a reason why the ancients, both Jews and Greek and Romans, used a word like “heaven” for where God is and where folks go when they die. Yes, there’s lots of variety in the ancient world; and they used a variety of words, but the NT word is “heaven” and that word means “sky.” And there all kinds of Jewish texts about ascending into heaven. Why did Jesus and the early Christians fasten on that word for doing the lion’s share of work on where God is? Obviously this is phenomenology. God was above and beyond and when we die, if we are righteous, we go to be with God and that means we go to heaven (in the skies). This is at work in the NT but .., but… but… and this is where Rob camps and he’s right. The NT modifies this: it eventually lands not on just ascending into heaven (into the skies) but on a meeting of heaven and earth in the New Heavens and the New Earth. Most Christians need to learn this and the sooner the better. The “final” place in the Bible is the New Heavens and the New Earth — and these two meet in Jerusalem! Read Revelation 20-22. Bell’s emphasis here is correct and important.
Second, I want to argue the rich man in Luke 18 was asking about the future world too and not just the present world. For Jews of Jesus’ day, The Age to Come distinguishes itself from This Age. So, there was This Age and The Age to Come. Bell seems to equate Eternal Life with The Age to Come and to emphasize it as now, but Jesus says those who give up their lives for him will — and this is my translation of Luke 18:30 — “will not fail to receive [first] abundance in This Age and [second] in The Age to Come eternal life.” So it does not appear to me that “eternal life” is quite the same as The Age to Come so much as a property or characteristic of The Age to Come. Eternal life then is the kind of life one has in The Age to Come. [Rob somehow uses the word aion when the Greek word is aionion. The first means “age” with a beginning and an end, and he drives this idea hard. But the second one, the one Jesus uses, according to the standard specialist lexicon, means “pertaining to a period of unending duration, without end.” The Latin equivalent of aionion was perpetuus. Rule for writers: use the standard lexicons and if you differ from them you better have good evidence because you are disagreeing with some mighty good scholars who have for centuries pondered the evidence in the original languages.]
So, let me put together what Jesus says in Luke 18: Jesus says his followers will acquire “eternal life” in The Age to Come, which is endless, and that means they would possess a kind of life appropriate to that Age. That eternal life, or aionion, is beginning to work its way into the present. It appears to me, then, that the rich man and Jesus were referring to a future endless reality; in fact they were referring to the future reality and saying it could invade time now — the future can begin now but it is still the future …
But Rob wants to push against this harder (p. 58): “heaven is not forever in the way that we think of forever, as a uniform measurement of time, like days and years, marching endlessly into the future.”
Third, Jews did conceive of The Age to Come in terms of endless time. Rob’s ideas need to be sharpened because Jews did think of The Age to Come in a measurement of time. I could draw on a number of texts but one NT that makes this clear is that the Book of Revelation describes the Age to Come with this description: it involves a Lake of Fire, and the Lake of Fire — which is John’s equivalent for Gehenna in Jesus, which is also called the “second death” — lasts “for ever and ever” (Rev 20:10), and there the words are aionas ton aionon, or “ages of ages.” Their way of saying this would be like this: The Age to Come is one Age piled on top of another on top of another. It is not some kind of abstract infinity but a measurement of time expressed in an endless quantity of Ages: Age after Age. [See below for more of this.] The New Heavens and the New Earth have that same property, but instead of a fire it is a place where all things become New (21:1-8). In fact, I would say the Jews did think of The Age to Come in a measurement of time. And they used what was the longest one they knew: ages upon ages.
Now let me turn this inside out, and for those who are deconstructionists, that’s what this is. “Here is the new there” is Rob’s line. OK, but… the new heavens and the new earth are different enough from what is now here that Rob’s here-is-the-new-there is actually somewhere else because it is not the same place as we have now right here. The here-is-the-new-there is all new so his now-here is not his there but a new-here and a new-there. It may be here, but here will be so different that we can take off our oven mitts and play the piano and dance to the eternal music. The minute you start talking about taking off our mitts you enter into the “somewhere else” (at least in part).
Now reduced to its simplest form: When the rich man asked Jesus about eternal life and Jesus used “life” in his response, they were both talking and thinking about what it takes to participate in The Age to Come, that future endless glorious rule of God when heaven and earth meet in the New Heavens and New Earth. Jesus was saying it can begin now, but that now will continue into The Age to Come, which is eternal and where death will be no more. The Here, then, is a foretaste of the There.
The rich man, I suggest, was asking a 1st Century version of what some ask today when they say “How do I get to heaven?” Our answers will nuance “heaven” but they aren’t in a different category altogether as Rob contends.
[Another Jewish expression for eternal as endless is found in the Jewish Josephus, when commenting on the Pharisees, and he was one of them at one time in his life, says the “souls of the wicked suffer eternal punishment.” Jewish War 2.163. The term “eternal” here is not aionios but aidios, and that word (like aionios) comes from aei, which means “always.” Josephus, the Jew, the former Pharisee, sees punishment as endless in duration. The good have a soul that passes into another (eternal?) body via resurrection. See also Antiquities 18.14, which gives a variant on this same idea with aidios again meaning eternal punishment and the good souls being given a new (eternal) life. More at Jewish War 2.154-155, where endless punishments are stated.]
Exploring Love Wins 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
For other posts, see Tony Jones, Greg Boyd.
Jeff Cook compares Rob Bell with C.S. Lewis.
Early Rob Bell reviews.
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