Assume for a moment that this temporal life is it. I don’t think you need to dismiss faith to engage the exercise. I’m told that there’s good evidence that belief in an afterlife was only a late developing, unclear, and disputed concept for the people of Israel before Jesus. But there’s no doubt Israel was a people guided by faith in God and faithfulness to God.
Do we really need the promise of eternal bliss to find God faithful? Are we so tied to heavenly reward that we would walk away from God without it? I think not. I think if it was removed from our vocabulary as if never conceived of, there would remain a strong (God given) impulse to honor and serve him -- and to do it by honoring and serving the people around us.
To me there is something liberating about this. I can’t fully identify why, except perhaps that the idea of heaven is usually tied to its opposite. And there's an idea I honestly find hard to accept without difficulty. Yes, I know the arguments for the necessity of hell. I think I know them pretty well. And I struggle with it.
Maybe we think too little of ourselves. Maybe we think too little of God. If he is real, he deserves our faithfulness to him regardless.
5 comments:
Having read your post several times, Greg, allow me to make a few comments.
First, I am not that steeped in the history of the Jewish people before the time of Christ; however, I do know that, by the time of Jesus' ministry, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection/afterlife and the Sadducees did not.
In addition, the resurrection seems to have, at least, been implicitly believed at some point in Israel's history before Christ because, in Matthew 22:23-33, Jesus, in a debate with the Sadducees over the resurrection, refers to the oft quoted covenant formula, "I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" found in the Old Testament. Jesus interprets this as implying the resurrection, for he was saying that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive in God's presence.
Also, there are many places in the psalms that imply the belief in the afterlife, for they were interpreted typologically in the New Testament as referring to the resurrection of Christ.
Finally, in Hebrews 11, the author, while discussing the heroes of the OT, says, "But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one." This sounds like they believed in an afterlife of which the physical Promised Land was a representation.
You said the people of Israel before Jesus were "guided by faith in God and faithfulness to God." I would claim that, as a whole, Israel was unfaithful to God, except for the remnant that was filled, in some measure, with New Covenant grace and who (it appears) looked forward to the resurrection. Could it be that a reason for the faithfulness of the remnant and the unfaithfulness of the rest of the nation was due, in part, to their belief or lack thereof in the resurrection?
Greg, I'm not so sure Christians could maintain a fervent love for God without belief in the resurrection. They may be able to have a very cerebral and external display of religion (like many of the Pharisees of Jesus' day and the older son in the parable of the Prodigal Son), but I doubt they can have a holiness that springs from an internal love of God. The reason for this is that lovers want to see the beloved. What an unbearable pain it would be for those who deeply love Jesus Christ to know that there's no hope of seeing him in the afterlife, to know there's no beatific vision, to know that their love for him (and his love for them) doesn't reach beyond the grave. All hope is lost if there's no resurrection, and there can be no love or genuine faith without hope. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are to be pitied above all men. Let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for meeting this morning, Dave. Great to see you again! Seems to me we understand each other -- looking forward to exchanging ideas in the blogosphere ...
I, too, enjoyed the way iron was sharpening iron yesterday.
I have one question for you. You said in your blog that you struggle with the doctrine of hell. What are your struggles?
When our focus shifts from here-today to the afterlife, I think we loose our bearing, and that's the more important issue for me. I should mention that when I say that I struggle with the idea of hell, I don't mean I reject it. It's just hard for me to reconcile the love of God with the possibility of eternal torture.
I do understand how free will requires that we have the ability to reject God, but I think we have for too long been spending our energy on defining and arguing about who is in or out (of our group, of the "one true" this or that, of heaven or hell), and not enough energy loving each other.
I hear you. I posted an entry on my blog about how to reconcile God's love and hell. When you get a chance, you might want to check it out. It's the answer I have given to my students over the past several years when they ask me about God's love and hell. I'm sure there are flaws in it, but it's the best I can do now.
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