The content of his preaching is somewhat “cerebral” — engaging some of the most common intellectual challenges that both Christians and non-Christians face when seeking the face of God or the meaning of their existence. And this stands to reason: a big part of missional preaching is sensitively contextualizing the Gospel message, and Redeemer Pres. is made up largely of youngish, on-the-rise professionals in an environment that fancies itself as cutting edge.

It also means that Keller’s preaching is often very helpful for those outside his congregation who have many of the same pressing questions. What’s underneath our culture’s best formulated objections to faith in Jesus Christ? How can we address them well? What unselfconscious concepts of God or humanity or salvation has the church embraced that have prevented us from being a counter-culture for the common good?

I haven’t read it yet (trying to meet a dissertation deadline), but Keller has recently published a book that will be of interest to most Presbyterians who are seeking the missional renewal of the church. It’s called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, and can be viewed here on Amazon. The reviews of the book are quite good, and being familiar with Keller’s approach, I’m confident it’s a worthwhile and provocative read.

I also found that the Veritas Forum has both audio and video of a “talk” given by Keller on the topic of his book at a University of Chicago forum. Head over to the Forum’s website and check it out. Part One of Keller’s talk is here, and Part Two is here.

Feel free to offer your thoughts / questions / amens / rebuttals!

This morning we continue under the theme of Living Wisdom: Forming Our Faith with the Mighty Dead. The premise of this theme is that the tradition of the church — as lived and taught by the “mighty dead,” the saints of ages past — has much to teach us today. In our first lecture I cited C.S. Lewis, who encouraged us to read “old books” as a way “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.” Paying attention to history has many benefits, not the least of which is the fact that history can illumine the major blind spots of our own age and re-awaken us to significant truths about faith and life that we have discarded, sometimes unintentionally. Our goal is not to become antiquarians — interested in history merely for its own sake. Instead, we enter the drama of history seeking “Living Wisdom,” insight that is very much alive and that we ourselves would do well to live. Though as Protestants we believe that our faith and life must ultimately be founded on the teaching of Scripture, we also know that the Spirit has worked throughout history in helping the church to come to a better understanding of the Word of God.

In this first series on “The Story of the Future Life,” we are learning from the tradition about our biblical hope – what is our hope in Jesus Christ, and what is our hope for the future life?

In our first lecture we saw that we have much to learn about the future life from the early church’s struggle against Gnosticism. By looking at both the Gnostic heresies and their contemporary parallels in popular Christian literature, we talked about the perennial tendency to truncate our vision of the future life and forget the ultimate promise of the resurrection of the body and the establishment of a New Creation. We also saw that our views on the future life have a serious impact on how we view life in the present. Very often, those who envision our ultimate destiny as an immaterial existence in an immaterial heaven, often view life in the present as ultimately “empty and meaningless.”

And this stands to reason. How we view the future indicates what we think God really cares about — what is God’s ultimate plan for the world? What is the goal toward which everything is moving? When we envision God’s ultimate plan to be the destruction of this world and our bodies, while saving only our souls, then we tend to think all God really cares about is the spirit (or “soul”) of human beings, and not the whole created order (including our bodies, human culture and the rest of creation). But if God cares about and is redeeming all of it, then the scope of our participation in God’s mission includes all of it, and this world is full of meaning and purpose.

We saw these points brilliantly made by Irenaeus of Lyons, the 2nd century bishop who battled against Gnosticism in the early church. Irenaeus reminded us that this world is God’s good creation and that history is not meaningless but is rather the story of God’s activity to restore this world — and us along with it — to the life we were intended to live with him. This story of salvation in history unfolds throughout the Old Testament, and it culminates in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Jesus accomplishes the ultimate victory for the Kingdom of God. In the incarnation, Jesus took into himself humanity and the present order of this world, and in his own life he set things right, in his death he defeated the Devil and sin, and in his resurrection he conquered death forever and became the first-fruits of the New Creation.

And a central theme in the New Testament is the astounding promise that when Jesus comes the second time, this victory that he has accomplished will be fully manifest in all things. He will establish the New Creation and renew all things. And he will give us resurrected bodies in which to live and “reign” with him forever, continuing to honor the Creator by living lives of worship and cultivating God’s gifts so that all things reflect the beauty, truth and goodness of God. Irenaeus reminded us that God is not going to destroy this world and the present course of history; rather, he is going to renew this world and fulfill our history.

Those who believe in Jesus Christ have an extraordinary calling and responsibility in this world. We are not to envision salvation as escaping this world. Instead, we have been given the Spirit of the resurrected Christ to engage this world to unveil the coming Kingdom of God. Irenaeus called the Spirit’s work in and through us the “commencement of incorruption” in this world that, when Christ returns, will be advanced to perfection in the New Heavens and New Earth.

So, we have begun to explore “Living Wisdom” with the end in mind. And we have seen that the “End” is the end in the sense of the “goal” of all things. The “End” is the fulfillment all things; it will really will be a new beginning for life free from sin and decay and sadness and full of righteousness and growth and joy. That’s the promise we have in Jesus Christ. We have a foretaste of it now as our lives are driven and ordered by the Spirit of God; and it’s a promise that will be fulfilled when Jesus returns.

Now, this morning, we’re going to continue in the story of the future life by taking up the question — a profoundly existential question — of what happens to us if we die before Christ returns to set up the New Creation and give us new bodies? What happens to us when we die? If our ultimate hope is the New Heavens and New Earth, is there also a nearer, individual hope that we have in the face of death before Jesus returns and consummates his Kingdom? Jesus Christ was resurrected and ascended into heaven nearly 2000 years ago. His promise to return awaits fulfillment. And yet many have died while living in hope for Christ’s return, and many if not all of us probably will, too. So what will happen when we die? What happens to those who have died in Christ? Is there a part of us — we often call it our “soul” — that continues to live beyond the death of the body and awaits the return of Christ when it will be re-united with our resurrected body? Theologians often refer to this as the question of the “intermediate state” – “intermediate” because it is between death and resurrection.

For all the concern I have expressed about separating the spiritual from the material and viewing eternal life as an immaterial existence away from our bodies and away from the earth — for all of that concern, you might expect me to say: “No, our hope is in the resurrection alone. Our hope does not include life as a disembodied soul. We cannot be separated from our bodies. Our bodies and our selves are inseparable, and so when we go into the grave our whole person goes into the grave, and we will be raised at the last day.” And if we were to take this approach and think it impossible for our souls to continue existing consciously after death, we would be in good company.

We are confronted here with the all-too-human tendency, when faced with just about any matter, to reduce our options to two polar opposite possibilities. We either hope only in the resurrection and not in the life of the soul after death. Or we hope only in the life of the soul after death and deny the resurrection. Unfortunately, in much contemporary discussion on the topic, these are the two alternatives presented.

But there is, of course, a third option: that our hope includes both the life of the soul after death and the resurrection of the body. And this presents us with an opportunity to find some living wisdom among the mighty dead. The aim of this lecture is to show that our hope in the resurrection of the body and the New Heavens and New Earth is not opposed to belief in the life of the soul between death and resurrection. Or to state it positively, some of the great theologians in the history of the church have understood our future hope to be two-fold: we hope in both the life of the soul in an “intermediate state” after death, and our ultimate destiny of life in the New Creation with resurrected bodies. The challenge for us as it has been for the history of the church, is to understand how these two realities relate to one another within the one, larger hope of the coming Kingdom of Christ.

First, I want us to see why maintaining this two-fold character of our hope for the future life has been such a challenge. The example I’ll use is the influence of Greek philosophy on early Christian theology, where sometimes belief in the immortality of the soul eclipsed belief in the resurrection of the body.

Second, we’ll look briefly at how the development of the doctrine of purgatory in the Middle Ages has made it tempting to set aside the life of the soul between death and resurrection.

And finally, we look at the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and the tensions within the Reformation over this question about the life of the soul after death. The reformer whose views on this subject I will lift up as “living wisdom,” are those of John Calvin.

So, first, let’s take a quick trip back to antiquity and the early growth of the Christian movement. Jesus was born into a world teeming with pagan cultic worship, mystery religions and a variety of competing philosophical systems, all of which sought to make sense of the world and to offer people meaning and hope for their own lives. And the theologians of the early church were often compelled to explain Christian doctrine in relation to these competing systems of belief and religious practice.

The development of early Christian doctrine in relationship to Greek philosophy is captivating for those interested in the relationship between Christianity and culture. There are many sides to this story. But for our purposes today, suffice it to say that certain strains of Greek philosophy presented both challenges and opportunities for the development of Christian theology. This was certainly the case for “Platonism” – the developed forms of the philosophy of Plato. And we’ll see in a moment that some early Christian theologians got a little carried away in their use of Platonism, so much so that they tended to de-emphasize the resurrection of the body, in favor of the immortality of the soul. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

In the first centuries of the church, numerous challenges to Christian teaching came from the age’s intelligentsia, which provoked responses from the church’s able teachers. Some of these Christian teachers had themselves journeyed through the philosophies they now sough to refute, and they used every tool in the box for their defense of Christianity. They used Greek philosophy against Greek philosophy. But often they also explained Christian teachings by “taking up” philosophical learning and using it within the Christian theological enterprise. St. Augustine famously made the analogy with the Israelites “plundering the gold of the Egyptians” during the Exodus. God’s people were supposed to take the resources of the pagans and put them to use in the service of God. In the same way, Augustine said, Christian teachers can use pagan philosophy in the service of Christian teaching.

And this did have a salutary impact on Christian theology in many cases. In the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, the early church fathers were able to borrow and modify concepts like “essence” and “person” to explain that God is “one essence existing in the three persons.” Those are not biblical categories, strictly speaking, but used in this way they do communicate biblical truth.
Of course, the impact was not always positive. To go back to Augustine’s analogy of the Exodus, after the Exodus, when Moses took too long up on Mt. Sinai, the Israelites quickly drifted into unfaithfulness and used some of that Egyptian gold to fashion a golden calf — an idol. In the same way, Greek philosophy’s impact on the early church’s understanding of Scripture was a mixed bag.

So what does all of this have to do with the life of the soul after death? Well, one of the most prominent forms of Greek philosophy was Platonism, that is, a development of the philosophy of the great philosopher Plato. And Platonism had some remarkable similarities to Christian teaching. For this reason, numerous Christian theologians not only defended Christianity against Platonism but also incorporated certain insights of Platonism into their way of understanding the Bible.

The early church fathers who were influenced by Platonism tried mightily to hold the line and not to go beyond what God had revealed and mix it with pagan philosophy. And most of the early church fathers did quite well in this regard. But some of them, it must be said, were led by their Platonism to hedge on the bodily resurrection and tended to dwell on the immortality of the soul. Two early church fathers from Alexandria are good examples: Clement and Origen (fn. 1).

Both Clement and Origen rejected Gnosticism and they also defended Christianity against the charge that it was a religion for ignorant people. Alexandria was a great center of learning in the ancient world, and they had been trained in philosophy and, to be sure, they used it in defense of Christianity. They also got a little carried away.

Regarding the resurrection, Clement seems to contradict himself at times. He could affirm the bodily resurrection on the one hand. But on the other hand, he sometimes asserts something more like the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul, identifying the resurrection with the freedom of the soul when liberated from the body at death. (This is the view that, in the last lecture, I described myself as having in my early years as a Christian, though I did not hold this view with anything like the sophistication of Clement!) Clement also seems to have embraced the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of souls. And at times he can speak of the soul as immortal by its very nature, a teaching of many Platonists, which would mean that the soul is not constantly dependent upon God’s activity for its continued existence.

Origen of Alexandria went further, and apparently believed that our souls not only existed before the creation of the world, but that our souls fell into sin before creation. Origen describes this “pre-cosmic fall” of souls in this way: “these [souls] had not sinned so grievously as to become demons, or so venially as to become angels. God therefore made the present world, binding the soul to the body as a punishment” (fn. 2). Origen did write two books on the resurrection, but neither of them have survived. From what we can piece together of his surviving works, however, he seems to have understood the resurrection in rather spiritualist terms, that is, that we will have “bodies” in the sense that our personal identities will remain intact, but our “resurrected” bodies will not be of real flesh and blood as we have now.

Reflecting on Clement and Origen, even if we discard ideas like the existence of souls before creation, we can see how it’s easy to confuse the so-called “intermediate state” — the life of the soul between death and resurrection — with our ultimate destiny. They believed the Scriptures affirmed the ability of the soul to live apart from the body prior to the resurrection. And in a cultural environment that had all sorts of objections to the resurrection, and many resources to think about the independent existence of the soul, it was very easy to make the “intermediate state” into the “permanent state.” In other words, it was easy to hedge on the resurrection of the body, while affirming the immortality of the soul.

It will not surprise you that this understanding of the relationship between the body and the soul was often coupled with a rigorously “ascetic spirituality” — that is, an understanding of the Christian life where holiness means a thoroughgoing rejection of physical pleasures in favor of bodily self-denial. The spiritual part of us is what is good, but the flesh-and-blood part of us is just a source of temptation. There is in Christian history a consistent strain of ascetic spirituality that is rooted in Platonism. The mystical tradition is the most obvious example, where sometimes the Christian’s pursuit of union with God is understood to be enhanced by a radical denial of this world and the body, and sometimes even the intentional punishment of the flesh.

It must be said that there are many less severe examples of the integration of Platonism with Christian theology than we find in Clement and Origen. Nevertheless, these more extreme cases demonstrate a clear tendency. And because of this negative impact of Platonism on the development of Christian thought, there is a movement in some corners of the church today to rid Christian thinking of anything that even sounds like Plato, including the idea that the soul can exist apart from the body.

So, we’ve talked a little about antiquity. Now, a brief word about the Middle Ages is in order here before we arrive at the Reformation in the 16th Century.

From a Protestant perspective at least, things got worse in the Middle Ages when the “intermediate state” became the playground of the doctrine of purgatory. Purgatory refers to the purifying suffering of the soul after death, preparing the soul to be received into heaven. Purgatory was pictured as a place of cleansing fire whose pain was mitigated only by the certainty that one day the guilt of all your sins will have been “purged” and you will be able to enter heaven. Many practices related to the doctrine of purgatory belong to two of our future series, on the Story of Salvation and the Story of Holy Communion.

But it’s worth pointing out now that the doctrine of purgatory connected the dead with the living in a very real but often unhappy way. The church said that it was possible for those still living to shorten the time of suffering for their loved ones in purgatory. Those still living could, for instance, pay for Masses for the dead. There were many priests in the late Middle Ages who did nothing but say masses for the dead. Additionally, those still living could purchase “indulgences” — special pardons authorized by the pope that were thought to benefit the one for whom they were purchased. And they could be purchased for the dead.

At the dawn of the Protestant Reformation, a special indulgence had been authorized for sale by the pope, frankly in order to raise money to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. And then, as providence would have it, a famous indulgence preacher was traveling in Germany near the town of Martin Luther. This preacher is said to have had a rhyming song: “As the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Luther became so incensed by the pope’s pretended power even over those in the after life, that he wrote his “95 Theses” against the practice of indulgences. Luther’s theses are often considered the spark that grew into the fire of the Protestant Reformation. So, the Reformation, of which we are heirs, began as an argument about death.

Now, you might be exasperated at this point. “Enough already. The Gnostics got it wrong by thinking of eternal life as a disembodied spirit. The Platonists weren’t quite as weird as the Gnostics but they still denied the resurrection and had an undo influence on the development of Christian doctrine. And what’s more, the whole idea of purgatory is based on the presumption that the soul can exist apart from the body. Why not, then, just reject the idea of the conscious existence of the soul between death and resurrection? Wouldn’t that undercut the influence of Platonism and help us focus on the resurrection? Wouldn’t that deliver the one-two punch and just knock out the whole unbiblical idea of purgatory?” If you have begun to feel this way, you’re in good company. A few of the reformers in the 16th century seem to have had sympathies for just such a view.

Martin Luther’s own views on these things were not entirely clear. He seems not to have thought very much of the “intermediate state” between death and resurrection. This might be because he was convinced that Christ would return very soon, in which case the resurrection would be very soon and the “intermediate state” would be irrelevant. When Luther does talk about it, he tends to speak of it as a state of sleep. There are, of course, passages in Scripture that appear to speak of life after death as a sleepy experience. We’ll come to those in a moment.

And there were others, notably the Anabaptists, who became known for their denial of a conscious intermediate state between death and resurrection. Some of them believed that biblical references to the soul of human beings simply meant the “life” of a person, and so when you die, you die. There is no “soul” we can speak of apart from the body. Others apparently believed that there was such a soul, but that apart from the body it could not be “awake” and sensing things. Therefore, the soul would “sleep” between death and resurrection.

It was in the midst of these debates that John Calvin began his career as a reformer. Actually, his first theological writing was a response to these teachings about “soul sleep” and the “death of the soul.” Calvin’s position was careful and nuanced. He confidently affirmed the resurrection of the body, but he also thought there was a great deal at stake in affirming the continuing life of the soul between death and resurrection. And it is in Calvin’s work on this issue that I think we can find some real “living wisdom.” So let’s take a look at Calvin’s first little book, entitled Psychopannychia, which means “wakefulness of the soul” (fn. 3). What I want us to see is that Calvin sets out the classical Christian teaching of our two-fold hope – both in life between death and resurrection, as well as the ultimate hope of the resurrection and the New Creation – and he does so based on the teaching of Scripture.

First, Calvin lets you know up front what he thinks about the wisdom of “the philosophers.” He puts it this way:

“Here let human wisdom give place; for though it thinks much about the soul it perceives no certainty with regard to it. Here, too, let Philosophers give place, since on almost all subjects their regular practice is to put neither end nor measure to their dissensions, while on this subject in particular they quarrel, so that you will scarcely find two of them agreed on any single point! Plato, in some passages, talks nobly of the faculties of the soul; and Aristotle, in discoursing of it, has surpassed all in acuteness. But what the soul is, and whence it is, it is vain to ask at them, or indeed at the whole body of Sages, though they certainly thought more purely and wisely on the subject than some amongst ourselves, who boast that they are the disciples of Christ.”

There you get a little taste of 16th-century rhetoric in his criticism of the Anabaptists who are teaching soul sleep. But more importantly, you can see that Calvin admires the philosophers but his explicit desire is to make his case not on the basis of their teachings, but rather from the revealed Word of God in Scripture. He has read the philosophers: Calvin was a Renaissance humanist and had a thorough liberal arts education. But having seen what they have to offer, he charts a different course and seeks firmer ground for the life of the soul after death.

So, we should note a few of the passages of Scripture where Calvin finds the life of the soul between death and resurrection explicitly confirmed. For instance, in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul says he “would rather be absent from the body and present with the Lord.” In Philippians 1:21-23, Paul says: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.”

In Revelation chapter 6 we have a glimpse of John’s vision of the throne room of God, where he sees the souls of the martyred saints crying out to God. There is the mysterious passage in 1 Peter 3, where Jesus is said to have preached to “the spirits who are in prison.” Furthermore, Jesus and Stephen, as they are dying, call upon God and say “into thy hands I commit my spirit.” And to cite one final passage, though there are more, we can look to Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross in Luke 23. The criminal said, “’Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus answered him, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.’”

These passages alone would seem enough to confirm that we can continue to live beyond the death of our bodies, and that this “intermediate” existence between death and resurrection is one where those who are in Christ will be with him, as Paul says, and we can even call it “paradise,” as Jesus does. And they were enough for Calvin. But he realizes, of course, that his opponents have their own passages of Scripture that they use to support the doctrine of “soul sleep.”

For instance, what are we to do with those passages of Scripture that seem to speak of those who have died as “sleeping”? To give but one example, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:14: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” What does this phrase mean, that they have “fallen asleep” in him? It is passages just such as this that have been used to support the doctrine of “soul sleep.” But Calvin notes that when the Scriptures speak of “sleep” in this way, it was a common way of referring to rest from labors. This rest or peace in the Lord, begins when we trust in Jesus now, but we can truly rest in him after death. Calvin says:

“Believers have this peace on receiving the gospel, when they see that God, whom they dreaded as their Judge, has become their Father; themselves, instead of children of wrath, children of grace; and the bowels of the divine mercy poured out toward them, so that now they expect from God nothing but goodness and mildness. But since human life on earth is a warfare (Job 7:1), those who feel both the stings of sin and the remains of the flesh, feel overwhelmed in the world, though with consolation in God - such consolation, however, as does not leave the mind perfectly calm and undisturbed. But when they shall be divested of flesh and the desires of the flesh, (which, like domestic enemies, break their peace), then at length will they rest and recline with God.”

I should note that, when Calvin uses the word “flesh” like this, he is not referring to the body as such, but rather referring to the sinful and corruptible condition in which we find ourselves. This is true for the way that the Apostle Paul typically uses the word “flesh” as well, though he is often misinterpreted in this regard.

In any case, Calvin is picking up on the fact that the quest for rest and peace in God is a long story in Scripture, beginning with the Garden of Eden, then in the Sabbath in the Promised Land, now by faith in Christ and in the future in the New Heavens and New Earth. The souls of the faithful departed, who die in Christ before he returns, enter into this rest. And this is what we mean, for instance, when we say “rest in peace,” following Psalm 4. What awaits us after death is not an abyss of nothingness, but rather the peaceful embrace of God.

So, that’s one example of how Calvin responds to those teaching “soul sleep.” And Calvin takes a similar approach to those who taught the “death of the soul.” This group would cite passages of Scripture like Ezekiel 17:4, where God says: “For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son—both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.” In these cases, when Scripture sounds like it’s speaking of the “death” of the soul, Calvin explains that “life” and “death” are not just categories of “existence” and “non-existence.” On the contrary, to experience real death is to experience the judgment of God, and the death or destruction of the soul does not mean it ceases to exist, but rather that it exists in enmity with God. Likewise, to say that the soul is “alive” is not just to say that it exists. Rather, it is to say that it experiences the benevolence of God. Incidentally, some of the best modern interpreters of the Bible have confirmed Calvin’s interpretation on this matter, noting that “life” and “death” in Scripture are often spiritual – or we might even say “psychological” – categories of existence. Scripture can speak of “spiritual death” for those in opposition to God, or true “spiritual life” for those in fellowship with God.

This all may sound very technical, but questions of life and death are important wrestle with carefully. Indeed, for Calvin the question of whether or not the soul lives after death was an intensely personal one, for at the time he wrote this little book on the soul, his life was threatened by lethal persecution and some of his dearest friends had been killed by the crackdown by French authorities on the reform movement in France. One passage seems to have been especially dear to him: Matthew 10:28, where Jesus says: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

It may seem odd to say that a passage about God being able to destroy your soul in hell is comforting. But what this saying of Jesus affirms is that only God has power over the soul. For those who are alive in Christ, nothing could give us greater assurance. Another human being may be able to kill my body, but they cannot touch my soul. Calvin responds to these words of Jesus with deep gratitude:

“Graciously, therefore, has the Lord acted towards us, in not leaving our souls to the disposal of those who make no scruple of butchering them, or at least attempt it, but without the ability to do so. Tyrants torture, maim, burn, scourge., and hang, but it is only the body! It is God alone who has power over the soul, and can send it into hell fire. Either, therefore, the soul survives the body, or it is false to say that tyrants have no power over the soul!”

So, our life with God rests only in the hands of God. Our life with God cannot be interrupted by any other force, not even the death of the body. This is a tremendous comfort, because it means that we can face anything in this life without fearing that it could separate us from him.

Additionally, to remember that our souls rest in the hands of God also helps us avoid the error of Platonism that we saw a moment ago – the idea that our souls are immortal by their very nature. Our souls are not indestructible, so our hope rests not in the nature of the soul. Rather our hope is in the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Our lives rest in the sovereign hands of God.

So, we’ve seen some key passages of Scripture that Calvin points to for the life of the soul after death, and we’ve seen how he addresses some of the key objections of those who deny that the soul can truly live after death. But on top of all these things, we might even say that Calvin puts the most weight on another argument for the continuing life of the soul. And this is the believer’s union with Christ by faith, which is an unbreakable union.

Throughout the New Testament, and especially in the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John, it is clear that we have been bound to Christ so that his life becomes our life. Indeed, our entrance into “eternal life” begins now, by faith in Christ. And because by faith we are united to the one who is resurrected and has conquered death forever, even the death of the body cannot separate us from Christ. Calvin writes:

“[W]e have the additional security of his Resurrection, by which he constituted himself the Lord of death, and raised all of us who have any part in him above death, so that Paul did not hesitate to say, that “our life is hid with Christ in God.” (Colossians 3:3) Elsewhere he says, “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20) What remains for our opponents but to cry with open mouth that Christ sleeps in sleeping souls? For if Christ lives in them he also dies in them. If, therefore, the life of Christ is ours, let him who insists that our life is ended by death, pull Christ down from the right hand of the Father and consign him to the second death. If He can die, our death is certain; if he has no end of life, neither can our souls engrafted in him be ended by any death!”

And Calvin cites numerous other passages about eternal life, including John 6, where Jesus says we have passed from death into life. Or in John 11:25-26, Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

The truth that Calvin wants to drive home is the fact that, by the Spirit, we have been given the life of the resurrected Christ. And our union with Christ has the strength of Christ’s resurrection, which conquered death forever. As he says later in this little book, about Christ who is our life: “It is absurd to say we perish, while our life is living” – that is, as long as Christ lives, we shall live. And Christ can never die.

Jesus has then irrevocably set us on the path of life that will culminate in our own resurrection. Therefore, when we affirm the promise of our resurrection on the strength of Christ’s resurrection, we also affirm that we can never be separated from him. At the beginning of this lecture, we mentioned that in much contemporary thought these two things are opposed: resurrection of the body, or the continuing life of the soul after the body’s death. But Calvin helps us to see that these two realities are far from opposed to each other. Rather, they hang together, both of them founded upon the strength of our union with the resurrected Christ. The Apostle Paul sums it up in a famous passage in Romans 8: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Nothing can separate us.

Finally, it remains for us to see that Calvin was clear that the life of the soul after death should not to be understood as the final or “completed” state of our future life. Rather, Calvin understands the nature of this “intermediate state” of the soul to be a blissful, but incomplete experience. It is paradise compared to this life, as Jesus said to the thief on the cross. But it is not our eternal home, for which we await the return of Jesus, when comes the final judgment, the resurrection of the body and the establishment of the New Creation. Calvin describes the longing of the souls of those who have died in Christ:

“Now, when they wait for something which they see not, and desire what they have not, it is evident that their peace is imperfect. On the other hand, while they confidently expect what they do expect, and in faith desire what they desire, it is clear that their desire is tranquil. This peace is increased and advanced by death, which, freeing, and as it were discharging them from the warfare of this world, leads them into the place of peace, where, while wholly intent on beholding God, they have nothing better to which they can turn their eyes or direct their desire. Still, something is wanting which they desire to see, namely, the complete and perfect glory of God, to which they always aspire. Though there is no impatience in their desire, their rest is not yet full and perfect, since he is said to rest who is where he desires to be; and the measure of desire has no end till it has arrived where it was tending. But if the eyes of the elect look to the supreme glory of God as their final good, their desire is always moving onward till the glory of God is complete, and this completion awaits the judgment day.”

Calvin thus affirms that the “intermediate state” – what we often call “heaven” – will be wonderful freedom from the present warfare against sin in this life. But it will still be characterized by a future hope – a hope for Christ’s return, when the glory of God will fill all things.

To sum up, we can see that, in the midst of a variety of opinions in the 16th century, where it might have been tempting to discard the idea that the soul can exist consciously after death, Calvin re-affirms the classical Christian teaching. He confidently affirms the life of the soul after death without compromising the promise of the resurrection. And he sets aside the baggage that has often been attached this intermediate state: he bases his teaching not on Greek philosophy but rather on some clear teachings of Scripture and the unbreakable union we have with the resurrected Christ. There is no pre-existence of the soul as in Platonism. He is clear that the soul is not immortal by nature but rather is sustained in life by the will of God. And purgatory is set aside entirely.

In our own day, in the midst of similar competing options of “immortality of the soul” or “resurrection of the body,” Calvin helps us see those as false alternatives: the truth is not one or the other, but rather the two-fold hope in both, secured for us by the strength of Christ’s resurrection.

God’s desire for us is that we are “always moving onward,” as Calvin put it. First, we receive the gift of eternal life by faith in Christ, and we move onward in this life as the Spirit sanctifies us in Christ. Then, at death we are free from the battle with sin and enjoy peace with God. But we still await the time when “the glory of God is complete,” when Jesus returns to establish the New Creation and give us resurrected bodies to live with him in the New Creation forever.

And this is not just Calvin’s private interpretation of Scripture. It represents the mainstream teaching of the church fathers, as well as the clear witness of the Reformed confessions – from the Heidelberg Catechism to the Belgic Confession and the Westminster Confession and Catechisms.

What all this means is that, if you believe on the Lord Jesus, you can rest confidently in these promises of God, knowing that nothing can separate you from his love, not even death. What more can we say about the life of the soul after death? Calvin puts it this way: “To inquire beyond this is to plunge into the abyss of the Divine mysteries. It is enough to have learned what the Spirit, our best Teacher, deemed it sufficient to have taught.”

I hope you’ll continue with me next week, as take up the topic of the return of Christ.

Footnotes:

1. For brief discussions of these issues in the theology of Clement and Origen, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 46-49; and J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Revised Edition (Harper, 1978), pp. 178-183.
2. Cited in J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 181.
3. If you’d like to read Calvin’s Psychopannychia, I formatted the full text of the (19th century) English translation in a PDF file and it’s available for download on this site: click here.

I would like to begin today’s lecture with some words from G.K. Chesterton: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” With those words, Chesterton touches upon a profound truth not often recognized by modern Christians: sometimes the greatest resources for facing our future are found in our past.

Over the course of the next year, we’ll be exploring the theme of Living Wisdom: Forming Our Faith with the Mighty Dead. We’ll be taking a journey through major themes in the history of Christian thought, with the goal of deepening our faith, coming to a clearer understanding of Scripture on some important matters of faith and life, and being inspired by the Spirit’s work through the mighty dead – the saints of ages past.

“Living Wisdom” is a double entendre: I’m convinced that there is much wisdom in our history that is alive and worth taking into our own lives and our own faith in Jesus Christ. But in the other sense, my hope is that in our own lives we will be living this wisdom. The eminent historian of Christian doctrine Jaroslav Pelikan has famously written: “traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” But “Tradition” is the “living faith of the dead.” I think that captures it very well. Tradition is the living faith of the dead, and to have a living faith today that is not merely a reflection of our own age, we need to be living this tradition, continuing this living faith.

In far more general sense, C.S. Lewis once insisted on the value of reading old books.

“It’s a good rule after reading a new book never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to three new ones….Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and especially liable to make certain mistakes. We all therefore need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period…. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books….The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds and this can only be done by reading old books.”

That’s a good way of stating our aim in these lectures, we want “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”

So, under the theme of “Living Wisdom” we’ll have four mini-series over the next year, each mini-series consisting of three lectures. This first series beginning with this lecture is entitled “Living Hope: the Story of the Future Life.” Later in the year, we’ll move on to three other mini-series: “Living Grace: The Story of Salvation,” “Living Water: The Story of Baptism,” and finally “Living Meal: The Story of Holy Communion.”

The church’s understanding of these major themes – the future life, salvation, and the sacraments – has developed over a long period time. And by entering these stories, I hope we can, as Lewis put it, correct some of the characteristic mistakes of our own period, expose some of our blind spots and be inspired toward greater faithfulness.

And we begin with “Living Hope: The Story of the Future Life.” Why, you may ask, should we begin with the end? Well, beginning with the end in mind is often a good idea. Endings orient everything that comes before. When you know in what direction a plot is headed it helps to make sense out of all the major events that lead up to it. In this case, that would mean that beginning with the future life has the potential of providing an orientation for our life in the present. And indeed it does, as I hope to touch upon this morning and in the two weeks to come.

And we begin with the “end” because the “logic” of Scripture begins here, too. When we think about the drama of redemption that is told in the Bible and that gives shape to our own lives, we are compelled to begin with God’s promise to put right all that has been tainted in his creation. This promise of the future restoration of all things in Jesus Christ is right at the core of the message of the New Testament. Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom of God. In his life, death and resurrection Jesus accomplished the victory of the Kingdom of God. And he has promised to return again and consummate his Kingdom, and establish a New Heavens and New Earth, a New Creation. The Kingdom of God will come and transform this world.

The New Testament says that Jesus’ resurrection was the first-fruits of a physical, restored universe that awaits us in the future. What’s more, Jesus has promised to give us new bodies — resurrected bodies like his own resurrected body, bodies that will never decay or die, so that we can live as whole creatures and “reign” with him in the glory of his New Creation. What’s even more, the New Testament says that the same Holy Spirit in whose power Jesus was raised from the dead has been given to those who believe in him. In short, we not only can hope for the New Creation when Jesus returns, but our own lives now are supposed to be a living demonstration of the future hope of the whole world. These basic but astounding truths provide the foundation for Christian hope and life in the present; they show us the goal of our salvation; they show us the end toward which we are drawn as we participate in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion; and they show us that our lives here and now, and the world in which we live, have meaning because God has promised ultimately to renew them entirely.

Unfortunately there is great confusion in the church today about the future life and about its relationship to the present life. My own journey of faith has been a part of that confusion. When I became a Christian some sixteen years ago, my beliefs about the future life were the same as the other Christians I had the privilege of being in fellowship with. I understood that Christianity offered a message of salvation from sin; I understood salvation to mean going to heaven; and I understood going to heaven meant living an immaterial, spiritual existence where we could forever be free from constraints of this world like time and physical bodies and work. So, I thought God’s ultimate plan was to destroy this world and rescue us from it. I thought our souls would just live, forever, in heaven. Perhaps needless to say, I had a very hard time relating this vision of the future life to anything in this life. I just knew it would be a departure from this life. And I found comfort in many popular hymns, with phrases like: “this world is passing away,” “this world is not my home,” “we are only passing through,” and “I shall fly away.”

The truth, of course, is that this vision of the future life falls well short of the mark. I had neglected the New Creation. And I wish confusion about this was limited to me personally. But, to be blunt, the prevailing view of the future life in the church today is very similar, and it’s been shaped more by the massive cultural influence of ancient Greek philosophy and Gnosticism than it has been shaped by the promises of God in Holy Scripture.

How can we have missed the significance of the resurrection? How can we have overlooked the promise of the New Creation? In the early years of my journey of faith, if you had asked me if I believed in the resurrection I would have said yes. And then I would have gone right along thinking of the future life as an immaterial existence, as a disembodied soul forever. I probably had, in the back of my mind somewhere, the idea that the resurrection was in the end a “spiritual” sort of thing, kind of like the spiritual consummation of being “born again.” As for the New Heavens and New Earth, I probably thought all the Bible had to say about that was one reference at the end of the Book of Revelation, a highly symbolic and, I thought, confusing book that I used more for trying to figure out when the end would be and less for discerning what the promise of the New Creation meant.

Not to belabor the point, but just in case you are not resonating with this problem of setting aside the New Creation, let me offer some more concrete evidence of the typical view of the future life in the American church today. I’ll limit myself to one example. And don’t get mad at me, at least not for long, because many of you have probably read and enjoyed the book I’m about to critique. Actually, some of you have asked me about the book and what I think of it, so I went and skimmed it. So I guess I can say you asked for it!

A well-meaning Baptist pastor named Don Piper has written a little book about his experience of dying and going to heaven. The book is called 90 Minutes in Heaven, and it’s spent many weeks on the Bestseller list, has sold over a million copies and, to boot, has a “five star” rating on ChristianBook.Com. Piper tells the moving story of his experience of what he calls heaven, after he died, or seemed to die at least, in a car accident. His vision of heaven has many of the usual images like pearly gates and dazzling luminescence. Now, before I go any further, let me just say that I have no idea whether or not Don Piper really did go to “heaven.” What I’m more interested in is his characterization of this immaterial heaven as the permanent, eternal home of those who are in Christ. Piper writes: “I have made my final reservations for heaven, and I’m going back someday — permanently.” And one sentence sums up the purpose of the book. He writes: “I believe God gave me a hint of what eternity in heaven will be like.” Eternity. No resurrection. No New Creation. A permanent, eternal existence as bodiless, immaterial beings away from the earth.

Actually Piper is explicit about never wanting to return to the earth. He reflects on the fact that he did not get to see God during his stay in heaven, when he writes: “The only way I’ve made sense out of that part of the experience is to think that if I had actually seen God, I would never have wanted to return. My feeling is that once we’re actually in God’s presence, we will never return to earth again, because it will be empty and meaningless by comparison.”

Honestly that pretty well sums up the prevailing view: our permanent home is to shed the materiality of our bodies, escape the earth, and live eternally as disembodied souls; and life in this world that God created is basically “empty and meaningless.” I hope you know that my intention is not to pick on Don Piper. His story merely reflects the prevailing view in Christian circles, not to mention much of the wider culture.

One more thing worth noting about this: when I was investigating Piper’s book, I took a look at the New York Times bestseller list. In a highly ironic twist, there is, in fact, right now, a book on the bestseller list called “A New Earth,” and one of its chapters is entitled “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” The book is recommended by the Oprah Book Club. It borrows biblical language about the future life to describe “the flowering of human consciousness.” According to the book jacket, the author, Eckhart Tolle, describes “how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world.”

Now, what I’m about to say is going to sound harsh, so brace yourself. The co-existence of these two very popular books reveals a sad reality. Many people in our world are open about the fact that they are broken, and they are hungry to see themselves and this world changed for the better. And yet many of us Christians are off reading a book that describes this life as “empty and meaningless,” and we have left the rest of the world that’s longing for meaning and transformation scrambling to borrow the language of biblical hope and infusing it with lame pop psychology.

We can do better than this.

My own re-awakening to the cosmic scope of God’s redemptive purposes and their relevance to life in the present came through reading great works in the history of Christian thought. I wish I could say it was intentional. But my initial forays into historical theology were actually through assignments for college courses. I majored in religion so that I could get done quickly and go be a missionary, but something strange happened instead. I fell in love with history and it changed my life. It laid bare many of my blind spots and enriched my understanding of Scripture and God’s activity in the world. (So I got carried away with reading and ten years later I’m still trying to finish my PhD dissertation in historical theology.)

But back to the point: it was through reading history that my eyes were opened to the biblical hope of the New Creation – not that we will be saved from this world to live as disembodied souls, but rather that our destiny, along with that of the whole creation, is a restored, physical, everlasting life where the reign of Jesus Christ will be beautifully visible in all things.

We could learn this lesson from a variety of episodes in church history. But we can probably learn the hope of the New Creation best by looking at one of the most intense struggles of the church to defend “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), and that is the early church’s struggle against Gnosticism. In its struggle against Gnosticism, the early church made clear that the biblical hope is the hope of the New Heavens and New Earth.

“Gnostic Christianity” was an eclectic combination of teachings that stemmed from a variety of different sources, including the Scriptures but also Greek philosophy and a variety of ancient mythologies. For awhile it even looked like Gnosticism might win the day in many segments of the church. It was a powerful movement because it tapped into a perennial tendency in human spirituality that is still going strong today. So, as with many other doctrines, the early church honed its understanding of the future life in a somewhat defensive posture. That is, the church was faced with a surging movement that presented a contrary system of belief, which compelled the theologians of the church to respond with clear and forceful explanations of the teachings of Scripture.

From this early church struggle against Gnosticism we can learn the close relationship between five central tenets of biblical truth that under gird basic Christian spirituality: 1) the unity and goodness of God, 2) the goodness of God’s creation, including our bodies, 3) the redemptive significance of Jesus Christ’s incarnation, perfect life and bodily resurrection, 4) that our ultimate destiny is to live in resurrected bodies in the New Heavens and New Earth, and 5) the value of the present world and our participation in God’s renewing work by the power of the Spirit. The church’s struggle against Gnosticism can help us to see how these five realities hang together. As we have seen, much contemporary Christianity has seen fit to overlook the last two points – that is, the New Creation and the significance of our lives in the present. The same was true of ancient Gnosticism. Yet the early church’s rejection of Gnosticism showed that if we reject the New Creation and the goodness of the present life, then we are also rejecting the first three points: the goodness of God and his creation, and the full scope of Christ’s redeeming work.

So let’s go back to the second half of the second century, when the threat of Gnosticism was reaching a high point.

To complicate matters, at this early date the church had not come to a definitive consensus on what writings should be included in the New Testament. They accepted the Old Testament, and there were various circulating collections of the apostolic writings that would take final shape in what we now call the New Testament. But the church was only gradually forced to come to a consensus in its recognition of what books God had indeed inspired and intended to be the authoritative foundation for the church’s faith and life. This temporary fluidity of the canon should not be exaggerated — there was general agreement on what texts were authoritative, and there was a clearly emerging “rule of faith” (which became the Creed) that helped define the boundaries of orthodoxy, or “right teaching.” But the lack of a universally recognized Bible did make it easier for some heretical groups to claim that their own texts were in fact inspired by God.

And this was precisely what the movement we refer to as “Gnostic Christianity” did. The term “Gnosticism” when applied to ancient church history refers to a group of heresies that share some common “Gnostic” characteristics. The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek word “Gnosis,” which means “knowledge.” And this is what the Gnostics claimed they had, that is, “special knowledge.” Salvation, they believed, was not accomplished by Christ, as the New Testament teaches. Instead, Christ came to reveal special knowledge so that the elect would know the secrets that could free their spirits from this miserable creation, so that they might re-enter the world of spirit from which they originally came.

According to the elaborate and frankly bizarre mythology of Gnosticism, their spirits used to exist in a spirit world formed by a series of emanations of deities that came out from the Supreme God, who was unknowable. But these spirits had become trapped in human souls and bodies and were imprisoned in this evil, material world whose Creator was an evil, nasty lesser god. Often they actually identified this evil creator god with the God of the Old Testament, and they ridiculed him as vindictive and cruel. But they thought the God of the New Testament, the Father of Jesus, was a God of love who sought to free the elect from the evil materiality of this world and their bodies. “The elect” were a select group in whom a “spark of divinity” had been implanted prior to their imprisonment here. With the special gnosis or knowledge, they could reconnect with the spirit world. The special knowledge included a series of secret passwords that they needed to know in order to pass through the required levels of the spirit world in order to make it back to their eternal home.

Now, the Gnostics believed Jesus came to reveal this special knowledge to the elect. Because the Gnostics believed matter was evil, they taught that Jesus only appeared to be a man. Furthermore, it should be apparent that on this view he could not actually crucified; someone else was crucified in his place, while he returned to the supreme God. For Gnostics, Jesus came as a perfect spirit to reveal knowledge of salvation; so the incarnation, fully human perfect life and bodily death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were outside their understanding of salvation.

The Gnostics also believed that during his earthly ministry, Jesus revealed the special gnosis only in a thickly veiled form, such as in parables. So we would look in vain to the Bible alone for such saving knowledge. Instead, they believed that, after his “resurrection,” Jesus gave the special gnosis to a select few, special apostles. Armed with this special gnosis, one could then use it as a code of sorts to then go back and understand the writings of the Old and New Testaments accordingly. In this way, the Gnostics could cite the Bible, but it was cleverly filtered through their independent system of belief that they said was specially revealed to them by the voice of the risen Christ. Among their favorite verses from the Bible were sayings of Jesus like, “The Kingdom of God is within you,” to which they attached their own special meaning. In any case, the insufficiency of the apostolic writings that now form the New Testament, and the need for their special gnosis, led them to write their own Gnostic Gospels. So, it goes without saying that, because the Catholic or Universal Church relied on the writings of the New Testament apart from this “special gnosis,” the Gnostics battled against the institution of the church and believed it did not possess the real truth.

So, here’s a summary of ancient Gnostic spirituality. Listen for the modern parallels, too: they viewed material existence, including their bodies, as something to be escaped; their true selves were a “spark of divinity” that they found by turning inward into themselves; special knowledge could free this spark of divinity from the confines of material reality; they used their eclectic beliefs to filter the teaching of Scripture; and they warred against the institutional church. You can see the remarkable similarities between ancient Gnostic spirituality and the spiritual ethos of the modern western world, both within the church and outside it. Numerous scholars have drawn the parallels between ancient times and today.

It’s well known that a number of the “secret Gnostic Gospels” were discovered in Egypt in 1948, and their likeness to much contemporary spirituality has given them enormous popularity. For instance, there is the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth. The famous book and movie the Da Vinci Code is, of course, about Gnostic Gospels, replete with the “special codes” and a very negative view of the institutional church.

Back in the 2nd century, let’s see how the church responded to these Gnostic beliefs. In particular, I want to look at the one early church father who did more than any other to confront the challenge of Gnosticism. This was Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons from about 177AD until his dead about twenty-five years later. Irenaeus wrote a collection of five books entitled, A Denunciation and Refutation of the So-called Gnosis, or as often more simply called, Against Heresies. In this work, Irenaeus set out the main lines of what became the enduring Christian response to Gnosticism. (This work is important for other reasons as well; his appeal to the authority of Scripture and to the unbroken succession through which he believed orthodox doctrine had been handed down from the apostles also had a significant impact on the church’s thinking about “Christian authorities.”)

In order to refute Gnosticism, Irenaeus employed several approaches. He spent the whole first book of Against Heresies simply outlining Gnostic beliefs, which we have merely summarized above. To some extent, just to explain some of the Gnostic “secrets” is to have refuted them, for they seemed quite fanciful even in ancient times. Outlining Gnostic beliefs also served the purpose of showing how their teachings worked as a package, so to speak, a total system: their understanding of creation, for instance, relates directly to their understanding of redemption: if you do not believe creation is good, then nor would you think a good God would seek to redeem it. Or, as the case might be stated for modern forms of Gnostic Christianity, if you reject the redemption of creation in favor of eternity as a disembodied soul, then it seems you’re implying either that God’s act of creation is not good, or that God is not good, or both.

But Irenaeus does not stop with a negative rejection of Gnosticism; he also states the case for biblical Christianity positively as well. The Gnostics had divided up the Bible and driven a wedge between the Old and New Testaments. But Irenaeus showed that the Bible tells ones universal story. The story begins at creation. And after sin enters the world, what we find is one great drama of redemption that leads to the New Creation, the restoration of all things in the New Heavens and New Earth.
At the outset of Book II of Against Heresies, Irenaeus begins by summarizing the Bible’s teaching on the unity of God, the goodness of the Creator and the goodness of the creation. He writes:

It is proper, then, that I should begin with the first and most important point, that is, God the Creator, who made the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein (whom these men blasphemously style the fruit of a defect), and to demonstrate that there is nothing either above Him or after Him; nor that, influenced by any one, but of His own free will, He created all things, since He is the only God, the only Lord, the only Creator, the only Father, alone containing all things, and Himself commanding all things into existence.

There is only one God, and he is both the Creator of all things and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and he is good. The creation, which was created by God out of nothing, is therefore a good gift for which we should give thanks, and Irenaeus goes on at length – sometimes with intentional humor – about how the Gnostics are ungrateful creatures who “blaspheme their Creator after a most impudent manner.”

Furthermore, while the Gnostics thought the very creation of human beings was the fall of humanity into sin and corruption — since matter is evil — Irenaeus sets out the biblical teaching that God created human beings good, both body and soul. The evil in the world and in humanity is not the result of creation. Rather, as is taught in Genesis, it is the result of human sin, led by the first man, Adam. Irenaeus then sees the whole narrative of Scripture as the revelation of God’s activity to gather up the present fallen order of things, to transform it and carry it into the eternal Kingdom of God.

As he elaborated the biblical doctrine of redemption, Irenaeus gave full weight to the story of redemption in both the Old and New Testaments. Whereas the Gnostics saw a sharp division between the Old and New Testaments, Irenaeus saw a beautiful continuity. He put a great deal of emphasis on God’s progressive establishment of covenants with humanity: In the Old Testament, with Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses. Through these covenants God was preparing humanity to receive the incarnation of the Son of God.

By lifting up the unfolding character of redemption in history, Irenaeus shows that world history is the story of God’s progressive redemptive activity. This history is not “empty and meaningless,” and it will not, Irenaeus insists, end in destruction or the discarding of the world as irrelevant and useless. It is, instead, precisely what God is redeeming along with humanity. History is heading toward fulfillment, rather than annihilation.

At the climax of God’s redemptive activity in the world is Jesus Christ: his incarnation, perfect human life and bodily resurrection. These events, along with the continuing ministry of the resurrected Christ in the power of the Spirit, are the culmination of God’s work revealed to us in the Old Testament.

In the incarnation, the Son of God becomes human so that he can be the head of a new humanity. Adam was the first head of humanity, and it was because of his sin that the order of all things was turned away from God; but in Christ, the Second Adam, who was perfect, humanity and indeed the order of this world are taken up in order that they might be redeemed. Building on Ephesians 1:10, Irenaeus described what happened in the incarnation this way: “at the end of the times appearing to all the world as man, the Word of God gathering up in Himself all things that are in heaven and that are on earth.”

If in his incarnation Jesus is the Second Adam who can set humanity and the world right, then in his bodily resurrection he accomplishes the ultimate victory over sin and the Devil for both humanity and for the world. The Gnostics had denied even the bodily birth of Jesus, since that would mean Jesus was associated with matter. But Irenaeus replies, focusing on what that would mean for Christ’s resurrection and the hope of the world:

“Now, if He was not born, neither did He die; and, if He died not, neither did He rise from the dead; and, if He rose not from the dead, neither did He vanquish death and bring its reign to nought; and if death be not vanquished, how can we ascend to life, who from the beginning have fallen under death? So then those who take away redemption from man, and believe not God that He will raise them from the dead, these also despise the birth of our Lord, which He underwent on our behalf, that the Word of God should be made flesh in order that He might manifest the resurrection of the flesh, and might have pre-eminence over all things in the heavens, as the first-born and eldest offspring of the thought of the Father, the Word, fulfilling all things, and Himself guiding and ruling upon earth.”

The resurrection of Jesus Christ guarantees the promise of our resurrection and the establishment of the New Creation, where Jesus will be “ruling upon earth.” Christ’s fulfillment of all things and his ruling upon the earth will ultimately be visible in the transformation of this world when Christ returns and establishes the New Heavens and New Earth.

In one remarkable passage Irenaeus, at the very end of Against Heresies, sums up his understanding of the future life; he outlines his view of the physicality of the future resurrected life in the New Creation, and its relationship to the goodness of God and our life in the present. Building on a host of biblical prophecies from Isaiah to Revelation, as well as the general pattern of redemptive history, Irenaeus writes of what will happen when Christ returns:

“For since there are real men, so must there also be a real establishment (plantationem), that they vanish not away among non-existent things, but progress among those which have an actual existence. For neither is the substance nor the essence of the creation annihilated (for faithful and true is He who has established it), but “the fashion of the world passeth away;” (1 Cor. 7:31, Rev. 21)….And therefore this [present] fashion has been formed temporary…But when this [present] fashion [of things] passes away, and man has been renewed, and flourishes in an incorruptible state, so as to preclude the possibility of becoming old, [then] there shall be the new heaven and the new earth, in which the new man shall remain [continually], always holding fresh converse with God. And since these things shall ever continue without end, Isaiah declares, ‘For as the new heavens and the new earth which I do make, continue in my sight, saith the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain.’”

What a magnificent affirmation of the biblical promise. Because the God who created all things is good, he will refashion and not destroy his creation, including the bodies and souls of those who are in Christ. Irenaeus carefully acknowledges the teaching of Scripture, clear, for instance, in Revelation 21, that it is the present order or fashion of things that will pass away; the world will be renewed and will become the Kingdom of God when heaven and earth unite.

Thus, he highlights the remarkable continuity between the present life and the next life. The order of things will change: sin will be judged, corruption will be overcome, disorder will become ordered. But the world and its history will go on in a transformed fashion and become the Kingdom of God. As Paul says in Romans 8:21, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Such a biblical view of the continuity between the present and the future life opens up wide vistas of meaning and purpose for life in the present. It means that our service to Jesus Christ in all spheres of his creation will not be meaningless and irrelevant in the end; rather, they participate in the providential and redemptive history through which God is working to restore all things to himself. God will not simply destroy our work, our relationships, our art, our culture, our humanity. Nor will he destroy the creation. Rather, he will redeem these things. Our job as Christians is to nurture and cultivate God’s creation, which is full of meaning and purpose, honoring our creator and preparing for the consummation of the Kingdom.

Finally, I want us to see how we could possibly live up to such a high calling, to prepare for the consummation of the Kingdom. Irenaeus shows that the church can fulfill this vocation because the redemptive work of Christ has made possible the re-union of humanity and the Spirit of God. Pointing to biblical texts like 2 Corinthians 5:5 and Ephesians 1:14, Irenaeus speaks of the Spirit’s work in us as “tending towards completion, and preparing us for incorruption, being little by little accustomed to receive and bear God.” The “earthly kingdom” now – the reign of Christ by the Spirit through those who believe in him – is the “commencement of incorruption” in this world that, when Christ returns, will be advanced to perfection in the New Heavens and New Earth. This is not an arrogant triumphalism, but a joyful calling to engage God’s world to promote the beauty and justice and truth of God.

I hope it is clear just how far away we are now from the prevailing view of our history and this world as “empty and meaningless,” a view often coupled with a truncated, immaterial vision of the future life.

To sum up, we have seen how the early church’s struggle against the Gnostics demonstrates the close linkage between our view of the future life, and our view of the nature of this world and the goodness of the Creator of this world. It was logical and consistent for the Gnostics, for whom this world was only nasty and evil, to ridicule its Creator and indeed consider the Creator to be different from the loving God who sent Jesus to save them from it.

The Gnosticism that tends to influence the modern church is less consistent. Modern Christians who seek to escape this world and their bodies for all eternity, and who view the present course of history as ultimately meaningless, are not, at the same time, explicitly ridiculing their Creator. But such a shortsighted hope for escape rather than renewal is a far cry from the robust biblical promises of God, and it fails to honor God whose work in the world is redeeming rather than annihilating his creation.

God has not left us in a world without meaning and purpose. Rather, he has called us into this world, to participate in his renewing work by the power of the Spirit, as he prepares us and this world for the New Creation, our future life.

Next week, we’ll continue the story of the future life by investigating how the church’s views about life between death and resurrection have developed over time. If our ultimate destiny is life with the Lord in resurrected bodies in the New Creation, a transformed life that will begin when Jesus returns, what happens to those who die in Christ before Jesus returns? This will get us into the question of an “intermediate state,” whether or not our souls continue to live, temporarily, apart from our bodies. (I think the answer is a confident “yes.”) And finally in the third week we’ll look at how the church has wrestled with the question of when Christ will return, and how it will happen. Is the end of the present order of things coming soon? Will there be a so-called “rapture” of the church followed by a thousand year reign of Christ on earth, as the popular book series, Left Behind, teaches?

I hope you’ll continue on this journey with me into the “story of the future life.”

And how we view the future is indicative of what we think God really cares about — what is God’s ultimate plan for the world? What is the goal toward which everything is moving? When Christians think that all God really cares about is the spirit (or “soul”) of human beings, and not the whole created order (including our bodies), then this profoundly shapes our orientation toward life in the present. Do we attend only to “the soul,” or also to the body, or indeed to the whole creation? If God cares about and is redeeming all of it, then the scope of our participation in God’s mission includes all of it. (N.T. Wright has a nice interview in Time Magazine on this issue, emphasizing the cosmic scope of redemption, the truth that in Jesus Christ God is working out the redemption of all things. I posted a sermon I recently preached on this issue as well.)

I’m thinking about this today because I happened to be reading the early church father Irenaeus, who related this issue very practically to a host of issues in his struggle against Gnosticism in the early church. In the section cited in my devotional reading this morning, he points to the fact that our calling to offer material things to God speaks to God’s redemptive purposes for creation.  Irenaeus points out that it doesn’t make sense to offer to God what one thinks God cares little or nothing about — we offer “our” treasure and care for those in physical need, for instance, precisely because God intends his creation and all our “posessions” to be ordered around his redemptive purposes in the world, which are indeed cosmic in scope.  We don’t offer material things to God to prove that they don’t matter to us, so that we can get rid of what God doesn’t care about.  Rather, we offer them to God so that they can be used in a manner consistent with his mission to restore all things to himself — precisely because he does care about them.

Of course, Irenaeus ultimately grounds his discussion of these things in the incarnation — God uniting himself to humanity and to the physical world when he becomes human as Jesus Christ — and in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the firstfruits of the New Creation. And in the section I read today he also applies God’s work in redeeming “flesh” to the regular worship of the Church, through the Eucharist: physical elements that by the Spirit provide nourishment to our bodies and our souls, by communicating the body and blood of Christ to us:

“Then, again, how can they say that the flesh, which is nourished with the body of the Lord and with His blood, goes to corruption, and does not partake of life? Let them, therefore, either alter their opinion, or cease from offering the things just mentioned. But our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion. For we offer to Him His own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and Spirit. For as the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 18.5).

Whenever we offer material things to God (whether in the form of financial resources, caring for the creation or those in physical need, etc.), and whenever we participate in the Eucharist, we do so because our bodies and the physicality of all creation are part of the fabric of God’s good intentions for us and for the world, and indeed a part of what God is redeeming in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit.

In Deuteronomy 7:2, for instance, Moses tells the Israelites that when they enter the Land of Canaan, which God had promised to give them, they will encounter its current inhabitants whom they “must destroy totally.” And then in the description of the conquest in Joshua we find these instructions carried out in a sweeping manner. For instance, in Joshua 6, after God collapses the walls of Jericho, the Israelites “devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” The Hebrew word here translated “devoted” is herem and it’s a technical term in a variety of such Old Testament passages describing things (and people) that Israel was supposed to “devote” to the Lord, often devotion through destruction: “Herem War.”

Some refer to the Conquest of Canaan as “genocide,” since the term means the “killing of a people,” which is exactly what’s described in the Book of Joshua. God’s covenant people were to be holy, and the rationale of the Conquest seems to have been that the whole Canaanite culture of worshipping false gods in the Land needed to be eradicated so that Israel would not be tempted to violate their covenant with God and themselves be destroyed (Deut. 7:4).

These passages certainly jolt modern readers, and undoubtedly they were intended to raise the eyebrows of their ancient near eastern readers as well. I have recently had some conversations about these passages, considering them in light of the character of God, the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament, and “holy war” themes in the modern geopolitical landscape. Of course, these are areas of disagreement among Christians, and tomes have been written on each of these issues. But here are a few things that have come up in conversation.

The Broader Drama of Redemption

First things first: it is important to remember that the Conquest of Canaan is one event in the broader drama of God’s war against sin and evil, and his mercy toward sinful humanity. Ultimately, ancient Israel, including the Conquest of Canaan, played an indispensable part in the story we now know climaxes in Jesus Christ, through whom salvation is brought to all nations of the earth. Our reading of the Conquest narratives should begin with this in mind.

In the course of redemptive-history, God’s justice and mercy always go together. Put bluntly and simply, in the broader biblical narrative, God both extends grace toward humanity by saving some and judges humanity in destroying others. The story of the Flood in Genesis is a gruesome example (Genesis 6-9). While we like to make it a cute story to depict on the wall of children’s nurseries, the story is about how God destroys just about every living thing on earth, because it had become so corrupt. The mercy of God is seen in his provision of salvation for a few through Noah and the Ark. This story highlights God’s willingness to judge human sin through destruction and shows God’s mercy by giving humanity a fresh start. This theme runs throughout Scripture, right up to the Final Judgment when the Messiah returns. When we take sin as seriously as God does, including our own, the horror of human destruction doesn’t diminish, but we gain a perspective unlike the modern presumption of human goodness and belief in a distant and benign Creator. God is very much involved in history; and God is both just and merciful in the face of human sin and rebellion.

The uniqueness of the Conquest of Canaan, then, seems not to be that God would destroy human beings but that (a) he would single out a particular people group for destruction and (b) he would use one people group as his instrument to destroy another. Hence, the term “genocide” applied to this instance.

Looking More Closely at Some Aspects of the Conquest

While I don’t think there is any way to avoid characterizing the biblical narrative of the Conquest as “genocidal,” there are several other important things to keep in mind. The biblical narrative of the Conquest does not simply focus on one ethnic group (Israel) wiping out another ethnic group (the Canaanites). True to the broader scope of redemption just mentioned, it really focuses on God (the primary “protagonist”) vs. sin and idolatry (the primary “antagonist”). We see this in the story in numerous ways.

The Canaanites are pictured as wicked and idolatrous, toward whom their Creator, who is owed perfect obedience, exercises forbearance (Gen 15:16). And when the Canaanites are destroyed, the biblical narratives go to great lengths to emphasize that God achieves their destruction, not the Israelite solders: it is God who collapses the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6), and it is God who “threw down huge hail stones from heaven” on the Amorites, and “there were more who died because of the hailstones than the Israelites killed with the sword” (Josh. 10:11).

That the drama is really about God vs. his enemies and not Israel vs. the Canaanites can also be seen in God’s willingness to punish Israel when they turn against him: he sends them into Exile (e.g. 2 Kings 17). In the story of the Conquest, God had chosen them to be his covenant people who would receive the gift of the Land in which they were to live in holiness. When they violate their covenant with God, the instrument of destruction becomes the object of wrath.

We can also see the primacy of the covenantal nature of the relationship and the less-than-“pure” ethnic identification by the fact that Canaanites could apparently be spared by repenting and turning to God, such as in the case of Rahab and her family (Josh. 2). God’s covenant people were not strictly defined by ethnicity but rather by covenant faithfulness.

Additionally, “the commander of the army of the Lord” who comes to Joshua in a vision refuses to identify himself with the side of Israel (Josh. 5:13-15). That would be a misconstrual of the situation. Israel has been brought onto God’s side and has been given a special role to play in God’s fight against sin and evil; God has not come to take up arms for Israel.

Further still, and very importantly, the special role given to Israel in fighting the Canaanites was in the end not for the sake only of the nation of Israel but was one part of God’s ultimate plan to use Israel as a blessing to all nations of the earth (Gen. 12:1-4).

To the above clarification about who is really doing the fighting and why, we should note that the “special role” that the nation of Israel was given in carrying out a policy of Herem War was strictly limited to the era of the Conquest. God gives no extension to the policy beyond that particular campaign.

The above points at least help us to place the story in the broader plan of redemption and in the light of God’s justice and mercy. And though those who are prone to misuse biblical texts are not prone to careful exegesis, keeping these things in mind should also distance the biblical narrative from any contemporary programs of nationalistic violence and ethnic cleansing.

The Warrior God In the New Testament

In the New Testament, the picture of God as a Warrior is by no means left behind. In many ways God’s judgment on the Canaanites as Israel enters the Promised Land foreshadows the Final Judgment, where the “King of kings” comes “to strike down the nations” prior to establishing the New Heaven and Earth in which the saints will reign with Christ forever (Rev. 19-22). Indeed, in his first advent, Jesus the King came to earth to battle against God’s enemies, and the victory of God was achieved through the cross, which mysteriously defeats the powers of darkness (Col. 2:15), and through the Resurrection, which triumphs over death and destruction once and for all.

As God’s New Covenant people await Christ’s return, when that victory will be fully manifest on earth, we continue the battle through spiritual warfare as we witness to the reign of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul famously puts it: “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). If in the “Old Covenant” (Old Testament) God’s covenant people took up physical arms for physical battles in the cause of God’s Kingdom, in the “New Covenant” (New Testament) the war enters a new phase of deep, spiritual intensity. God has fulfilled his promise to Abraham, that through his descendants all the nations of the earth would be blessed: God’s people are now not a “nation” but among all nations, and we conquer not by the sword by the proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus is already the reigning King who will come again.

This does not, however, mean that in this era, before Christ returns and takes up the sword himself (Rev. 19:15), that God has not given the power of the sword to anyone. In Romans 13, we read that God has given the power of the sword to legitimate “governing authorities” to be “the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” The “state” is supposed to reward righteousness and punish evil. In other words, they are to rule with justice, and they have been given the power of the sword in the service of justice.

And now for the question that I will take up in a day or two: can Christians then participate in the state’s God-ordained activity of ruling with justice by the sword? This is not entirely clear. In a subsequent post, I’ll write down some thoughts on Christian pacifism, which emphasizes Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence, and on just war theory, which emphasizes Christian responsibility to protect the lives of the innocent. In the meantime, here’s some reading to consider on the Conquest of Canaan and the politically charged yet biblical theme of God as a Warrior.

Some Suggested Reading on the Conquest of Canaan

The following are only a few suggestions. They are from authors who have what I would consider to be a “high view” of Scripture – in other words, they really try to deal with the theology of the Conquest narratives as they appear in Scripture, rather than setting them aside on the assumption that they merely represent a primitive religious consciousness in ancient Israel - though they represent a variety of approaches to the biblical narratives.

Goldingay, John. Israel’s Gospel. Old Testament Theology, Vol. 1. Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2003. See pages 474-505 along with the postscript on the nature of historical narratives in the Old Testament. I found Goldingay’s treatment of the Conquest to be provocative, even if not entirely convincing. He embraces a pretty flexible understanding of the historicity of Old Testament historical narratives, and in the case of the Conquest he does a theology of the history of Israel instead of a theology of the Old Testament narratives. In other words, he makes what he admits is a “large exception” to his usual methodology, and attempts to go behind the text to the actual “history” of Israel and do his theology with that “history behind the text” in mind. Because there are so many different views on what that actual history is, the net effect of focusing on the “history” in this case is to make the meaning of the narratives a bit more ambiguous and less offensive for modern readers. While I find this tempting, in order to be really convincing I think he needs to make a stronger case for why we should employ a different methodology in dealing with the Conquest narratives than with most other “historical narratives” in the Old Testament.

Gundry, Stanley N., ed. Show Them No Mercy: 4 Views on God and Canaanite Genocide. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003. Here are four different “conservative” approaches to the Conquest narratives and how they relate to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. The one I agree with the most is Tremper Longman’s essay, where he argues for the “spiritual continuity” between the Conquest narrative and life as the New Covenant people of God.

Longman, Tremper. God is a Warrior. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995. A more extended version of his essay in the above book.

Wright, N.T. Evil and the Justice of God. Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2006. A very good little book, a biblical theologian’s approach to re-framing a classic theological and philosophical problem. I hesitate to offer a quote from the book, because you really need the larger framework within which he’s working in order to place it, but nevertheless here’s part of what he says about the Conquest:

“We look back from our historical vantage point – and post-Enlightenment thought has looked back from its supposed position of moral superiority – and we shake our heads over the whole sorry business of conquest and settlement. Ethnic cleansing, we call it; however much the Israelites had suffered in Egypt, we find it hard to believe that they were justified in doing what they did to the Canaanites, or that the God who was involved in this operation was the same God we know in Jesus Christ.

And yet ever since the garden, ever since God’s grief over Noah, ever since Babel and Abraham, the story has been about the messy way in which God has had to work to bring the world out of the mess. Somehow, in a way we are inclined to find offensive, God has to get his boots muddy and, it seems, to get his hands bloody, to put the world back to rights. If we declare, as many have done, that we would rather it not so, we face a counter-question: Which bit of dry, clean ground are we standing on that we should pronounce on the matter with such certainty? Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared that the primal sin of humanity consisted in putting the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God. That is one of the further dark mysteries of Genesis 3: there must be some substantial continuity between what we mean by good and evil and what God means; otherwise we are in moral darkness indeed. But it serves as a warning to us not to pontificate with too much certainty about what God should and shouldn’t have done” (pp. 58-59).

David Van Biema, the article’s author and the senior religion writer for Time, visited a public school where a Bible course was being taught as part of the regular curriculum. He was encouraged to find that the teacher did a good job of presenting a religiously “neutral” position or “secular teaching” on the Bible. His point is that when teaching the Bible “neutrally” in public school we do our children an invaluable service: we inform them about a book without knowledge of which they could hardly be considered educated and we do it neutrally so as not to indoctrinate them or cross the constitutional lines separating church and state.

Biema says there is an upsurge of interest in teaching the Bible this way in public schools. It will certainly be interesting to watch this trend unfold. They do predict – surely correctly – that mistakes will be made, court cases will ensue, etc. But in the end he thinks it’ll be worth it. And I agree, with a few qualifications.

First I should say that the notion that a “secular teaching” on anything, much less an explicitly religious text, is religiously “neutral,” is a bit old-fashioned. There are certain “canons” or fundamental commitments of “secular reason” which make presumptions about reality, what counts for “truth,” and so on, that have quite religious implications, and therefore are not “neutral.” So just to clarify, however this shakes out, it won’t be “neutral.” That shouldn’t surprise anyone, but we should be aware of what we’re doing and the education must go on.

But I do think there is an approach that is more workable than most of the options presented by Biema. On the one hand, he notes the approach of the two leading curricula for teaching the Bible in public schools both have some potential problems with crossing constitutional lines. One, for instance, “still devotes 18 lines to the blatantly unscientific notion that the earth is only 6,000 years old.” So, on the other hand, Biema’s own approach seems to want all “unscientific” notions excised from the explanations of the Bible stories. And he goes on to say that proper teaching of the Bible in public schools must address “the Bible’s harmful as well as helpful uses.”

I can sympathize with Biema’s comments. On the creation issue, I’m not a “young earth” person and if the curriculum advocates that position, it’s inappropriate. And on the question of the “harmful and helpful uses” of the Bible, there are certainly both, and history gives us limitless examples of each. But Biema’s comments here set up a paradigm that would likely lead to a major and unnecessary clash of ideologies.

The problem I see beneath the surface of Biema’s approach is the problem with much contemporary education – it proposes an enormously prescriptive pedagogy and does so unawares. On the “helpful uses” question, for instance, who gets to decide? Clearly this isn’t neutral. When we make the “harmful/helpful” distinction in uses of the Bible or any topic we’re teaching, we do so because we’re making judgments about what’s appropriate and trying to produce a particular kind of person. And then we measure the subject matter, in this case the Bible, against that prescriptive criteria. So the question is, who gets to decide what are the appropriate uses of the Bible?

Normally in these cases, what’s considered “helpful” is something consistent with the faith of secular humanism – dismissing the distinctive truth claims of any of the major world religions and ending up with a kind of non-specific moralism that everyone can feel pretty good about. (I’m not against teaching moral principles in schools, but I am against filtering sacred texts down to such principles.)

And on the question of the “unscientific” stories of the Bible, well, this is a complicated topic but let’s just say the resurrection of Jesus is probably more “blatantly unscientific” than six-day creation. And while I would never expect teaching that claims “neutrality” to favor such an idea, which is the most central of all Christian teachings, I wouldn’t think such teaching would campaign against it either.

So here’s my modest proposal for a better approach: teach the Bible as literature, with sensitivity to literary context and the “history of reception” of this literature, i.e. hit the highlights of the major narrative framework of the Bible and the dominant trends in the history of biblical interpretation in western civilization. The whole thing should be “multi-perspectival”: views about the original literary intention of, say, the creation story of Genesis, and three or four representative ways the story has been “received” in the history of interpretation. This approach would be as descriptive as possible – making them familiar with the actual content of the Bible and the significant trends in interpretation – ancient, medieval, and modern. The question isn’t “do the first chapters of Genesis teach six-day creation?” but “how have these chapters been understood in western civilization, including (but not necessarily limited) to those who have accepted them as sacred writing?”

The point is that many folks, even those who favor a ‘secular’ teaching of the Bible in public schools, are still operating in a mold where the Bible in the secular teacher’s hands is a book that is making truth claims in the classroom, claims which must be vetted through the assumptions of scientific naturalism and lowest-common-denominator ethics. And while any sacred text could be said to be making certain truth claims implicitly whenever it is read, in the public schoolroom it is taught as we would teach any enormously influential body of literature produced over hundreds of years and interpreted in a whole variety of ways.

Biema may be assuming that the Bible in the classroom is still the Bible of the religious right, and no doubt there is some justification for this fear. But if we are too afraid of that possibility as we develop a better approach, we’ll end up with a secular humanist Bible, which isn’t any more “neutral.” While no method we choose will be neutral, a more literary-historical approach would serve public school students much better, and it would introduce them to Bible content and some significant ways it has shaped our civilization. And because it would at least attempt to set the truth claims and prescriptive applications off to the side, it might even make for a better run in the courts.

Stossel did a segment on risk-taking and the American fascination with danger, as part of his larger “Worry in America” series. During this segment he interviewed a psychologist who defended risk-taking and argued that experiencing danger was vital to our humanity. The segment argued that, from being a soldier in combat to base-jumping and various extreme sports, from firefighting to the exploits of “Jack Ass,” it’s all part of the human need to take risks in order to feel alive, complete, etc. It puts us in touch with a part of ourselves and even reality that we otherwise couldn’t experience. (Foucault called these “limit experiences,” but that didn’t make it onto 20/20.) After showing a clip of a man jumping from the Eiffel Tower with a parachute, they showed pictures of the Revolutionary War, noting that this was all part of a great American tradition of taking risks and feeling good about it. It’s the American way of life, they argued.

Does anyone else think this is ridiculous? Does anyone notice a slight difference between taking risks because one believes he is fighting for the freedom of his people — or any principle that transcends oneself — on the one hand, and just taking risks for the hell of it — to feel better about myself — on the other? Even if you wish we were still English colonies, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that the soldiers in the Revolutionary War were fighting simply in order to experience an adrenaline rush. I guess in a sensate culture, which is motivated by the need for more and more cycles of extreme elation and relaxed comfort, we are prone to interpret the aims and actions of previous eras in the same vein.

If we do this consistently, we’ll make history as boring and void of meaning as our own lives often are — the very condition that often leads to the extreme risk-taking and search for the adrenaline rush. I’m not an antiquarian longing for the good ‘ole days, but I’d prefer to have a past that can speak a word of hope and passion and self-transcending belief into the solipsism of the present.

(Another great irony in all this is that, as I understand it, one of Stossel’s aims in the show is to argue that Americans are too afraid, too worried about too many of the wrong things. This is true, of course. But it’s true because we’re afraid of those things that can interrupt our cycles of elation and comfort. Giving people statisical information about why they shouldn’t fear the things they are fearing will only shift the earthly object feared (e.g. a bike accident instead of a terrorist). It’s a problem with the soul. People worry too much because they are too turned in upon themselves, not because they don’t have good enough information about what dangers to avoid. As long our hopes are set on a pain free, adrenaline-infused existence, we’ll have morbid fear of anything that can take that away.)

“Chrysler is fighting for its survival again, a situation that lays bare
the failure of previous generations of managers to resolve, or even
fully address, its many fundamental problems. Rather than using crises
as opportunities to remake Chrysler in the model of its Japanese
competitors, say analysts conversant with the company’s trajectory, a
revolving cast of corporate stewards repeatedly relied on silver
bullets to revive the automaker. Over and over, they introduced a
single hot-selling model here or tightened the screws on suppliers
there, instead of doing the tougher work that real transformation
required.”

A tweak here and there, or a flashy new angle, isn’t going to bring life, at least not for long, though it’s what we most often try. To live, deep long-term transformation is required. Otherwise, we’ll just sputter out and get stuck on the side of the road.

While watching TV in airports recently (and I’m in airports quite a bit), I have heard lots of buzz about certain retail stores directing their employees not to say “Merry Christmas” to their customers. The idea is that it would offend people to give a holiday greeting that is fitting for only one of the many religious communities in the U.S.  So, rather than offend anyone, some stores have chosen the more ambiguous and universal “Happy Holidays.”

Some TV commentators have come out swinging, noting that not saying Merry Christmas may actually offend the majority of Americans (and so the majority of customers), who prefer the traditional phrase.  Often the defense of “Merry Christmas” comes not so much on the basis of an ideal “Christian America” as it does on the assertion that Christmas is not necessarily a religious designation, but rather the official name of the national holiday that we associate with a special kind of tree, Santa Claus, and gift-giving. So, “my goodness,” they insist, “say ‘Merry Christmas!’”

I experienced this debate over naming our seasonal bliss during a recent trip to that large discount store that has been in the news for other things as of late. When the cashier said “Happy Holidays!” to the customer in front of me, the customer was incensed. She replied by saying “You should say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Why can’t you just say ‘Merry Christmas!’” 

So next it was my turn. When I asked the cashier how she was doing today, she said, “Well, I’ve been cussed out twice by people who want me to say Merry Christmas” (a good Christian witness).  “I don’t want to offend anyone, because I can’t tell by what someone is wearing if the person celebrates Christmas or some other religious holiday, so I just say ‘Happy Holidays.’”  Since I was wearing my clerical collar, this was a perfect set up, and I said with a smile, “Well, you can tell by what I’m wearing!”  The other customers laughed. And the cashier smiled and said…“Happy Holidays!”  Yes, even in the South.

The debate over defining and naming what we do as an American retail culture during the month of December is a good illustration of the changing relationship between the church and the culture in which we find ourselves.  Christians have shaped the culture, so much so that our most significant national celebration is called Christmas. And the culture has returned the fashioning favor, often keeping the Christian name for nostalgic reasons and inviting us to participate in its own celebration. And we do. The sad thing is that Christians are often more outraged when the name starts to change than when the substance of the thing is replaced.

Whatever we do this Christmas, it is important for us as a church to anticipate and celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.  Who knows, perhaps fewer Christmas banners in department stores will be a good reminder to us that the key to Advent cannot be found in the store, and it may help us to encourage one another to observe Christmas in prayer, worshipful anticipation, and self-sacrificial community.

To see the letter, click here.

To see the press release accompanying the letter, click here.

To learn more about the Association for Church Renewal, click here.