N. T. Wright on Hell and the Afterlife

Hell, of course, has been lavishly described by thousands of theologians, preachers and poets, notably Dante. The New Testament, interestingly, doesn’t have nearly as much to say about it, though there are plenty of warnings of judgment to come, couched in apocalyptic language which first century Jews would have found easier to decode than later Greek and Latin theologians. In particular, the warnings about Gehenna – which in Jesus’ day was the name of the smoldering rubbish heap outside the south-west corner of Jerusalem – must be read not so much as warnings about a fiery hell after death, but as warnings about catastrophes that might overwhelm the city and its inhabitants within the present world order.

We should remember especially that the use of the word ‘heaven’ to denote the ultimate goal of the redeemed, though hugely emphasized by medieval piety, mystery plays, and the like, and still almost universal at a popular level, is severely misleading and does not begin to do justice to the Christian hope. I am repeatedly frustrated by how hard it is to get this point through the thick wall of traditional thought and language that most Christians put up. ‘Going to Heaven when you die’ is not held out in the New Testament as the main goal. The main goal is to be bodily raised into the transformed, glorious likeness of Jesus Christ.

We have been fooled, not for the first time, by a view of death, and life beyond, in which the really important thing is the ‘soul’ – something which, to many people’s surprise, hardly features at all in the New Testament. We have allowed our view of the saving of souls to loom so large that we have failed to realize that the Bible is much more concerned about bodies.

The New Testament does indeed hold out great promises for a glorious future. Romans 5 and Romans 8 speak of the great sweep of God’s mercy, reconciling and freeing the whole cosmos. This doesn’t sound like a small group of people snatched away to salvation while the great majority faces destruction. Somehow, we have to hold all this together without cutting any knots. We should note, for instance, that even in the astonishing and moving vision of the New Jerusalem, the renewed heaven and earth, there are some still ‘outside’: the dogs, sorcerers, fornicators, murderers, idolaters and liars. It is hard to see how we can ignore such passages – and many similar ones in Paul and elsewhere – without being accused of trimming our theology to suit the prevailing desire to be nice to everybody, never to say anything which implies that someone might be in danger. There are mysteries here we should not reduce to simplistic formulae.

We should of course always stress that the question of who shall eventually be saved is up to God and God alone. I stress again that it is not up to us to say who’s in and who’s out. There is such a thing as a fundamentalist arrogance that declares that only its own type of Christian is the real thing, and that all others are a sham and heading for hell. But it is equally arrogant to insist that, because we must indeed be reticent at this point, we can cheerfully assume that everyone must be ‘in’.

These are some interesting thoughts by N. T Wright in his book ‘For All the Saints?: Remembering the Christian Departed’. I’ve been wanting to copy down some of what he wrote since I read it a few weeks back, but I haven’t had the time. With the mission trip now over, I can finally do it. Though this is not the main focus of the book, I would like to make a few conclusions here after reading and struggling about the issue of hell in recent months:-

1. The Bible is not as clear about hell and the afterlife as many of us have been brought up to think. There are mysteries here that we should not reduce to simple formulas. God is so much greater than we think He is!
2. I agree with N. T. Wright that it is not for us to say who is saved and who is not. Yes, I believe that as followers of Jesus, we can have the assurance that we will have that ‘everlasting life’ and eternal hope that the Bible talks about, whatever it is like. However, we cannot know for sure who is in or out, based on formulas like whether a person accepted Christ as personal Savior or not. We should just let God be God.