Chuck's Column - 10/09/09
I think it comes as something of a shock to many Christians when they finally discover that there is actually very little in the Bible about "going to heaven when you die." Many Christians simply assume that whenever the New Testament speaks of heaven it refers to a place where the saved go after death.
In Matthew's Gospel the phrase "kingdom of heaven" replaces the phrase "kingdom of God" which occurs in the other Gospels. Matthew, writing mainly to Jewish Christians, adheres to the Jewish principle of substituting a word for "God" in reverence for the divine name.
Unfortunately, since many read Matthew's Gospel first, they automatically assume that the phrase "kingdom of heaven" is talking about the afterlife in a different world. Any Gospel scholar worth his or her salt would contend that neither Jesus nor Matthew had "heaven" (in the way many Christians conceive today) in mind when they used that phrase.
The "kingdom of God" in the preaching of Jesus never refers to the afterlife. It never refers to one's postmortem destiny or to escape from this world into some heavenly world. It refers, rather, to God's healing, transforming rule coming "on earth as it is in heaven," as Jesus taught his disciples to pray.
The Gospels indicate that Jesus believed in resurrection from the dead, but even then, his view of resurrection related not to some other world, but this world. In Jewish theology heaven was a rather ambiguous concept. Many Jews during the time of Jesus believed in a plurality of heavens or levels of heavenly reality, equating the last level with "paradise," a holding place for the righteous dead.
Whatever the nature of heavenly reality, Jesus was mostly concerned about earthly reality, about God's redeeming presence and power transforming this world. The hope of Jesus' first disciples had nothing at all to do with being snatched up to heaven, escaping this world, but had everything to do with Jesus' "coming" to this world, the manifesting of Christ's loving presence and compassionate rule in this world.
I believe in life after death, but life after death in some other reality is not the gospel of Jesus. The good news of Jesus is about God's new world of peace, non-violence, and distributive justice filling the earth. It's about relationships reconciled, communities healed, and societies transformed. It's about the law of love written on the minds and hearts of all people. It's about a world where all God's children have what they need to flourish and live an abundant life.
This is why, I believe, that the gospel preached in the "Left Behind" books is actually opposed to the basic message of Jesus. The gospel of Jesus is not about escaping this world and letting the rest of the world go to hell; the gospel of Jesus is about redeeming this world through the magnanimous, unconditional love of God.
The death and resurrection of Jesus is God's demonstration of how committed God is to the salvation of this world.