It occurs to me that in the previous piece I wrote about the afterlife I was a little unclear about which aspect of the afterlife I was on about!
For those of you whose interest was piqued enough to follow up any of the links I referenced, you will see that they relate more particularly to Christian teaching on the alternative to ‘heaven’. Thus you will find consideration of such things as: second death; ‘hell’; conditional or unconditional immortality; and so on.
While we’re here, regarding the other side of the post-mortem coin, I’d also say that my understanding of the Bible’s teaching on ‘heaven’ as the destination of the Christian believer, has been challenged over the years too. This has been a more straightforward process and I’d suggest a lot less controversial in my theological circles than the re-thinking hell conversation. I’ve found that the simple ‘going to heaven’ paradigm fed to most of us for so long was more reliant on popular cultural allusions than it was on the Bible. This, as I say, is fairly uncontroversial, and many have written and spoken on it, for example here and here.
The Biblical hope is of a redeemed new creation, a telos for this world which is far better news than the somewhat thin expectation many have been taught, of ‘going to heaven’. The Biblical story is geared towards this end: a marriage of heaven and earth in a finally perfected new creation. If you’ve never thought about this, and now wonder what I’m on about, you could do a lot worse than start with Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
The reality is that life is brief, and I assume that most of us, regardless of faith, have contemplated what comes after. To me it appears that this is one of the most crucial matters we can attend to. If eternity is at stake, surely it merits a little reading, a little discussion. a little curiosity.
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