Scott Mcknight | Revolution in Jesusland

An old new picture of Heaven July 21, 2008

Posted by Zack in Uncategorized | 23 comments

Popular theologian Scott McKnight has been writing a long series on what the Bible says about Heaven. Today he’s up to Part 12. McKnight says:

We are looking into such issues as whether or not “heaven” is the eternal home, or whether it is better to speak of “new heavens and new earth” as the eternal place, and then we are looking into whether heaven/new heavens is “up there” or the earth itself under new conditions as it is recreated. (From part 5.)

This changing picture of Heaven is the furnace that fuels the Revolution in Jesusland. (I guess that’s a weird metaphor.) As far as I can tell, the tension between the “up there” and “down here” versions of Heaven have been part of the church almost since the beginning. For much of the 20th century, it felt like the “up there” version had almost won the day forever. The drive of the born-again/evangelical church became to save as many souls as possible (i.e. get people to say they accept Jesus) to fill up Heaven. If it’s all about going to Heaven, then conditions on earth don’t matter much.

But then, in the 70’s, some theologians got an undertow going that eventually starting pulling seminarians and others back to the “down here” version. Those obscure theologians gave rise to best-selling popularizers, young mega-church pastors and thousands of young church planters who are sowing this new/very old version of the Gospel. That early undertow has progressed into a full tidal shift that’s pulling everyone over. In some churches this has led to controversy. But — and this is just anecdotal — I think that in most evangelical churches they are simply mixing up the two versions and the people in the pews don’t even notice that anything’s happening as their church moves along the continuum.

However, that may be my outsider’s bias speaking. There might be controversy everywhere that I’m just not seeing. For example, there was a church I attended in North Carolina. I was amazed at how radical the sermons were for being a middle class, white, Southern evangelical church. But the other day I heard the story of an Emergent pastor who kind of got pushed out for pushing things too far.

This Heaven question: this is what the Revolution in Jesusland is really all about. The revolutionaries believe in in a real Heaven. Most seem to believe in a future change that will be just as dramatic as Tim Lahay’s apocalypse as portrayed in his Left Behind series. But the Revolutionaries believe it will be peaceful. They believe the whole human race will be physically resurrected into amazing super bodies that never get sick and can probably fly. An actual New Jerusalem will descend from the sky — a giant urban cube (thus the wings!) about as big as Rhode Island. We’ll have the time to talk to everyone and do everything we’ve ever dreamed of, and to do it all twice. Every addict, every mentally ill person, every leader, every housewife, every nation and ethnicity from every era will all have the time to process all the crazy stuff we did here on old Earth, and then who knows what we’ll do after that. What a great vision though. But we’re building it. We have to build it. That’s what’s so cool about this vision of Revolution that American Christianity is taking on.

Anyways, check out Scott McKnight’s series on Heaven. And don’t forget to stop back and check the comments here where knowledgeable Christians will rightly take me to task for all the over simplifications in this post.

Tags: Heaven, scott mcknight

Obama-Dobson clash a fertile topic in Jesusland July 7, 2008

Posted by Zack in Uncategorized | write a comment

Obama’s willingness to engage the Christian Right directly in biblical terms has caused a lot of excitement among theologians and bloggers (and blogger-theologians). When the Democratic nominee can hold his own with James Dobson on the Bible, that’s a man-bites-dog story.

First, here’s a reminder of what Obama said recently in his engagement with Dobson. Then below, a post by popular born-again writer and theologian Scott McKnight. And this is a great example of the intellectualism of Jesusland. With these guys, a discussion of a CNN-style political dust up instantly takes us back to the Civil War and complex issues of race, class & theology.

Obama, as reported by the Washington Post:

“And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount — a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles now. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.”

Here’s McKnight:

Some thought Barack Obama’s comment about which passages we should choose if our country was to follow the Bible was messing with the authority of Scripture. What wasn’t clear in the criticisms of Obama was this: it was when Obama mentioned Sharpton and Dobson as folks at the ends of the interpretive spectrum that perhaps the most significant issue came to light. In other words: OK, let’s follow the Bible, but whose interpretation will we follow? You might want to know that the dean of American evangelical church historians, Mark Noll (formerly a mainstay at Wheaton and now at Notre Dame), has weighed in on this with a brilliant book many should read; the book is a set of lectures.

It is called The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

In essence, Noll argues that the Civil War precipitated a crisis, a major theological crisis. What the Civil War illuminated was that economics, race and slavery were so intertwined that discerning what was biblical and what was American and personal and denominational became confusing. When many thought they were fighting a slavery debate, they were so tied to their economic theories and blinded by their racism that they simply could not see their way to the Bible clearly.

Two options emerged from the Civil War: First, hand the business of theologians to the military generals and judge that the one who wins is also right theologically. Second, forget trying to base public policy on any one’s interpretation of Scripture. America, Noll argues, did the former during the Civil War and, ever since, has lived and dwelled in the second view.

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Read whole McKnight post here.