Year: 2009

James K. Baxter: ‘Letter from the Mountains’

Hemi at Jerusalem

Letter from the Mountains

There was a message. I have forgotten it.
There was a journey to make. It did not come to anything.
But these nights, my friend, under the iron roof
Of this old rabbiters’ hut where the traps
Are still hanging up on nails,
Lying in a dry bunk, I feel strangely at ease.
The true dreams, those longed-for strangers,
Begin to come to me through the gates of horn.

I will not explain them. But the city, all that other life
In which we crept sadly like animals
Through thickets of dark thorns, haunted by the moisture of women,
And the rock of barren friendship, has now another shape.
Yes, I thank you. I saw you rise like a Triton,
A great reddish gourd of flesh,
From the sofa at that last party, while your mistress smiled
That perfect smile, and shout as if drowning—
‘You are always—’
Despair is the only gift;
When it is shared, it becomes a different thing; like rock, like water;
And so you also can share this emptiness with me.

Tears from faces of stone. They are our own tears.
Even if I had forgotten them
The mountain that has taken my being to itself
Would still hang over this hut, with the dead and the living
Twined in its crevasses. My door has forgotten how to shut.

Encouragement for pastors to be pastors

Eugene Peterson is always worth listening to, and his writing on pastoral ministry is enormously encouraging. Here’s some snipperts from a Leadership interview with this pastor to pastors:

‘The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, “Let us worship God.” If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, and the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor. I pick up some other identity. I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to his Word, to offer themselves to God. Worship becomes a place where we have our lives redefined for us. If we’re no longer operating out of that redefinition, the pastoral job is hopeless. Or if not hopeless, it becomes a defection. We join the enemy. We’ve quit our basic work’.

‘I don’t ever want to convey that our primary job as pastors is to fix a problem. Our primary work is to make saints. We’re in the saint-making business. If we enter the human-potential business, we’ve lost our calling’.

‘I begin with the conviction that everything in the gospel is experience-able. As a pastor, whatever the person’s situation, you’re saying to yourself, This person can experience the gospel here. I haven’t a clue how it’s going to happen, but I’m willing to slog through whatever has to be slogged through and not give up. I will continue to keep the gospel clear on Sundays; I will continue to be a companion with this person on Fridays’.

‘You cannot go to a pulpit week after week and preach truth accurately without constant study. Our minds blur on us, and we need that constant sharpening of our minds. And without study, without the use of our mind in a disciplined way, we are sitting ducks for the culture’.

‘I get my job description from the Scriptures, from my ordination vows. If I let the congregation decide what I’m going to do, I’m as bad as a doctor who prescribes drugs on request. Medical societies throw out doctors for doing that kind of thing; we need theological societies to throw out pastors for doing the same thing. And if you give up prayer and study, you will soon give up the third area: people’.

‘Listening, paying attention to people is the most inefficient way to do anything. It’s tedious, and it’s boring, and when you do it, it feels like you’re wasting time and not getting anything done. So when the pressures start to mount, when there are committees to run to and budgets to fix, what’s got to go? Listening to people. Seeing them in their uniqueness, without expecting anything of them. You quit paying attention, and people get categorized and recruited. It doesn’t take long for pastors to become good manipulators. Most of us learn those skills pretty quickly. If you can make a person feel guilty, you can make him or her do almost anything. And who’s better at guilt than pastors?’

‘The person who prays for you from the pulpit on Sunday should be the person who prays for you when you’re dying. Then there’s a connection between this world and the world proclaimed in worship. Classically – and I have not seen anything in the twentieth century that has made me revise my expectation – a pastor is local. You know people’s names, and they know your name. There’s no way to put pastoral work on an assembly line … Pastoral care can be shared, but never delegated. If the congregation perceives that I exempt myself from that kind of work, then I become an expert. I become somehow elitist; I’m no longer on their level. Elitism is an old demon that plagues the church’.

‘The church is not a functional place. It’s a place of being’.

‘It’s odd: We live in this so-called postmodernist time, and yet so much of the public image of the church is this rational, management-efficient model. If the postmodernists are right, that model is passe; it doesn’t work any more. In that sense, I find myself quite comfortably postmodern. I think pastors need to cultivate “unbusyness.” I use that word a lot. My father was a butcher. When he delivered meat to restaurants, he would sit at the counter, have a cup of coffee and piece of pie, and waste time. But that time was critical for building relationships, for doing business. Sometimes I’m with pastors who don’t wander around. They don’t waste time. Their time is too valuable. They run to the tomb, and it’s empty, so they run back. They never see resurrection. Meanwhile, Mary’s wasting time; she’s wandering around. To be unbusy, you have to disengage yourself from egos – both yours and others – and start dealing with souls. Souls cannot be hurried’.

‘For me, being a pastor means being attentive to people. But the minute I start taking my cues from them, I quit being a pastor’.

‘Most pastoral work is slow work. It is not a program that you put in place and then have it happen. It’s a life. It’s a life of prayer’.

To read the whole interview: Part I; Part II.

Hauerwas on sex, marriage, politics and love

Jan van Eyck, ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’ (1434). Oil on oak panel of 3 vertical boards; National Gallery, London.

‘The dominant assumption has been that the evaluation of different kinds of sexual expressions should center on whether they are or are not expressive of love. On the contrary, the ethics of sex must begin with political considerations, because ethically the issue of the proper form of sexual activity raises the most profound issues about the nature and form of political community. I am not denying that sex obviously has to do with interpersonal matters, but I am asserting that we do not even know what we need to say about the personal level until we have some sense of the political context necessary for the ordering of sexual activity. Indeed, one of the main difficulties with the assumption that thc ethics of sex can be determined on the basis of interpersonal criteria is the failure to see how that assumption itself reflects a political option. To reduce issues of sexuality to the question of whether acts of sex are or are not fulfilling for those involved is to manifest the assumption of political liberalism that sex is a private matter. The hold this political theory has on us is illustrated by how readily we also accept the assumption that the private nature of sexuality does not involve issues of political theory …

‘We must understand that if Christians and non-Christians differ over marriage, that difference does not lie in their understanding of the quality of interpersonal relationship needed to enter or sustain a marriage, but rather in a disagreement about the nature of marriage and its place in the Christian and national community. Christians above all should note that there are no conceptual or institutional reasons that require love between the parties to exist in order for the marriage to be successful …

The requirement of love in marriage is not correlative to the intrinsic nature of marriage but is based on the admonition for Christians to love one another. We do not love because we are married, but because we are Christian. We may, however, learn what such love is like within the context of marriage. For the Christian tradition claims that marriage helps to support an inclusive community of love by grounding it in a pattern of faithfulness toward another. The love that is required in marriage functions politically by defining the nature of Christian social order, and as children arrive they are trained in that order.

Moreover, Christians should see that the family cannot, contrary to [Bertrand] Russell’s claim, exist as an end in itself nor by itself provide a sufficient check against pretentious rationalism. Such an assumption is but a continuation of the liberal perversion of the family and only makes the family and marriage more personally destructive. When families exist for no reason other than their own existence, they become quasi-churches, which ask sacrifices far too great and for insufficient reasons. The risk of families which demand that we love one another can be taken only when there are sustaining communities with sufficient convictions that can provide means to form and limit the status of the family. If the family does stand as a necessary check on the state, as Russell and I both think it should, it does so because it first has a place in an institution that also stands against the state – the church …

‘ … the ambivalence of the church toward marriage is grounded in the eschatological convictions which freed some from the necessity of marriage – i.e., singleness becomes a genuine option for service to the community. This is a dangerous doctrine indeed, for it is a strange community which would risk giving singleness an equal status with marriage. But that is what the church did, and as a result marriage was made a vocation rather than a natural necessity. But as a vocation, marriage can be sustained only so long as it is clear what purposes it serves in the community which created it in the first place. With the loss of such a community sanction, we are left with the bare assumption that marriage is a voluntary institution motivated by the need for interpersonal intimacy …

‘Many want to treat sex as just another form of communication – like shaking hands. I suppose in response to such a suggestion one can at least point out that sex is often more fun than shaking hands. However, the reason that we seem to assume that sex should be reserved for “special relations” is not that sex itself is special, but that the nature of sex serves the ends of intimacy. But intimacy is indeed a tricky matter to sustain, and that may be the reason why many have argued that marriage is necessary to provide the perduring framework to sustain intimacy.

Moreover, once the political function of marriage is understood to be central for the meaning and institution of marriage, we have a better idea of what kinds of people we ought to be to deal with marriage. Most of the literature that attempts to instruct us about getting along in marriage fails to face up to a fact so clearly true that I have dared to call it Hauerwas’s Law: You always marry the wrong person. It is as important to note, of course, as Herbert Richardson pointed out to me, that the reverse of the law is also true: namely, that you also always marry the right person. The point of the law is to suggest the inadequacy of the current assumption that the success or failure of a marriage can be determined by marrying the “right person.” Even if you have married the “right person,” there is no guarantee that he or she will remain such, for people have a disturbing tendency to change. Indeed, it seems that many so-called “happy marriages” are such because of the partners’ efforts to preserve “love” by preventing either from changing.

This law is meant not only to challenge current romantic assumptions but to point out that marriage is a more basic reality than the interpersonal relations which may or may not characterize a particular marriage. Indeed, the demand that those in a marriage love one another requires that marriage have a basis other than the love itself. For it is only on such a basis that we can have any idea of how we should love’.

– Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and “Human Sexuality”‘.

Aliens in the Church: A Reflection on ANZAC Day, National Flags and the Church as an Alternative Society

Hagia Sophia - Mosaic of Christ with Constantine IX and Zoe

‘There is no agreement between the divine and the human sacrament, the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, the camp of light and the camp of darkness. One soul cannot be due to two masters — God and Cæsar’. So was Tertullian’s response (in On Idolatry 19) to a question he posed of ‘whether a believer may turn himself unto military service, and whether the military may be admitted unto the faith, even the rank and file, or each inferior grade, to whom there is no necessity for taking part in sacrifices or capital punishments’.

My recent return to the Antipodes (after only 3 years) has been met with something of a shock at what I observe to be a distinct revival of patriotism in this part of the world symbolised not least in the hoisting of national flags. I can only interpret this as a public confession that the soul of the nation is distressed. Holding this thought, I remember once hearing (on tape) the great Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones lamenting that the saddest day in ecclesiastical history was when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. (Of course, it may been different if Constantine had turned out to be a different kind of Emperor, but that’s not my point here). At the time, I wondered if this was a bit of an overstatement (a brilliant preacher’s rhetoric beclouding more constrained reflection on what is only one of millions of possible ‘saddest day’ candidates), but he was certainly onto something: that the Church’s jumping into bed with and baptising nationhood with its programs and events – such as Anzac Day – serves to highlight yet again that there is literally all the difference in the world between discipleship and citizenship, that with or without the third verse the Church cannot in good conscience sing the hymn ‘I vow to thee, my country’, words which were rung out at many a recent Anzac Day service. (And while I’m on Anzac Day services, let me tout that the Church can only faithfully recall the deaths that war has claimed if she does so as part of her proclamation against all war.)

The Church betrays its witness to the one Word of God when she includes a national flag among – or alongside – her emblems of worship. Nationalism and patriotism are always idolatrous enemies of a jealous Lord who tolerates no rivals. To see a national flag displayed in a place of Christian worship is to witness a message as scandalous and confusing as to see an ATM machine in a ‘church foyer’. Moreover, to witness (or to participate in) what Lesslie Newbigin described as ‘the Constantinian trap’ is to observe (and/or to participate in) the greatest of public failures – the denial of the Church’s font, table and pulpit, its raison d’être and its catholicity in the world. It is to preach that the greatest thing in the world – the Church – has become a chaplain of the State and its violent machinery. Paul Fromont recently gave voice to similar concerns by drawing upon Stanley Hauerwas’ writing as that concerned with ‘liberation’. For Hauerwas, he writes, this typically centres on a two-fold dynamic: (1) The liberation of the church from its captivity to agendas, values and practices intrinsically alien to its character and calling; and (2) liberation (in order to) restore the church to be and act as what [Hauerwas] terms a ‘free agent’ of the Kingdom appropriate to God’s agenda of the salvation of the cosmos and its re-creation (cf. Rev 21:1; Rom 8:22). I recall Hauerwas’ words from another context: to ‘worship in a church with an American flag’ means that ‘your salvation is in doubt’. Patriotism is no Christian virtue. (See Hauerwas’ Dissent from the Homeland, p. 184). The problem in Germany during the 1930s and 40s wasn’t that German Christians draped the cross with a Nazi flag; it was that they draped the cross with a flag full stop. Christian communities ought remove all national flags from their places of worship, and to do so at least as publicly as when they were first placed there. The removal should be accompanied by a public prayer of confession for despoiling the Church’s witness to its Lord, and to its own catholicity.

Cologne Cathedral, 1937

Against those who contend that the Church’s role is to baptise those creations of common good that the State concerns itself with, William Cavanaugh, in his brilliant essay, ‘Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is not the Keeper of the Common Good’ (Modern Theology 20/2, 2004), observes that Christian social ethics more often than not proceed on the false assumption that the responsibility for promoting and protecting the common good falls to the State. He avers:

The nation-state is neither community writ large nor the protector of smaller communal spaces, but rather originates and grows over against truly common forms of life. This is not necessarily to say that the nation-state cannot and does not promote and protect some goods, or that any nation-state is entirely devoid of civic virtue, or that some forms of ad hoc cooperation with the government cannot be useful. It is to suggest that the nation-state is simply not in the common good business. At its most benign, the nation-state is most realistically likened, as in MacIntyre’s apt metaphor, to the telephone company, a large bureaucratic provider of goods and services that never quite provides value for money. The problem, as MacIntyre notes, is that the nation-state presents itself as so much more; namely, as the keeper of the common good and repository of sacred values that demands sacrifice on its behalf. The longing for genuine communion that Christians recognize at the heart of any truly common life is transferred onto the nation-state. Civic virtue and the goods of common life do not simply disappear; as Augustine saw, the earthly city flourishes by producing a distorted image of the heavenly city. The nation-state is a simulacrum of common life, where false order is parasitical on true order. In a bureaucratic order whose main function is to adjudicate struggles for power between various factions, a sense of unity is produced by the only means possible: sacrifice to false gods in war. The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the Church, meant to save us from division. The urgent task of the Church, then, is to demystify the nation-state and to treat it like the telephone company. At its best, the nation-state may provide goods and services that contribute to a certain limited order – mail delivery is a positive good. The state is not the keeper of the common good, however, and we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. The Church must break its imagination out of captivity to the nation-state. The Church must constitute itself as an alternative social space, and not simply rely on the nation-state to be its social presence. The Church needs, at every opportunity, to “complexify” space, that is, to promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish. (pp. 266–7)

Cavanaugh contends that by regarding the nation-state as responsible for the common good, ‘the Church’s voice in such crucial moral matters as war becomes muted, pushed to the margins. Just war reasoning becomes a tool of statecraft, most commonly used by the state to justify war, rather than a moral discipline for the Church to grapple with questions of violence. The Church itself becomes one more withering “intermediate association”, whose moral reasoning and moral formation are increasingly colonized by the nation-state and the market. To resist, the Church must at the very least reclaim its authority to judge if and when Christians can kill, and not abdicate that authority to the nation-state. To do so would be to create an alternative authority and space that does not simply mediate between state and individual’ (p. 268). That is why one appropriate Christian witness might be the refusal of those who reside in States where funding goes to pay for the machinery of aggressive war to withhold a percentage of their income tax commensurate with the State’s war budget. (Here I have in mind Yoder’s essay ‘Why I Don’t Pay All My Income Tax’).

While the Church shares some cultural space with the world, it is not an institution alongside others, and it exists for the propping up of none. The Church, as Peter Leithart argues in Against Christianity, is both ‘an alternative world unto herself’, and a participant in the Spirit’s ‘subversive mission of converting whatever culture she finds herself in’. And the Church participates in the second only as she lives authentically as the first – i.e. as she embodies an alternative Societas determined by its own jealous Servant-Lord and shaped by its own unique narrative. Christendom can never undertake this mission because it can only propose ideas or offer the Church as a ‘new sort of religious association’, essentially no different to a local lawn bowls club. It does not form an alternative city, a ‘new, eschatological ordering of human life’. ‘Constantinianism … is a theological and missiological mistake’ (Rodney Clapp).

If Leithart is right that the mission of the Church involves the converting of culture then, as I intimated above, this can only happen as the congregation of Jesus lives uncompromisingly under a different economy and politic. The consequence of such living will inevitably provoke a declaration of war by the gods. History is indeed the battle for worship, as the Book of the Revelation bears witness to.

Anyway, back to the issue of the flag. Few have named the stakes as cogently and as carefully as Karl Barth, with whose words I bring this post to a close:

[The] combining of the Word of Jesus Christ with the authority and contents of other supposed revelations and truths of God has been and is the weak point, revealed already in the gnosis attacked in the New Testament, at almost every stage in the history of the Christian Church. The prophecy of Jesus Christ has never been flatly denied, but fresh attempts have continually been made to list it with other principles, ideas and forces (and their prophecy) which are also regarded and lauded as divine, restricting its authority to what it can signify in co-ordination with them, and therefore to what remains when their authority is also granted. Nor is this trend characteristic only of early and mediaeval Catholicism. It is seen in Protestantism too, from the very outset in certain circles, even in the Reformers themselves, and then with increasing vigour and weight, until the fatal little word “and” threatened to become the predominant word of theology even in this sphere where we might have hoped for better things in view of what seemed to be the strong enough doctrine of justification. It needed the rise of the strange but temporarily powerful sect of the German Christians of 1933 to call us back to reflection, and at least the beginning of a return, when the more zealous among them, in addition to their other abominations, awarded cultic honour to the portrait of the Führer. The overthrow of this whole attitude, and its provisional reversal, was accomplished in the first thesis of Barmen which is the theme of the present exposition. But there are other Christian nations in which it is customary to find a prominent place in the church for national flags as well as the pulpit and the Lord’s table, just as there are evangelical churches which substitute for the Lord’s table a meaningfully furnished apparatus for the accomplishment of baptism by immersion [or, one might add, that most holy of contemporary ecclesiastical furniture – the data projector and its accompanying screen]. These externals, of course, are trivial in themselves. But as such they may well be symptoms of the attempt which is possible in so many forms to incorporate that which is alien in other prophecies into what is proper to that of Jesus Christ. If these prophecies are prepared for this – and sooner or later they will make an open bid for sole dominion – the prophecy of Jesus Christ asks to be excused and avoids any such incorporation. If it is subjected to such combinations, the living Lord Jesus and His Word depart, and all that usually remains is the suspiciously loud but empty utterance of the familiar name of this Prophet. “No man can serve two masters” (Mt. 6:24). No man can serve both the one Word of God called Jesus Christ and other divine words’. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.1 (ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance; trans. G.W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 101–2.

Around the traps …

A new essay by Cavanaugh: ‘Telling the Truth about Ourselves: Torture and Eucharist in the U.S. Popular Imagination’
Ben draws attention to some new Bultmann and Heidegger books
Peter Leithart posts on the Dangers of Anti-Constantinianism
John Pilger on Obama’s 100 days
Robin Parry on the violence of Christendom

The teaching of Jesus

‘The teaching of Jesus was an intervention in the history of Israel, which was a history of debate and dialogue concerning the demands of Torah. Jesus did not start de novo, propounding a completely new Torah; instead, He propounded a reading of Torah’. – Peter J. Leithart, Against Christianity (Moscow: Canon, 2003), 133.

The grace of judgement and the judgement of grace

Rembrandt van Rijn, 'Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves' (1653), drypoint and burin, National Gallery of Art, Washington

‘If a message of grace tell us there was and is no judgment any more, and that God has simply put judgment on one side and has not exercised it, that cannot be the true grace of God. Surely the grace of God cannot stultify our human conscience like that! So we are haunted by mistrust, unless conscience be drowned in a haze of heart. We have always the feeling and fear that there is judgment to follow. How may I be sure that I may take the grace of God seriously and finally, how be sure that I have complete salvation, that I may entirely trust it through the worst my conscience may say? Only thus, that God is the Reconciler, that He reconciles in Christ’s Cross that the judgment of sin was there for good and all’. – Peter T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), 167–8.

Barth on love

Rembrandt, 'The Jewish Bride'. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

‘Love does not question; it gives an answer. Love does not think; it knows. Love does not hesitate; it acts. Love does not fall into raptures; it is ready to undertake responsibilities. Love puts behind it all the Ifs and Buts, all the conditions, reservations, obscurities and uncertainties that may arise between a man and a woman. Love is not only affinity and attraction; it is union. Love makes these two persons indispensable to each other. Love compels them to be with each other’. – Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4 (trans. A.T. Mackay, et al.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 221.

April bests …

Best books: Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge, written by Mem Fox and illustrated by Julie Vivas; The Longest Memory, by Fred D’Aguiar; The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson; The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Žižek; Always the Sound of the Sea: The Daily Lives of New Zealand’s Lighthouse Keepers by Helen Beaglehole.

Best music: Blair Douglas, Stay Strong; Don McGlashan and the Seven Sisters, Marvellous Year; Neil Finn, Try Whistling This; Placido Domingo, Amore Infinito: Songs inspired by the Poetry of John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla); Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, The Assassination of Jesse James; Conor Oberst, Conor Oberst; Bob Dylan, Together Through Life.

Best films: Pan’s Labyrinth [2006]; Hunger [2008]; Pride and Prejudice [2001].

Best drink: PNG Coffee (Fairtrade) from Izon Coffee. (BTW: the folk at Izon are great to deal with)

The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune

Last night saw the launch of John Newton’s new book, The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune, which examines the commune that New Zealand’s best-known poet James K. Baxter was instrumental in establishing at Jerusalem, on the Whanganui River.

The book was lauched by Lydia Wevers in Wellington at Unity Books. Here’s what she said:

‘In his introduction John says he was fractionally too young at fifteen to have known Baxter or been part of the commune at Jerusalem, yet it is his book which makes sense of that world to me. I wasn’t too young. I encountered Baxter first as a poet – he was the NZ poet when I came to university in 1968. I loved his richly metaphorical formalist poems, his essays and broadsheets and later Autumn Testament and the Jerusalem Sonnets. He embodied, for me and for many other people, the spirit of the age. Baxter was a frequent presence at Vic, at student meetings, round campus, at class. It was said that when he needed money he rang Frank McKay, our NZ lit lecturer and later Baxter’s biographer, and arranged to teach a class. I remember one 8am lecture when he recited an ode he’d written on the way to class which began with the petrol station at the far end of the Viaduct. Even more excitingly he borrowed my watch-I kept it for years after it stopped working because of that. Soon after he died I was marking first year exam papers, and a number of them were dedicated to Hemi – the emotions of his death marked the end of 1972 in a way that I have never forgotten.

But this book The Double Rainbow is not a book about Baxter in a biographical or personal way. John calls it a ‘work of cultural history which aspires to be a work of bicultural history’ which is his typically modest way of describing what is a really remarkable achievement. Like the story it tells, this is a book inspired by Baxter but not contained by him.

First I want to say-this is a brave book. In February 1969 Thomas Wallace was chopping firewood when ‘a bare-footed, bearded Pakeha emerged from the mist’. This is how John described Baxter’s first appearance at Jerusalem & though John is not barefoot or bearded it made me think about the courage it takes to really engage with another culture. There are very very few scholars in Aotearoa who have attempted real bicultural work. Lots of people, myself included, have discussed Maori history or literature from a Pakeha point of view. But to try to see from the other side of the river requires courage, openness, and the willingness to actually learn something hard and new. Baxter could do that, and so did some of his followers. Ngati Hau did it and so did the sisters at the convent. And now so has John. I think it’s a remarkable achievement.

The second thing I want to say is what a huge amount of work has gone into this book. You can see it in the list of acknowledgements, and its contextual depth. From the ancient eel weirs of the Whanganui to what happened after Baxter died, the book provides a deep and rich slice into a particular place and what has happened there. John has journeyed the length and breadth of Aotearoa, to say nothing of the river, to talk to participants. He has spent months at Jerusalem talking to iwi and to the sisters at the convent. He has read the considerable number of books written about the river, intentional communities, the commune and Baxter – the result is a book that will take its place as a new and adventurous history and also as a cultural analysis that might tell us something about what we should do now. In a way it’s a call to action. Part of what is so striking about this story of Baxter and the diverse community that surrounded him is the loving-kindness and generosity that emerged between cultures, between generations, between city and country and between the pa and the Top House. John makes the point that there were many economic and social transactions that took place – gifts of food for gifts of work – but what struck me most was the way that something happened there, suggested also by what happened at Baxter’s tangi, that briefly transcended the fears and anxieties and moral failings that keeps most people living in the circles of their own skulls. What John’s book reveals, in the voices of the people who lived in it and through his own lucid prose, is something bigger than the people who took part in it.

Before The Double Rainbow the prevailing idea, as John points out and in my own idea of it, was that Jerusalem was Baxter. There’s no doubt that Baxter was visionary and charismatic. But what his vision resulted in was the product of many people – the old ladies at the pa and the Ngati Hau leaders are crucial, as were the sisters at the convent and the remarkable and saintly Father Te Awhitu – there are too many people for me to name and anyway they are in the book. But their collective story is a very powerful one – it is touching and charming but also inspiring – the way the pa educated the influx of city pakeha in tikanga and kaupapa, so they could be part of what happened on the marae. In this book the most remarkable generosity is that of the iwi, as Baxter noted, the tuakana, the older brother, and the response of pakeha to it – open minded to a vision of an alternative world, is what we should all be doing. When I read about how the kuia would march up to the Top House with a bottle of Jeyes fluid and insist they used it, I had to scrub my house from top to bottom.

The last thing I want to say about The Double Rainbow is that this book is a joy to read. I left myself slightly too little time for it – or so I thought, panicking slightly that it was Saturday morning and I hadn’t started. I needn’t have worried. I know John’s writing – it has flow and light. He sweeps you along. I had time to start on something else by Sunday. But at the same time I felt enlightened and excited by John’s lucid prose and even more importantly, his sense of conviction – this is a book with a commitment to what it describes. And it made me go and reread Baxter. So I thought, even though this book is a bicultural social history, an ethnography, a work of fact and not a ‘book about Baxter’, I’d give Hemi the last word

This is from ‘Sestina of the River Road’, one of his last poems from 1972:

I want to go up the river road
Even by starlight or moonlight
Or no light at all, past the Parakino bridge
Past Atene where the tarseal ends
Past Koroniti where the cattle run in a paddock
Past Operiki, the pa that was never taken,

Past Matahiwi, Ranana, till the last step is taken
And I can lie down at the end of the road
Like an old horse in his own paddock
Among the tribe of Te Hau. Then my heart will be light
To be in the place where the hard road ends
And my soul can walk the rainbow bridge
That binds earth to sky. In his cave below the bridge
Where big eels can be taken
With the hinaki, and the ends
Of willow branches trail from the edge of the road
Onto the water, the dark one rises to the light,
The taniwha who guards the tribal paddock

And saves men from drowning.

‘”What Happened Next?”: Vincent Donovan, Thirty-five Years On’

Dear Bishop,

… Suddenly I feel the urgent need to cast aside all theories and discussions, all efforts at strategy, and simply go to these people and do the work among them for which I came to Africa. I would propose cutting myself off from the schools and the hospital and just go and talk to them about God and the Christian message. Outside of this, I have no theory, no plan, no strategy, no gimmick, no idea of what will come. I feel rather naked. I will begin as soon as possible … (Vincent J. Donovan)

I will always be grateful for my being introduced to Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle to the Masai by Vincent J. Donovan, who I’ve posted on before. I can’t recall how many copies that I’ve given away over the years but it runs well into double figures (a wee plea: this is not a gloat but an indication of how highly I view this book). The book continues to have a profound influence on the way I think about Church, mission and the Gospel. Yet like many readers of this wonderful story, I was always left with a set of frustrating questions: ‘What happened next?’ ‘Did the Masai Donovan encountered go on to do the self-theologising and self-ecclesiologicalising that he (in the spirit of Roland Allen) had hoped that they would?’ ‘What happened to Donovan himself?’ etc. So I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to pick up the latest copy of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (33/2 April 2009) and read John P. Bowen’s article entitled ‘”What Happened Next?”: Vincent Donovan, Thirty-five Years On’. The story is significantly sadder than I had hoped, but Bowen’s piece is no less important for that. Bowen also draws attention to his forthcoming edited book The Letters of Vincent Donovan, to be published by Orbis Books.

And while I’m drawing attention to newies, here’s two more to look out for:

A new journal: Wunderkammer
A new book: ‘What’s Wrong with Sin?’ by Derek R. Nelson

Impressing or Confessing?

‘One reason why the Church does not impress the world more may be because we are too much bent on impressing it, more bent on impressing than on confessing. We labour on the world rather than overflow on it. We have a deeper sense of its need than of our own fulness, of its problems than of our answer … We are tempted to forget that we have not, in the first place, either to impress the world or to save it, but heartily and mightily to confess in word and deed a saviour who has done both, who has done it for ourselves, and who is doing it every day’. – PT Forsyth, ‘The Soul of Christ and the Cross of Christ’. London Quarterly Review 116 (1911), 193.

Susan Boyle: Judged by Beauty

A guest post by Bruce Hamill:

The story of Susan Boyle captured the imagination of the world. At one level it was simply the surprise of beauty. Where did that voice come from? And yet there is so much more than that here. And the “so much more” has to do with the expression on the judges’ faces and the sniggers of the audience including those universal judges on their couches throughout the world. It was here that the analogy to resurrection is greatest. For here the whole world was agreed on the form of the beautiful and it didn’t include Susan Boyle. Only the act of casting her out, in which both audience and judges were complicit, explains the looks on the judges’ faces and the astonishing popularity of her YouTube clip. And yet in that moment of discovery a strange thing happened. We realized for a moment our own judgment. We were the judges judged by her truth. And then another thing happened. We began to tell stories which justified the world we are a part of. We could not face the judgment that her unveiling made upon our world, so we turned the attention on her heroism, in such a way that we could in fact adore her as an appropriate idol and icon of our time. Like Pilate we avert our gaze from the truth that judges us. Where Pilate asks the dialectical question, we renarrated the familiar ‘rags to riches’ tale in which there is no judgment or surprise and Susan’s triumph is the logical conclusion of our meritocracy. She becomes the hero so we can avoid the spotlight being turned on us the audience and the world of American Idol-atry that we participate in.

I wonder what will happen to Susan now? How much longer will she avoid baptism by ‘makeover’? How much longer will we be able to stand her ‘look’? How much longer will she be able to avoid seeing herself through the eyes of the crowd?

Kevin Rudd and the problem of evil

Andrew Hamilton has this good piece in Eureka Street:

After both the bushfires and the recent explosion on the asylum seekers’ boat, Mr Rudd expressed himself with uncharacteristic vehemence. In the first case he spoke of the evil of arson, and in the second he said that people smugglers could rot in hell.

This kind of language echoes the tabloid characterisation of people who have done particularly foul deeds as monsters. Such strong language serves many purposes. It insists that there is a clear difference between right and wrong, and that moral standards are objective, not subjective. It cuts through moral complexities and through arguments that would diffuse or minimise the moral culpability of the perpetrators of monstrous deeds.

It also separates evil-doers from ‘people like us’, and effectively excommunicates them from society. Arsonists and people smugglers have abandoned themselves to an evil that is alien to the rest of us. By denouncing and excluding them we keep ourselves untainted by their evil.

This view, for all its uses, contrasts with the Christian view of moral evil. The Christian view is more complex and holds together under tension three different insights.

First, it sees sin as pervasive, present in every human heart, and as distorting every relationship and institution of society. Because sin is so pervasive, the crucial line of separation does not lie between monsters and ordinary human beings. It lies between movements of the human heart that are open to God and others, and those that are selfish and possessive. The difference between Hitler and ourselves is one of degree, not of kind.

Of course, simply to insist that sin is ordinary and universal risks domesticating it. If there is a little Hitler in every human being, then what Hitler did could also seem to be of little significance. The second strand of the Christian view of sin is to recognise its destructiveness. When we choose our individual interests over our relationship to God and to others, we incalculably harm both our world and ourselves.

The BrisConnections business illustrates this. The greed of the parties who structured the deal, lured investors into it and served their own interests in resolving its conflicts is ordinary enough. But its drabness may cause us to neglect the potential damage done to society when it leads observers sensibly to decide that neither the parties to the dispute nor similar financial organisations are trustworthy. Such withdrawal of trust led to the Recession and its diminishment of human lives.

To recognise simultaneously the havoc that sin wreaks in individuals and society, and its pervasiveness in all human lives and relationships is challenging. It seems to encourage a grim view of the world. Indeed it is no wonder that people associate negativity and repression with Christianity and with any emphasis on sin. So the third strand of the Christian view of sin is also central. It is that God has overcome evil. So we can look honestly at our own lives and realistically at our world, confident that the Good News has outrun the bad.

The Christian attitude to people who have done monstrous deeds is complex. It encourages us to begin by seeing them as people like ourselves who are held in play by God’s love. We recognise the twisted knots of motivation in them and the factors that lessen moral culpability. We also give weight to the harm they have done. That does not deprive them of the respect to which they are entitled by their shared humanity.

Seen in this light, the incident involving people smugglers and asylum seekers requires a more complex view than that taken by the Prime Minister. We should look carefully at all the people involved. They are human beings like us, and the line of sinfulness runs through them as for us.

But they are also caught up in the sin of others — embodied in the Russian occupation, the initial encouragement of the Taliban for geopolitical ends, the current military action, and the ethnic hostility between different tribal groups in Afghanistan.

We should also give full weight to the selfishness that has led Australians to evade the claims that asyulum seekers make on us by virtue of their shared humanity. This is embodied in the artificial devices used to exclude asylum seekers, the pressure previously put on asylum seekers to return to their death in Afghanistan, the forced separation of refugees from their families through Temporary Protection Visas and so on.

But our focus throughout ought to be on the people caught in this story who are like us. They include the asylum seekers, the people smugglers, the officials administering an unjust policy, and Mr Rudd himself. Each makes claims on us that should be heard and judged. All are entitled to receive a hearing and a just judgment.

[Source: Eureka Street]

Psalm 6: A reflection

For the director of music. With stringed instruments. According to sheminith.

A psalm of David.

¹O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.

² Be merciful to me, LORD, for I am faint;
O LORD, heal me, for my bones are in agony.

³ My soul is in anguish.
How long, O LORD, how long?

⁴ Turn, O LORD, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.

⁵ No one remembers you when he is dead.
Who praises you from the grave?

⁶ I am worn out from groaning;
all night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.

⁷ My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.

⁸ Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the LORD has heard my weeping.

⁹ The LORD has heard my cry for mercy;
the LORD accepts my prayer.

¹⁰ All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed;
they will turn back in disgrace.

The problem with a hymnody that focuses on equilibrium, coherence, and symmetry (as in the psalms of orientation) is that it may deceive and cover over. Life is not like that. Life is so savagely marked by incoherence, a loss of balance, and unrelieved asymmetry.[1]

What strikes me most about Psalm 6 is that (like Job), when under the cloud of defeat, David doesn’t whinge to others, nor does he use the occasion to cultivate a calloused heart toward God. Fear, pain and distress constitute his world (and little else, or so it would seem). And his enemies want him dead.

But David turns to God. His turning constitutes a refusal to settle for things as they are, a snub to recognise the world as it would seem. His song is an act of relentless hope that considers that no situation falls outside of God’s capacity for transformation, nor of God’s responsibility.[2] Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III, in their book Cry of the Soul: How our emotions reveal our deepest questions about God, recall that:

The Psalms do not offer an analytical treatment of emotions. They are not a how-to text from which we can extrapolate four easy steps to resolving difficult emotions. Such simplistic reductions of our inner world, and of life itself, strip the heart of calling out to God in the darkness of His mysterious involvement with us. Instead, the Psalms invite us to question God. But they do this in the context of worship – they were the hymnal used in public worship. God invites us to bring before Him our rage, doubt, and terror – but He intends for us to do so as part of worship.[3]

So David calls out to God, and he recalls, among other things, God’s unfailing love.

Yet what if we were to listen in on this prayer as if it were not only David’s, but also that of a frightened man in Gethsemane, afraid that his impending death would mean the end of fellowship with God. ‘Who praises you from the grave?’ There is no resurrection hope here. So Thielicke:

Sheol [is] the land of no return, which means exclusion from God’s saving dealings with his community. Since salvation is history – in God’s mighty acts and in worship – exclusion from history is particularly painful. It involves the contradiction that on the one side life is ordained for God’s honor and praise and the other side is lost in the land of no return.[4]

When the Son takes on flesh and becomes Jesus, he becomes our brother, fully identifies with us in all the experiences of life, entering into the depth of creaturely existence ‘so savagely marked by incoherence, a loss of balance, and unrelieved asymmetry’. And as our brother, he dies our death, the death of all. All humanity enters Sheol in him.

And on the third day … Jesus – and humanity in him – turned to God.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Spirituality of the Psalms (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 25.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology: Essays on Structure, Theme, and Text (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 29.

[3] Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III, Cry of the Soul: How our emotions reveal our deepest questions about God (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1994), 37.

[4] Helmut Thielicke, The Evangelical Faith, Volume Three: Theology of the Spirit (ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 401.

Conferencing in the Antipodes

There’s a number of conferences coming up in the greatest part of the world:

Trinitarian Theology after Barth: An International Symposium (Auckland, 14-15 May)
South Island Ministry Conference (Dunedin, 19-21 May)
International Conference on Baptist Studies V, and the Australian Baptist Research Forum III (Melbourne, 15-18 July)
Calvin Rediscovered (Dunedin, 24-25 August)
Australian Association of Mission Studies (Canberra, 2-5 October)

What love has in view …

‘For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected – not in itself, but in the object’. – George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II and III (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004), 10.

If creation fails …

‘If creation fails, then all has failed: God has failed. Making a new and different creation is not the sign of God’s success but of His failure. Indeed a new creation has no guarantee, either, that it will succeed. If the work of redemption is a corrective and an aid to initial creation, then that is not good enough: creation would still prove to be defective if it were to fail. It must succeed’. – Geoffrey C. Bingham, Creation and the Liberating Glory (Blackwood: New Creation Publications, 2004), 73.

Hell: The Nemesis of Hope?

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 'Dante And Virgil In Hell' (1850)

Some time ago I mentioned Nik Ansell’s superb study, The Annihilation of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (Paternoster, forthcoming). Nik is professor of theology at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. The Other Journal recently posted this piece wherein Nik picks up many of the themes in his forthcoming must read(!):

Abandon every hope, who enter here.

-Dante, Inferno, Canto III.9

Despite the Church’s curse, there is no one

so lost that the eternal love cannot

return-as long as hope shows something green

-Dante, Purgatorio, Canto III. 133-135¹

If Hell is the nemesis of hope, can it be part of the Gospel? If Christ came to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:15), should the fear of Hell keep the Church in business?² If not, what on earth does “hell” mean in the New Testament?

Too hot to handle?

I’d like to explore these questions by first revisiting a controversy that came to a head twenty years ago concerning the theology of John Stott—a church leader who has been so influential and is so highly regarded worldwide that the New York Times recently referred to him as the “Pope” of Evangelicals.³

In 1988, David Edwards, an Anglican scholar long associated with the Student Christian Movement and SCM Press in the United Kingdom, published a respectful yet probing analysis of Stott’s theology entitled Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue. Predictably enough perhaps, one of Edwards’ sharpest challenges concerned the traditional doctrine of hell. Stott’s response, in the space he was given at the end of the relevant chapter,⁴ is now as famous as it is contentious. Forced to come clean about a topic he had largely avoided in his writings, he unambiguously rejected mainstream evangelical theology, declaring himself to be an “annihilationist.” While in traditional orthodoxy, the eternal souls of the saved and the damned experience either the blessing or the wrath of God forever, in Stott’s “conditional immortality,” the parallel (if not the contrast) is broken as those who fail to repent have no future in the age to come, thus passing out of existence. In the overcoming of evil, hell itself will pass away.⁵

Although reluctant to articulate his convictions in this area due to his concern for unity in the worldwide evangelical community, Stott nevertheless thanked Edwards for forcing the issue. He even went as far as to say of the traditional position, “[E]motionally, I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain.”⁶

Stott’s reluctance to write on the issue of hell and its annihilation because of the disunity it could create (or reveal) proved well founded. Soon afterward, at a major North American conference on what it meant to be an evangelical, the question was raised as to whether Stott himself should now be excluded given these recent revelations.⁷ It was put to a vote, and the motion was only narrowly defeated. The Pope was nearly excommunicated!

The Annihilationist Alternative

Annihilationism or conditional immortality has since been widely discussed and debated.⁸ If Stott’s theology is as representative here as it is elsewhere, then perhaps in another twenty years, this view of hell will no longer be confined to “open” evangelicals but may come to characterize the evangelical mainstream. Much will depend on whether there is widespread acceptance of Stott’s two-fold conviction that the Bible “points in the direction of annihilation” and that “‘eternal conscious torment’ is a tradition which has to yield to the supreme authority of Scripture.”⁹

Stott puts forward four main reasons for his position. Firstly, he proposes, we must take the biblical language of judgment-as-destruction far more seriously, and secondly, in the light of this extensive body of material,¹⁰ we must interpret the imagery of eternal fire far more carefully. In this context, Stott argues that fire’s main function “is not to cause pain, but to secure destruction, as all the world’s incinerators bear witness.”¹¹ It is the fire that is eternal and unquenchable, Stott insists, not what is thrown into it. The smoke that “rises for ever and ever” (Rev. 14:11) is therefore to be seen as evidence that the fire has done its work. Eternal punishment, in other words, is not eternal punishing.

Stott claims that the “imagery” of hellfire, addressed in his second argument, is to be understood within the “language” of destruction, addressed in his first argument.¹² His third and fourth arguments for annihilationism are similarly connected and concern the nature of justice as that is to be understood within God’s victory over evil.

Stott’s third point is that God’s justice is surely a justice in which “the penalty inflicted will be commensurate with the evil done.” Sin is indeed a grave matter, but in the traditional position there is a “serious disproportion,”¹³ in Stott’s judgment, between sins consciously committed in time and the torment that is to be consciously experienced throughout eternity as a result. Aware that traditional orthodoxy justifies everlasting punishment on the grounds that sinners will continue in their impenitence for ever, Stott develops his fourth point, which involves an appeal to those texts that are taken by some to point to a biblical vision of universal salvation. It is not that Stott wishes to defend universalism—far from it!¹⁴ But the biblical themes of God’s final victory over evil and his becoming “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) that are present in these texts,¹⁵ are incompatible, he insists, with the eternal existence of those who are damned and who would thus presumably continue to be in a state of rebellion against God.

Annihilationism, Stott proposes, solves these problems while doing justice to the biblical language about the judgment of the impenitent. His critics, however, accuse him of “special pleading” and of “playing fast and loose” with Scripture.¹⁶ The questions this controversy raises are still very much alive. Which position can claim biblical support? Which viewpoint should we endorse? With whom should we side: the annihilationists or the traditionalists?

The Last Word?

My own answer is: neither! Both positions, I suggest, must be rejected for at least two reasons, both of which call out for the development of a new theology in which Hell is no longer the nemesis of hope.

Firstly, both views allow evil to have the last word. As annihilationists have been quick to realize, the hell of traditional orthodoxy cannot do justice to the vision of Habakkuk 2:14 in which “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” or to the New Testament expression of this hope found in the promise that God will become “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). The traditional claim that the eternal suffering of the impenitent serves to glorify God by revealing his justice reduces the revelation of God’s glory to the restoration of God’s honor, thus separating the glory of God from the glorification of creation.¹⁷Justice conceived as retribution closes down redemption and blocks the dawn of the age to come. In traditional eschatology, sinners no longer have the power to sin after the final judgment, yet they remain sinners. If they are to be everlastingly punished for the sins of the past, and for their impenitent condition, how is evil not still present in the world?¹⁸

Although the annihilationist attempt to find eschatological resolution beyond the confines of traditional orthodoxy is certainly justified, their own position has serious problems of its own. It is worth reminding ourselves, especially in this age of ecological violence and crisis, that the annihilation and destruction of God’s good creation is precisely the aim and goal of evil, not evidence of its defeat. The destruction, including the self-destruction, of those made in God’s image represents a victory for the forces of darkness. In the transformation of everlasting punishment into final judgment,¹⁹ evil still has the last word.

Secondly, I would like to suggest that both traditional orthodoxy and annihilationism seriously misread the Scriptures. There are fourteen references to “Hell” in the New Testament according to the New International Version (NIV), eleven of which refer to a place where human beings may end up as a result of God’s judgment. These eleven references all occur in the words of Jesus. Seven of the eleven are to be found in Matthew (5:22, 29, 30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33). The remaining four are all parallel texts: three in Mark (9:43-7) and one in Luke (12:5). These biblical references require closer attention than they have received in the current debate.

Gehenna

The Greek word for Hell in these texts is transliterated into English as Gehenna.²⁰ In its earlier Hebrew form, Gehenna makes its debut in the Bible as a geographical place: the valley of (the son[s] of) Hinnom, or gê hinnōm (see Josh. 15:8, 18:16).²¹ According to archeologists, this is one of the valleys that is found close to the walls of Jerusalem.²²

In Jeremiah 7:30-34, this valley is no longer seen as a piece of real estate that anyone would wish to own.²³ Now it has become a place of judgment—an imminent judgment in history directed against Israel:

The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declares the Lord. They have set up their detestable idols in the house that bears my Name and have defiled it. They have built the high places of Topheth²⁴ in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire—something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind. So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call it Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter, for they will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. Then the carcasses of the people will become food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no one to frighten them away. I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem, for the land will become desolate.

Similar language occurs in Jeremiah 19, where an imminent siege of Jerusalem is prophesied in response to Israel’s idolatry. The references to burning sons and daughters in the fire (see Jer. 7:31, 19:5, and 32:35) refer to atrocities associated with Judah’s kings Ahaz and Manasseh (2 Ki. 16:2-3, and 21:1-6). That such sacrifices were conducted in the Valley of Hinnom is made explicit in 2 Kings 23:10 and in the parallel account of their reigns found in 2 Chronicles 28:3 and 33:6.

The valley continues to be associated with idolatry and fire in the prophetic tradition, but now the fire is seen as coming from God. In Isaiah 30:33, God says:

Topheth has long been prepared; it has been made ready for the king [of Assyria, cf. v. 31].
Its fire pit has been made deep and wide, with an abundance of fire and wood;
the breath of the Lord, like a stream of burning sulfur, sets it ablaze.

In this imminent, historical judgment, we have fire and sulfur, or fire and brimstone, which harks back to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19:24) and reappears in the book of Revelation (see Rev. 14:10, 19:20, 20:10, and 21:8).²⁵

The same valley is also intended as the location for the judgment described in the final verse of the book of Isaiah. Thus, Isaiah 66:22–23 reads:

“From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me,” says the Lord. “And they will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.”

During the rise and fall of Jewish nationalism—a period that includes the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids (169-160 BCE), the Great War against Rome (66-70 CE), and the revolt of Bar Kokhba, also against Rome (132-135 CE)—it is not hard to see how these passages from Isaiah, taken together with the portrayal of God’s judgment of the nations in Joel 3,²⁶ could have fuelled the conviction that the dead bodies of Israel’s enemies should be cast into this Gehenna.²⁷

Although a nationalistic agenda that would equate God’s enemies with Israel’s enemies is foreign to the prophetic tradition, it remains the case that for the Old Testament prophets, Gehenna is understood as the place where the wicked will be punished with fire in the “last days.” But as this is an earthly place outside Jerusalem and as the “last days” are clearly understood as taking place within history,²⁸ this is very different from the Gehenna of later rabbinic literature in which the Valley of Hinnom has become an underworld or otherworldly realm that has been in existence since the creation.²⁹ Such a place can indeed be identified with the Hell of traditional Christian theology. But these later Jewish texts all come from a time after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70³⁰ when the Jewish worldview was thrown into crisis, to be recast by the rabbis into a far less geographically rooted form.³¹ By contrast, the Gehenna of the gospels, I suggest, continues the Old Testament tradition of imminent, this-worldly judgment.³²

But there is a twist. Whereas his Jewish contemporaries saw Gehenna as the place where the nations in general and the Romans in particular would get what was coming to them,³³ Jesus, standing in the tradition of Jeremiah, uses the language of the prophets to speak of God’s wrath against Jerusalem.³⁴ Thus, in Mark 9:48, Jesus draws on the final verse of Isaiah, as cited above, to refer to a judgment that will soon fall not on the Romans as expected, but on his fellow Israelites:

And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into [Gehenna], where “their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched.”

All of Jesus’s references to Gehenna, which are widely thought by believer and non-believer alike to refer to a last judgment at the end of time, are actually about the coming judgment on Israel, Jerusalem, and its temple. Here we should not be misled by the fact that Jesus’s language is apocalyptic in character. It is no coincidence that the last of the seven references to Gehenna in Matthew’s gospel (Mt. 23:33) is so close to the long discourse about the “end of the age” (Mt. 24:3 cf. Mt. 24:4-25:46). But to speak of this coming judgment of Jerusalem as “the end of the world,” thus using apocalyptic language for the events of history, is a way of speaking that is not as foreign to us as we might think. When we refer to certain events as “earth shattering,” for example, we know that there may be no literal geological upheavals or volcanic eruptions. But we also know that there are times when we need this kind of language if we are to even begin to capture the significance of what is happening. If we bear this language of cosmic upheaval in mind, then we can better understand the apocalyptic discourse that is found in Scripture.³⁵

Contrary to popular belief, no Jew in Jesus’s day was expecting God to bring about the end of the space-time universe.³⁶ But the destruction of the temple, which was built to symbolize the creation, thus revealing God’s presence within it,³⁷ would be seen as truly cataclysmic. For Jesus, this was God’s judgment on Israel, signaling nothing less than what we might call the end of the old world order.³⁸ The only appropriate language was the language of de-creation. This is precisely how Jeremiah speaks in his day of the coming destruction of Judah and the temple (Jer. 4:23-28). God’s judgment on Israel, carried out by the Romans, is acted out by Jesus in his ‘cleansing’ of the temple and his cursing of the fig-tree (see Mk. 11:12-25 and 13:28-31). In the coming destruction, he said, the Son of Man would be vindicated (see Mk. 13³⁹). This judgment/vindication, which is described in terms of de-creation and enthronement, is also a main theme of the book of Revelation.⁴⁰

The Jewish leaders and those who followed them were destined for Gehenna, said Jesus. In refusing to be a light to the Gentiles, in judging the world, and in preparing to engage in “holy” war against Rome, Israel had become like her Gentile oppressors, caught in idolatry. It is a grim fact of history that when the Romans laid siege to Jerusalem and the temple, culminating in its destruction, one generation later, the dead who were thrown from the city walls literally piled up in the Valley of Hinnom, Gehenna, Hell.⁴¹

In Jesus’s understanding, this was the “eternal” fire or destruction of God’s judgment (Mt. 18:8, 25:41, 25:46). When annihilationists claim that it is the punishment rather than the punishing that is everlasting, the argument is tenuous and tortured. But it is also unnecessary. The word translated as eternal here literally means “of the age (to come).”⁴² This is the judgment that ushers in the new age as foreseen by the prophets who looked forward to the end of the exile.⁴³ According to the New Testament, God’s judgment on Israel at the hand of the Romans is a judgment that Jesus suffers on the cross so that his followers may avoid it. The destruction of the temple is the vindication of Jesus and his followers as the true Israel. It also marks God’s judgment on the enemies of this true Israel: a judgment that marks the birth pangs of a new world, heralding the true return from exile and the dawn of the new creation. Now, with the establishment of the people of God made up of Jews and Gentiles, God’s promise to Abraham—that he would have offspring as numerous as the stars—is finally coming true.⁴⁴

The decisive victory against evil and thus against the idolatrous powers and principalities that humanity serves has been won on the cross, says Paul—a cross through which even the very powers and principalities that crucified Christ are reconciled to their Creator (see Col. 1:20ff.). In the power of the Spirit, the church is to live out this redemption, spreading the good news to the ends of the earth.

The future is far from dark. The non-human creation too will be healed and, according to the famous language of Romans 8, will experience a cosmic exodus and thus be set free from the oppression of our idolatry.⁴⁵ Evil will be completely eradicated. As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15: 24-25, 28:

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet [. . . .] When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.

It is significant that here, in the most sustained discussion of the general resurrection in the New Testament, there is no mention of Hell, either as eternal torment or as annihilation. But this should come as no surprise, I suggest, as the Christian doctrine of Hell, for all the appeals to Scripture that have been made on its behalf, has no biblical basis.

Hell in History

Although Hell is foreign to the gospels, Gehenna is another matter—its significance for the church’s own history having been completely overlooked.

To briefly summarize the gospel setting in which the judgment of Gehenna is found, the Israel of Jesus’s day is consistently portrayed as failing to be a light to the Gentiles, its election being (mis)understood not as a calling to reveal God’s presence to the nations but as a sign that it is safe from the justice and wrath of God that would soon descend on the Gentile—and specifically Roman—world for its moral depravity and idolatrous ways.⁴⁶ Far from sharing God’s love and wisdom, Israel’s leaders, according to the gospel writers, understood the way of holiness as purity from outside contamination.⁴⁷ Yet the very different spirituality and holiness of Jesus is vindicated when the judgment that he prophesied and enacted against the temple comes to pass, marking the end of the old age (Mt. 24:3, 14) and the birth pangs (Mt. 24:7) of the age to come.

Generalizations have their limits, but a good generalization is generally true. More often than not, I suggest, the church has gone on to recapitulate the sins of Israel: calling God’s wrath down on sinners, setting itself “over” and “against” the world, hiding its true light under a bushel.⁴⁸ The Roman Empire fell. Christendom was born. The Holy Roman Empire,⁴⁹ as it came to be known, ruled the world, threatening all who would not toe the line with the fires of eternal torment.⁵⁰ There is a place for nuanced historiography, but to those who were oppressed by the church when it was at the height of its powers, this would not be seen as a caricature. The secular critique of Christianity, for all its one-sidedness, is not without foundation.

There are two biblical patterns, I believe, that can help us interpret this history. The first is a complex, two-part motif found in the prophets, whereas the second is a pattern found throughout Scripture in which judgment is understood as related to salvation rather than to damnation.

This first biblical pattern, evident in Isaiah 10: 5-17, comes to the fore in the conviction that when God’s people fall into idolatry and fail to respond to the warnings of the prophets, they are handed over to their enemies who act out God’s wrath, to be judged in turn when God, responding out of his covenant love, judges Israel’s enemies for the way they have judged his people! In this light, and in the light of the judgment revealed against Israel in the synoptic apocalypse (Mt. 24/Mk. 13/Lk. 21), should we not ask ourselves whether history reveals God handing Christendom over to its enemies to face its hell, its Gehenna? If the Christian era came to an end with the dawn of the Enlightenment, which, in is secular form, attacked the church for its evils, not least for its cruel doctrine of Hell, then instead of condemning it, should we not, first and foremost, ask whether the dawn of the modern age can be seen as God’s judgment against the church? Even as we may also ask whether, given the violence with which modernity has dealt with people of faith, God has now handed modernity over to its postmodern critics.

Judgment unto Salvation

If we are open to God’s revelation in the secular critique of Christianity, it will not be hard to see that for too long, a church bent on control and motivated by fear has proclaimed that the good news amounts to avoiding the bad news. The self-critique of the prophetic tradition can further alert us to the fact that the church, if it is to avoid being thrown into Gehenna yet again, will need to jettison its doctrine of Hell and the mentality that goes with it and recapture how the Gospel is the good news of life lived to the full in covenant with God, without whom there is no life.⁵¹

That said, if we are to find a deeply biblical orientation to our own history, this way of understanding the significance of Gehenna—the way of self-critique— needs to be related to the second biblical pattern I have alluded to. Because justice conceived as retribution closes down redemption, we must be careful that we are not simply historicizing the traditional or annihilationist understanding of how God responds to evil. In a truly biblical redemptive-historical paradigm, I propose, judgment is not an end in itself and is therefore not final in that sense, but is always a judgment-unto-salvation.

This understanding of justice and judgment calls for a fundamental rereading of many biblical passages. Elsewhere I have explored this in relation to the book of Revelation.⁵² Here I will mention just one example that I think is paradigmatic for all of Scripture: the diversifying of the peoples and their ways of speaking that happens after the fall of Babel.⁵³ In the light of God’s self-maledictory oath, after the flood, never to annihilate human life (Gen. 8:21, 9:11), it is important to see how the judgment of Babel is not a punishment, but a blessing that intends to get history back on track in line with the emergence of the nations that are described as “spread[ing] out over the earth” in Genesis 10:32 (cf. Gen. 10:5). Viewed within Genesis as a whole, the diversifying of the peoples that is highlighted in emphatic detail just before the Babel narrative (see Gen. 10:1-32) is seen as a positive response to the original benediction of Genesis 1:28 to “fill the earth,” even though this blessing, due to fear, is experienced as a threat in Genesis 11:4. What the judgment on Babel reveals is that the attempt to resist history is itself a dead end. It is a judgment-unto-salvation because the scattering allows the call to “fill the earth,” misconstrued in a fallen world as the word of death, to become once again the word of life.

The good news of Gehenna is that for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, the attempt to invoke God’s judgment as an end in itself, as final, is revealed as a dead end. Such a spirituality does not belong to, and cannot be a part of, the life of the age to come. Thus, in looking back over church history at the rise and fall of the doctrine of Hell, we may be set free to develop an eschatology in which hope is allowed to triumph over fear.

Open Ended

Rather than close by spelling out what this means for our theologies, or by articulating a theological position as such, I would like to end with an open-ended image from the book of Revelation that is suggestive of a theology and a vision of the church that does not yet exist.

In the final chapters of John’s Apocalypse, we might expect to discover that the sinners who clearly do not escape the judgment that is described in language drawn from the fall of Jerusalem⁵⁴ are either in the lake of fire or have now been annihilated by it. But instead, we actually find them outside the city (Rev. 22:15).⁵⁵ Furthermore, this ‘exclusion’ is one that must be read in the light of the fact that there is still a mission to the nations (Rev. 21:24; 22:2). John’s vision reveals that because sin has no future in God’s world, the impure may not enter the city (Rev. 21:27). Yet this provides no ammunition for those who want to preach the final judgment of hellfire and damnation as “On no day will [the] gates [of the New Jerusalem] ever be shut” (Rev. 21:25).

Against the openness of God, the evil that would annihilate God’s creation, close down history, and shut the world off from its Creator, does not have a hope in hell.⁵⁶

Notes
1. The Divine Comedy Of Dante Alighieri, Inferno, A Verse Translation with an Introduction by Allen Mandelbaum (New York, NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1981), 20-21 and The Divine Comedy Of Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, A Verse Translation with an Introduction by Allen Mandelbaum (New York, NY: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1983), 26-27.

2. Because I am engaging with evangelical theology in particular in this essay, biblical quotations will be from the New International Version (NIV).

3. See David Brooks, “Who Is John Stott?” New York Times, November 30, 2004, available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/opinion/30brooks.html?_r=1. Brooks cites Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center as saying that “if evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose.”

4. See “John Stott’s Response to Chapter 6,” in Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue, David L. Edwards with John Stott (London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), 306-331.

5. Although Stott does refer to “annihilation,” (Essentials, 315, 318, 320), he seems to prefer to speak of “conditional immortality” (Essentials, 316). One of the merits of characterizing this position as “annihilationsim” is that it captures how those who remain in their sins come to nothing (Latin nihil) to the point where they are not even “history.” At the same time, it is important to note that for Stott, and for many others associated with this viewpoint, this is a misleading term because of what it could imply about God. A key tenet of Stott’s position, in distinction from traditional orthodoxy, is that the soul is not inherently immortal. Consequently, those who reject the gift of eternal life are seen as either foregoing resurrection altogether or as being left to pass out of existence after the final judgment. God, in other words, does not “actively” destroy them. This is a more fundamental departure from the God of traditional orthodoxy than annihilationism might be imply.

6. Stott, Essentials, 314.

7. The back cover of Essentials—hot off the press and on sale at the conference—introduced a summary of the dialogue to be found within its pages by posing the question: “What beliefs define an evangelical?” For an account of the Evangelical Affirmations consultation, see Walter Unger, “Focusing the Evangelical Vision” in Direction 20, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 3-17, available online at: http://www.directionjournal.org/article/?692.

8. In Essentials, 320, Stott wrote, “I do not dogmatise about the position to which I have come. I hold it tentatively. But I do plead for frank dialogue among Evangelicals on the basis of Scripture.” For examples of the dialogue that Stott was hoping for, see William Crockett, ed., Four Views On Hell (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996) and Edward William Fudge and Robert A Peterson, Two Views of Hell: A Biblical and Theological Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). For additional evidence that annihilationism is increasingly perceived as a legitimate evangelical position, see David Hilborn, ed., The Nature Of Hell: A Report by the Evangelical Alliance’s Commission on Unity and Truth among Evangelicals (ACUTE) (Carlisle, UK: Acute/Paternoster Publishing, 2000). For an Anglican case for annihilationism that included but was not confined to evangelical input, see The Mystery Of Salvation: The Story of God’s Gift. A Report by the Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England (London, UK: Church House Publishing, 1995), 198-199.

9 Stott, Essentials, 315. One might explore the question of the future of evangelicalism by asking whether it will be the theology of John Stott or that of J. I. Packer that will endure. See note 14 below.

10. In support of reading judgment as destruction, Stott, Essentials, 315, initially cites: Mt. 7:13, 10:28; Jn. 3:16, 10:28, 17:12; Rom. 2:12, 9:22; 1 Cor 1:18, 15:18; 2 Cor. 2:15, 4:3; Phil. 1:28, 3:19; 1 Thess. 5:3; 2 Thess. 1:9, 2:10; Heb. 10:39; James 4:12; 2 Pet. 3, 9 and Rev. 17:8, 11.

11. Stott, Essentials, 316.

12. Stott’s distinction between “language” and “imagery” is explicit in Essentials, 315 and 318, and it frames the discussion of the first two points. His critics could presumably reverse this hermeneutically loaded distinction.

13. Ibid., 318.

14. Ibid., 319. There is now some evidence that universalism is being considered as an evangelical possibility. See David Hilborn and Don Horrocks, “Universalistic Trends in the Evangelical Tradition: An Historical Perspective” in Universal Salvation? The Current Debate, ed. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). This volume gives particular attention to the evangelical universalism of Thomas Talbott. Compare to Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2006)

15. In addition to 1 Cor. 15:28 here, Stott also cites Jn. 12:32, Eph. 1:10, Phil. 2:10-11, and Col. 1:20 in Essentials, 319. There is a parallel between Stott’s first and fourth points and between his claim that the biblical texts that speak of judgment-as-destruction and the biblical texts that speak of the “universal” nature of salvation both need to be taken far more seriously. But the parallel is incomplete as Stott does not turn to the latter texts to define the contours of a paradigm.

16. See for example, J. I. Packer, “The Problem of Eternal Punishment” in Orthos, no. 10 (nd [an address originally given in Melbourne on August 31, 1990]), the account of Packer’s response to Stott in Robert A Peterson, Hell On Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1995), 11-16 and Peterson’s own response to Stott in Hell on Trial, 161-182. For Peterson’s debate with Fudge, see Peterson, Two Views of Hell.

17. Another way to put this is to say that God’s rule over creation, in this understanding, can never find fulfilment in God’s presence with creation.

18. One might redefine good and evil in the light of a certain view of God’s honor and imagine that provided God’s justice is being revealed, there is no longer evil from God’s point of view. But I do not see how God can be “all in all” in this perspective. Traditional orthodoxy can, in its own way, speak of God’s eschatological presence. Thus, God might be said to be present in terms of (a certain view of) justice toward the impenitent while being present in terms of a love beyond justice toward the saved. But the contrast—between justice and love, between a justice without love and a love beyond justice—points to an absence and thus to a limited view of God’s full eschatological presence that cannot do justice to Hab. 2:14 and 1 Cor. 15:28.

It is important to stress that love beyond justice includes a justice whose nature is fulfilled in love. While there cannot be love without justice, there cannot be the fullest form of justice without love. This means that traditional orthodoxy cannot do justice to justice. On the notion of justice “making way for” love, see the comments on “judgment unto salvation” below.

19. On the language of final judgment, see the section entitled “judgment unto salvation” below.

20. Gehenna is also the term in James 3:6, but this is not a reference to a place of judgment. To complete the survey of the fourteen references to “hell” in the NIV, Lk. 16:23 refers to Hades as an intermediate state, while 2 Peter 2:4 refers to Tartarus, which is also intermediate and not associated with human beings.

21. To trace the journey of the term fully from Hebrew to English, there are four main steps: first, the Hebrew gê hinnōm takes on an Aramaic form gēhinā(m). This is then transliterated into Greek as géenna, before being transliterated into the Latin Gehenna, from which is derived the English term.

22. See Lloyd R. Bailey, “Gehenna: The Topography of Hell” in Biblical Archaeologist 49, no. 3 (September 1986): 187-191. Cf. Stephen Von Wyrick, “Gehenna” Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, ed. David Noel Freedman, Allen C. Myers, and Astrid B. Beck (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 489 and Richard A. Spencer, “Hinnom, Valley of” in Eerdmans Dictionary, Freedman et al., 592. Compare to note 24 below.

23. There is one other geographical reference, found in Neh. 11:30, that does not carry the connotations of judgment to be explored below.

24. In Brian P. Irwin, “Topheth,” in Eerdmans Dictionary, Freedman et al., 1321, Irwin notes that Topheth was probably “at the lower end of Hinnom Valley close to the southern tip of the City of David.” It is thought that the name may derive from the Aramaic word for fireplace combined with the vowels from the Hebrew word for shame.

25. Imagery from Jer. 7:30-34 shows up in Rev. 18:23 and 19:21.

26. While the valley in Joel 3:2, 12, 14 is symbolically rather than geographically named, its close vicinity to Jerusalem, as indicated in 2:9 and 3:16, means that it would have been associated, if not identified, with the Valley of Hinnom.

27. As Von Wyrick puts it in “Gehenna,” Eerdmans Dictionary, Freedman et al., 489, “By the time of the Maccabees, the valley was the appropriate location in which to burn the bodies of one’s enemies.” Here he would seem to be echoing Bailey’s claim, in “Gehenna,” 188, about the use of the Valley of Hinnom in the Maccabean revolt. Although 1 Maccabees itself is not considered an apocalyptic work, and although it makes no mention of the valley, the frequent references to the burning of Israel’s enemies (see 1 Macc. 3:5; 4:20; 5:5, 28, 35, 44, 65, 68; 6:31; 10:84, 85; 11:4, 61; 16:10; cf. 2 Macc. 8:33, 10:36, 12:6) are significant, especially if this work influenced the way Joel 3 and Isa. 66:23 were (mis)read. Compare to note 33 below. The other texts that Von Wyrick refers to in this context are 2 Esdras 7:36 and 1 Enoch 27:1-2 (see note 32 below).

28. If one were to read Isa. 66 in the light of the reference to the “last days” in Isa. 2:2, or if we were to interpret Joel 2:28 as referring to the “last days” (as this text is cited in Acts 2:17) and then read Joel 3:1ff in that light, Peter’s understanding of the “last days” as falling within history in Acts 2 underscores the point I am making. Old Testament apocalyptic prophecy is not about the “end” of history. Compare to note 35.

29. Although child sacrifice in the Valley of Hinnom was associated with Molech (2 Kings 23:10) who was an underworld deity, the prophetic tradition does not seek to portray an “underworldly” reality. When later Christians saw this as a hellish realm ruled over by Satan (thus going beyond the underworld understanding of Gehenna found in the later rabbinic tradition, cf. n. 31 below), one might wonder whether Molech had found a place in the “Christian” imagination.

30. I refer to 70 CE as AD 70 here because AD (anno Domini) connotes the vindication of Jesus’s message in relation to the destruction of the temple, as explored below.

31. At this point, I find a crucial lack of precision in the articles by Bailey, Von Wyrick, Spencer, Kirk-Duggan, and Reicke cited in this note and notes 22 (above) and 32 (below). For further details concerning the dating and evaluation of the relevant references to Gehenna, see my The Annihilation Of Hell: Universal Salvation and the Redemption of Time in the Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, forthcoming), chap. 7, especially 7.1. There I argue that the eclipse of Jewish nationalism and its focus on land as the locus of God’s promises after the destruction of Jerusalem, an eclipse which is so evident in the early rabbinic tradition, must be borne in mind when that tradition occasionally attributes belief in an “underworldly” Gehenna to Jewish teachers in the early first century. For, as Bo Reicke notes, in “Gehenna” in The Oxford Companion To The Bible, Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993), 243, “In the Mishnah and later rabbinic texts, the name Gehenna [. . .] has superseded the older terms for underworld (Sheol).” Compare to note 32 below.

That Gehenna is effectively hellenized after 70 CE in the rabbinic tradition is a modest claim (cf. the analysis of the extent to which the Jewish worldview could be recast given the eclipse of Jewish nationalism after the failed revolt of 115-7 CE in Carl B. Smith, No Longer Jews: The Search for Gnostic Origins [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004]). But whatever we make of the relevant first century evidence outside the New Testament, my main point below is that Gehenna is not seen as a postmortem underworld in the gospels.

32. This prophetic interpretation of Gehenna also makes good sense of the reference to the “cursed valley” in 1 Enoch 27:1-2 (contra Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, “Hell,” in Eerdmans Dictionary, Freedman et al., 572-3, which is misleading at this point). It is important to note that this valley is distinct from the underworld of 1 Enoch 22 (cf. George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1-36; 81-108 [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001], 308). Furthermore, the fact that the chapters that follow (1 Enoch 28-36) lack “explicit eschatological material” but “fill out the comprehensive tour of the ends of the earth” begun in 1 Enoch 17, as John J. Collins notes in The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Second edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 55-56, should (contra Collins) come as no surprise. This material, from what is usually considered the earliest (third century BCE) part of 1 Enoch, is in line with the geographically located portrayal of Gehenna in the Old Testament prophetic tradition. I think that a good case can be made for discerning the same perspective when this valley is in view in later parts of 1 Enoch. See 1 Enoch 54:2 (cf. 53:1, 5) and 90:26 (where the valley, seen as an “abyss [. . .] south of that house” [i.e., Jerusalem], is distinguished from the “abyss” of vv. 24-25, as noted by Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 403-404).

The reference to Gehenna in 4 Ezra 7:36 (= 2 Esdras 7:36) seems to belong in a somewhat different—and in many ways unique—category. While in this Jewish apocalypse, Gehenna (in distinction from the rabbinic tradition) is still distinguished from Hades (see 4:7-8 and 8:53) and while there are echoes of the prophetic tradition’s judgment of the nations here (see 7:37, cf. the discussion in Michael E. Stone, 4 Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990], 222 and cf. 5 Ezra 2:28-29 [= 2 Esdras 2:28-29]), this judgment is seen as taking place after a resurrection in the transition between the present age and the age to come. This is a significant departure from the Old Testament, where the idea of postmortem, post-resurrection judgment, found only in Dan. 12:2, is not explicitly associated with Gehenna (though Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 319, detects a linguistic connection between Dan. 12:2 and Isa. 66:24).

4 Ezra 7:36, dated after 70 CE (and usually at the end of the first century, cf. 4 Ezra 3:1) marks an important transition between the Old Testament (and, I will, argue, the New Testament) understanding of Gehenna and post-biblical conceptions of Hell. Other pre-diaspora Jewish texts also from the first century CE (for current views of their dating and location, see Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination) either give fleeting or confused attention to Gehenna (see 2 Baruch 59:10, Apocalypse of Abraham 15:6 [cf. the comments in James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 686, 696] and Testament of Moses 10:10 [cf. the rejection of R. H. Charles’s textual emendation in ibid., 933]). By the time we get to the Sibylline Oracles 1.101-103, 2.293 and 4.106, later in the first century and written beyond the promised land, Gehenna and Tartarus have become synonymous (cf. the blending of Gehenna and Sheol in the rabbinic tradition in note 31 above).

Of all the extra-biblical books thought to shed light on Gehenna in the New Testament, 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra are the most important both historically and theologically. Both texts are considered canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, the latter also having this status in the Russian Orthodox and Coptic traditions. Even if 4 Ezra were considered fully canonical, even if we overlook the fact that most Christian groups who preserved it knew a text that was actually missing 4 Ezra 7:36-140 (cf. Bruce W. Longnecker, 2 Esdras [Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995], 110-112), it is still important to maintain on historical grounds that the post-resurrection Gehenna of 4 Ezra 7:36 should not be read into the gospels (see note 39 below). Its perspective also differs from the book of Revelation (see note 55 below).

33. It is easy to imagine how the success of the Maccabean revolt less than two hundred years earlier could inspire a certain reading of Joel 3 in this context.

34. It is most significant that seven of the eleven references to Gehenna in the synoptics occur in Matthew, for this gospel is particularly steeped in allusions to Jeremiah. Cf. Michael Knowles, Jeremiah in Matthew’s Gospel: The Rejected-Prophet Motif in Matthaean Redaction (Sheffield, UK: JSOT Press, 1993).

35. The nature of biblical apocalyptic is contested, but here and in what follows, I am indebted to what I take to be the extremely insightful analysis of N. T. Wright in his The New Testament And The People Of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, volume 1 (London, UK: SPCK; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1992), 280–299. In my judgment, biblical apocalyptic, in its fullest form, has as its focus the transition between the old age and the new age, which I refer to below as the death throes of the old world order and the birth-pangs of the new creation. Our contemporary language for the cataclysmic, though it does help us understand this kind of discourse, typically lacks a reference to the birthing of the new.

36. See Wright, The New Testament And The People Of God, 333.

37. See G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004).

38. Using more traditional terms, this is the end of the old covenant. As references to the “old” covenant can easily be co-opted by anti-Judaism, it is worth pointing out that the language of the new (and by implication the old, first, or former) covenant is found in the Hebrew Bible (see Jer. 31:31 and see the contrast between new and former in Isa. 65:17).

39. Mk. 13:28 connects this apocalyptic discourse to the cursing of the fig tree in Mk. 11:12-14. The reference to the passing away of heaven and earth in Mk. 13:31, given the cosmic symbolism and significance of the temple, may be connected to Mk. 13:1-2. These two references to the temple thus frame the chapter.

In Wright’s analysis, in The New Testament And The People Of God, 390-396, the language about “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” in Mk. 13:26 (and parallels) refers in the language of Dan. 7:13 to the coming of the Son of Man to God. This is enthronement language that signals vindication. If there is thus no reference to the “second coming” in the synoptic apocalypse (Mk. 13, Mt. 24, Lk. 21), this coheres with the fact that there is nothing in these passages, or in the synoptics’ references to Gehenna, that would place the judgment referred to after the general resurrection. This is an important difference between the gospels and 4 Ezra 7:36 (cf. note 32 above).

40. I have explored the book of Revelation in “An Apocalyptic Appendix” in The Annihilation Of Hell.

41. For a contemporary account, see Josephus, The Jewish War, 5.12.3-4.

42. This translation allows us to maintain the inverse parallelism of Mt. 25:46, while robbing traditionalists of their main “proof text” against universalists and annihilationists.

43. For the return-from-exile theme in the New Testament as far deeper than a geographical return to the promised land, see N. T. Wright, Jesus And The Victory Of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, volume 2 (London, UK: SPCK; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1996) and Brant Pitre, Jesus, The Tribulation, And The End Of The Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005).

44. For a discussion in relation to Romans 9-11, see N. T. Wright, The Climax Of The Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh, UK: T and T Clark, 1991), chap. 13.

45. See Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Paul and His Story: (Re)interpreting the Exodus Tradition (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999).

46. It is worth considering whether Paul in Rom. 2:1 aims to expose not merely hypocrisy but the mindset that would say “Amen!” to the words found in Rom. 1:18-31. Cf. the discussion in James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8: Word Biblical Commentary 38A (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1988), 78ff., including his comments on Rom. 2:24 on ibid., 115-116.

47. See Marcus J. Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in The Teachings of Jesus (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998).

48. Here I allude to Mt. 5:15/Mk. 4:21/Lk. 11:33 in its famous King James Version form. These words have been understood individualistically but are best understood as referring to Israel in relation to the nations.

49. Here my generalizing is focused on Western Christianity. The first Holy Roman Emperor (Otto I) was crowned in 962, while the last (Francis II) abdicated in 1806. Although the language of the Holy Roman Empire is striking, and should be alarming, in the light of Christianity’s origins, the same ethos can be discerned whether we focus on the royal or papal throne.

50. For an illustrated history, see Alice K. Turner, The History Of Hell (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993). The social function of Hell also comes to light in the debates engendered by the growing opposition to Hell and damnation since the Protestant Reformation. D. P. Walker, in his The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 159-160, notes that even those who rejected eternal punishment distinguished between a secret esoteric doctrine for themselves and a vulgar exoteric doctrine (i.e., the standard view) which was to be presented to the masses in order to maintain the social order. Geoffrey Rowell, in his Hell And The Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1974), 83, n. 79, cites one anonymous nineteenth-century critic of F. W. Farrar as saying: “Once remove the restraints of religion, teach the poor that future punishment is a fable, and what will be left to hinder the bursting forth with savage yells of millions of ravening wolves, before whom the salt of the earth will be trodden underfoot, Church establishments dissolved, and baronial halls become piles of blackened ruin?”

51. For this emphasis on “Life,” see Deut. 30:11-20.

52. Ansell, “An Apocalyptic Appendix,” in The Annihilation Of Hell, especially 9.5.

53. For a very helpful analysis of this narrative, see David Smith, “What Hope After Babel? Diversity and Community in Gen 11:1-9, Exod 1:1-14, Zeph 3:1-13 and Acts 2:1-13,” in Horizons in Biblical Theology 18, no. 2 (1996): 169-191.

54. See my “An Apocalyptic Appendix” in The Annihilation Of Hell.

55. This is an important difference from 4 Ezra (and from the paradigm that results from reading 4 Ezra 7:36 into the gospel references to Gehenna). Compare to note 32 above. For further discussion, see my “An Apocalyptic Appendix” in The Annihilation Of Hell.

56. This essay is a revised version of a workshop presentation made at the “Crossing Thresholds, Blurring Boundaries: What Next for the Christian Community?” ICS worldview conference, Toronto, Ontario, October 30, 2004. My thanks to all who participated and to all who have commented on this essay since then.

New books on Bruce Springsteen

There’s two new(ish) books on Springsteen: Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy edited by Randall E. Auxier and Doug Anderson; and The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen: Rock and Redemption, from Asbury Park to Magic by Jeffrey B. Symnkywicz [Reviewed here].

As a long-time Springsteen fan, I’d be keen to hear thoughts from anyone who has read one or both of these. What is their value (for the theologian)? Strengths? Weaknesses? Basic theses? Do they provide a healthy model for cross-discipline study?