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Heaven



New Testament scholar and Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright talks about life after "life-after-death" and heaven not being our ultimate destiny. What do you say?

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1710844,00.html

Comments

Anonymous said…
ur Wright :-)

why are there no comments!!!
Sao Tunyi said…
Some general remarks first.

• Putting up this topic, people may think that we just love to pick controversial issues and fight all the time. So I was a little hesitant to respond. But I believe that’s not true.

• Quiet time we know is very necessary. We should encourage one another to have a devotional life. But we all agree with one another and what is there big enough to discuss and debate about?

• Christians do not hide uncomfortable issues under the carpet. As much as building up, we are also to ‘do away with’ and ‘to tear down’.

• It is interesting to note that many of our Christian doctrines became formulated as believers responded to heresies, e.g. doctrine of Trinity. They were not ‘just there’ from the beginning.

• Jt has rightly put it in the previous debate that “even good biblical scholarship admits to its own limitation on the possibility of future re-interpretation (excluding those re-interpretations of its core beliefs…)

With the ‘left behind’ school of thought dominating the shelves of our Christian book stores, and the type of teaching in Sunday school that we grew up with, “it (may) therefore comes as something of a shock that Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term” (I hope you’ve read the link above).
What Wright has been saying is that nowhere in the Bible is written that when we die, we’ll go to heaven, or Jesus is risen so we’ll go to heaven. The Bible rather says that Jesus is risen, new creation has begun. It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation. Wright says that heaven (if you want to use that word) is an intermediate state and we’ll all be raised bodily into the new creation. That the creation is basically good is the original Jewish understanding of reality, and the world as intrinsically evil and salvation an escape from reality into a disembodied state is Plato’s.

Someone can please contribute in discussing the apocalyptic texts and the implications of having the correct view of heaven.

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