things you thought i believed as a Christian, but i don't

When you die your soul goes to either heaven or hell

Why do we think of this belief as Christian?

This a strange one to try to tackle. As a pastor, I know that if I do the funeral of a grieving family that hasn’t seen the inside of a church building in twenty years, that has probably never openly discussed theology, and that may have even renounced any particular faith whatsoever, I know the chances are that I’m still going to hear some quasi-theological sentiments. Namely, I’ll hear that the loved one’s soul continues on outside their deceased body and that if they were basically seen as a good person (according to the family’s baseline moral tolerances and preferences) the loved one’s soul is now in an alternate, parallel plane that we’ll imprecisely refer to as heaven and, if not, another one that we’ll refer to as hell.

What you have to understand, firstly, is that there is nothing specifically Christian about this belief (actually, just the opposite, as I’ll argue in a second). It’s more like the unofficial, metaphysical assumption of Western culture that acts as filler when we lack anything more specific speak of.

Modern heaven and hell depictions spawned not from biblical sources but from Greek speculation on the afterlife (notice the superficial similarities between Heaven and Elysium and between Hell and Hades). The earliest quasi-Christian literature that began to speculate about such things was second century story called The Acts of Paul, a highly fanciful collection that emerged a full century after Paul’s death.  There were periodic mentions of heaven and hell in writings of the first few centuries of Christianity, but earnest speculation about heaven and hell as the fate of good and evil people in the afterlife didn’t start in earnest until Roman Catholicism came into ascendency in the middle ages.

Is there a more authentically Christian belief?

Because Euro-American culture has officially been called “Christian” for the last 17 centuries or so (Wikipedia - Constantine), when the library of our minds doesn’t know where else to file this kind of vaguely supernatural chatter, we absentmindedly file it away in the religious section on the “Christian” shelf.

Here’s the irony, though: the biblically and theologically informed Christian is actually the only person in the Western world who has a story to tell about our eternal fate that is precisely the opposite. We believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. We actually believe in the resurrection of dead bodies, not resuscitated but made new. And we believe that this rock on which we live is made new too. I don’t expect this to make Christian beliefs sound any more plausible to anyone. We don’t believe something that’s plausible; we believe something that’s miraculous.

No one really speculates too much on how resurrection works since it’s based on a promise from a person whom we find trustworthy and have encountered in someway after his own death rather than on plausible metaphysics. And because it’s not essential for us to conceive of how it all works, many liberal Christians hedge on the bodily-ness of resurrection because they find it easier to believe in something a little less concrete.  But the key point is that if we live anywhere, it’s still here in this creation. Our souls don’t abandon ship in favor of some more promising metaphysical plane.

Biblically, heaven is, almost by definition, a place where humans can’t dwell. God dwells in heaven, and since God’s holiness is an all-consuming fire that would overwhelm anything in its presence that is not God, heaven is that place where God restricts God’s self so that another place called creation can exist. The two don’t mix—well, not really, but for one exception, the one man, Jesus, is seen as a sort of rift or wormhole in the metaphysical boundary. In biblical speak, he is like a new Jacob’s ladder, up and down which the stuff of heaven can sort of break quarantine and slip through the cracks (but, notably, not the other way around, see John 1:51).

It’s lost in English translations, but when Paul speaks of the dead being raised to go meet the Lord “in the clouds” (1 Thess. 4:13-18), he is not suggesting that they’ll ascend anywhere else permanently, but rather, on Jesus’ descent toward us from heaven we will go meet him as delegates in Roman culture would go outside the city walls to meet a visiting ruler before all parties return together inside the walls of the original city.

In the last chapters of Revelation, humans don’t abandon Earth and get plucked up into heaven, but a new Jerusalem (an intermediary space where God’s holiness can exists in the midst of creation) descends from a new heaven down to a new Earth.

Why is this distinction important?

If we believe in an eternal future that has nothing to do with the creation we now occupy, what impetus could we have to care for this creation? That so many American Christians can concern themselves with private morality as it unfolds inside the home while espousing public views and policies that are outright hostile to this world that John tells us “God so loved” and that God called “very good” from the very earliest chapter in the Bible, is nothing but crass ignorance of their own tradition.

A Christian who is convinced that creation is precious and that God’s intentions for the future of humanity have to do with this creation and no other ought to be the first to, in Martin Luther’s words, “plant a tree.”

God chooses either to save or to not save individuals based on their merits

Why do we think of this as a Christian belief today?

For Jesus and for most of the New Testament, salvation is something that happens to communities, not to individuals. Some hint that individuals might receive salvation for themselves starts to creep into 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus which are the latest of the NT epistles written somewhere between 90 and 115 AD. Early patristic fathers like Origen speculate here and there about the fate of individuals, but salvation is still assumed to mostly be a communal concern until Augustine begins to speculate on the matter and elevates it to the level of church doctrine in the late 4^th-early 5th centuries.

Is there a more authentically Christian belief?

Biblically, since salvation is, by definition, reconciliation and restoration back into a joyful community with God, with each other, and with nonhuman creation, it’s inconceivable for salvation to happen to individuals apart from community. When Jesus does seem to indicate that he has “saved” an individual (e.g.  the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5; Zaccheus in Luke 19:1-10; or the man born blind in John 4) salvation means precisely that they had been in a state of isolation from community but have been brought back.

For the Hebraic thinkers that first started confessing, “He is risen,” Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection wasn’t understood to have reconciled certain individuals to God. It was seen as the event that fulfilled God’s covenant with a family that was blessed in the days of Abraham with the intention that they might become a blessing to all families. And even when the early church did debate over the scope of Jesus’ salvation, the debate was not about whether Jesus’ actions might have relevance for Lionel but not for Jim Bob. They debated whether they had relevance for the community of the uncircumcised or for the community of Apollos.

Any depiction of eternal self-fulfillment in the absence of community sanctifies the very narcissism that Jesus despised. If Jesus has anything to say about it, salvation must definitely involve reconciliation with our enemies and with people whose lifestyle, beliefs, and so on we now disapprove of. Creating a reconciled community of people who already got along with each other and believed the same things would be no miracle at all. It’s called reconciliation precisely because people whom we didn’t consider part of our community become our community.

Why is this important?

This ‘Murica.