In an interview with Evangelical Alliance, New Testament Scholar and former Anglican Bishop of Durham N.T. Wright recalls a conference at which John Stott responded to questions about the “irreducible, minimum Gospel.” Stott replied, “I don’t want the irreducible, minimum Gospel! I want the whole Gospel!”
Evangelicals have stood in this tension since the movement began. In our zeal to spread the gospel as widely as possible, we embarked on the dangerous journey to find the minimum, barest Gospel. It usually goes something like this: Each of us have sinned, and that sin separates us from God. Through Jesus Christ, we can find forgiveness and experience eternal life with God in Heaven.
Overall, this isn’t a terrible summary of the message of the Bible. It does, however, have one major fault: the final two words.
The phrase “go to Heaven” occurs nowhere in the Bible. The Gospel brings with it eternal life, but this life doesn’t come through going to Heaven. Rather, Scripture says, Heaven comes to Earth,where God’s establishes his reign in Creation again just as it was in the days before sin. This is the message of the Bible: not that we can go to Heaven when we die, but that Heaven is coming to us.
Why is it important that we read the Bible through this perspective? First, because it makes the most sense of the Bible as a whole. If salvation takes place in another world, the messages of the prophets seem to be untrue, significant portions of the New Testament (such as Paul’s extreme emphasis on the importance of bodily resurrection or his claims about creation awaiting redemption) also become problematic. In its entire context, Scripture imagines the world as awaiting redemption, not abandonment.
Second, the idea that God will take us out of the world is theologically problematic. God created the world and called it “very good”- not just humans, but the world they inhabited as well. If human sinfulness has tainted the world in such a way that God must completely destroy it, we have, in a sense, overcome God by destroying his work; but if God saves the world and expunges it of sin, how much more is he glorified above humanity! Christians have long held that God’s power is manifested more clearly in redemption and restoration than in destruction. Thus, God saving the world brings him more glory than scrapping it.
Make no mistake: the world, in its present form, will not continue forever. The future return of Christ will see the Earth purified and cleansed in a way that will be beautiful to those who have anticipated it and fearful to those who have not. This is why, in various parts of the New Testament, the coming of Christ is described with fire imagery. When reading these passages, we must not make the mistake of bringing our assumptions about what the text says into the text. To the writers of the New Testament, the idea that humans would spend eternity in some other place was a foreign concept. This was the conception held by Greeks, not Christians. Rather, Christ’s return purifies the Earth like fire refining precious metal: it burns away the impurities so that only the pure metal remains.
For far too long, Evangelicals have been spreading the unbiblical idea that eternal life takes place in a separate realm. The Bible is too optimistic about the power of God to assume that Heaven has to be somewhere untouched by humanity. We wait not to be swept away to somewhere utterly foreign to us, but for that which we know and loved to be transformed and redeemed and purged of that which ails it. Perhaps the old hymn “When we all Get to Heaven” should be amended to “When Heaven gets to us.”
J. E. Raabe 