I know the title isn’t very creative, but this article in itself is. It was written by Dr. Andrew Root, a professor at Luther Seminary. The basic consideration is how God’s timeline is separate from ours. This meaning that when miraculous things happen in our timeline it is God’s future breaking into our timeline. Dr. Andrew explains so much better than I, here is an exerpt followed by a link to the rest of the article
This week I’m continuing my little paper - “The False View of Hell”. My goal with this piece is to try and show to both our Christian and non-Christian visitors, that the typical, predominant view that good people go to “Heaven” and bad people (or people just not believing in Jesus - a.k.a. “becoming a Christian”) go the “Hell” when they die, is NOT what the Bible actually says. Such a belief can only be seen in the bible when the presuppositions of that idea are read into certain Bible passages. And even then, they come into direct conflict with other parts of Scripture that point to different “afterlife” views. However, if (as I mentioned in Part 1) one looks at Scripture as a whole and doesn’t read Plato’s dualistic concepts into the Hebrew texts, it can be seen that man doesn’t automatically continue to live on past death in the “good place” or the “bad place”. Let’s dig deeper into this here in Part 2!
Jesus’ life is a Gospel presentation. I do not mean that in an abstract way. Jesus, as Messiah, literally lives the Kingdom age for all to see. His values are the values of his Father, and therefore the values of the next age. Jesus’ life isn’t a Gospel presentation because he “just loved everybody”, or “met them where they were at”. He did much more than that. He did love them, and he did meet them where they were. But as a result of Jesus’ actions these peoples’ lives were changed forever. It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to reveal why the miraculous Church came out of him. They were literally being Jesus. As I’ve started to show in my last two posts Jesus’ “theology” was lived in his life. It wasn’t only a mental construct that he believed in a vacuum. His core beliefs defined his behavior. His core beliefs were the values of the Kingdom set against the reality of fallen humanity. Even beyond this, his behavior was not for himself, but for others. His behavior caused healing and restoration in and around the people he came in contact with.
I came across this fantastic quote in “A Community Called Atonement” by Scot McKnight of jesuscreed.org
The Beattitudes are normally misunderstood as a list of virtues. The Beattitudes, however, are not a virtue list: they are a list of the kinds of people in the society Jesus maps for his listeners. Those who are responding to his kingdom vision are the poor and hungry, those who weep and those who are despised by the powerful - and those who are not responding are the rich, the well fed, the party-prone, and those are who approved by such powerful folks. No, this is not a virtue list but a sociopolitical statement: the work of God in Jesus and through the kingdom is to include the marginalized, to render judgment on the powerful, and to create around the marginalized (with Jesus at the center) an alternative society where things are (finally, by God) put to rights. Here we come into a vision of the kingdom of God on the part of Jesus that is an extension of the Magnificat and the Benedictus and Jesus’ inaugural address. pg 12
I thought the following quotation was fantastic. Not only does Bart Ehrman clear up that the kingdom of heaven is not heaven but he also states that the kingdom is not in your heart. Instead the kingdom is a real, physical paradisal world that God will usher in at the end of this age.
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium pgs 142-143
For one thing, almost all scholars today would agree that when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, he is not referring to “heaven”–in the sense of the place that your soul goes, God willing, when you die. To be sure, the Kingdom of God has some relationship to “heaven” as the place where God is enthroned; but when Jesus talks about the Kingdom, he appears to refer principally to something here on earth–where God will at some point begin to rule as he already does rule up above. This is in fully keeping with the Jewish background to Jesus’ life and thought. For throughout the Hebrew Bible, there is constant talk of the God of Israel being the King of all people and establishing his rule for them…