Have you ever thought about where your views and beliefs about God, Jesus, salvation, and the church have come from? We can idealistically say our views on spiritual subjects comes from the Bible but the reality is that our spiritual views are shaped by many sources.
A couple of years ago I taught a September through May class exploring the foundations of our faith. The premise of the class was to explore foundational elements of our faith to see how much our view of spiritual subjects was consistent with the Bible. The class turned out to be a massive research project that brought about a transformation in my own personal view on a number of subjects.
When I was growing up I watched Road Runner cartoons every Saturday morning. Inevitably the Road Runner would get squashed, flattened, or obliterated in the cartoon- good wholesome fair for a 9 year old! What happened next? He got wings, he floated up, and ended up sitting on a cloud playing a harp. My Saturday morning cartoon reflected what I had been taught about heaven. Heaven was a non-physical existence that was seperate and apart from this world. In church I would continue to learn intermittently that we would go to heaven after this world had been literally destroyed by fire. I also intermittently learned something about the Baptists's believing in something to do with 1,000 years but I shouldn't believe in the 1,000 years- whatever it was.
As I grew up and entered into ministry heaven was where we were headed after we died but it was something that was not discussed very much. I would teach about heaven in generalities; it is a place where we are with God, it is the opposite of hell... As I continued in ministry I still did not know much at all about heaven or that 1,000 year thing. Then in 1999 I entered Denver Seminary and had a professor encourage us to dig into the word of God. He told us that the Bible is the word of God preserved for us through the power of the Holy Spirit and throughout history God's people have poured through the Bible seeking to understand God. He encouraged us to do the same and gave a personal example of why he had come to the views he had about the 1,000 year of reign of Christ after exhaustively digging through the word of God. He went on to tell us that our view of the 1,000 year reign would not get us into heaven or keep us out of heaven but the importance was pulling our sleeves up and digging through the word of God.
I was intrigued because this was the first time in my life I had ever heard anyone talk about the 1,000 years and end times. My antennas were up! However for the next few years life and ministry stayed fast furious as Michelle and I raised 5 and then 6 kids while we both worked full time jobs. But the spark of interest about end times and rapture and heaven and hell were still on my radar which was one of the primary passions leading me to develop a class exploring the foundations of Christianity.
Through the course of research I was turned onto a New Testament scholar named N.T. Wright. His background is the last place I would have thought to find a New Testament scholar, the Anglican Church of England. As I read more of his writings I was startled to discover that his teaching was most consistent with what my Biblical research was producing so I asked a friend of mine who is a Greek/Hebrew/ Old Testament/ New Testament scholar and he affirmed that N.T. Wright was in fact the real deal and in his view spot on with his understanding of the New Testament.
His views on heaven were radically different than the Bugs Bunny cartoons I had grown up on. But then it occurred to me... maybe it's a problem that my theology of heaven and hell was primarly shaped by Bugs Bunny cartoons instead of the Bible.
Here is a link to N.T. Wright talking about heaven... Enjoy.
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