We all know what Christianity is
about, don’t we? It’s about saving your soul from hell, from an eternity of
fiery agony because you’re such a bad person. It’s about accepting Jesus as
your personal Lord and Savior so your soul will spend a blissful eternity
inside those pearly gates walking those golden streets. (Just who would use
gold to pave streets escapes me, but never mind.) There is no doubt that that
is what Christianity came to be mostly about. Catholics and Protestants may
give slightly different answers to the question of how we avoid hell and gain
heaven, but avoiding hell and gaining heaven is what both varieties of
Christianity are about, right? So for that matter is the third big variety of
Christianity, eastern Orthodox Christianity. Ask almost anyone at all familiar
with Christianity today and they’ll say right, that’s what Christianity is
about.
The critics of Christianity, the
nonbelievers, mock Christians for their conviction that their faith is about
heaven and hell. All your superstitions are about is an expected afterlife,
they say. You’re scared of hell. Your faith is grounded in fear of a vengeful
God who’s going to let you have it after you die because you’re such terrible
people! You believe, or pretend to believe, just because you’re scared. What
the hell kind of faith is that? You don’t even know for sure that there is an
afterlife or that heaven and hell are real. Stop living in fear! That’s no way
to live, but it’s all your precious Christianity is about. Get over it!
Many of us know that gaining heaven
and avoiding hell really isn’t what Christianity is about at all, but it’s easy
to see how a great many people, both Christians inside the churches and people
outside them, can believe that faith is indeed grounded in fear about an
afterlife. Since at least the fourth century CE when Christianity became the
established state religion of the Roman Empire the official voices of the faith
have diverted people’s attention away from worldly issues of peace and justice
toward an afterlife the nature of which depends on what you did or didn’t do in
this life. They’ve told people you have to believe what we tell you to believe,
do what we tell you to do, and not do what we tell you not to do or else, as
the Gospel of Matthew says in a few places, you’ll be cast into a furnace of
fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For centuries the most
visible forms of Christianity have indeed been grounded in fear.
Yet fear of eternal suffering isn’t
at all what Jesus was about. It isn’t at all what Christianity was originally
about either. One good way to see that that isn’t what the faith was about is
to consider the understanding of an afterlife in Christianity’s mother faith,
ancient Judaism. Ancient Judaism had an understanding of sorts of an afterlife,
but it didn’t include any notion of heaven and hell. We see what that great
faith thought about the afterlife at Psalms 30:9. In that verse the psalmist
says to God:
‘What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
“The Pit.” Sometimes the texts call it Sheol. In ancient
Jewish faith it was everyone’s fate after death. It is a sort of shadowy place
of pseudo-existence. It isn’t complete nonbeing. It isn’t quite nothingness,
but it isn’t really life either. There is no judgment in it. It’s where
everyone goes. Whatever form we may have there, we can’t actually do anything.
Most of all we can’t praise God. The psalmist of Psalm 30 pleads with God to
save his life so that he can continue to praise God, something he won’t be able
to do after death.
Christianity developed out of a faith
with that conception of the afterlife. In that way of thinking there is nothing
we need to do to secure a blissful afterlife nor anything we must do to avoid a
tortuous one. In Christianity’s mother faith life wasn’t about an afterlife at
all. The righteous weren’t better off after death than were the unrighteous. In
some ancient Jewish thought there was the idea that the righteous are rewarded
and the unrighteous punished, but that reward and that punishment happened in
this life not in some next life. See for example Deuteronomy 30:15-20.
Christianity’s faith of origin had no conception of post-death judgment with
heaven or hell as a consequence of how one had lived life on earth. Original
Christianity didn’t either, or at least gaining heaven and avoiding hell was
not its principal focus. Living the way God wants us to was the faith’s primary
focus, but the purpose of living right wasn’t to avoid hell. Christianity
originally called us to proper living not to gain heaven but as a faithful
response to God’s grace.
So where did the Christian focus on
gaining heaven and avoiding hell that we’re all so familiar with come from? It
was a consequence of the establishment of the faith as the official religion of
the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. When we focus on this life the way
Jesus calls us to we are primarily concerned with peace and with economic
justice for the poor. Empires ancient and modern (whether they call themselves
empires or not) don’t like people being primarily concerned with those things.
They don’t like it when people condemn their violence and call them to the ways
of peace. Empires ancient and modern are based upon a radical inequality of
wealth. They benefit a wealthy few at the expense of the masses of people all
or most of whom are poor. Empires don’t like it when people demand justice for
the disadvantaged the way Jesus did. Empires ancient and modern have no use at
all for Jesus’ social and economic teachings.
In the fourth century CE the
Christian church became the official church of the Roman Empire. The church
reveled in its newfound lofty position of power and wealth. It sure didn’t want
anyone annoying the emperor and his minions by condemning violence and
demanding economic justice. So it began to tell people not to worry too much
about those things beyond perhaps doing charity as a response to people’s need.
Worry instead about the eternal fate of your soul after this life. Focus on
gaining heaven and avoiding hell. It told people they did that by believing the
right things and living the right way, but living the right way became a purely
personal matter. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t lie or cheat others.
Do what the church tells you to do. Do what the emperor tells you to do and
don’t worry about whether that is moral or not. The churchmen said God had
established the Christian empire, so to obey the empire is to obey God. What
the empire is actually doing is not your concern. Read Romans 13:1-7 they said,
and be obedient. Don’t try to end suffering in this life. Worry about eternal
suffering in the next one.
Now, it is true that a promise of a
blissful life in heaven after death can be a powerful message of comfort and
hope for people who are doing nothing but suffer in this life. We mustn’t deny
the power of that message for many people. Yet if grace is truly grace (and it
is) that blissful afterlife isn’t anything we need worry about. It is God’s
free gift for everyone. We need not live in fear of hell. Pope Paul VI said
that he believed that hell is real but he wasn’t sure anyone was in it. Many of
us Christians today go one step further and say hell isn’t even real. Beyond
that we know that heaven and hell were not what Jesus was mostly about. He
called us to live the values of the kingdom of God in this life to be sure, but
he didn’t do that so we could gain heaven. We do it just to be faithful to the
God who loves each and every one of us unconditionally. Yes, Matthew sometimes
speaks about people being thrown into a furnace of fire or an outer darkness
where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, but nearly no one else in
the New Testament talks that way. Jesus surely didn’t. Christianity really is
mostly about peace and justice in this life not about heaven and hell in a next
one.
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