It’s Not (Much) About
Heaven
September 4, 2021
Perhaps you have noticed that
different kinds of Christians have different favorite Gospels. Progressive
Christians tend to prefer Luke, Luke being the Gospel of social justice par
excellence. I don’t know that any of us progressive Christians live up to
Luke’s lofty vision of the Christian life, but we still tend to prefer Luke to
the other canonical Gospels. More conservative Christians (“conservative
Christian” being an oxymoron, but never mind) usually prefer the Gospel of
John. They have made John 3:16 the most quoted verse in the Bible. It reads, “For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes
in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This verse is indeed a
powerful statement of the foundation of the Christian faith, but there’s a
problem here. The problem is that conservative Christians love the verse
because they misunderstand the verse. They read substitutionary sacrificial
soteriology into the word “gave” though the verse simply does not support that
reading of it. They misunderstand what the word translated as “believe” means.
It doesn’t mean take unprovable facts as true, it means give your heart and
your trust to Jesus. They misunderstand what “perish” means. It actually means
the opposite of “eternal life,” but “eternal live” doesn’t mean what most
Christians think it means either. That last one is the error I want to focus on
here.
Conservative Christians understand
the phrase “eternal life” to mean the blissful life of the soul in heaven after
a person’s death. That phrase appears so often in John that Christians of all
sorts have typically thought that the entire Gospel of John is about how one
gets one’s soul to heaven after death. They then consider that that’s what the
entire Christian faith is about, but here’s the truth of the matter. The Gospel
of John simply is not primarily about life after death and how we get our souls
to heaven by believing in Jesus. I want to explain here how we know that the
Gospel of John is about this life not some next life. I’ll start by looking at
the one verse where the Gospel of John defines what it means by “eternal life.”
People are quick to assume that
they know what the Gospel of John means by the Gospel’s central phrase eternal
life. With only one exception John doesn’t define the phrase when it uses it,
which gives people lots of room to read their own definition into it. The
Gospel of John, however, does define the phrase “eternal life,” and it defines
it to mean something quite different from what people usually take it to mean. This
Gospel defines “eternal life” at John 17:3. That verse is part of what scholars
call “the great priestly prayer” in which Jesus prays for his disciples before
his arrest and execution. With some context included, that verse reads:
After Jesus had spoken
these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come;
glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him
authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.
And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom you have sent. John 17:1-3.
There you have John’s definition of
the phrase “eternal life.” Eternal life in the Gospel of John is life in the
knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. This definition does not say that’s how you get
eternal life, it says this is eternal life, knowing the only true God
and Jesus Christ. Every time we read the phrase “eternal life” in John we must
understand it to mean this life lived in that knowledge. I urge you to reread
John with that definition in mind. Doing so may well change how you understand
that whole Gospel and perhaps even how you understand the whole Christian
faith.
I’ll give you one example here of
how my suggestion works. There are other problems with John 3:16 that I
suggested above, but here’s how to understand that verse with a proper
understanding of the meaning of “eternal life:” “For God s loved the world that
he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but
may have life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ.” John 3:16 is all about
this life, not some imagined afterlife. The whole Gospel of John is about this
life not some afterlife.
At another verse in the Gospel John’s
Jesus tells us in a different way that he is about this life not some other life.
At John 10:10 Jesus has been using a rather obscure metaphor of himself not as
the good shepherd (he says he’s that in the next verse) but as the gate for the
sheep and about how those who come among the sheep in some way other than through
him are thieves come only to kill and destroy. Then he says, “I came that they
may have life, and have it abundantly.” John 10:10a. Life not afterlife. The
Greek word translated here as “life” is a form of the word “zoe, the
common Greek word for life with no connotation other than life here and now not
there and then. If the Gospel of John were as much about getting to a blessed
afterlife as so many conservative Christians think is we’d expect John’s Jesus
to say “I have come that they may have life in heaven” or some such thing. He
doesn’t say that. He says have life and have it abundantly. This verse tells us
that Jesus is about our lives in this life not in some next life. That’s what
the Gospel of John is about too.
When we pay attention to what the
Gospel of John actually says rather than what we’ve been told that it says or
that we want it to say we see that this Gospel is about this life not some imagined
afterlife. Yet there is one verse that people who want Jesus to be about heaven
not earth often cite. It is John 18:36. The King James Version translation of
the first part of that verse reads “Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this
world….” Many subsequent English translations have repeated the King James
Version’s translation “not of this world.” The New International Version, the
most widely purchased English translation of the Bible, does just that. It’s
translation of John 18:36a is “Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.” Sure
sounds like Jesus’ kingdom is in heaven not on earth, doesn’t it?
Well, it may well sound that way,
there’s a big problem here. “Not of this world” is not what the Greek original
of this verse says. The Greek original of the phrase so often translated as “of
this world” is “ek tou kosmou.” “Tou kosmou” means this world.
There’s no issue there. There is however an important translation issue around
the preposition “ek.” Though it is so often translated that way, “ek”
doesn’t mean “of.” It means “out of.” A person comes “ek” a room she is
leaving. Unlike the popular New International Version, the New Revised Standard
Version of the Bible that most progressive Christians and most scholars use
correctly translates “ek tou kosmou” as “from this world”. The NRSV
translation of John 18:36a reads, “Jesus answered, ‘My kingdom is not from this
world.” “From this world” not “of this world.
It is a small difference in wording
but an immense difference in meaning. When the phrase in question is translated
as “of this world” it is easy to read it as being about the location of Jesus’
kingdom, namely, in heaven not on earth. Countless generations of English-speaking
Christians have understood the phrase “of this world” to mean precisely that.
But that simply is not what the Greek original here says. The phrase is about
the origins of Jesus’ kingdom not its location. His kingdom is on earth (or one
day will be), but it has its origin in God. It receives its form, substance,
and authority from God not from anything on earth, but it is located on earth.
We simply must get beyond that old translation of “of this world.” It gives an
entirely wrong impression of what this text means.[1]
The important point here is that
the Gospel of John is about this life more than it is about a next life. Yes,
it calls over and over again to believe in Jesus; but we see in the definition
of “eternal life” at John 17:3 that it calls us to believe in Jesus for
purposes of this life not for the purpose of getting our souls to heaven in
some next life. Yes, John’s Jesus says that he goes to prepare a place for his
disciples in God’s house with many dwelling places. John 14:2. Yet that verse,
which does indeed seem to be about going to heaven, is almost a sidenote in the
Gospel of John. It isn’t what that Gospel is primarily about. The Gospel of
John is primarily about our believing in Jesus so that we may live the eternal
life of life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ precisely in this life.
And no, it’s not (much) about heaven at all.
[1] The
King James Version’s mistranslation of “ek tou kosmou” may have been
intentional. King James I of England commissioned a new English translation of
the Bible in 1701. The full translation, called the Authorized Version and
commonly called the King James Version, came out in 1711. King James was an
earthly ruler not a heavenly one. At least since the fourth century CE when
Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire secular
rulers have wanted the faith to be about how our souls get to heaven rather
than hell and not about how we establish justice and peace here on earth. Never
mind that Jesus was much more about the second of these concerns than he was
about the first one. The translators working for King James were not going to
give him a translation the king wouldn’t accept. So they said “not of this
world” rather than the correct “not from this world.”
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