Closing off the "series" on Hell House, I now want to propose an alternative to Hell House. The professor of New Testament theology from my school, in reading about a comment I made on Facebook about Hell Houses being the evangelical equivalent of water-boarding, put forth his own idea of an alternative hell house: "I recommend deploying 'heck houses,' in which room by room people would experience minor but persistent annoyances (someone talking loudly on a Bluetooth headset; Jonas Brothers music; aroma of gas station restrooms; men with saggy pants and exposed underwear, grabbing crotch and pulling up shirt to reveal bellies; Bill Cunningham WLW clips; spam messages for Viagra; blasts of hot air like getting into the car in July; clips from census-promotion and political campaign commercials; Windows Vista) and then at the end ask, 'Would you like to spend eternity in a place like this? Well, this is heck. Imagine what hell is like.'" To which my Old Testament professor replied, "Jonas Brothers with video = GEHENNA." This is a good modification and deserves to be thought-about. But here is my own proposal: over and against Hell Houses, create Heaven Houses.
There are several misconceptions about Heaven that prosper: Christians assume they are going to a certain type of Heaven, and people who are not Christians assume that Christians assume they are going to a certain type of Heaven. This Heaven, often immortalized in literature and paintings and sermons, is an ethereal place, a spiritual world where we will sit on clouds and play harps or some derivative thereof, singing songs to God for all eternity. Heaven thus become a disembodied church service that stretches into oblivion. And, let me be frank, that sounds like Hell. It's not a place I want to be. The good news is that this is not the biblical description of heaven but, rather, a caricature of heaven due to, primarily, two veins of thought. The first is the ancient philosophy of Platonism: Plato taught that matter is temporary and the spirit is eternal, that the physical world is a world of transience and that the spiritual world will last for all time. And then there's the ancient idea of Gnosticism, which still raises its ugly head all over the place: the idea that the physical world is evil and that the spiritual world is good. Platonic philosophy on one hand, and Gnostic theology on the other, infiltrated the young Gentile church at an early age, and their effects were felt relatively early-on. In Colossians, St. Paul rails against gnosticism, and the apostolic fathers railed against it even more-so as it grew and prospered within the churches. This supra-spiritual heaven is often perceived in our minds as something like this:
Heaven is not a supra-spiritual realm where we will sing hymns to God for all eternity. Heaven, in the ultimate sense, is, as I've said in an earlier post regarding Hell House, the rescue and renewal of God's good creation, not least his image-bearing creatures. It would be interesting to see a dramatization of this, where tourists were led room-to-room and given different scenes of heaven: perhaps a scene of people swimming with dolphins, followed by a scene of people kayaking down the Amazon; and then maybe show an image of the New Jerusalem, a beautiful city that rivals anything we've ever created, rivaling even the Gardens of Babylon. Perhaps we ought to creatively show that heaven is not what many of us are expecting, and that it is something to be longed-for, hoped-for, yearned-for. It is the substance to which this current world is the shadow. It is where we will live full human lives, which will make our current lives pale in comparison. It is where we will experience exhilaration, joy, peace, excitement. It is where we will laugh and play and explore and conquer. Perhaps it is time we contrast the popular conception of heaven with what I would say is a more biblical conception of heaven:
Instead of trying to terrify people into becoming Christians, perhaps we should inspire them? Perhaps we should give them Good News--"Look what God has planned for his world!"--instead of giving them Bad News--"God wants to destroy you, so you'd better turn to him so he spends his anger on Jesus' cross instead of on you." At the least, it would help people see that Christians aren't dualistic platonists, that we're not stupid, that we have a hope, and that it's a pretty damned good hope. At the least, it would make people question their understanding of Christianity, perhaps make them want to look deeper into it. Would that be so bad? When people walk out of Hell Houses, their conceptions of Christianity as a rule-enforcing religion that seeks to terrify people into loving Jesus are solidified. Maybe a "Heaven House" can devastate such conceptions and force them to rebuild, or at least make them admit that not all Christians view God as this Old Man in the Sky who is angry with everyone. Just a thought.
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