Life Before (and After) Heaven

With just a few days left of our travels before we re-enter life in our home country, I feel myself reflecting on life this past year. Though we figured, in some ways, we were putting life “on hold” to take this trip, nothing could be further from the truth. So much life has happened these eight months. We could put nothing on hold, we could only be ushered into life all around and within us. As Christy said in our India update, “We have long abandoned the notion that we could have journeyed in these four countries as researchers and observers, purely collecting data. Weakness, vulnerability, total grief and communal living have stripped us of that false covering.” And so I find myself reflecting from many angles: the life we have been living, the work we have been doing, and the work Jesus has been doing in me.

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I have no interest in a sentimental view of heaven.

Thoughts of my miscarried baby being received by my dad, that they somehow know one another in heaven, are comforting. And not invalid.

And yet.

SO much thought after death is given toward this hope of seeing our loved ones again one day. About the great reunion in heaven. That is the go-to in bereavement. It’s… nice. It’s conservative. And it’s often where we look for the most comfort.

But it’s not THE hope. THE hope is so much more.

Say “salvation,” and most all Western Christians assume you mean something about going to heaven when you die.

But the great Christian hope of salvation is resurrection from the dead, not going to heaven when you die.

Jesus did not die so that we can go to heaven. Jesus died and now holds the keys to death so that we, like him, can be resurrected in the promise of new creation. He is the first fruit of that day when all who are in him will likewise be transformed, as the kingdom at last comes in its fullness. Jesus died so that we might have eternal life.

Death provokes mourning because we know it doesn’t belong. Death is an enemy. It’s a defeated enemy, yet its final breath (spanning millenniums at this point) still surrounds us, chokes us, seems to have the final say.

And that’s the thing:

If a heavenly destination is all there is to look forward to, then death DOES have the final say. Heaven may be a better destination than hell, but death still puts us one place or the other. Make of heaven and hell what you will — if that’s the end, death still reigns. If our soul goes away to heaven while our body is left to decompose, and that’s it, we haven’t been rescued from death. If that’s it, then God’s declaration of “good” and “very good” over his creation and the humans that bear his very image has not been restored.

But resurrection tells a different story. The Bible tells a different story. In it, death itself is upended. Death does not have the final say. Bodily resurrection, bodily transformation — like Jesus — is what Christians await. And not just humans but the entire cosmos.

Resurrection isn’t merely a different way of talking about heaven. It's something else entirely, something beyond the heavenly state that departed ones currently experience. This, I have discovered, is foundational to how Christians live on earth in the present. Living with the belief that, in the end, the earth—indeed, the solar system—is going to be thrown into the waste bin and all the Christians will at last live in a spiritual, heavenly destination "up there" is completely different from the belief that God’s ultimate purpose is one of restoration, not evacuation, and that, in the end, ALL things will be made new while death and its friends are put away once and for all. Living with the belief that "This earth is not my home, I'm just passing through" is completely different than "This earth it not my home, but it will be." And living with the belief that nothing here matters much because it's all going to hell anyway is completely different from living with the promise that the work we do in the present, work that bears the fruit of the Spirit: the stuff of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control... all of that will find its way into new creation. It is not wasted. It is not in vain. It is partnership with God, a resounding “Yes!” to his plans and purposes for ourselves and the world he is redeeming.

N.T. Wright sums this up well:

"The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and re-creation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context—not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being “fellow workers with God”) within that larger picture and purpose. And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alternatives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question. The question ought to be, How will God’s new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world? The choice before humans would then be framed differently: are you going to worship the creator God and discover thereby what it means to become fully and gloriously human, reflecting his powerful, healing, transformative love into the world? Or are you going to worship the world as it is, boosting your corruptible humanness by gaining power or pleasure from forces within the world but merely contributing thereby to your own dehumanization and the further corruption of the world itself?”

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Growing up in the stream of evangelical charismatic Christianity, salvation meant going to heaven when you die, and Christian living meant tools and instructions about having a good relationship with God in the meantime. And, in many ways, "born-again Christian" was synonymous with that stream and only that stream.

One day, or perhaps I should say one season, I began to discover the various streams of Christian faith and their unique contribution to the faith (as did Brian Zahnd, the pastor of that once charismatic evangelical church). He came to put it like this:

“Each branch of Christianity has its own unique emphasis on Christ. The Orthodox give us the Christ of Glory. The Orthodox have their beautiful icons and a high Christology. The Catholics give us the Suffering Christ, which is why the crucifix is so prominent in Catholicism. The Anglicans give us Christ the Teacher—so many of our best theologians either come from the Anglicans or eventually find their home there. Protestants give us the Reforming Christ, the Jesus who challenges the Pharisees and cleanses the Temple. Evangelicals give us the Personal Jesus, the Jesus who calls his disciples by name and talks to Nicodemus about being born again. Pentecostals give us the miracle-working Jesus, who heals the sick and casts out demons… Christianity is a symposium, a symphony, and we need our beautiful diversity."

This changed everything for me. The thing is, in having my eyes opened to the beauty of diversity within the various streams of Christian faith and wondering at that, with a sort of “wait, how did no one tell me this before?”, it then made me a bit antagonistic toward what I grew up in, that charismatic stream which, however unintentional it may be, contained a definite air of "this is the way to be a Christian, those others are lost in dead tradition." Though it's certainly true that dead tradition is a real thing and that many evangelicals of my parent's generation fought to escape churches that had become lost in rote ritual, I now see how damaging it can also be to be cultivated in an atmosphere that essentially assumes "ah, nope, dead religion" about "everyone else."

For many years now, I have been warring against the pride and cynicism that is the side effect of recognizing that arrogance. I regard those who are still fully invested in that stream of faith as waffling in a mixture of arrogance/ignorance, because I feel a bit betrayed by that the stream even though it contains a lot of wonderful people who have contributed significantly to my upbringing and have given me many of the opportunities in life that I have had. And so though I try to only critique the stream, what this actually looks like in reality is a pride toward fellow Christians. I can turn human beings into ideologies and concepts, and this, as Jesus constantly reminds me, is not something he approves of.

So he brought me to India. For lots of reasons, of course, but for one specific personal one; to re-learn something while across the world.

I was having coffee with a brother and was asking some questions about Christianity in India. The question at hand was: why Christianity? Why not Hinduism, or Buddhism? Why Christianity?

His short, simple answer hit me between the eyes: personal relationship with Jesus Christ. What Christianity has that other religions do not is a personal relationship with God himself.

There it was. That very emphasis that evangelical Christianity has: the personal relationship. That’s what I had to re-learn, be told once again. Because the thing is, I’ve seen the distortions of that emphasis, the calamity of genuine faith reduced to a sort of private sentimentality. Because though personal relationship with Jesus Christ is valid—indeed, definitive—the idea of Jesus as one’s "personal Lord and Savior” is problematic. In due time it easily conjures up me-and-Jesus sentimentality that falls prey to private spirituality. Jesus IS Lord and Savior. That’s the proclamation. He’s not my personal Lord and Savior, though he saves me personally.

That is one reason why we need the whole church, the beautiful diversity. The evangelical emphasis is not all there is, and becoming aware of the emphases of other streams of Christian faith helped me greatly in working out why a personal relationship with Jesus emphasis seemed both extremely important but also easily isolating. Of course, no evangelical would claim that Christianity should ever be isolating, and yet I think most would recognize that that’s exactly what happens to many a Christian evangelical. It’s not from a failure of the emphasis, it’s from a failure to recognize that it’s just that — an emphasis, and coming to understand that different emphases in other streams of the Christian faith became emphases for good reasons, which is not a betrayal to the emphasis you hold, but an embrace. It’s an embrace that open us to a much bigger faith, one rooted in history while open to the living Spirit of God, one that recognizes that there is so much more to Christianity than just me-and-Jesus-and-getting-a-ticket-to-heaven-when-I-die.

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What Christy and I have been doing this year, through filmmaking, is capturing a glimpse of Christianity in cultures different from our own. We opened ourselves to where God would take us on this trip; been led by him to the specific people and stories that will be present in the film we are creating. We had no idea what it would look like when we set out, who we would meet and what their stories would be and how they would fit together into one complete film. Our prayer is that the Spirit of God has been present in the process and will be present in the viewing of the finished film. From the beginning, our main stated intent for this film is that it would be an "encouragement to the western church.”

Of course, that statement is ridiculously broad. And, due to the limited sphere of our reach of connections, the people present in this film are limited to an expression of evangelical Christianity. And the viewership, I imagine, will be largely that as well.

As the trip progressed, I was a bit troubled by this for a while. With my understanding of the beauty of Christianity in its larger scope, I wanted to reach out broader, to bring some of those streams together.

But it’s okay. Because God had other things in mind, things of ongoing personal transformation being the catalyst from which this film finds its essence — a prayer that we in fact prayed but that I didn’t figure would be answered by returning to an evangelical emphasis. (Leave it to God to order things completely differently than you would.) But now I see that precisely because the evangelical emphasis is what I grew up with, became cynical of, and needed reminding of the goodness to be found within, a film with an evangelical emphasis — a film about personal relationship with God — is therefore what I, together with Christy, are best equipped, at this time, to actually create.

One day, a film I’d like to make would reach into all streams of Christianity, a film that showcases the emphases that the many varied streams of Christianity holds. (Perhaps such a film has already been made, but I have not heard of it.) I can only wonder at what kind of encouragement to the western church that kind of film could bring. But we were not ready to attempt such a thing on this journey, not the least of reasons being my own cynicism toward the stream I know best needing to undergo some healing this year.

So I think that’s the question from Jesus to me: Are you willing to take the bad along with the good and still be faithful? Preston Yancey talks a lot about this, about settling down denominationally, about the willingness to become rooted to a people, saying that you are willing to take from them both the good and the bad. For him, this led to a transition from Baptist to Anglican, finding a home with the richness of liturgy while remaining a “happy-clappy Jesus-lover.” That always makes me chuckle, because I get it, and I think its beautiful. There's a lot in me that is pulled toward the Anglican as well. But then, that's the thing. There’s not necessarily a real need to hop to another stream. If the stream you’re in truly doesn’t feel like home, perhaps home is to be made in another. But, they all have the same source. And so, the question lingers: Are you willing to take the bad along with the good and still be faithful? †

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