All posts in Resurrection

  • Life Made Livable

    So I ask you for the umpteenth time, dear blog reader, what does it mean to be saved? Does it mean some part of you, your spirit let’s say, is saved to exist in a non-spatial, non-temporal existence following your death? That your spirit is “harvested” for a “spiritual” postmortem existence? A saved ghost preserved in a heavenly museum? If so, small wonder that some think we’ve got heaven and hell all rolled into one.

    Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
    Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while

    Yes, I know the Bible can be read in such a way that salvation looks like this — part of you is saved for another time and place — but it’s a tragic misreading. And, sadly, it’s a common misreading. Which, I suppose, is to be expected, thanks to the massive doses of Platonism and Gnosticism which seem to be the very religious air we breathe. The “vapors” of Gnostic Platonism have caused popular American Christianity for the past two centuries to be unabashedly dualistic; to the extent that a dualistic reading of Scripture seems to be orthodox, when in fact it is entirely unorthodox.

    It’s frustrating.
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  • Anastasis


    This is another blog that is actually a letter. I was in conversation with an important Christian leader and I had asked him this question: “Why did Jesus come?” He answered, “So we can go to heaven when we die.” I told him this was the wrong answer and explained the true purpose of the Incarnation and the true nature of salvation. A short time later he asked me to to put what I had said to him in writing so that he could preach on it. The following is my reply. It is by no means a full treatment of the subject, but the “notes” of what I said during our conversation:

    Why did Jesus come? The answer is not, “so we can go to heaven when we die.”

    The problem with saying that Jesus came so that we can go to heaven when we die is that it diminishes the full scope of salvation and misunderstands the purpose of humanity.

    God created man from the dust of the earth, breathed into him the breath of life and in this act man became the creature that is uniquely human. (Genesis 2:7)

    Animals are physical creatures (dust of the earth) while angels are spirit beings (breath of God), but humans are neither animals nor angels. Humans are a hybrid creature suited for both the heavens (spiritual dimension) and the earth (physical dimension).
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