A little girl was talking to her teacher about
whales. The teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a
human being because even though it is a very large mammal its throat is very
small.
The little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed
by a whale. Irritated, the teacher reiterated that a whale could not swallow a
human being; it was physically impossible.
The little girl said, “When I get to heaven I
will ask Jonah.” The teacher asked, “What if Jonah went to hell?” The little
girl replied, “Then you ask him.”
Many people grow up with a fairly defined view
of life: Do good and you go to heaven, do bad and you go to hell.
So the basic human problem is trying to do good
and trying to not do bad. Your outcome is all about how well you do with one or
the other. Some simply give up on the exercise and throw away the whole
concept.
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of being
confronted by a well-meaning Christian with the blunt question, “Are you saved?”
The question most often means, “Are you confident that you’ll go to heaven when
you die?” The implication is that the most important thing about life now is to
concern yourself with the afterlife. Getting saved means securing your future
in the next life.
Theologian and scholar Marcus Borg once stated
in response to a question following one of his lectures, “If I were to make a
list of Christianity’s ten worst contributions to religion, on that list would
be popular Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife.” Not that the after-life
is wrong. But that the almost exclusive obsession with it is one-sided and
incomplete. (Borg, p. 171)
He said there are three reasons why he made that
remark. First, whenever the afterlife is emphasized, the almost invariable
result is that it turns spirituality into a religion of requirements. If there
is a heaven, it doesn’t seem right that everybody gets to go there regardless,
so there must be something that separates those who do get to go from those who
don’t, namely, something that we believe or do.
Second, such an exclusive emphasis creates a
distinction between an in-group and an out-group: there are those who are saved
and those who aren’t. The problem with this over-emphasis is that it too often
leads to judgmental and arrogant attitudes on the part of believers, those
presumably on the “inside.” The whole point of life becomes convincing people
to get inside with you. Nobody outside is good enough or living right. We have
what they need and there’s never a give-and-take or sense of mutuality or
mutual respect. Everyone needs to be like us. So labels and value judgments are
put on people on the “outside.” An “us against them” mentality results.
And third, emphasizing the afterlife focuses our
attention on the next world to the exclusion of transformation in this world.
Our responsibility to grow and develop ourselves, furthermore make this world a
better place goes unnoticed, unprioritized, unimagined or unattended to. The
world can go to hell while we get ready for heaven.
None of this critique, says Borg, is to deny the
reality of heaven or the afterlife or the importance of it. The point, rather,
is to highlight what happens when heaven is made central and when salvation is
virtually identified with going to heaven. It becomes a self-centered religion.
So what is salvation in its wider context and why would I want to be saved? Continued………
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