Page 4959 – Christianity Today (2024)

I must confess that when I am invited to write about heaven or hell I feel an extreme reluctance. Does this reluctance spring from the promptings of the Holy Spirit, or from the promptings of the Devil? How much of it is due to a proper fear that it is presumptuous to try to inquire in detail into mysteries that God has left veiled? And how much of it is due to an unworthy determination to focus the mind on things of this world and not on things above? I suspect that the latter motive is strong in all of us. The young do not want to think about the afterlife because it is too far off, and the old do not want to think about it because it is too near.

How Long Is Forever?

Biblical teaching will not allow us to shrug off all thought of life hereafter. It promises “everlasting” life, life that is timeless. Clearly, therefore, any reflection on the character of life hereafter has to reckon with the immense differences that must exist between life that is subject to time and life that is freed from time. Although all human beings are locked for 60 or 70 years in a time sequence of hours and days, weeks and months, we Christians are accustomed to adjust our familiar temporal perspectives when we ponder the truths of Christian revelation. For these truths transcend the limitations of time. Jesus Christ is alive, we say, yesterday and today and forever. His entry into human life and his resurrection are not just historical events of the first century A.D., but realities of our daily experience now. The eternal impinges on the temporal whenever the Holy Spirit touches an individual, whenever a prayer is said or a hymn sung.

It is not only in prayer and worship that what is outside time impinges on what is inside time. Poets through the ages have described how awareness of the eternal came flooding over them as they contemplated the wonder of God’s creation. When Wordsworth was overwhelmed on a walking tour by the grandeur of the peaks and crags, the winds and waterfalls of the Simplon Pass, he discerned that all the aspects of the magnificent scene before him were “types and symbols of Eternity / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.” He grappled with words to try to define an irruption into the fabric of time from a world beyond time. John Milton was so moved by music, he said, that it brought “all heaven” before his eyes. Coventry Patmore told how the beauty of the girl he loved had the same effect on him:

She seemed expressly sent below

To teach our erring minds to see

The rhythmic change of time’s swift flow

As part of still eternity.

Earthly experiences that open a window in the framework of time are fragmentary. They come and go. In the same way, for most of us, our moments of conscious contact with God are fleeting, our sense of his presence is fragmentary. This fleetingness and fragmentariness are aspects of life in time.

We are always wishing that our life on earth were different in this respect. We use two words that, when put together, sum up the difference between the joys of life in time and the joys of eternity: “If only.” If only the vigor and beauty of youth did not fade! If only the energy of youth could be experienced at the same time as the poise of maturity and the wisdom of age! If only there were no human sinfulness to plunge nations into misery! If only bodies could not be destroyed by cancers, wills broken by addictions, emotions poisoned by perversions! If only! And what would follow? Life would be “heavenly,” of course.

Life Without The Negatives

If only we could have the positives of earthly life without the negatives. But that is precisely what heaven has to offer—the removal of the negatives. All those “if onlys” will be realized. Yet two factors especially stand in the way of our realizing them here and now: human sin and the dominion of time. Both will be swept away. Here below, time withers flowers and human beauty, it encourages good intentions to evaporate, it deprives us of our loved ones. Within the universe ruled by time, the happiest marriage ends in death, the loveliest woman becomes a skeleton. Fading and aging, losing and failing, being deprived and being frustrated—these are the negative aspects of life in time. Life in eternity will liberate us from all loss, all deprivation.

Since in heaven there can be neither loss nor deprivation, it follows that possession of a thing in heaven cannot be like individual ownership here below. Owning things in earthly life takes meaning from the fact that others lack what the possessor owns. If you have a highly prized collection of antiques, your distinction in possessing them depends upon the fact that others lack them. If every householder in your street had a matching collection of antiques, your delight in ownership would be diminished. Their value depends on scarcity. That is the nature of material “value” on earth. When you pay a high price for a seat in a concert hall to hear the performance of a world-famous singer, you know that the value of the performance is determined by its rarity. If everyone in the audience could sing like the star performer, the show would lose its point.

Members of an audience might well say, after a night at the opera, “If only I could sing like Pavarotti!” Suppose they all could. What then? No doubt they might all take the same delight in the exercise of their gift as the great virtuoso does; but the rarity value of the accomplishment would be lost. Along with it would be lost many pleasing by-products of the star’s career—the power to attract huge audiences, to bask in the glow of fame, to tour the world in style, and to make lots of money. I raise this point because Saint Paul promises us all crowns of victory in heaven. On earth, the value and importance of crowns depends on their scarcity. A sovereign takes his or her dignity and importance from the fact that he or she has the only crowned head in the kingdom. On earth the Olympic gold medalist takes his or her status from the fact that when he or she wins, all the others lose. Saint Paul, however, promises crowns and laurels all around.

The truth is that the relationship between winning and losing, like the relationship between ownership and deprivation, cannot exist in heaven. All delights are purged of these earthly limitations. On earth, value depends on scarcity. In heaven, value resides in abundance. Whatever experience we enjoy in heaven will be magnified, not by the fact that others are deprived of it, but by the fact that others enjoy it, too.

We have to make a special effort if we are to picture heavenly things disentangled from the limitations of earthly experience. The seventeenth-century English poet Lord Herbert of Cherbury depicted a young lover assuring his beloved that their bodily delights will be renewed in heaven:

These eyes again, then, eyes shall see

And hands again these hands enfold,

And all chaste pleasures can be told.

Heavenly Bodies

Saint Paul, however, wisely urged us not to equate the resurrection body with the earthly body. The one is sown in corruption, the other is raised in incorruption. After all, our earthly bodies are finely adapted to their earthly environment, and our resurrection bodies will inhabit a very different environment. Consider how our senses are tuned to the measure of space and the span of time that we inhabit. I can see a mountain a few miles away, but I cannot see distant stars without a telescope. I can see a fly on my hand with the naked eye, but I cannot see house-mites in the carpet without a microscope.

Owen Barfield once recommended to scholars the need for the art of “unthinking.” If we are going to try to conceive of life in a resurrection body, we must first unthink some aspects of our physical situation. For instance, we must accept that our physical equipment might conceivably be very different from what it presently is. I don’t just mean that we can imagine a human being with a third arm, which could conveniently be brought into play to hold a flashlight while the left hand holds a screw and the right hand holds a screwdriver. Immensely useful as this appendage might prove, it would not fundamentally alter our basic human interconnection with our environment.

The resurrection body will not be constructed and equipped to match the conditions of the space-time dimensions from which eternity will release us. It will not be tuned to the 24-hour day of darkness and light, sleeping and waking, for we know that heaven has no need of sun or moon. It will not be programmed to a 70-year life span, with its rhythm of blooming and fading, growing and decaying.

In what sense, then, will our bodies in heaven be the same bodies we have here on earth? Will they, perhaps, resemble the earthly bodies in the same way as the butterfly resembles the caterpillar? There, indeed, the risen body has a beauty scarcely hinted at in the appearance of the original body. The caterpillar, even if it had an almost-human level of intelligence, would be hard put to understand what life as a butterfly would be like. Suppose we had the task of trying to explain to it, as it clung to a leaf or crawled along a twig, that its risen body will enable it to fly like a bird, and to escape all the limitations imposed by gravity on a creature accustomed to drag its long segments from level to level by a cumbrous array of legs. We should have to explain that the array of legs will be forfeited as redundant. What will remain will be little more than a couple of props, for the present power of mobility supplied by the legs will be utterly transcended by mobility in a further dimension on an unthinkably more liberated scale. As for “seeing,” the caterpillar’s rudimentary apparatus that is sensitive to little more than the distinction between darkness and light, will be superseded by the butterfly’s truly perceptive “eyes.”

To try to make a caterpillar imagine its future life is a useful, if fanciful, way of pinpointing the difficulty men and women have in picturing life in resurrection bodies. When I look up caterpillar in an encyclopedia, I find its structure defined in terms of its future as a butterfly. “Caterpillar is the name given to the larvae of the Lepidoptera, or butterflies and moths.” I cannot help wondering what an angel would find if he looked up Man and Woman in the Encyclopaedia Caelestis: “The name given to the larvae of the saved in their prepupal stage as terrestrial beings. They are two-legged, two-armed, two-eyed, and two-eared (and the most degenerate specimens are said to be two-faced). They are wingless. They have only a rudimentary sensitivity to reality. They tend to measure everything wholly on the basis of their immature understanding as creatures imprisoned in the space-time continuum.

Is Heaven Real?

It used to be fashionable in the pulpit to declare that heaven is not a place but a spiritual state of being. I never thought such efforts to de-substantialize the afterlife were helpful to anyone. The poet Shelley could rhapsodize nebulously about the “white radiance of eternity” dissolving all substance into a mystic glow; but nothing could be more concrete than the picture of heaven in the Book of Revelation. In Saint John’s vision of the New Jerusalem, we have a city of walls and gateways and foundations, its measurements defined with the clarity of a mathematical textbook. This is one of the most crucial corrections that need to be hammered into our heads when we think about life in heaven. Our education is such that many people tend to picture the afterlife as something less solid, less substantial than our earthly life, an existence in some ethereal and virtually disembodied state. In this respect, much current thinking is topsy-turvy. The one thing we can with certainty say about life in heaven is that it is more real than life on Earth. We rightly sing hymns in church about the ever-rolling stream of time bearing us all away, about change and decay in everything around us here; we compare the brief life on Earth with its cares and sorrows to the tearless life that knows no ending. Such, of course, is the true Christian perspective—to set our eyes on what has more substance than earthly life because it is beyond the power of time to wither and destroy. Christian teaching does not represent the afterlife in terms of what is attenuated and intangible. Christ’s imagery of heaven speaks of a place where treasured objects can no longer be consumed by moths and corroded by rust. The biblical imagery of harvests and wedding feasts, Abraham’s bosom and fiery torment, compels us to grapple with concepts far removed from what is vaporous or nebulous.

The biblical presentation of the future life also underscores the compensatory aspect of the life hereafter. We see this illustrated in the parable of Lazarus where the earthly relationship between the rich man feasting sumptuously at his table and the beggar lying in rags at his gate is going to be turned upside-down. The rich man would now be grateful to have his lips moistened by the touch of the once-squalid and bedraggled creature. He is told to remember that he had a good time during his earthly life when the beggar suffered badly. The emphasis of the parable is that the injustices and deprivations of earthly life are going to be fully corrected.

Clearly Christ did not mean that those who scarcely had a cent to call their own on Earth will be gloating over piles of dollar bills in heaven, and that those who lived on bread and water will sit down in the hereafter to platefuls of jumbo steaks and bottles of vintage burgundy. The losses and deprivations that constitute the worst miseries of life are not primarily financial. They are those that take loved ones from us or otherwise damage our physical and mental well-being. More than once in his parables Christ pointed to the joy of recovering what has been lost—the coin, the sheep, the prodigal son. The Lord who raised Lazarus knew that recovering lost coins and sheep is going to be small compensation to the man or woman who has lost a loved one. The cancellation of bereavement is precisely what the resurrection life is all about.

Living In God’s Home

The highest reward of heaven, however, is that it is a place where we will be with God. We have seen how the most blissful experiences of earthly life give Christians fragmentary glimpses of what the joys of heaven will be like. They do so in showing the hand of God at work in our world. The whole character of heaven is essentially determined by the fact that it is God’s home. Evidence of his touch is here no longer fragmentary; awareness of his presence is here no longer fitful. The supreme joy of heaven is the vision of God himself. Poets and mystics have depicted the beatific vision as a culminating experience of almost intolerable bliss. In Milton’s heaven in Paradise Lost, the brightness of God’s presence is so intense that a shadowy cloud is drawn like a veil around the central blaze; but such is the blinding dazzle escaping from the edges of the cloud that the seraphim have to fold their wings doubly over their eyes to approach the Presence.

The keynote of many accounts of what it must be like to be confronted by God himself is this note of unbearable intensity. In Elgar’s setting of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, Gerontius, lying on his deathbed, is carried in a dream into the hereafter. His first approach to heaven brings him within earshot of angels singing their praise in rapturously glorious chorus. The dreamer is all the more eager and impatient to see his Lord; but when he actually draws near the Presence, the music escalates to an overpoweringly climactic thunderclap, and Gerontius’s voice is heard screaming, “Take me away!” From before the seat of judgment he would plunge into the depths and hide from the overwhelming promise of the bliss to come.

Whatever form your most moving earthly experiences of beauty have taken, they were foretastes of heaven. Wherever you have found lovingkindness in human hands and human eyes and human words, you were confronting Christ’s personality operative in God’s creatures. Since the source of all that beauty and all that tenderness is God, the full opening up of his presence before his creatures can be nothing less than the aggregation and concentration and intensification of every loveliness and every goodness we have ever tasted, or even dreamed of. All the love we have ever known in our relationships with others—all that collected and distilled into the personal warmth of him from whom it all derived, and he standing before us: that is the kind of picture that the Christian imagination reaches towards when there is talk of the ultimate reward of the redeemed. It is small wonder that mind and pen falter under the weight of glory brought to mind.

The afterlife is in. Newsweeklies cover it. Talk-show hosts discuss it. And a few pastors have begun preaching about it again.

Once buried by the secular community as a fantasy of the fanatical—and set aside by believers as something too difficult to comprehend or too far off to worry about—the afterlife seems to have come back from the grave. According to a recent Gallup poll, about 78 percent of the public believe in a heaven where people who have led good lives are rewarded. And 60 percent believe in a hell where those who have led bad lives are eternally damned. Even many who claim no religious belief expect life to go on after death: 46 percent believe in heaven, 34 percent in hell.

While Christians accept the Bible’s teaching that there is life beyond the grave, even those of great faith occasionally struggle to understand just what awaits them after their own resurrection. It is not surprising, then—nor should it be alarming—that Christians wrestle with questions raised by God’s final judgment of individuals: What is heaven really like? Who will go? What about good people who never confess Christ as Savior? And would a loving God really send the unrepentant to an eternity of suffering?

Although no one of our acquaintance has brought back an eyewitness account of heaven or hell, we thought it worthwhile to have two respected Christian thinkers, Harry Blamires and Leon Morris, guide us through the biblical and theological evidence for two very real destinations.

Fallacy 1: Workaholics dislike their lifestyle.

Marilyn Machlowitz, in her book Workaholics, found that most workaholics are satisfied and content with their lives, though their lifestyle produces problems for their families.

Fallacy 2: The growth of technology results in more free time in a society.

The percentage of Americans who work 49 hours or more on the job (not counting other types of work) has risen from 18 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 1985, and to 23 percent in 1989. Declining hours per week spent in leisure confirm the trend: 26 hours in 1970, 24 in 1975, 19 in 1980, 18 in 1984, 17 in 1987. International time-use surveys also puncture this myth. Staffan Linder’s book The Harried Leisure Class argued that because the total amount of a person’s time is fixed, an acquisitive lifestyle actually diverts time from leisure to the purchase and care of things.

By Leland Ryken.

When he was eight years old, Bennie Carson had his most spectacular Christmas ever. His mother, his aunt, and his uncle swamped the two Carson boys with toys to try to make up for the departure of his bigamous father. It was also the year of his first religious experience, the year he came home to the heavenly Father.

Pastor Ford of Detroit’s Burns Avenue Seventh-day Adventist Church had just told the suspenseful story of a missionary-doctor husband and wife who were miraculously rescued from a gang of bandits. As the congregation sang the invitation song, the inspired Bennie decided he wanted to follow Jesus, he wanted to be a missionary, and he wanted to be a doctor.

Today he is an active Christian, a leading pediatric neurosurgeon, and a missionary of sorts. Sitting in his cramped cubicle in the Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, he says with quiet passion, “There is a great deal of missionary work that can be done right here in this country. And I spend a fair amount of time trying to do it. I feel that the U.S. is in a crisis situation, educationally and spiritually.

“We are rapidly approaching a Third World situation,” he says, citing ominous statistics. “Our young people’s abilities to understand science and math is thirteenth out of thirteen of the major industrialized countries.”

Though he gave up his plan to become a foreign missionary, Dr. Ben Carson is an avid preacher of the gospel of hard work, dedication, and achievement.

He can preach these things, because his own achievements are remarkable: by age 33, the chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins; the surgical-team leader in the first completely successful separation of Siamese twins joined at the head; the perfecter of the hemispherectomy as a surgical treatment of seizures in young children.

What may be more remarkable is his belief that others from humble circ*mstances have the same chance that he did. What stands in their way is the good intentions of liberal politicians.

“I think one of the greatest tragedies that ever occurred in the United States of America was the emergence of the liberals after the civil-rights struggle. The liberals started handing out things to everybody, creating a welfare-state mentality at a time when doors were beginning to open and people could make it on their own because of perseverence and hard work.

“Now there are no consequences for irresponsible behavior. Look at the soaring rate of fatherless children. I’m talking about gradually reversing that emphasis, so that people learn that there are consequences for actions, and that they are to take responsibility for themselves.” He compares the state of the economic underclass to that of grizzly bears in a national park: “People started giving them food, and they forgot how to hunt, how to live in the wild.” The hand that feeds, destroys.

Powerful men often surround themselves with the symbols of power: expansive desks of rare woods, ankle-deep carpets, objets d’art, and trophies of achievement. Among the powerful, any sign of actual work is usually hidden.

But Ben Carson’s office is cramped and too brightly lit. His functional desk is Formica topped. His objets d’art are crayon drawings of Sesame Street characters, the cultural icons of the American child. Nothing in these surroundings is there to make a statement. This is not an office, but a workshop; the books and journals that crowd its shelves are the intellectual tools of his trade—and the weapons with which he fights the neurological disorders that can erase a child’s future.

Once his weapon was not a scalpel, but a knife, and his passion was not healing, but rage. Today’s visitor, leaning forward and straining to hear Carson’s words, would have a hard time believing this soft-spoken figure once was possessed by a volcanic temper. Carson refuses to try to understand that anger: Did it grow from frustration with the stoic code of silence his mother observed about her difficulties? Did it spring from feelings of abandonment? All he can do is tell how God conquered the anger and the interpersonal communication gradually opened up.

Carson’s temper erupted once too often when he was in the ninth grade. His best friend teased him about his taste in music and changed the channel to which his transistor radio was tuned. An instantaneous, blinding anger possessed Carson, and he grabbed the camping knife he carried in his hip pocket and lunged at his friend’s belly.

The attack was over as quickly as it had begun. Carson stared open-mouthed at the knife in his hand, its blade snapped and lying on the ground. But for God’s grace and his friend’s ROTC belt buckle, it would have been Bob and not the knifeblade on the ground.

Carson was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and shame. He ran home and locked himself in the bathroom with his Bible. The Bible fell open to Proverbs and its condemnation of those who are swift to anger. For hours, he read his Bible and prayed. He emerged believing that God had helped him, and determined never to let another person’s actions so control his reactions.

Racism, of course, is one way that people control other people. Carson decided as a young person that he would not let others’ racist attitudes limit his achievement. As one of few black children in a predominantly white school, he was once convinced that his blackness was a reason for his backwardness. But his mother’s encouragement and the rewards of his steps toward success convinced him otherwise.

When he first came to Johns Hopkins, he was often mistaken for an orderly or a respiratory therapist. White nurses made racist assumptions about black men dressed in hospital whites. Even patients would ask, “When is Doctor Carson going to come?” But he decided not to be intimidated.

“Racism will exist as long as there are stupid people in the society,” he says. “People who cannot get past the color of somebody’s skin are obviously not intellectually inclined. But if you focus on that, you spend an awful lot of energy worrying about something that won’t necessarily change and that doesn’t necessarily affect what you can do. So why worry about it?

“My mother used to tell me, ‘Always remember that if you walk into a room full of racist people, you don’t have a problem, they have a problem. You can sit anywhere in that room that you want; but they’re all worried about who you’re going to sit next to.’ ”

“My mother used to tell me …,” he says. Like many black children, he was raised by a mother whose strength somehow exceeded her resources. She would not stand for his father’s bigamy and forced him to decide between his two families. He left, and she screwed up her courage and raised her boys.

While the three of them suffered from poverty, she herself suffered from clinical depressions. When she felt the dark serpent wrapping about her, she would tell the boys she was going away “to visit relatives.” After leaving them with friends, she would check into a psychiatric hospital.

Bouncing back, Sonya Carson would work as hard as ever to make her boys successes. “Some people are born to work,” Carson wrote in his 1990 autobiography, Gifted Hands. “And others are pushed into it by their moms.”

Once, when Mrs. Carson found out how poorly her son was doing in school, she insisted on good study habits, and good naturedly badgered him into learning his times tables. Because she worked in the households of the wealthy, she observed not only the manners but the mind habits of the successful. These she taught her boys. And once Ben discovered that self-discipline produced rewards, he no longer relied on his mother for motivation but began to drive himself—to be the best speller in the class, to achieve the highest student score to date on the ROTC field-grade examination while in twelfth grade, to go to Yale. At Yale, for the first time in his life, he was among people who were clearly brighter than he. He had to work even harder.

While a student, Carson worked as a recruiter for Yale. When he saw bright students fail to achieve their potential, he resolved to encourage young people at every opportunity. Their inability to “think big,” he says, is their biggest obstacle. Indeed, THINK BIG is the acrostic he frequently uses in his inspirational talks: Recognize your Talents and don’t waste Time, live in Hope and deal in Honesty, glean Insights from experience, be Nice to people, acquire Knowledge, read Books, learn In depth, and rely on God.

Carson’s recipe runs directly counter to what he sees as the trends of the culture. “We have to start emphasizing intellectual achievement over sports, entertainment, and the accumulation of material things,” he argues, making a point frequently underscored in his talks to young people. “By the time the average person in this country is 18 years old, he has watched over 18,000 hours of television. And the overriding emphasis there is on sports, entertainment, and the accumulation of wealth. Young people begin to feel that there’s nothing else as important. The media need to start realizing the responsibility they have for our youth.” He pauses to reflect. “If I had my druthers, I would simply ban most of the entertainment industry and put books in its place … but that’s not going to happen.”

Carson may believe in hard work, but it is clear that that is not all he believes in.

He believes even more in prayer. Despite—or because of—his tremendous success in risky brain surgeries, he is in the habit of giving parents “prayer homework.”

And he believes in prayer because he believes in miracles, of which he has experienced many. The most notable occurred when he was a freshman at Yale. Discouraged by the difficulty of his chemistry class, and ready to give up his goal of practicing medicine, he studied hard for the big exam, then left the results in God’s hands and went to bed. While he slept, he dreamt he was taking a chemistry test and working out the answers. And the next morning he discovered that his test was problem-for-problem what he had seen in the night. Such experiences confirm not only his belief in God, but his confidence in his special calling: He believes he has “gifted hands”—not “gifted” in some vague, colloquial sense, but as a special divine endowment of eye-hand coordination and an ability to see three-dimensionally into a brain what the results of an action will be.

He sits in his chair, his slender legs twisted around themselves, and his long, slender fingers fairly shouting their dexterity. Those fingers, constantly in motion as the doctor nervously massages them, are the fingers of precision, digits with an intelligence of their own: gifted hands.

During the midtwentieth century, someone coined the phrase “the leisure problem.” The phrase still fits, but in the opposite way from what was originally intended. Those who popularized the expression thought that we were moving to shorter and shorter work weeks and that people would not know what to do with all their free time. The predictions turned out to be naively optimistic.

Instead, the chief problem of leisure today is that there is simply not enough of it. And things are getting worse instead of getting better. A Harris survey found that leisure time has steadily declined from 26 hours per week in 1970 to 17 hours in 1987; in other words, in under two decades Americans lost on average 35 percent of their leisure time.

Nearly every observer of the cultural scene agrees that in North America people are suffering from a time famine. According to one survey, a fourth of our overstimulated population claims that it “always feels rushed.” A Time magazine article on the time famine speculated that “leisure could be to the ’90s what money was to the ’80s.”

Even when people find time for leisure, problems persist. One is the poor quality of people’s leisure pursuits—a trivialization of leisure that leaves people bored and diminished instead of enriched.

Another is an inability to value leisure apart from work. People who overvalue work tend either to be passive and lethargic in their leisure or to work at their play, carrying over the intensity and competitiveness of their work into their leisure (and sometimes into their church life as well). They are never less at leisure than during their leisure time. A survey found that a significant number of executives do not take the full vacation time to which they are entitled.

Guilt over leisure is another aspect of the problem, especially in Christian circles. It is fed by the conviction that we should always be doing something useful. Leisure is perceived as unproductive and misspent time. Paradoxically, many of the people who feel guilty about taking time for leisure also feel guilty because they work too much.

Finally, although a lack of leisure is the main problem, for a significant minority in our culture the problem is the opposite. Leisure has become their idol. One manifestation of this obsession with leisure is the syndrome of the endless weekend—not only living for the weekend, but talking about it all week long. Checkout clerks dutifully command us to enjoy our weekend. In our urban society, moreover, the young have become today’s leisure class, characterized by an insatiable capacity to be entertained.

In summary, the problem of leisure in our society is a problem of excess. People have either too little of it or too much of it.

Work Versus Leisure?

Christians share these problems, but this is only the beginning of woes. We also inherit a burden of guilt about leisure from our Christian practice and heritage.

The time famine, for example, is intensified by the usual round of religious activities. By the time we factor in church attendance, Bible studies, devotional activities, committee work, and volunteer service, time that might otherwise have been spent on leisure goes to Christian causes instead. A CHRITIANITY TODAY survey disclosed that Christian leaders spend nearly 25 percent less time in leisure activities than does society at large.

Christianity also poses an inescapable conflict in attitudes toward leisure. By its very nature, leisure is a form of self-indulgence—something to which we treat ourselves. Yet Christ calls us to deny ourselves. At the heart of the Christian faith are such attitudes as duty and service to those in need.

It is no wonder Christians feel guilty when they relax. While this is mainly a false guilt, in at least one major way it is deserved.

Christians are often guilty of mediocrity by default in their leisure lives. Operating on the premise that leisure is beneath them, they drift into whatever leisure pursuit pushes itself into their path. The resulting leisure is often much less than it might be.

Faced with the leisure problem, leisure theorists today assert that we must repudiate the work ethic inherited from the Reformation. The work ethic “no longer fits the needs of the hour,” writes one theorist. We must “escape from the shackles of the work ethic” and “renounce the false notions of the dignity of work, the necessity of work, self-fulfillment through work, and … the duty to work,” writes another. Yet another voice asserts that “it appears … that society, both individually and collectively, would be happier, would be more harmonious and would have fewer problems if the work ethic were either destroyed or reconstructed.”

This is a false solution. A rich leisure life depends on having a healthy work ethic. We must work before we can play. The unemployed and poor do not lead rich leisure lives. Furthermore, work gives meaning to leisure. By itself, leisure quickly palls and loses its point. When seen as a contrast to work and a reward for it, leisure assumes meaning.

The Protestant work ethic is not our foe. Its main tenets—that God calls people to work, that all legitimate types of work have dignity, that work can be a stewardship to God and a service to self and humanity, and that work should be pursued in moderation and in deference to spiritual concerns—are not hostile to leisure. Our problem, shared by the Puritans and their successors, is that we do not have an adequate leisure ethic to go along with our work ethic.

Christians should not feel guilty when they relax. Nor should leisure theorists malign the Protestant work ethic. The distinctive contribution that Christianity can make to discussions of leisure is its insistence on balance between work and leisure, and between self-denial and enjoyment.

Because the Bible says a lot about work and little directly about leisure, the misconception has arisen that the Bible is uninterested in leisure. The God-intended balance between work and leisure was present from the beginning of earthly history. After God performed the work of creation, “he rested, and was refreshed” (Exod. 31:17). The same rhythm of work and rest reappears in the fourth commandment of the Decalogue: “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but [on] the seventh day … you shall not do any work” (Exod. 20:9–10).

Neither work nor leisure is complete in itself. In prescribing a day of rest, the fourth commandment also commands us to work. Here is the integration of work and leisure into a harmonious cycle that is essential to a Christian view of leisure. If God commands us to work, he equally commands us to cease from work.

Since Christian leisure theorists typically make so much of the Sabbath as a biblical basis for leisure, I would urge a caution. We should not equate Sabbath observance and leisure. A day of worship is sacred time that God requires in a way that he does not require us to attend a ball game or to go for a walk.

The command to cease from work also appears in the Old Testament system of religious festivals. Hebrew culture was a subsistence society. Yet it followed a schedule of annual festivals that ensured days free from work. On the first and seventh days of the feast of unleavened bread, for example, as well as the day of the first fruits, the Israelites were commanded to “do no regular work” (Num. 28:18, 25–26, NIV). When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were commanded not to till their land and vineyards in the seventh and fiftieth years (Lev. 25). The idea of rest is deeply ingrained in the biblical consciousness. It was part of a daily, weekly, yearly, and lifetime rhythm.

Jesus confirms this rhythm. During his extraordinarily busy public years, Jesus found times of retreat. On an occasion when the disciples were so pressed by the demands of the crowd that “they had no leisure even to eat,” Jesus commanded them to retire from the obligations of the moment (Mark 6:30–32). Jesus did not confine life to ceaseless work and evangelism. He warned against the tyranny of the utilitarian in his discourse on anxiety, where he commanded us to “consider the lilies of the field” (Matt. 6:25–34).

Self-Denial Versus Enjoyment

If Christianity puts work and leisure into a state of harmonious balance, it does the same for another perennial pair of rivals: self-denial and self-indulgence. At the heart of the Christian faith is something that is destructive to the very idea of leisure. It is the idea of the suffering servant and the command to deny oneself. “If any man would come after me,” Jesus declared, “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

We do not have to choose between this command and the command to enjoy leisure. The Bible itself makes them complementary ingredients of the Christian life. Self-denial and duty are not the whole of the Christian life.

The most extended biblical affirmation of pleasure comes from the much misunderstood Book of Ecclesiastes. It is true that the author of this book takes a dim view of the pursuit of pleasure “under the sun”—that is, life lived by human striving apart from God. The quest to find meaning in work, eating, and pleasure through purely human efforts fails because it attempts to get more out of earthly life than it can offer.

But the Book of Ecclesiastes repeatedly sets up an alternative to life under the sun. It abounds with God-centered passages that affirm the enjoyment of life as a gift from God. “It is God’s gift to man,” the Preacher tells us, “that every one should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil” (3:13). “Every man also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and find enjoyment in his toil—this is the gift of God” (5:19). Here is the ideal of godly hedonism.

That ideal does not cease when we come to the New Testament. Paul wrote to Timothy that God “richly furnishes us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17). God is not a sad*st who hopes his creatures are miserable. Jesus was so fond of dinner parties that his detractors called him a “a glutton and a drunkard” (Luke 7:34). Jesus turned water into wine to keep a party going.

All of this biblical data may seem remote from the leisure problem in the last decade of the twentieth century, but it is not. The Christian community has failed both itself and its society by failing to practice and proclaim the balance between work and leisure, between self-denial and enjoyment, that its faith espouses.

The Stewardship Of Leisure

For the Christian, an adequate leisure life begins as a personal responsibility. Leisure is part of the stewardship of life. We forge our personal identity from our leisure just as surely as we derive it from our work. We are not commanded simply to rest from work: As stewards we should strive to be all that God wants us to be in our leisure as well as in our work and worship. Christians have a motivation to rise above mediocrity in their leisure life.

The first step toward such excellence is to make leisure activities a matter of conscious choice instead of drifting aimlessly. Dozing off with the paper or plopping in front of the television set need not compose the whole of a person’s leisure life. If leisure is conceived only as a quantity of free time, then anything that helps us pass the time will do. But if it is thought of as a quality of life and state of soul, we then need to find ways to fill our leisure times with enriching activities.

Excellence in leisure also means that we choose leisure pursuits that meet our leisure goals. If family unity is a goal, for example, we need to plan family outings. If becoming informed about a topic of personal interest is our goal, we need to read. If strengthening friendships is a goal, we need to spend time with friends.

The quality of our leisure will also improve if we realize that our individual identity stems partly from what we do in our leisure time. Through choosing leisure activities that fit and develop our gifts, we can rise above the mass identity of a media-oriented society. If we picked up an interest in history during our college years, we can cultivate that interest during our leisure time. If we enjoy working with our hands, we can confirm that identity by planting a garden or building a cabinet.

Finally, we can develop a taste for the best in leisure. When leisure rises above mere pastime to a state of being, we feel satisfied and enriched within ourselves, aware that our leisure has added something (perhaps permanently) to our lives. Leisure as a state of soul cannot be programmed, but it can be recognized and developed. We will find our quest satisfied more often if we monitor what leisure activities are conducive to inner satisfaction.

Leisure is more than a personal responsibility. It is also a family matter. It is no coincidence that the religious group that has cultivated leisure most aggressively at an institutional level—the Mormons—is family-oriented. Christians in our day have generally accepted the specialized leisure patterns in which family members go their separate ways as they pursue leisure activities with peers or interest groups. In acquiescing, Christians have lost a key opportunity to build family unity and values through shared leisure experiences. Education for leisure is a parental responsibility that we have too often abdicated.

The church also has a stake in leisure. In addition to providing opportunities for leisure, the church needs to provide direction from the pulpit and in the classroom. Many a person in the pew would be surprised to hear that leisure is part of the Christian’s stewardship of life. The New England Puritan Cotton Mather preached a sermon on “how to employ the leisure of the winter for the glory of God.” When did you last hear (or preach) a sermon on leisure?

If the Bible prescribes a balance between work and rest, the church schedule should reflect a similar balance between service and leisure. In some cases, the church program may have to be scaled down or rechanneled to help members achieve this balance.

At all levels—personal, family, and church—the goal is a Christian lifestyle. The church in our century cannot be said to have given its best thought and effort to leisure. The time has come to do so.

When a neighbor informed us that my young son could no longer play with her daughter, I was sad, but I did not argue. I thought it a righteous request. Moreover, to put the best face on a painful situation, I took the chance to school my son in self-restraint.

Even from his infancy, Matthew had been an exuberant child. Life and every desire were matters of gladness for him. He was up with the morning light, loud and laughing and out the door, a host of children in our back yard, but one boy only: Matthew, three years old.

We lived in the country in those days—and in those early summer days, when strawberries fattened and peopled the green patch, Matthew didn’t, as he said, “think two times.” He flew on wings of an aching hunger and satisfied his appetite, smearing the sweet red juice all over his face.

I yearned to delight in life as he did. At the same time, I yearned for him to learn my own self-discipline, because the kid could hurt himself. He could hurt others—and did, and always felt remorse for so doing, but did it again. Well, desire and delight gave Matthew the edge: he got there first, he ate it first, he thought of nothing but sweet strawberries, the sugarjoy bursting against his palate, and he filled himself at others’ expense. At our expense. At the expense of our neighbor’s daughter, who often stood in his smoke.

So then, that child’s mother imposed a prohibition. “Your son is out of control,” she said, and she sundered the friendship. Neither could go to the other’s house. No more playing, no more talking together, no more whispered secrets—no more nothing.

Matthew was sad when I told him this law. Loud delights make very low sorrows, and he truly liked the child. I did, too. She was a porcelain creature, small-boned, lisping, wispyhaired. Blue veins in a milk-white skin. Breakable.

So I seized the opportunity to teach my son that he must think of others always before he thinks of himself. “Please, give before you take. Walk before you run. Listen before you whisper, and whisper before you shout.”

He suffered the new knowledge, this three-year-old boy, that his own behavior had lost him his friend, and she had lost a good friend, too, and he was the cause. His sadness grew sadder.

“Can I take her a bowl of strawberries?” he wondered, large-eyed. Can I fix the friendship?

“Not now.” I said. “Let’s wait a while. I will go talk to her mother, and we’ll see. Okay?”

After a decent interval, I did go to talk to my neighbor, my son’s friend’s mother.

The conversation first startled me, then angered me so suddenly and deeply that I could scarcely speak, then grieved me—which dead-sorrow of soul I have not forgotten even to this day.

I went immediately to look for my son. I saw him downhill behind our house, standing in a field full of yellow flowers, his arms flung out to some interior melody, turning circles. In fact, the flowers were a kind of weed, profuse that particular summer, but to me most terribly beautiful because of the presence of Matthew in their midst. They were a sort of grounded sunlight, a glory around his dark complexion.

So I knelt down in front of him in the field of yellow flowers, and I gathered him into a hug so tight that he grunted, and I did not speak for a long time.

He didn’t understand. “Daddy? What’s the matter?”

“Well, I don’t think you should take strawberries over. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

“Why? Don’t they like strawberries?”

No, my son did not understand. In time he would, but then he would be more than sad. He would be confused. Worse, he would suffer that confusion, the assaults of an iniquitous world.

We teach our children fairness. We do well.

The selfish child is a danger. The self-centered child grows into a marauding adult whose sins are justified by that same idol, Self.

We wish our children to be good, so we teach them to be just, to be selfless themselves, to do to others as they would have others do to them: to be fair.

We do well.

And we do it from a deep parental love, don’t we? We teach them fairness for their own protection, because we don’t want them to suffer blame or slaps hereafter. In a world bigger and badder than he is, the selfish child is a danger mostly to himself.

So we say, “Share with your friends, and they will stay friends with you.” Cause and effect. We button their coats for school, and we say, “Play by the rules, my child, and others will trust you.” Connections! Good things lead to good things. We drive them to college, repeating a fine, fundamental ethic: “Be fair, even when I am not nearby to watch you. Out of your own soul, be fair. This is moral independence. This is maturity.”

So we say, implying thereby that they shall have some control over their destinies: certain behaviors will have certain consequences. Choose the right behavior.

Throughout our instruction, we presume that there is a reasonable law at work in the world—reasonable, feasible, universal, and impartial: the Law of Fairness.

Its positive expression is this: Good behavior earns a good reward. Good gets goodness in return—a consoling logic!

Its neutral expression: If you do not misbehave, you will be left in peace.

And its negative: But if you break the law, the world will punish you according to your deserving. Ill deeds earn an ill response—a cold logic, but orderly withal and necessary.

The Law of Fairness does not pretend to love people; rather, it loves stability in the community, and everyone benefits. It maintains a structure that all can understand, within which every individual can choose good or evil for himself. Its very rigidity permits, therefore, a moral liberty person by person, child by child.

And so we teach our children that law, both to know it and to obey it, and we do well, and all should be well.

And all would be well—if the world as well obeyed the law.

But what if the world itself tears fairness to shreds? What then?

At ten-thirty on a Saturday night, Matthew was stepping out of the gas station counting change when he heard shouts from his car. Men’s voices, rough and angry. He looked up to see two police officers bearing down on his friends.

His friends were lifting their hands in helplessness.

The cops were shouting. “Get in the car!”—but the car was locked. By habit Matt had punched the locks down. “Get in that car now or you’re going to jail.”

Exact quotes. Matthew does not forget what he met in emotion. His mind and his heart together are strong.

He began to run, snatching the keys from his pocket, and the officers, seeing him, redirected wrath: “Unlock this car. Get in and drive away now! Now! Or you’re the one going to jail.” Matt’s the one. My son’s the one.

He was 17 years old. He had by then developed a flat manner for precisely this sort of situation—that is, he blanked his eyes and slacked his face and slowed all motion to nothing suggesting threat or flight. Deliberately he began to unlock the four doors of the big Buick LeSabre, back first, front second, his last—

And the uniforms exploded: “Not fast enough. I don’t like your attitude. In fact, show me some ID! Now! Now! Now!”

At that last bellow, a friend whom the officers had not seen stepped out around the car, surprising them.

“Yow!” cried one cop, leaping backward and snatching his sidearm all in a single motion. “Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah, you’re going to jail. Bet on it.”

Matthew stood absolutely still, now not giving back what he was getting, now not invoking fairness, for he had learned, Lord; he had learned beyond my teaching him: that the best, in such moments as these, is, as much as possible, not to be. Vanish.

He had learned by cruel and finally redundant experience.

I do not lie. I declare it as an objective and verifiable fact, that Matthew had often been harassed by officers of the law for no ill he had done and in spite of the good he had sincerely chosen.

My son is adopted. He is black.

We live in a black neighborhood, in the center of our city, where there is congeniality of community for our children.

The officers are mostly white.

We were not wrong to move here. Here most of the people suffer the same distortion of the Law of Fairness, and here we can talk of the trouble and still be understood.

In the country we had experienced the cold, white eye alone, and we, at first, were inclined to accept the guilt. Surely we suffered the sundering from our neighbors and the isolation.

That’s why I hugged my son so hard and why he looked so terribly beautiful and tragic in the field of yellow flowers. The mother of his young friend had said to me, without perciptible anger but with absolute conviction and condemnation: “They won’t never talk again, ’cause black and white don’t marry.” She said. “I don’t want ’em touchin’, hear me? It’s unnatural. Black and white don’t marry. Y’ go on an’ keep him hobbled and home, away from my girl, ’cause black and white—”

“—don’t marry,” she said, when they were three years old. And even then the walls of my protective law began to crumble. The Law of Fairness was less effective a ward in the world than the trick the “brothers” taught my son: the blank expression, the slack face, the vanishing. Do nothing. Say nothing. Be nothing.

It worked. At the gas station that night he seemed sufficiently subservient. He did not go to jail. He came home. He shrugged when he told me the story, and he told it only incidentally. No big deal. This is the way things are.

But I wish he were three, beautiful in a field of yellow flowers, laughing as once he laughed when he was innocent.

All of our children will suffer the loss of the good law.

So what do we do when the world, and not our children, proves selfish and hurtful and unrepentant and unpunished after all?

Teachers will deal unfairly; coaches will scream, pink and popeyed; friends will trash them for other friends; bosses will play favorites; the marketplace will not love our children as we do, but rather will love itself at their expense; countless promises will be made and, though the children shall count on them, not be kept. So what do we do when bad people have power, when good and goodness is crushed as wimp and weakness?

Injustice, in this sinful world, will certainly strike the child both bluntly and personally.

Listen, parents: If we do nothing, if we do no more than communicate the Law of Fairness strictly and only, then our children will change to protect themselves, but the change will break our hearts.

One young man may respond with an anger so radical that all our teaching is lost on him. He may mimic the world, exchanging laws of fairness for laws of brutality: Might makes right. The strong survive. Look out for number one, since you have no better friend than yourself.

Or one young woman, having been deceived, may never trust another person again. To the degree that she was burned for her faith, she shall now doubt promises and dread the motives of people. Scared child! If hurt came from the place she thought safe, then hurt can come from anywhere. And love itself becomes the ultimate personal risk—too dangerous ever to take.

Or the saddest change within our children is this, that they never let go of the Law of Fairness, that they accept guilt for all the hurt visited upon them, believing that they must deserve whatever they receive. And if they cannot discern what wrong they did, soon they will conclude that it is the wrong they are.

If, when the good law breaks in a broken world, we do nothing new, our children shall begin to die an early death.

For three years in high school, Matthew played the point position on his basketball team. Something of a leader. Even off court he wove the players together by driving them hither and yon in the LeSabre, by gathering them at our house before games and giving them haircuts. I remember with pleasure the laughter booming in our basem*nt.

All but two of the Bosse H.S. players were black.

I remember, too, a rather more nervous group on the days they were to be bused from the city, into the counties of southern Indiana, to meet small-town high schools in all-white communities.

These folk in their own gymnasiums enjoyed a joke or two: they ran onto the court carrying hubcaps. They wore watermelon patches, red and green and seeded. “Fun! It’s all in good fun.” The adults in the stands shouted epithets rather more unkind.

Neither Matthew nor his teammates felt comfortable under such white glare. But they cohered. They endured.

In the dark midwinter of 1988—just as the bus and the basketball team were slowing down to turn off Highway 231 into the parking lot of a rural high school—there flared beside the windows a violent fire, a bright, ascending flame. Boys could see boys’ faces in the immediate orange, and the bus driver gunned his engine. Matthew’s eyes went wide. The whole team fell perfectly silent.

This was the first time any of them had seen a cross afire.

Matthew (he later told me) had such tightness in his stomach that he couldn’t breathe. It occurred to him that a fire near a high school was unsafe. Even the building could burn, couldn’t it?

So then, how do you enter the white glare of the basketball court when your mood is confusion? The act seemed so clearly obscene, so vile—that someone should burn the cross of Jesus! Nothing had prepared Matthew for this. So, how do you walk onto the court when everyone else is happy, laughing, ordinary, but someone here was just outside torching the wood of a cross?

You enter stiff. Wooden-legged. You put on the blank-eyed mask, the impenetrable wall, the slack-faced declaration that nothing matters. You pretend indifference, even while your heart ticks so quickly that you feel pulse in your throat, and your ears are acute, hearing even the whispered epithets, nigg*r, nigg*r. But hearing registers nowhere in your face. Take the ball. Shoot. Warm up. Stretch. Don’t look to the stands. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.

There is another law. The laws of fairness and brutality are not the only ones a child may learn. Against these two—or against lawlessness altogether—the third law is essential.

This is what we do when the children suffer the failure of fairness: with all our hearts, by all our love, we model before them and for them the Law of Forgiveness.

This is not a matter of choice. It’s at the core of our Christian faith. Moreover, it is absolutely necessary for life. Without it, the children are caught in a killing society—dying.

We parents, in the place of the true Father, God, must by all our action image the forgiveness of Christ himself—and must name Christ Jesus both as the Lord and the source of what we are doing. No secrets here! His forgiveness shall pattern the children’s; his forgiveness shall empower theirs; and as their spirits more and more reflect the Spirit of God, they shall more and more be free of the world—neither to be ruled nor to be crushed by it.

This is not merely an abstract doctrine to be conned.

This is practical action. This is a daily shield, their best protection after all. Even as we train our children in eating and sleeping and some sustaining profession, so we must train them to sever themselves from the hurt and the powers of the world (though not from the world itself) by a true and holy pardoning.

“Sinner, sincerely, I do not hold this thing against you.”

No, the children do not say this simply on their own. They must know (by your good guidance) that Jesus said it first to them from the cross. Whisper their sins to their souls until they ache in sore repentance: but then quickly sing to them the measure of mercy they have received from Jesus. Their sins are gone. In place of sin is righteousness and the love of God. The Spirit of the love lives in them! God is actually inside of them! And from that God truly, truly, comes the miraculous power to forgive people who do not in fact deserve forgiveness.

Such forgiving children are liberated from this world, utterly free, making choices altogether on their own. Such children enjoy partnership with the Almighty God. The world can destroy the Law of Fairness, but it cannot again destroy this Holy Companion or the child whom Jesus keeps.

And look at the marvelous accomplishments of such children: they become the means by which God enters the world again; for their forgiveness is the coming of Jesus, again and again. Is there a higher calling for any child than this?

They won. Matthew’s team won. No razzle dazzle, no slam dunks, no show—a steady game, a solid and solemn win, that’s all. The fans in the stands were not happy.

Neither was Matthew’s coach, despite the triumph. He was angry, rather. Jumpy. Nervous.

As the teams walked off the court, one man halfway to the rafters bellowed about the “nigg*r win,” and the coach blew up. With a roar he began to climb the risers, clearing a path by short chops of his arms, preparing to split the skull of a very fat and very frightened fan. At the same time, people began to scramble toward the coach, balling their fists and shouting. And then both teams swept up the stands like birds in flight.

Amazingly (Matthew told me), he was not afraid. He was the first to reach the coach. He tried to restrain him and got tossed aside for his effort, but he wasn’t scared. He truly did not expect a fight, because of what had happened during the game.

Early in the second half—by habit, I suppose, a spontaneous act—Matthew complimented his opposite on a good shot. Just a nod. An acknowledgment of skill between equals: “Hey, man.”

And, “Hey,” said the opponent.

No, not once. Several times over Matt indicated by glances and touches his praise and his pleasure in the contest.

In response, the white guard smiled. Grinned. Matthew was an outstanding player. His compliment carried weight.

So then, there was a mutual relationship here, independent of other noises in the gym. So then, Matthew’s mask cracked. So (by the minor marks of forgiveness) then Matthew smiled too, and the rest of the team observed this weird, uncaused behavior (except as God causes things that otherwise would not have happened), so both teams began to shut out the idiocy of sinful fans and apoplectic coaches, and all the players attended to what they liked anyway: the game!

That’s why, when the coach arose in a rage, Matthew wasn’t really afraid. It was a single team—a mixed team, white and black, all of the players, rural and city—that swarmed up the stands and interposed itself between a choking coach and a fat fan and a possible brawl among adults.

You see? The children were perfectly free.

Yesterday I said goodby to my son all over again. He went back to college. He is 19. I feel so homesick for him.

Matthew has changed. Innocence is gone from him. His exuberance is much tempered. He is cautious now—and I am altogether helpless to protect him. The sense of general fairness and universal beauty in this world has been compromised for both of us.

He departs this home for a difficult life, my dear one does. I hugged him. I hugged him hard, but I could not hug him long, as once among the flowers. There are no fields of yellow flowers any more.

I hugged him and let him go, and now I console my loneliness in prayer:

O Holy Father of my son, he bears in your forgiveness his veriest strength. Forgiven, he can forgive—and forgiving, he shall survive unto eternity. Never let my boy forget this best of lessons. Never.

Amen.

If the Presbyterian Church (USA) approves a controversial statement on sexuality, it will more closely resemble a Canaanite fertility cult than a Christian church.

Following is a guest editorial by James R. Edwards, professor of religion, Jamestown College, Jamestown, North Dakota:

Next month, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be asked to adopt the report of the General Assembly Special Committee on Human Sexuality. The report, entitled Keeping Body and Soul Together: Sexuality, Spirituality, and Social Justice, is a sustained apology for erotic empowerment in its manifold forms under the expression of “justice-love.” It is a quantum leap away from the biblical and Reformed heritage of the church.

What’s In The Report?

Here is a sample of the report’s pronouncements and recommendations:

• That “all persons, whether heterosexual or hom*osexual, whether single or partnered, have a moral right to experience justice-love in their lives and to be sexual persons” (p. 46).

• That gays and lesbians be received as full participant members, and for ordination “regardless of their sexual orientation and that sexual celibacy not be a requirement for ordination” (p. 168).

• That worship resources be designed to celebrate same-sex relationships (p. 169).

• That the problem before the church is not sexual sin but the “prevailing social, cultural, and ecclesial arrangements … [and] conformity to the unjust norm of compulsory heterosexuality” (p. 34).

• That “a reformed Christian ethic of sexuality will not condemn, out of hand, any sexual relations in which there is genuine equality and mutual respect” (p. 40).

These standards, and the paper that presents them, are to be presented to congregations for study and distributed with copies of the current youth curriculum on sexuality. The recommendation to foist this report on our young people is unconscionable. Having spent the last 25 years ministering to youth in churches and colleges, I grieve to think what this report would mean for young people struggling to realize their God-given sexuality in the light of divine revelation.

The 196-page report goes far beyond same-sex issues and the ordination of practicing hom*osexuals. It appeals for a fundamental reconstruction of sexuality and sexual ethics in this culture, dismissing biblical mandates or Reformed theology wherever these vary from “justice-love.” Eroticism in any form is accountable only to “fidelity,” which is defined as “an open-ended process of learning how … to renegotiate the [relationship’s] character as needs and desires change” (p. 45).

Beneath The Surface

A study issued in April 1990 showed that a strong majority of Presbyterians disapprove of sexual intercourse outside of marriage or of the ordination of practicing hom*osexuals. Clearly the special committee does not represent what the majority of Presbyterians believe about sexual morality.

Three motifs echo throughout the report. They represent a kind of reasoning that is evident not only in mainline churches, but increasingly in evangelical circles as well.

First, the report is an example of what happens when pluralism, rather than Scripture, is made the final arbiter of faith and morality. The report may claim a place of honor for Scripture, but, like the honor of the queen of England, it is largely a formality. Citing a shift away from “explicit appeals to scriptural authority” to “the broad message of Scripture” (p. 22), the report reveals a reductionist view of Scripture. By “broad message,” the committee means “inclusive wholeness” and all Scripture that challenges that canon is summarily omitted. In the minds of the committee, the “historical distance between twentieth-century Christians and first-century Christians” is too great for us “to borrow … their conclusions about human sexuality” (p. 23).

The result, biblically speaking, is like looking at the Alps through a keyhole. Numerous passages in both Testaments that give unambiguous mandates regarding fornication, adultery, hom*osexuality, sodomy, and sexual perversion are either distorted or neglected. The New Testament teaching of fidelity in marriage or abstinence outside it—and those who hold it—are dismissed as “voices of conformity … largely white, affluent, heterosexual protestants in nuclear families” (p. 8).

The critical reader will find a document that assumes such values without argument, and demeans those who disagree as middle-class bigots who are anxious for power and fearful of sex. The effect is to neutralize the Bible and eliminate its authority in order to exonerate consensual sex under the rubric of “justice-love.” “Where there is justice-love, sexual expression has ethical integrity. That moral principle applies to single, as well as to married persons, to gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons, as well as to heterosexuals. The moral norm for Christians ought not be marriage, but rather justice-love” (p. 56).

Second, the report is essentially an ideological document, ostensibly radically feminist, but actually rooted in a neo-Marxist hermeneutic. Its conclusions are determined by the classic Marxist dichotomy of oppressed (read: “marginalized” “gays,” “lesbians,” “bisexuals,” “sexually active singles”) versus oppressors (read: “patriarchy,” “heterosexuals,” “white males,” “the church,” “conventional sexual morality”). According to the report, the Christian’s chief calling is neither faithfulness to God nor ethical holiness, but egalitarianism. “The prime Christian virtue of our day is solidarity” (p. 12).

The report assumes that social sciences, and above all, changing social conditions, are normative for the church in sexual mores. Scripture and theology are made subservient to this determination. The report claims to offer a “prophetic” word on sexuality, but it is in fact an accommodation to what the Confession of 1967 called “anarchy in sexual relationships … and perennial confusion about the meaning of sex” (9.47). The drive to “decenter patriarchy” results in demeaning, by innuendo and negative association, biblical virtues of heterosexuality, monogamy, and chastity. Inclusiveness irrespective of sexual orientation supplants all other values.

Third, the report emphasizes a theology of creation at the expense of a theology of redemption. An erroneous assumption is that the human package we are born with neither can, nor need, be changed. There is little hint here that because of the Fall, sexuality, like other human gifts, is prone to selfishness or abuse. Absent are terms such as sin and disobedience. Sexual expression is regarded as a “right” that, apart from coercion, is beyond morality. There is apparently no need for the Cross of Christ for forgiveness and moral renewal, and no mention of it. The word agap, which characterizes God’s love and Christian love 320 times in the New Testament, is conspicuously absent, whereas eros, which does not occur once in the New Testament, is apotheosized into a prophecy of God as “the fiery flame of … divine eros” (p. 63). “Justice” and “spirituality” are linked inextricably with eros. That is a revealing association, as anyone will recognize who is familiar with the Old Testament’s warning against collapsing covenant fidelity into the Canaanite fertility cults. The “erotic spirituality” of this report brings us back to the courts of Baal and Ashtoreth.

Elevating eros to the plan of spirituality, the report says that “unless we Christians are able to embrace eros, we stand in danger … of falsely misrepresenting love in our actions.” So much for the love of Jesus, Paul, Saint Francis, and Mother Teresa.

A Clear Choice

The fundamental issue before American Christianity—both liberal and conservative—is the proper relationship between pluralism and confessionalism. Christianity is by nature confessional. American democracy is by necessity pluralistic, and rightly so. A serious problem results, however, when the political concept of pluralism takes precedence over the creedal nature of Christian belief. This is the Achilles’ heel of Keeping Body and Soul Together, and of reports that will follow it. The issue is not that of pluralism or confessionalism, but rather of the limits of pluralism. Pluralism without limits is like a football field without boundaries.

This same issue lay at the root of the fourth-century Trinitarian debates. If the Great Church could not pinpoint the exact nature of the Trinity, it did succeed in drawing a large circle outside of which it believed the truth could not be found. The orthodox consensus, as it came to be known, is worth reconsidering. American Christians must redefine the circle of faith and the limits of pluralism.

Keeping Body and Soul Together is a wholesale departure from the biblical witness to morality, from 2,000 years of Christian moral theology, and from the ethical wisdom of the ages. Dean W. R. Inge said, “The Church which is married to the Spirit of its Age will be a widow in the next.” Deacons, elders, and ministers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have not taken a vow to the spirit of this age, but to “fulfill [their] office in obedience to Jesus Christ, under the authority of Scripture, and be continually guided by our confessions.” Commissioners must remember that vow when they vote on Keeping Body and Soul Together. The report, along with a proposed two-year study process, deserves to be defeated and buried without honors. This is the kind of thing that is killing the mainline denominations.

The recent Gulf War played havoc with my schedule. I learned years ago that if I didn’t follow a schedule, I got little done. Thus I rise at 6:30; breakfast at 7:00; read the Scripture and share a time of prayer with my wife from 7:20 until 7:45; and start work at 8:00. I spend a half-hour at lunch and then take an hour for a nap. (I started that discipline when I turned 70.) Then it’s back to work until 6:00, when I take a full hour off for a quiet dinner, sharing the family news with my wife, and listening to Bach, Vivaldi, or Mozart.

I then read and study until 10:00, when I knock off for the day, go to bed, and read Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, Agatha Christie, or some other novelist who requires no mental energy, until I get sleepy—usually no later than 11:00.

But it wasn’t that way during the Gulf War. I couldn’t keep away from the television. You would think an old man with no members of his immediate family in the war would not be so involved. Yet, I was intensely concerned. The awful destruction of innocent people and the loss of resources were utterly sickening.

First thing in the morning, I’d turn on the television to hear how the war had been going. I went to my work, but again and again I was lured back to the screen during the day. In the evening it disrupted our dinner hour. And before we went to bed, we watched again to see the latest news.

While Others Die

Several things troubled me: Why should I be so privileged as to monitor the news in safety while others were fighting, hoping to achieve a bit more justice in the world? No Christian would think the war would bring either permanent peace or perfect justice. But to secure a better justice, to battle against wickedness in high places, to alleviate human suffering—these are worth living and dying for. Next to the good news of the gospel, nothing is rated higher in Scripture. Should I be sitting in my study reading and writing while others are suffering and dying?

Then I was reminded of an old sermon by C. S. Lewis. His text was Deuteronomy 26:5—“A Syrian ready to perish was my father.” He writes: “How can we continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?”

The only answer to this question, he argues, is to put it against another question every Christian ought to have asked himself many times. To a Christian, the true tragedy of Nero is not that he fiddled while the city was on fire, but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. War, Lewis explained, does not create anew suffering and death. The truly great tragedy is sin and suffering and death—which all human beings experience; and the greatest tragedy of all is to be punished by eternal separation from God. What war does is to remind us in most vivid and immediate form of the larger tragedies we face every day.

Our Lord has revealed his will for us with clarity: to bear witness to the gospel in all the world, to hold out to all the forgiveness of sin and the hope of the life to come, to teach the necessity of obedience so that we may live wisely and well in the light of eternity. These things are of infinite value, and we must give them highest priority.

The question we need to ask ourselves with Lewis is, therefore, “How is it right … for creatures who are every moment advancing either to Heaven or hell to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities [as the ordinary pursuits of life].”

Yet, we dare not forget that God has given other commands: we are to care for the widows; to bind up the wounds of the injured in our society; to seek justice; to celebrate our joys. Our Lord attended a merry wedding in Galilee. The apostle Paul urged the Thessalonians to stick to their ordinary jobs. He even provided instruction about going to dinner parties held by pagans. “Christianity,” Lewis sums up, “does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities.” The single unifying test is that we must do all to the glory of God.

The nation has recently been shocked by revelations of police brutality in Los Angeles. A videotape shot by an amateur showed the brutal beating of Rodney King by L.A. police. King was repeatedly kicked in the head, side, and abdomen while he lay helpless.

The continuing outrage over this incident is justified. Due process of law is accorded the most violent criminal in America. And protection from physical abuse at the hands of the police is an absolute requirement for a free society.

But I am disturbed that voices in the media have been silent over police treatment of prolife demonstrators in cities such as Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Hartford, Connecticut. Operation Rescue demonstrators attempting to block entrances to abortion clinics were the targets of the abuse (CT, April 8, 1991, p. 60).

While there are differences of opinion about the appropriateness of barring entrance to abortion clinics (the Christian Action Council, which I serve as president, does not endorse the blockade strategy), there should be no difference of opinion over ruthless police tactics used against those who want to save the lives of the unborn. Besides being jailed, these nonviolent demonstrators have suffered broken arms, sexual harassment, and even miscarriage. In one instance a videotape shot by prolifers shows L.A. police breaking the arm of one demonstrator, Michael Houseman, with a nunchaku, a weapon of Asian origin, possession of which is illegal in California.

In the documentary The Brutal Truth, produced by American Portrait Films, other prolifers relate their treatment by the police as follows:

The Rev. Norman Weslin: “It was excruciating pain. It was calculated torture; the policemen were enjoying the pain.”

Tammy Cable: “One guard picked me up by my bra … and I was totally exposed. They drug me up five flights of stairs by my bra.”

Deborah Grumbine: “I miscarried my ninth child. The medical opinion is that the probable cause was the excessive and violent use of nunchaku, and the plastic restraints.”

Attorney Rossanna Weissert, who has filed a class-action suit against the city of Pittsburgh on behalf of women rescuers, has argued that the women were verbally abused by jail guards with threats of rape and sodomy. Other prolifers tell of Mace being sprayed in the faces of demonstrators and even in the face of a two-year-old child.

Does not our country guarantee “justice for all”? Yet at the time of this writing, both state and federal authorities have refused to probe deeply the need to prosecute various policemen for abuse to prolifers.

It is time that the prolife movement and Christians of every persuasion join together and denounce such brutal tactics. If such brutality had been used against demonstrators protesting apartheid, the national news media undoubtedly would have elevated the incident to the status of scandal. Sadly, no such controversy has emerged surrounding the treatment of prolifers.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” Perhaps this sin of silence is the greatest shortcoming of the church in America today. Our indifference and silence have allowed 25 million unborn children to be destroyed in the last 17 years. And continued silence in the face of the unjust treatment of those who oppose the killing is evidence of a church that has ceased to be the salt of the earth.

For my part, I intend to speak out. The lives of the unborn demand it. The integrity of my brothers and sisters requires it. And my Lord commands it. For inasmuch as we do it for the least of his brethren, we do it for him.

By Thomas A. Glessner, president of the Christian Action Council, an evangelical prolife organization with headquarters in the Washington, D.C., area.

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

God’s Word Is Central

The article “New Denominations” [Mar. 11] was interesting and informative. The strength of every ministry I am familiar with that is growing and alive in Christ has been the centrality of the Word of God. Faithful, expositional, systematic teaching of God’s Word has produced great health and great results.

If more pastors taught the Word, instead of giving ill-prepared book-of-the month reports, perhaps more fellowships would be vital and growing.

David Rosales, Pastor

Calvary Chapel

Ontario, Calif.

In spite of mumblings to the contrary, success in church work and the status of pastors is measured almost exclusively by Sunday morning body counts. (Your own articles reinforce this. They say hardly a word about the spirituality of churches but cite all sorts of statistics about numerical growth and decline.) Ambitious pastors and would-be denominational leaders almost invariably target upwardly mobile yuppies. The three things almost all religiously inclined, upwardly mobile yuppies want are (1) an uplifting, contemporary, and emotionally satisfying worship experience; (2) a social context filled with people like themselves with whom they can form friendships, and (3) a program that will occupy and benefit their children and hopefully impart some of their own values. Furthermore, they want these things with minimal demands or commitments. Successful church leaders have found that if they provide these three things and find out how to market them, they will have growing and hence “successful” churches.

Ronald L. Klaus

Philadelphia, Pa.

I believe many long-time evangelicals are becoming disillusioned by the simplistic theology and political conservatism rising to the fore in their congregations. My wife and I recently left the church of our youth and began attending a “liberal” United Methodist Church. We’re very happy in our new church and, quite frankly, consider the tolerance, openness, and social concern we find there as a breath of fresh air. The adherence to the Christian calendar has given us a newfound understanding of our heritage.

Michael R. Norlen

Olathe, Kan.

We mainliners are weary of whatever-is-politically-current sermons and the “Mark was written first, etc., etc.” approach to Bible study. That is why some of us wander around from church to church seeking soul food with or without baptism.

Alma Blanton

Torrance, Calif.

The authors leave room for speculation on whether Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Fellowship, and Church on the Rock will become viable denominations in the future, but give more credibility to these movements than they have earned. The most far-fetched comparison comes when John Wimber is compared to John Wesley and Larry Lea is compared to (please!) Martin Luther. It will take more than the media-produced aura of personality that Wimber and Lea depend on to lead their movements to bring either into the same dynamic that surrounds the work of Wesley and Luther.

Lee Saunders

Thayer, Mo.

You may have misled your readers in the article “The New Denominations” in the graph labeled “Conservative denominations and movements”; among these you have listed Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I hope CT is not suggesting these two “denominations” are Christian.

William Beyer

Baraboo, Wis.

Our chart lumped Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses with Southern Baptists for sociological, not theological reasons. Students of church growth recognize that these groups share a pattern of resisting cultural change (the breakdown of the two-parent family, for example) and of adhering to an authority of “supernatural” origin. The declining denominations, which we labeled “Liberal,” adapt more quickly to social change, and (sadly) frequently fail to measure social forces against a transcendent authority.—Eds.

Faith without commitment

Having pastored for ten years, I say “amen” to Robert Patterson’s “In Search of the Visible Church” [Mar. 11]. Too many want to be Christians without commitment to the local church and disciples without the discipline of the local church.

Glenn R. Felty

West Chicago, Ill.

Patterson assumes the twentieth-century denominational church is the body of Christ. A recent survey by Search Institute indicates that 68 percent of denominational Protestants have a “faith” that is mainly knowledge of Christian concepts. Most never spend any personal time helping the poor, sick, or suffering. My opinion is that this is not “faith,” it is hypocrisy.

Nan Van Andel

Ada, Mich.

The article reminded me of the “half-covenanters” in early colonial New England churches. “Religious” people seem quick to receive the privileges to be had with associating with the body of Christ while standing at arm’s length from the corresponding responsibilities. Scripture is clear: You can’t have one without the other!

Michael Madeleine

Mt. Clemens, Mich.

Patterson’s article is insightful and needed. The connection between evangelicals’ devaluing of the visible church and their unbiblical sidestepping of the sacraments is a message that especially needs to be heard and heeded.

Cynthia Erlandson

Ontario, Calif.

The reason parishioners are looking for the “best spiritual deal in town” is because preachers serve up a Scripture verse with a few disconnected stories and wonder why people don’t come back Sunday after Sunday. The folk go from church to church looking for spiritual food because they are getting a bare bone with no meat on it. It is not always convenient to run around from church to church, but it is a necessity to keep from starving to death.

Muriel Clement

Boston, Mass.

If ministers are going to develop a thorough grasp of the doctrine of the church it will come from our Christian colleges and seminaries. Do they have the courage of conviction to stress such things and cut their own throats?

Rev. Richard D. Chaffee

Marietta, N.Y.

Selective justice

J. Dudley Woodberry [“Our Turn in Babylon,” Guest Editorial, March 11] criticizes the U.S. government for its “selective sense of justice” in the Gulf War since it has not acted “similarly to protect other peoples when oil has not been involved.” Does he really mean the United States should attempt to right every wrong in the world? Such a stance would seem in clear conflict with another of his own principles: humility. In point of fact, Iraq’s attack on peace and justice, backed by a huge army and a growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, was extraordinary.

As for oil, no one should discount its significance to economic justice—not unless he is prepared to go without heat, transportation, and medicine. An oil market controlled by a Saddam Hussein is a terrible thought, not least in its impact on precarious economies and lives in underdeveloped nations.

John P. Smith

Rochester, Minn,

If Woodberry is looking for an opportunity to link the Gulf War with peace in the Middle East, why look beyond Iraq? What about the Kurds—a non-Arab people who have been seeking independence and autonomy for many years? There are 15 million Kurds—more than four times as many Palestinians—who live in the northern part of Iraq and Iran. Where is the cry for justice among Christian Arabists for these people? Why not link the Gulf War with Kurdish independence? Interestingly, the PLO—the recognized representatives of the Palestinian cause—does not support a Kurdish homeland. In fact, the PLO has supported Iraqi repression against the Kurds.

Louis Lapides, Pastor/Teacher

Beth Ariel Fellowship

Sherman Oaks, Calif.

The editorial has me wondering what happened to “turn the other cheek” and “if someone wants your coat, give him your cloak as well”?

Robert Grunden

Key West, Fla.

Changes at USCWM

Don Richardson contends “that without major changes in the structure … of the U.S. Center for World Mission, its future contribution to world missions is in jeopardy” [News, Mar. 11]. The only “major change” I’m aware of occured when Richardson and three other disaffected board members were asked to resign. A colleague on the board made the proposal in the interest of peace and unity, and also to offer opportunity for a new board acceptable to the staff.

Ralph Winter and team players who have held doggedly to the pristine focus of 15 years ago are now unshackled to pursue a disciplined missionary fellowship. Their goal remains the same as it was at its inception in 1976—to evangelize unreached ethno-linguistic groups on the planet.

Matthew J. Welde, General Director

Presbyterian Center for Mission Studies

Spring City, Pa.

The situation at the center is nothing so very new. Winter is simply facing the dilemma a number of Christian leaders faced, such as Hudson Taylor, William Carey, and St. Francis of Assisi—founders of organizations whose authority was severely questioned. Satan uses similar tactics against churches across America. The Enemy has always tried to quench any individual or organization that is being used by God; we shouldn’t be so surprised about it that we treat it as news.

Deborah J. Conklin

Wonder Lake, Ill.

More on women presbyters

I congratulate your courage in printing “Let’s Stop Making Women Presbyters” by J. I. Packer [Feb. 11]. For some time I felt CT had been unfair to those of us who did not change our position regarding women in ministry and leadership after CT made the change a decade ago. Thank you for this small step in restoring the balance with at least one article from the other side.

Dr. Nelson J. Annan

North Palm Beach, Fla.

In response to our esteemed brother, J. I. Packer, I affirm his right to a strong conviction, but I cannot endorse the attempts to support this conviction by the manner in which he exegetes the Scriptures he uses. Perhaps I, as a pacifist, should applaud his modeling male roles in church leadership on Jesus’ maleness, because Jesus also modeled pacifism, and such literalism will lead my brother to become a pacifist.

But in exegeting the Word, let us be as true to context as possible. This includes discernment between the prescriptive and the descriptive aspects of a passage. In the 1 Timothy 2:12–14 passage, the emphasis on “learn,” “modesty,” and “not usurp authority” are prescriptive. The reference to Adam and Eve is descriptive and should not be read otherwise.

Let us as men dare to be men of equality, and find our maleness fulfilled not in displacing women but in elevating women as Christ did, to the equality that maximizes the potential of each. There is room in the kingdom for more creative work by each, and no place for us to limit one another in struggles for dominance.

Myron S. Augsburger

Washington, D.C.

Packer’s article is a well-written but misguided argument. While “emphatically for women’s ministry,” he yet relegates them to working with children, women, or in the home. What ministry then is he for? A subordinate and ‘safe’ one, it seems. Is this what he means by “maternal … in flavor?”

Rev. David J. Graham, B.SC., B.D.

Glasgow Bible College

Glasgow, Scotland

For as long as I can remember, we’ve played in a softball league where just about every team had Baptist, Bible, or Evangelical in its name. This year we joined an ecumenical league, and I think we made a big mistake. Disparate church traditions and softball just don’t mix.

It’s not so much a matter of competition. Most of these, um, different churches are pushovers. Take the Mennonites, for example—always an easy victory. On principle, they refuse to play offense. They even seem to enjoy getting trounced.

I can’t say the same for the team from Calvary Spirit-filled Holy Ghost Power Temple. Their manager claims victory in each pregame prayer, which always makes us feel we have to lose to keep their faith strong.

Sometimes, hermeneutics gets in the way. When First Baptist played All Souls Episcopal, the game was delayed for an hour while they debated whether or not 1 Timothy 2:11 prohibited All Souls from using a lady pitcher—a tactical error tor the Baptists. They won the argument but lost the game, thanks to All Souls’ manly pitcher who threw a shutout.

The Methodists are actually quite fun to play against. They let everyone play, regardless of age, sex, creed, or ability. And if disputes arise over rules, we always win. They’ll believe anything.

All in all, though, I think we’ll go back to our all-Calvinist league next year. It’s nice to walk off the field with opponents who share our belief that the outcome had more to do with election than execution.

EUTYCHUS

Whenever we plan to devote a large number of pages to a particular topic, we consult two important resources: our senior editors and our research department. Several months ago our senior editors acknowledged that while entire books have been written on heaven and hell, most people still want to know two things about both places: what will it be like and who will be there?

We then asked our research department to find out what CT readers believe about heaven and hell. The results were somewhat surprising. While most of you (89%) believe heaven is a real place where redeemed people will enjoy eternity, only slightly more than half of you (53%) believe that hell is a place of real suffering—physical, emotional, and spiritual—the natural consequence of the choices people make. Thirty-one percent believe that hell is a place in which “real fire burns to torment lost souls,” and 14 percent believe that it is “a metaphor for the intense spiritual suffering that comes from being shut out of heaven.”

Apparently there are also a few cynics among our readers. Two percent believe hell is just an idea used by the church to scare people into being good. Hmmm.

Our Christianity Today Institute supplement on heaven and hell begins on page 29. If you read the articles carefully, you will come away with a clearer picture of both eternal destinations. And although the authors identify the conditions of entry for both places, we suspect that many of us will be a bit surprised to see who made it. And who didn’t.