Heaven comes to us

“Are you saved, brother?” was a question I often heard when growing up in the fundamentalist circles of my youth. If asked to explain what this meant, I would have said that being saved means you go to heaven when you die, and not being saved means you are going to hell. There was not much more to be said, and some of my friends more or less knew who was going where. That was really what the Christianity of my youth was about, knowing where you would go when you died, even though I had no idea where heaven might be, though presumably somewhere above the clouds – today we would say where the www.com is located. But such questions were not asked back then, rather I was exhorted to forget about questions and get on with “saving souls” because I would score big time with God if I did so. Looking back I recognize how simplistic it all was and how soon I came to see things differently. But, of course, my friends from the distant past who are still in that camp would probably say that I had “backslidden” and wonder to themselves, “is de Gruchy still saved?”

This reminds me of the story told about the great Bishop Westcott who was one of the leading New Testament scholars of a previous generation. While travelling on a train somewhere in England, an ardent Christian sitting in the same compartment asked him whether he was saved. This startled the bishop, but he kept his wits about him and replied, quoting the Greek words: “do you mean was I saved, am I saved, or will I be saved?” His fellow passenger was reduced to silence because what seemed to him like a simple question requiring a straightforward answer, had become a little more complex. And, of course, if you read the New Testament with care and note how the Greek words for “save” are translated you will soon discover that they are used in different ways. But, you may be surprised to know that they are not used in the sense of going to heaven when you die. That is a construct we put on them. So when people read the story about the Philippian jailor and hear his anguished cry “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” they immediately assume that he was asking how he could get safely to heaven. But actually he was concerned about being saved from the devastation of the earthquake that had destroyed the prison in which Paul and Silas were under his custody and the consequences when the authorities discovered they had escaped. The only way for him to get out of his predicament, Paul replied, was for him to put his trust in Jesus and join their company.

All of this came to mind recently as I read a book by Tom Wright, the former bishop of Durham who is now professor of New Testament at Aberdeen University of Scotland and an evangelical by conviction. The book called “Surprised by Hope” is a discussion of the significance of the resurrection of Jesus for Christian faith and witness. I know of none that more convincingly argues the case for Jesus’ bodily resurrection. But Wright also discusses many other thorny subjects like heaven, hell and purgatory, the second coming of Jesus, and what the New Testament means by salvation. And salvation, he insists is not about leaving this sordid world and “going to heaven” when you die, but about being raised to new life in Christ and becoming part of God’s kingdom that breaks into the here and now. It is this new life we have in the risen Christ over which death has no final power.

People get the wrong idea about salvation for several reasons. The first has to do with how they understand “heaven” or the “kingdom of heaven.” The image is invariably of a place somewhere out in space, where God is surrounded by a heavenly host of angels and where the souls of the faithful departed are engaged full-time in worship following the 1662 Anglican Prayer Book. That image, embellished by popular piety over the centuries, has its roots in images found in the book of Revelation, but what Revelation actually speaks about is not a place “up in the sky where you go when you die,” but of the coming to earth of a “new heaven” where God will be “all in all” and God’s will “will be done on earth as in heaven.” The word heaven is a synonym for the presence of God; heaven is where God is truly acknowledged and worshipped.

Another misunderstanding of salvation is that it has to do with some part of us we call our “souls.” But the Bible does not normally speak about an immortal soul that leaves our bodies when we die, but about the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. When the Bible speaks about “souls” it is referring to who we really are, our identity and personality if you like, and this is always connected in some meaningful way to our bodies. Of course, the New Testament acknowledges that our physical bodies eventually die, it could not do otherwise, but it expresses the hope and conviction that who we are will be re-embodied or re-membered in a new way in the risen Christ.

This helps us sense of the fact that sometimes when Jesus heals someone he declares: “Your faith has saved you!” Modern translations of the New Testament usually say: “Your faith has made you whole,” or as Jesus said to Jairus’ daughter: “Your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” In other words, salvation is about being made whole. Or being saved could have another related meaning as in the story Zacchaeus the despised tax-collector. Jesus, you recall, goes home with him for a meal and helps him start living a new way of life. “Today,” Jesus says, “salvation has come to your house!” There is no word about heaven in these stories. Rather, they are about people who have been healed, made whole, people whose lives have been turned around, people for whom God has become a real presence in their lives. When Jesus says that he has come that we might have life to the full, he is talking about salvation here and now. We do not go to heaven; heaven comes to us, and finally embraces us.

(John W. de Gruchy is Emeritus Professor of Christian Studies, University of Cape Town and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. This is a weekly meditation given at the Eucharist service at Volmoed Christian Community Centre, Hermanus.)