A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [22]
What we call history is this tragic thrashing about in the Aristotelian real, where (shudder) things keep happening and (gulp) changing. Theos stands above, holding his thunderbolts ready to strike, ready to melt the whole damned thing down to primal lava, ready to set it all on fire to purge all that is imperfect, so only perfect purified being remains. Every person born into this creation begins in this deplorable fallen status, according to conventional Christian theology. Every time we use terms like “the Fall” and “original sin,” I believe, many of us are unknowingly importing more or less of this package of Greco-Roman, non-Jewish, and therefore nonbiblical concepts like smugglers bringing foreign currency into the biblical economy or tourists introducing invasive species into the biblical ecosystem.15
In the Greco-Roman telling of the story, salvation (which in this version of the story is virtually equivalent to atonement, justification, or redemption) occurs when Theos finds a way to forgive this fallen, dropout, broken, detestable creation for its descent from perfect holy being into pathetic, detestable becoming. Various theories explain how this forgiveness is brought about, but each involves lifting back into a perfect forgiven or justified state what has fallen into this festering cesspool of change and decay. On an unconscious level, being forgiven, being saved, being born again, and being justified mean being rescued from the sad story of Aristotelian becoming and restored to the high, timeless plane of perfect Platonic being, so the creatures in question can be loved by Theos again.16 When Theos liberates them from the fatally flawed and absolutely unsalvageable Aristotelian universe—of which their bodies are a part—their essence, the ideal Platonic abstraction of them called soul or spirit, will enjoy perfect peace, perfect rest, perfect status, perfect and unending and unchanging (of course) joy in heaven. As the old tombstones used to say, in heaven they will rest in peace. They will be delivered from this world of stories to an eternal state in which they will be safe forever, for nothing will ever happen again.17
What happens to those who are not saved, justified, atoned for, or otherwise redeemed? Theos can’t permit or command their essence to be extinguished, because that essence is spirit rather than flesh and therefore incurably immortal. Nor can Theos permit the universe to continue for much longer because the whole thing, after all, is fallen and now reeks of Aristotelian becoming, a.k.a. decay, and that rotting smell is inherently detestable to Theos, Greco-Roman Neoplatonist that he is. So, Theos has no choice, really; this tainted universe and all it contains must be destroyed, which will leave the eternal essences of the unredeemed all undressed with no place to go. So, they are banished to hell—the Greek Hades, intensified and decorated with plenty of borrowings from its Zoroastrian counterpart and seasoned liberally with imagery misappropriated from Jesus’s parables and sermons.18 And what is hell? It must be a state, since no story can ever exist in a universe purged of change and becoming. That’s why nobody can ever repent and leave it. There is a sign over its infernal, eternally locked gates: “DESPAIR ALL WHO ENTER HERE: NO BECOMING ALLOWED”
What remains in the end? Theos, plus the perfected souls of the redeemed in heaven, plus everyone else suffering the absolute, “perfect” torment of eternal, unquenchable, pure, and unchanging hate from Theos, getting what they deserve for being part of the detestable fallen universe.
This is—more or less, and put baldly—the “good news” taught by much of the Western Christian religion (not all of it, thank God), the religion in which I was raised, in which I have done my life’s work, of which I am a part today. True, it could be worse: there could be even fewer in heaven and even more in hell. True, it is seldom put this crudely. True, its defenders will quarrel with various details here, because