Of Heaven and Hell

A recent exchange between some old friends on Facebook has me thinking about some deeper issues lately. Pastor Rob Bell recently published a book called "Love Wins" in which he apparently called into question the traditional christian beliefs of heaven and hell (and to be fair, I have not read the book yet).

I'm certainly no theologian, so I won't be using fancy seminary type language as I describe these things that I sometimes wonder about. Hopefully, should any seminary types read this posting, I will be forgiven for my ignorance.

I am a Christian. By that I mean that I believe in a creator of the universe that I call God the Father. I believe that God exists in three forms - the Father, the Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that God, working through men as far back as the disciples, has guided and directed the formation of the Bible for the spiritual instruction and nourishment of those who choose to read it.

I believe that Jesus Christ came as mankind's first face to face with God. As a man he had to be born of the flesh and so God brought him in to this world through the virgin Mary. I believe that Christ came to call men back to God, that he lived a sinless life, and that he became the final sacrifice for mankind's sin through his death on the cross and then his resurrection.

Those who accept this sacrifice by confessing their sinfulness and surrendering their lives to God are redeemed from the "wages of sin" and can be certain that after death they will be united with God in heaven.

And that brings us to the current issue...

What of those who choose NOT to turn to God?

What of those who follow a different belief system for their life?

What of those who live good lives, but reject the notion of a God or afterlife?

There are certainly other difficult questions if you choose to live a life devoted to the christian God. In many ways, these questions can be even more difficult than the question of heaven and hell. Why is there so much suffering? Why would a loving God allow for the presence of so much evil in the world?

I don't know the answers to these questions either.

Universalism is a belief that all people will be taken to heaven at some point. I'm sure I've oversimplified it to the extreme, but I think that's the gist. Anyway, as I understand it, the idea here is that a loving God would never allow a single person to suffer forever, and that an all powerful God will eventually triumph over all evil and redeem every single soul to heaven.

Well...I don't buy that.

I've been reading and studying the Bible on and off again for nearly 30 years. And while I'm no expert, it seems clear to me from it's writings that there is ultimately a delineation between the people of the world. Eventually the faithful are separated from the unfaithful.

The God that I have tried to follow throughout my life is a God who seems to want US to decide. He wants US to choose to seek Him out. He wants US to make decisions in our life that are consistent with the knowledge He has given us. Choosing to me implies that there is in fact right and wrong choices to be made. In fact I think there are many different paths - one that is the best, some that are not the best will eventually get us there, and others that, for various reasons, may just be wrong.

If ultimately we all win, why the decisions along the way?

If the serial killer and the zealot both spend eternity in heaven, what's the point?

Here is about the point that I always find myself pausing to remember that ME trying to figure out the mind of God is a futile exercise. I long ago accepted that God is far too vast for me to even begin to understand the deep whys and hows of the universe. At the same time, surely God plans to remain consistent to what we know of Him through His word.

I do believe, have long believed in fact, that there are going to be some big surprises in store for me when I enter heaven. I fully expect to find people there who I never thought would be there. I'm not at all convinced that only those who took on the label of "Christian" will be spending eternity with God.

For example, much of the Bible is concerned with the Israelites and God's love for them. Who could possibly believe that those who walk in the footsteps of God's chosen people will be left behind because of a doctrinal difference?

For that matter, God is big and vast, certainly big and vast enough to use different approaches to reach out to people of different worlds/cultures. Is the idea of the christian faith being the only type of faith journey that God allowed for, consistent with an all knowing and all powerful creator God of the universe?

With all that being said, I must say that I DO believe in Hell. I do believe that this life we live MATTERS.

God has given us life, and He has given us choices to make. He has surrounded us, according to the Bible, with sufficient evidence of His existence "so that no man has an excuse." The ways to God may vary, and I believe they likely do, but ultimately the life we live reflects the choice we make.

Have we chosen to live in a way that honors God?

Or have we chosen to live a life that honors our self?

To me this is the crux.

If all get an eventual free pass to eternity in heaven, the whole point of the guidance found through scripture, through fellow believers, through prayer, is meaningless. In fact, it seems a bit like a nasty game for a God to be playing.

If charity doesn't matter, why not hoard and steal? If honesty doesn't matter, why not lie when it is profitable? If faithfulness is irrelevant, why not live a life of hedonism?

Oh well...

Again, I'm no theologian...

Impressions from "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"

As a fifteen year high school math teacher, this past year of turmoil in public education has hit me hard. Conflicts across many states and severe budget problems in my home state of North Carolina have placed the spotlight firmly on public education, and the results have not been pretty.

It's not been just the attack on schools, teachers, and teacher's unions from newly elected politicians - those are almost expected. The troubling part for me has been reading, over and over again, negative and hostile comments from average Americans towards those in the field of education.

Teachers are categorized as unprofessional, incapable, selfish, greedy, and lazy. Read the comments from members of the public on any article about teaching or education and you will find that there are seemingly large numbers of people out there who believe that educators are almost solely responsible for everything from failing students to the federal deficit.

As a teacher, I struggle to respond.

I know how passionate I am about my work. I know the heart that I have for my students and how badly I want for them to succeed. I also know that the vast majority of my colleagues feel the same way.

At the same time, I know that something needs to change in the American public education system.

Recently Mark Tucker from the National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE) released a paper/report that is the result of several decades work comparing the approach to public education in some of the top performing countries of the world, with the approach to public education in the United States. The paper is titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants," and I highly recommend that you take the time to read and digest what he has to say.

The basic premise of the paper is that the five top performing regions on the PISA exam (Japan, Finland, Canada, Shanghai, Singapore) are doing NONE of the educational reform steps that are currently en vogue in the U.S. Meanwhile the U.S. is doing NONE of the educational reform steps that each of these countries have put into practice.

Some of the things these parts of the world are NOT doing at all:

• Charter schools


• Lower class sizes


• High stakes standardized tests for every grade


• Teacher performance tied to these standardized tests


• Emphasis on financial equity


• Focus on rooting out "bad" teachers


• Efforts to remove teachers unions from influence

Some of the things they DO that we do NOT do:

• Rigorous teacher preparation


• Educational schools made as difficult as the best schools in country


• Training in content area commensurate with a major in that content area


• A full year of methodology/pedagogy training in content area (after the 4 years in content)


• Mandatory first year with a master teacher mentor (this mentor is excused from classes for that full year)


• Pay equivalent to first year pay in highest professions (engineer, architect, programmer, etc)


• Gateway exams from elementary to lower secondary, from lower secondary to upper secondary, and upper secondary to university


• Gateway exams that are NOT multiple choice, and that require complex problem solving and essay writing


• A comprehensive curriculum that is entrusted to teachers


• Focus and emphasis on teacher collaboration

There is much more in the paper and I encourage you to read it fully.

Some will say that the United States is fundamentally different from most if not all of these countries. And I will agree. I agree because it is fundamentally true in the United States that our actions have shown that we do NOT truly value education, that we do NOT truly consider educators to be among our most valuable commoditities, and that we absolutely have been more concerned with adults than kids.

I wish every single one of these characteristics outlined in Tucker's paper could come to pass here in the U.S. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that they can.

There are simply too many ADULTS who stand to lose too much in such a system.

Politicians would have to show that they truly do place the highest value in educating our young people. But they would also have to admit that they don't have the foggiest notion of how that would be done properly, and be willing to leave that work to those who do.

Colleges would have to start treating School's of Education like they treat School's of Law, Medecine, or Engineering, instead of allowing them to become the dumping grounds for those who fail in other places. They would have to establish a rigorous training program that would ensure FEWER educational students in the long run.

Teachers and their unions would have to release the reins on some of their holy grails, such as tenure, seniority, class sizes, etc. Just like the rest, teachers and their unions would have to stop believing in the party line just because it's been repeated over and over again through the years.

And perhaps most importantly, parents and communities would have to back up their support of education as a "most important thing" with actions instead of just words. Parents would have to provide an environment at home that emphasizes learning and knowledge instead of entertainment and indulgence. Parents would have to support the educators at their schools, instead of assuming that they were wrong and clueless.

Can we do this as a country?

I'm not sure, but I hope so.

This has been a season of confrontation and adversarial relationships. Some of the powers that be in our states and in the federal government have chosen to "divide and separate" we the people over this matter of public education. They have been disturbingly successful.

The time has come to decide just where we place the education of our students in the priority list of the United States. We don't need another movement. We don't need another politically labled approach.

We need change.