Heilsgeschichte

The past year I have been doing a lot of thinking on the function of hell (Geheena in Greek) in the Synoptic Gospels. One of the embarrassments of Christianity is the way many Christians use hell to scapegoat the "other" ie. homosexuals, people of other religions etc. This egregious behavior is striking given the fact that Jesus primarily evokes hell terminology in the context of disciples and Israel's leadership. While my wife and I were in the Dominican Republic serving Haitian refugees I read through Dale Bruner's Matthew commentaries. Perhaps the most profound yet undeveloped idea of the commentary regarded the function of hell. Bruner writes,

Jesus concentrates the fire of almost his entire gospel on his church’s sins. This was one of my most interesting discoveries in the study of this Gospel. Hell in Matthew, for example, is not a place by which the external enemies of the people of God are threatened; hell is always the existential threat for precisely those who think that they are the people of God (Bruner, The Christbook, 331).

Bruner’s observation has caused me to seriously rethink how we: a) study hell in the gospels b) understand the function of hell in Jesus’ ministry. Let me briefly comment on both points:

a). It seems to me that the dated and atomistic approach of traditional word studies has dominated the semantic domain of hell in Gospel studies for too long (see Hans Scharen's article: Geheena in the Synoptics Bibleteca Sacra, 149 (October-December): 454-470. Rather than look at the Narrative context and historical audience in which Jesus evokes hell, students are taught to go to the TDNT or squabble over the tendentious debates of annihilationism and conditional immortality. I think that we would do well to study hell as part of a larger discourse—in a narrative context and with the historical audience of Jesus’ invective maintaining a fundamental role.

b). When the Narrative context and historical audience of Jesus’ invective of hell is taken into account, the purpose and function of hell becomes much more apparent. Matthew’s only uses of the word hell (geheena) are directed toward Jesus’ disciples (Mt 5:22, 29-30, 10:28, 18:9) and Israel’s leadership (23:15, 33). With this in mind, I think that hell functions in the form of parenesis (pertaining to instruction, exhortation or command) to warn Jesus’ disciples and Israel’s leadership of imminent judgment. In other words, Jesus is acting as every good prophet did in Israel's history: warning Israel of the consequences of not following YHWH/Jesus.

I am going to stop here for now. I need to work on my sermon for this Sunday! I will post some concluding thoughts on hell in the next few days. Let me be clear: I am not a universalist, nor am I attempting undermine the role of Jesus as Judge in the Gospels. However, I am unapologetically rethinking the function and significance of how hell is thought of and used in the church. I think that careful exegesis will show that preaching hell to outsiders both undermines Jesus’ prophetic role toward Israel and takes the “good” out of the “news” for pagans.

This entry was posted on Tue, 12/02/2008 - 23:04

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