The problem with heaven

There have been various responses to the announcement by Iain Banks that he is suffering from incurable cancer of the gall bladder. One of the pieces written already, almost as a premature obituary, has reflected on the image of the future that Banks has created in his Culture series of science fiction stories.
John Butterworth writing in the Guardian said;
'In his Culture novels, Banks has created what as far as I know is the only convincing utopia in print.
Dystopias are relatively common in fiction. You take a bad trend, give it more technology, and extrapolate. They can be terrifying and salutary, and powerful writing about them may help avoid their realisation. But describing utopia seems to be harder. You have to deal with, and incorporate, the flaws. And what is a person, when there are no struggles? What is life for, when everyone already has everything they want?
Religions have the same problem as Sci-Fi here, I think. Hell, with fire, demons, liver-tearing-birds or whatever, can be quite a convincing threat. But heaven lacks conviction.
Banks writes of a human race which knows itself, in which human beings have practically complete control over their own lives.'
There is an unintentional observation here that Christians need to consider very seriously. We have been very good and creative in drawing pictures of the hell that we need to avoid, complete with flesh tearing demons and never ending fire, but the picture of heaven we create is anaemic at best. We have allowed images of angels sitting on clouds to dominate the popular mind partly because our focus has been on salvation as 'being saved from', interpreted as avoiding the unpleasant scenarios, but we have failed to really work with Jesus' own statement that he had come in order to bring life in all its fulness and so consider where salvation, 'being saved in order to', takes us. True, there has been much done to identify the qualities of Life in all its Fulness but we have fought shy of attempting to draw a picture of what that life might look like. There are no works that I am aware of that attempt to create a picture of a Christian Utopian future, the images of Banks and others are entirely secular. Immortality is achieved through technology and any sense of life transformed is similarly the product of bio-technological advances.
The question for Christianity is whether there really are no permissible images that would enhance the Christian image of heaven? We have, after all, taken huge liberties of conjecture in painting pictures of hell!
Is it unreasonable, for example, that we might envisage a future in which we, both individually and as a race, are engaged in some way as mentors to other species on other worlds and that we are actively engaged in the development of the Universe albeit in ways we cannot yet imagine? There are enough comments in the Bible to suggest that being given responsibility and being drawn into the ongoing creative work of God is much more the character of our future than simply surviving into some kind of static state of bliss.
Another trap we fall into is to speak all too willingly of 'life after death'; but surely that is to deny the message of the resurrection of Jesus which speaks instead of the defeat of death and gives us clues as to the nature of life that has been transformed, taken on into dimensions of existence that are currently beyond us.
The image contained in the 21st chapter of the book of Revelation, of the New Jerusalem into which the Kings of the Earth bring their splendour and in which God and humanity lives together is also a potent and positive image of how things will be. Again, it is a dynamic image very different to the pale and static image of simple survival.
Maybe we need some creative and powerful Christian fiction that is unafraid to speculate and of course to be wrong in the detail but confident in its underlying theology of God's plan for partnership with humanity and prepared to state that the future in partnership with God is dynamic and exciting.

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On the choosing of a new Pope

It's been a long time since I've blogged but the appointment of a new Pope and such an interesting one, compels to me to my keyboard again!

Given the fact that it had to be one of the cardinals in the conclave clearly meant that the world wasn't going to get either a woman, someone in a civil partnership or someone with such radical views that they would be selling the Sistine Chapel on eBay in a weeks time. Despite that, the choice of someone whose actual name is hard to recall unless you are a Spanish speaker and who will therefore very quickly be known only as Francis, seems an inspired choice. But it is a choice fraught with dangers!

The problem is that given his already well publicised history of living simply under a vow of poverty and his genuine 'preference for the poor', there will be those who will be disappointed not to find the Sistine Chapel on eBay and the money being used to finance projects to end poverty or develop work to offer real alternatives to the false god of 'The Market'. His known humility will also lead them to expect him to listen to those on the edge, especially those of the LGBT community and change both his previous thinking and the teaching of the church and when he does not, disappointment leading to disaffection will set in.

I say these things because I am one of those prone to react that way. Being an ecumenical diplomat means that often the things I really feel have to take second place to more considered responses and that can be frustrating because, after all and 'For God's Sake!' People are dying because we faff around and cannot tell the difference between form and content! We obsess over questions of conciliar versus personal episcopacy when it is clear that what Jesus concentrated on was the quality of the way that way people in leadership behave and should understand the risks of power. And so we hold each other at arms length and scrutinise each others' statements with a microscope in case we find something that is 'wrong' and cannot recognise organic unity when it is staring us in the face. And we obsess about this while the world screams out its need around us so please Francis do something sensible and really radical and get us all to really make a difference! Please!

Of course it's not as simple as that. There can be rapid cultural shifts caused by something such as social networking that causes almost overnight changes in the way we connect with one another with all kinds of as yet barely understood side effects but other changes inevitably take generations especially when they involve an appeal to higher motives. We take our time because we do not want to rush into damaging changes that may be irreversible not to mention the fact that to set aside something that we believe God has told us to do or say is remarkably difficult.

Nevertheless there is a potency in the very idea of a Pope called Francis and we live in the world of the butterfly effect where subtle things can make differences on the other side of the world or all over the world, that we never expected. If we cannot plan anything because of that, surely God can and may bring things into existence that we can only pray for.

So I will expect less than may be promised but pray for everything and wait to be surprised even in the midst of disappointments.

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