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That's a very shallow analysis because I know America got rid of kings when they booted George III out 230 years ago, but in terms of today's world, when you look around and say, who in today's world has the kind of authority and the kind of empire that George III had, the answer is George II, your current president. You actually have something much more akin to the sort of monarchy that we had then, even though it's democratically elected.

What does the everyday person need to understand about how hell is used in Jesus' teaching?

I think part of our difficulty is that we are still firmly plugged in to a medieval picture of heaven and hell, such as you find in Michelangelo's painting of the Cistine Chapel, such as you find in Dante's Inferno in Paradiso. We Protestants miss out the middle bit, the purgatory bit, but you've still got a medieval picture which is not a New Testament picture of people after death going either to the one place or to the other.

What would a Palestinian Jew in the first century have thought when they heard those words?

A Palestinian Jew would have used the word Gehenna and Gehenna is the rubbish heap on the southwest corner of Jerusalem. I was actually filming part of a television program about the Resurrection in Gehenna just a matter of months ago, and so I know the place quite well. There was always a to-and-fro between the idea of this smoldering rubbish heap, which was always burning away as they piled more stuff on, and the idea of an event or a state of being rather like that which would serve as a metaphor for the place where the people who rejected God would go eventually.

So much of the Bible is appropriately metaphorical and we need to know what it actually refers to. But much more important than that is to get into our heads what the New Testament really is banging on about, which is resurrection, which is not a synonym for going to heaven when you die, but is what is going to happen after that.

I've often said, heaven is important but it's not the end of the world. What the New Testament is on about is what I call "life after life after death." That is, resurrection life after whatever state we go into after death. The New Testament teaches a two-stage post-mortem eschatology. And it goes on and on about resurrection and says very little about the intermediate state, which we can call heaven if we like. It's very interesting that so much Western Christianity has focused on the intermediate state so much that it's forgotten that there is an ultimate resurrection. It thinks that heaven is all there is.

What do we learn about being a Christian from the radical words of Jesus' call of his disciples?

It isn't a matter of simply taking a step of faith; it is a matter of signing on with the acknowledgement that Jesus is Lord. When the disciples made the decisions to down tools and follow him around Galilee, they were saying with their feet as well as with their hearts, we're with this man. Wherever he goes we're going to go, too.

When Paul talks about "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord," one of the things he means, of course, is confessing that Caesar is not lord and that there are other lords which have ruled over you. And so the step of faith is also necessarily a step of commitment, which is a commitment of life to live in a different way, to live by a different rule.

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48