The New Gospel

When the end did not come as expected, some of Jesus’ followers transformed this temporal dualism (this age versus the age to come) into a spatial dualism, between the world below and the world above.  Or put differently, they shifted the horizontal dualism of apocalyptic expectation of life in this age versus life in the age to come (horizontal dualism because it all takes place on this plane, here on earth) into a vertical dualism that spoke instead of life in the lower world versus life in the world above (with an up and down).  In other words, out of the ashes of failed apocalyptic expectation there arose the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell.

Let me illustrate [how Christianity spread] with a hypothetical example.  I’m a coppersmith who lives in Ephesus, in Asia Minor.  A stranger comes to town and begins to preach about the miraculous life and death of Jesus.  I hear all the stories he has to tell, and decide to give up my devotion to the local pagan deity, Athena, and become a follower of the Jewish God and Jesus his son.  I then convert my wife, based on the stories that I repeat.  She tells the next-door-neighbor, and she converts.  The neighbor tells the stories to her husband, a merchant, and he converts.  He goes on a business trip to Smyrna and tells his business associate the stories.  He converts, and then tells his wife, who also converts.

Roman religions did not stress belief or the “intellectual content” of religion.  Instead, Roman religion was all about action — what one did in relation to the gods, rather than what one happened to think or believe about them.

Probably the hardest thing for me to deal with personally involved the core of what I had believed as an evangelical Christian.  I had become “born again” because I wanted “to be saved” … In the view that was given to me, Christ had died for the sins of the world, and anyone who accepted him in faith would have eternal life with him in heaven.  All who did not believe in him — whether out of willful refusal or sheer ignorance — would necessarily have to pay for their own sins in Hell.  Hell was a well-populated place; most people went there … Roasting in hell was, for me, not a metaphor but a physical reality … This view of hell was driven into me and deeply burned, so to say, into my consciousness.  As a result, when I fell away from my faith … I still wondered, deep down inside: could I have been right after all?  What if I was right then, and wrong now.  Will I burn in hell forever?  The fear of death gripped me for years, and there are still moments when I wake up at night in a cold sweat.