Christianity Is Not About Heaven (And Never Has Been)
Traditional belief in heaven is actually contradictory to scripture
There are millions of Christians in the world today whose entire worldview revolves around the idea of heaven and hell. Christians go to heaven. Non-believers go to hell. Therefore, it is the duty of the believer to convert non-believers to save them from hell. Fear of hell is used to keep members in line and to drive people to fervent evangelicalism. Everything is about getting into heaven and avoiding going to the bad place. However, these beliefs do not appear anywhere in the Bible. In fact, an unhealthy obsession with the afterlife is rotting Christianity from the inside out.
If heaven were so important to Jesus, you would think he would have spent most of his time preaching about it. But he didn’t. In fact, Jesus says little about heaven at all. Most of Jesus’s teachings are about the nature and intention of the law, how to treat other people, how to see people the way God sees them, and how to pray and grow near to God — in this life. All of Jesus’s teachings are about how people should act in their physical lives and not about how to get to heaven.
Jesus’s belief in heaven was not at all what people think today. In Judaism, the body and soul are inextricably linked. One cannot live…
