This past year I finally got around to finishing Brian McLaren’s New Kind of Christian trilogy, which ends with the book aptly named The Last Word and the Word After That.  The first book, A New Kind of Christian, dealt with postmodernism, post-fundamentalism, etc. and basically set the stage.  The second, and my favorite of the three, The Story We Find Ourselves In, dealt with creation care, more postmodernism, atonement theories, and narrative theology.  The third book turns it’s focus to the afterlife, specifically to the current Christian understanding of both hell and resurrection.

If you weren’t aware already, McLaren wrote these three books in the vein of “theological fiction” or “creative non-fiction.”  It’s hard to describe other than to say these are books about theological ideas and themes but the medium is a fictional narrative.  Whatever we want to call it, I rather appreciate the different approach to doing theology in this way.  There is something much less combative, much less propositional about theology done via narrative.

So I don’t want to turn around and just extract propositions from the book here on my blog, I’d much rather just give the book a hearty recommendation and say that it will make you reexamine how biblical our ideas about hell as well as heaven really are.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Western Christianity owes it’s ideas about hell to Dante and heaven to Plato much more than we do to the Bible.  McLaren’s book tries to retell the story the Bible tells about hell and about resurrection and the Kingdom of God.

Much of Brian’s thinking here is influenced by the notable New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop, N.T. Wright.  So the next book I went out and read was N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, which is summed up nicely by it’s tag line – Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.  If you’re looking for a more straight-forward approach and all the scholarship that goes with it, you might want to check out this book as well.  It fleshes out in much more detail the conversation that McLaren wants to start with The Last Word.

For those who are really brave and want to tackle a much larger, much more academically written book, check out N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God.