Heaven: Why being good will only get you so far

As I was growing up, American pop culture had sketched out the basic outlines of Christian belief—at least one generic kind of Christian belief. Most of us have seen the basic pattern: if you are a good person, you go to Heaven when you die, and if you are bad, you go to Hell.

This imagery has been played out for us a million times—when an otherwise good-natured cartoon character is blown up by the dynamite, they float up to heaven with wings and a white robe to play harp on a cloud somewhere. When the bad-natured character falls off the cliff, he just keeps tumbling through the layers of the earth to end up in a rocky, cavernous underground torture chamber full of fire and a red-suited devil with a pitchfork.

And the whole thing gets preached by a droning minister the next Sunday at the Springfield Presbylutheran Church on The Simpsons.

While these cartoon images capture the general spirit of the ultimate hopes and fears of the theology I grew up with, they miss a lot of the nuance of the dialectic between good and bad, faith and works, and divine and human nature within this particular culture.

While the Holiness tradition in which I grew up did teach us to strive for eventual “sanctification,” a state in which God had done God’s cleansing and perfecting work in us to cause us to finally stop desiring to sin, there was still a basic underlying belief that impacts every other belief, teaching, and action that stems from it:

We are not good.

We are totally depraved

And by “we,” I mean all of humanity—everyone who has ever lived, is living, or will live. None of us has ever been good, are good, or will be good—at least not by virtue of our own effort.

Although God’s original creation, as described in the book of Genesis, is said to be “good”—and this from the creator themselves—it is more often a quote from the book of Romans, chapter 3, that I heard across the pulpit as a child and young man (quoted from the King James Version, for its gravity):

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:

There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.

They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

To summarize the theology in its simplest form (which is nearly impossible to do, because every word is theologically charged and has, at some point in history been hotly contested, but here goes…):

God wanted us to do good, but we are incapable of it. Because of our inability to do good, we deserved to be punished by death. God sent God’s son Jesus to experience punishment and death in our place, so we could be back in a right relationship with God. However, this salvation is only available to us if we believe in Jesus and accept this gift of salvation.

It is because of the intricacies of this transaction of salvation, called “penal substitutionary atonement,” that you will sometimes hear people who believe in it say things like, “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship.”

What that means is that one’s salvation is not actually based on being good or following the rules, because there is no way we could be good enough or have the ability to follow the rules closely enough to earn our way into Heaven.

We are fallen. Our very nature has changed. This is what theologian John Calvin meant when he spoke of the “utter depravity” of humankind. We are too depraved to even know how depraved we are.

Therefore, our only way to avoid going to Hell and ensure that we go to Heaven is through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Substitutionary atonement: it’s not about being good

This nuance is why there are some Christians who resist the idea that all religions are just about being good, or that being good to others is enough to please God. This is why there are some Christians who will tell you that good figures in history, such as Gandhi, didn’t do enough to get to Heaven, because he never accepted Jesus as his savior (even though he read the Gospels and had the chance to believe them).

This is why I say the whole notion of “good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell” misses the point of the substitution model of salvation, which is a surrender to God to save us, precisely because we can’t save ourselves.

This is not to say that Christians are absolved from being good. It is understood that once someone is saved by Jesus, that the Holy Spirit will go to work transforming that person, making their desires and eventually their actions conform more to the love and righteousness of God.

As Paul says in Romans 6:

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?

God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? 

Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

The implication here, and through the rest of that chapter, is that becoming a Christian is to let our old, sinful selves die, and to be metaphorically resurrected into a new life, obedient to God and righteous before other people.

Holding onto salvation for dear life

The problem that I often struggled with as a kid was how to know I was still saved—still safe—after I was saved. Because although I had a relationship with Jesus, I knew that I had not killed my desire to sin. As good as I may have wanted to be, I just kept on being bad.

As a kid, it was the somewhat laughable sins of a child, although they were deadly serious at the time: getting angry at a friend, lying to my Mom about where I had been playing, shoplifting a box of Lemonheads from the 7-11 because I wanted it but had already spent my money on comic books, my friend and I running over a frog with our bikes to see what would happen. (After that last one, a nosy neighborhood mom who’d been watching out her window shouted that we were certainly going to go to Hell.)

But when I got a little bit older, into my teen years, I had some real sins in mind, and I planned to try at least some of them before I died or Jesus came back.

For some people outside of Christianity, it can look very hypocritical—the devotion to a belief system that is dedicated on some level to doing good, but relying on a relationship with the heavenly higher-ups, rather than righteousness, to get saved. For some critics, it just doesn’t make sense.

Johnny Cash got it. He could sing about his love for Jesus Christ along with his love of drugs, alcohol, guns, sex, and murder, all in one song, and no one would give it a second thought. In fact, throughout the vast catalog of country and western music (as well as classic rock, jazz, folk, maybe all of them), it seems to be understood: we may love God, but we’re also going to fall in love with disreputable partners, our own selfish pleasures, and copious amounts of Jim Beam.

The apostle Paul got it, too. It’s a confusing passage of scripture, but this quote from Romans 7 is one of my favorites from the entire Bible. In its own winding, twisting way, it captures the dialectic between the human desire to do good and the human temptation to not do good, as well as our seeming powerlessness in the face of this dilemma. Follow along if you can:

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.

If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.

Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

(And as Frank Sinatra said, “Do be do be do…”)

Essentially, what Paul is saying is that he wants to do good, but he doesn’t do it. Instead, he does bad, which he doesn’t want to do.

Finally, frustrated with this whole business, he exclaims:

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

Paul’s answer? It’s this:

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God;…

Even though Paul also admits:

 …but with the flesh the law of sin.

As a young person, I took no comfort in Paul’s confession of imperfection—although I would have been totally justified in doing so. After all, if the de facto founder of Christianity was not free from sin, why should I be expected to be?

Shouldn’t Paul’s words give me license to be a little easier on myself? I could follow his example to take comfort in Jesus, in my spirit, but understand that my body is trying to run its own game, and do my best to try to keep it under control, knowing that I might achieve progress, but never perfection.

But in the back of my mind, I still suspected that God couldn’t love me as I am, and I didn’t want to take any chances. On the day of judgement, when the movie of my life played in front of God and everyone, I wanted it to show that I was good.

On the other hand, along with Paul and Johnny Cash, the fire that was fueling my engine was not from above but below. And that engine was still driving me to be bad sometimes.

I felt that if I were going to be good, the strength for that would have to come from outside myself. In the meantime, I just hoped that God would forgive me anyway.