Touring Heaven

A person dies and is being shown on a tour around heaven. It is beautiful. Then the person notices a walled-in enclosure with no doors or windows. The person asks St. Peter what that is for. St. Peter replies, "Oh that is for the *________; they think they are the only ones up here."

* fill in the blank

1. If you are United Methodist, fill in Presbyterian; if you are Presbyterian fill in United Methodist, etc. etc. pick a denomination you think tends to be exclusive.

2. If you are Protestant, fill in Catholic; or visa versa; or permutations of Lutheran, Orthodox, or others.

3. If you are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim there have been historically some claims to supercessionist exclusion. Fill in blank after you've thought a bit.

("supercession" refers to belief that the dispensation of a more recent revelation supercedes in some sense a previous revelation. The implication is often to universalize the more recent witness, or to withdraw the faithful to an enclosure.)

4. If you are of Abrahamic religions, Peter might show a lot of cubicles for you and other peoples of other religions.

At this point, I'm not sure if this is a joke, or a parable. But is it funny or sad? I've heard it told many times and almost everyone laughs. But that is while "preaching to the choir, and usually at level #1 or #2. Let's look deeper, and reflect on our perspectives, assumptions and worldviews.

In a concise way this image points to a lot of assumptions and questions that get raised in the ecumenical and interreligious field. Here are some hermeneutical questions for the joke/parable and for our ecumenical task.

1. What does the teller assume about the nature of God?

2. Is God here assumed to be the God of all people, the Father of all his children?

3. Does the "geographic" nature of the story skew the plot in the direction of "salvation" being "getting into heaven?"

4. Is salvation a relationship? and is relationship to God and others possible in a variety of ways?

5. Does this story imply "universal salvation" and if not, are we privy to God's exclusions?

6. How do people hold on to particular faith and witness and avoid "indifferentism" that saps the spirit or relativizes values?

7. What is truth? A statement? A way? A sine qua non?

8. Part of satirical humor is blindness to the obvious. (eg. Emperor's new clothes, mote in enemy's eye) How do we discern when God's fiat of truth trumps the "obvious" of judgmentalism?

9. Does anti-judgementalism grow out of theology or human subjectivism?

10. Themes both of inclusion and exclusion have been found in the Bible. What are some?

11. Can one have identity without boundaries? Do "good walls make good neighbors." Or is there "something that doesn't love a wall?"

12. What is the gospel?

13. Do koinonia, hospitality, love, ecumene transcend tolerance? How?

14. Are you the person being shown around heaven, or are you already there? And whereabouts are you in the scene?

15. What did Jesus mean by "In my Father's House are many rooms?" (John 14:2)

16. What if the enclosures had doors and windows?

17. Is this more a story of heaven, or about earth now?

18. Does the humor of this story depend on one's worldview?

19. How do people with different worldviews talk to each other?

20. See addendum below.

Maybe the ecumenical movement and interreligious dialogues are ways of opening doors and windows so we can know each other and relate to each other better as brothers and sisters, and so relate in faith more closely to God with thanksgiving.

Ed Hiestand

Addendum

* For religions having a mandate to universalize, there are similar joke/parables about who is in hell, They may begin, "A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim were arguing for the truth of their respective religions and who was going to hell . . . . ". Does that add a different dynamic to the questions suggested by the joke parable above?

* In Owen Wister's The Virginian a challenging statement that could lead to a fight was responded to with, "When you say that, smile." Is it the same with jokes? Does inclusion/exclusion rhetoric change when a smile establishes that a relationship exists? How does one feel in telling and hearing something angry, friendly, ironic, or insider/outsider?

* See also:

* Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's (1729), Nathan the Wise taken from medieval historical legend and its center, the parable of the three rings from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron.

* Heaven and Hell and who is there were debated in Newsweek,. August 12, 2002.

* Implications of various gospel quotes, eg. Luke 20:27-38 Jesus comment about heaven and woman who had seven husbands.

* The movie "Places in the Heart" ends with a communion service including everyone.