Dr. Mike Wittmer: Heaven Is A Place On Earth: The IM Interview

As we were discussing the subject of “Can We Be Too God-Centered?,” I remembered an excellent book I’d read a couple of years ago: Heaven Is A Place On Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters To God by Dr. Michael Wittmer.

I contacted Dr. Wittmer and he graciously agreed to a blog interview here at Internet Monk.com. Check out the interview, leave your comments and check out both of Dr. Wittmer’s books. Here’s the brief bio he provided.

“Mike Wittmer is Professor of Systematic Theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. Grand Rapids is the home of Rich DeVos, who owns the Orlando Magic, who bounced Cleveland from the NBA playoffs. Mike grew up in Northeast Ohio, and has been waiting his entire life for Cleveland to win a championship. Now, thanks to his Christian neighbor, the ordeal continues. Mike distracts himself from his cursed teams by spending time with his wife, Julie, and their three young children.”

1) Dr. Wittmer, it’s great to have you on board for the IM audience today. We’ve had a vigorous discussion on the subject of your first book and I immediately thought of you as we explored this subject of the relationship between Christianity’s view of creation and its view of God.

How would you identify the typical evangelical misunderstanding of the relationship between heaven and earth, God and human beings?

Many evangelicals think too little of God’s physical creation. They wrongly suppose that matter doesn’t matter or worse, that matter is the matter. This leads them to suppose that their spiritual soul is good and their physical body is bad and that a spiritual heaven is good and this physical earth is bad. So salvation becomes escapism. The goal of life is to slough off this body and troubled planet and go to heaven, where their divine-like souls can twinkle and shine forever. Of course, this is precisely what the Gnostics believed, but as I show in Heaven Is a Place on Earth, there is not one verse of Scripture which supports this view. Instead, the biblical hope, as N.T. Wright explains so well in Surprised by Hope, is the restoration of this creation.

2) An atheist might say something like this: Christianity claims that God is infinite in every way. This necessarily means that human life has no real value, since all value and importance belongs to God. Therefore, at the core of Christianity is a kind of self-hatred, i.e. you must hate yourself and do away with yourself so that God alone can matter forever. Why would anyone want to be part of a religion that zeroes out the significance of everything human?

Some evangelical leaders unwittingly support this idea when they leave the impression that God is selfish. They say that God exists solely for his own glory. He is like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the glory that we are obligated to give him. While they are right to say that the infinite God is the most real and valuable being in the universe, they are wrong to suggest that God is selfish.

Because God is Triune, a community of self-giving lovers, he is unable to be selfish. Just as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sacrificially serve the others within the Godhead, so they create new others—you and me—to love. God did not have to create us, but given who God is—a community of self-giving lovers—it’s not shocking that he would do so.

Here’s the point: God is committed both to his glory (because God is one essence) and to our flourishing (because God is three persons who necessarily love the other). So God’s infinity is not an obstacle to my value, but because the most valuable being created and cares about me, I have real value. God’s infinite value does not cancel my finite value, rather it establishes it.

I wonder if an atheist can make a similar claim to human value. It seems that if there is no God and if this life is all there is, then we and whatever we do doesn’t ultimately count for much.

3)How would you relate these two ideas so that one does not overwhelm the other:

Answer a) We glorify God by not thinking about orange juice, but by thinking about God as the creator of orange juice. b) We glorify God by enjoying the orange juice.

I don’t like (a) at all. How can you enjoy your glass of orange juice if you’re not even thinking about it as you drink it? David Naugle told me recently that another esteemed evangelical leader so emphasizes God the Giver that he leaves the impression that we aren’t allowed to enjoy his gifts. We can’t enjoy orange juice because we like it, but must see through it to God above. Personally, I think we bring glory to God when we enjoy the juice and thank him for it. It’s not that complicated!

4) How does worship contribute to the right understanding of the relationship of God to the ordinary activities of life?

I wrote my dissertation on Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, and I concluded that we need to combine his “Christ above culture” and “Christ the transformer of culture” models. Christ above culture reminds us of the supernatural/natural distinction—that though we exist entirely on the natural level we will never be satisfied until we know and love God. This will keep us from the temptation of idolatry as we work to redeem culture and creation. Everything matters—because Christ is Lord of all, but not everything matters equally. Worship reminds us that the kingdom of God is the pearl of great price, worth more than anything else in the world (Matt. 13:45-46), and then it sends us into the world as yeast to transform it for our Lord (Matt. 13:33).

5) How would you counsel someone who said they were changing their major from engineering to theology because they wanted to glorify God with their lives?

I would inquire about their motivation. Do they think they will glorify God less as an engineer? If so, they don’t understand the Christian worldview. Every so often I meet students who come to seminary from this wrong, Platonic motivation. Actually, it’s a big reason why I decided to enter the ministry when I was in high school. So God can use wrong motives for good, but it’s best to clear this up, as I do with my students, and assure them that they may well bring glory to God as a pastor, but they may bring him just as much glory in a secular field. I teach them to find their calling by asking What am I good at?; What do I enjoy doing? And what does the world need? If you can find where these lines intersect, you can know that whatever you do is a calling from God, whether that is preaching a sermon or drawing a blueprint.

6) Someone once said that we ought not try to be more religious than God. Bonhoeffer enigmatically wrote about “religionless Christianity.” Are these ideas useful?

I have said that Jesus is 100% God and 100% human. He is 0% angel. So Jesus did not come to turn us into angels who are constantly engaged in spiritual activities, but he came to enable us to thrive in our human lives. The Christian faith is an earthly, material faith. The physical world is both the object of God’s creation and the scene of his redemption. There is no salvation without a physical incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. So yes, evangelicals who sing the Platonic line (and they are many) are ironically attempting to be more spiritual than God. This was the Corinthian problem. They thought they were too spiritual to have sex (1 Cor. 7) and believe in the resurrection (1 Cor. 15). Paul told them that they are so spiritual that they are no longer Christian! (1 Cor. 15:12-17).

I’m not sure that we know enough about what Bonhoeffer meant to say whether we agree with him, but I do think that some are appropriating a similar idea in dangerous ways. The declaration “Everything is spiritual” is true if we mean that everything in the world matters in God’s kingdom, but it’s dangerously false if it is used to flatten the distinction between the natural and supernatural realms. Gathering for corporate worship is not the same as having a conversation in a coffee shop; reading Scripture is not the same as reading Charles Dickens; and prayer is not the same as twittering. If we forget the transcendent value of God, we will also lose the value of everything else. If everything is spiritual, then nothing is.

7) Have Catholics, in general, done better in articulating and practicing the relationship of God and creation than Protestants?

I think that Catholics have been just as influenced by Plato as Protestants. The Catholic hope is for the beatific vision, an unmediated gaze into the glory of God which apparently happens in some heavenly state. I may have missed it, but I am not aware that the Roman Catholic Church has done much with the biblical hope of a new earth, at least in comparison to what we find in the Kuyperian tradition. Historically, the Reformational worldview first took root in Luther, who rebelled against the Catholic dualism (celibacy trumps marriage; poverty trumps money) when he renounced his monastic vows and all attempts at a higher “spiritual” life and became an ordinary, married pastor. Since Protestants from the beginning had a creation-affirming impulse, I’m reluctant to say that Catholics have a leg up on this one.

8] Tell us about your other book and about any other projects you are involved in?

My latest book, Don’t Stop Believing: Why Living Like Jesus Is Not Enough, attempts to bring some biblical sanity to the emergent/conservative conversation. I address the big questions that many people are asking, questions about salvation, other religions, hell, homosexuality, Scripture, and truth. Each chapter begins with the conservative extreme that I grew up with, presents the understandable emergent reaction, but then shows how many of them react too far. I don’t argue for middle ground between emergent and conservative extremes but call the church to embrace what is right in each. We must love like the liberals say and value right doctrine like the conservatives are known for. As John writes: his command is to believe in the Son and to love one another (1 John 3:23). It’s not an either/or but a both/and.

My next projects are still in the planning stage, but I may try my hand at an evangelical assessment of Karl Barth and/or a book which explores how we might keep our faith in a secular and pluralistic world. I haven’t yet found an 80’s pop song title to appropriately cheapen the content of either project, but I’m hoping that something will pop into my head before I’m finished. Everyone needs a shtick, and though I hit on mine by accident, now that I’ve started I feel pressure to keep it going. At least my books come with a soundtrack!