The problem of heavenly rewards

That's me standing on the spot where Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were burned.

The NT is full of talk about heavenly rewards for those who are persecuted for the sake of Christ. Think Matt 5:10-12, where the persecuted are those who can count themselves blessed, because they get the kingdom of God - and more!

What begins as a word of comfort to those who are under the pressure of persecution and possible death, or to those who have lost someone in the arena becomes, under less pressured conditions, not merely an encouragement to endure but a motivation to seek out a martyr’s death in order somehow to guarantee God’s approval. If the promise of vindication and reward comes so surely to those who find themselves under trial, then it would follow that one ought to seek out trials, or even perhaps provoke them if necessary. This was in fact exactly what happened in the first centuries of the Christian era, and it was a problem that Augustine aligned himself against. Yet, to be fair, this is only the consequence of the notion of heavenly rewards gone awry. The notion of heavenly rewards – as we have seen, deeply embedded in the Christian scriptures and the subsequent tradition – is problematic not just because of its problematic effects. In the first place, if renunciation of life and its pleasures and comforts is motivated by expectation that this very act of renunciation will bring as a certainty eternal life and heavenly bliss, is it not then the case that the act is really a form of self-interest? And further: is it not affirming the paradigm of rewards that it seems at first to reject? Secondly, we can see here that this desire for a heavenly prize can certainly mean that the martyr dies in a way which denies or diminishes the goodness of the created order – including the other people in it. This was certainly a feature of Origen’s construal of martyrdom. It is hard to see how martyrdom is a genuinely loving act in this case. A third difficulty is perhaps even more serious: the one who wills for himself to become a bloody martyr becomes his own judge; or at least, attempts to force God’s hand, to trigger divine approval as an automatic right. The one who designates himself ‘martyr’ is presumably conscious of imitating Christ in his death; and yet, this martyr presumes that his own death secures the merit, at least for himself, that only Christ’s death secures for any human person. All three of these problems are, at base, evidence for the accusation leveled against martyrs of all faiths that the apparent denial of the self is really a complete fabrication. Martyrdom is egotism of the worst kind.

This applies to the having of martyrs too: the church that designates and then celebrates martyrs is with not much subtlety proclaiming its own blessedness, it's own God-favouredness over and against even other churches. It is not incidental that the cult of the martyrs sprang up in the fourth and fifth centuries, as the various sees of the empire jockied for position. The keeping of the relics of the martyrs and the veneration of their tombs and shrines threatened also to subvert the power of their witness to the work of Christ. We see here the temptation of supplanting the divine judgment once more.