Life in the Purple Wedge, Van Harden - Spring 2021

Book: Life In the Purple Wedge: finding yourself on the map and how that changes everything.

Author: Van Harden

Publisher: Xulon Press -2013

Format: Paperback, 87 pages

This was a short book (it took me a little under an hour to read), so it will be a short blog. this book was given to me by a friend, Rose Hendrickson.

Thesis: (according to Joel)

The Christian life is best understood as a plane on which the realities of the world and the realities of God’s kingdom are intersecting to form some amalgamation of the two and the believer must keep in mind that the worldly dimension will quickly be over for each person, while the reality of God’s kingdom will be eternal.

Argument:

Harden portrays a human’s life in this world as a red circle with a dot on the far left representing our birth, and a dot on the far right representing our death. He then diagrams God’s kingdom as entering into a Christian’s life at the moment of their conversion which creates a line that bisects the circle at some point from top to bottom. God’s kingdom is represented by a blue rectangle which continues through the right portion of the circle and on to the very end of the diagram, though Harden tells the reader to imagine it heading off into eternity, not just tho the right, but to the top and bottom of the diagram as well. These intersecting red circle and blue rectangle form a purple wedge which is the subject of the book

Harden wants the reader to understand their place in the purple wedge as a paradigm through which should understand all the phenomena of our life. He asserts that this awareness will help us to make sense of and endure hardships that we face in life, and that being aware that our purple wedge will one day turn all-blue will supply us for strength and wisdom while in the purple wedge.

Here is a quote that I appreciated from this book:

It is a shame that so many Christians do not realize, believe, understand, remember or at least act as though they immediately entered God’s kingdom when they surrendered to God, through Christ, the way God instructs. What an honor it is that god moved His big, blue eternity over the final part of our red circle. He didnt have to do that. None of us is good enough to dersrve it. It is an undeserved gift, with aboslutely no obligation on Hi part to give. It is a life-changing experience when it happens, and if our life isnt’t changed by it, then it either didn’t happen at all or we are so caught up in this owrld, spending so much time, effort, and emption on the red circle, that we are ignoring the permanent, eternal , gigantic, blue part of the map in which we will forever be. (p.25)

There is really only one issue that I take with what Harden has presented here, and it comes when he is discussing what the eternal blue plane of God’s Kingdom will be like. He derides the popular imaginativeness of our modern society which likes to dream up their own ‘custom’ heavenly pleasures that are perfectly suited to their worldly passions (like an eternal bass fishing trip with unlimited gear and a fish on every cast) - which I would agree with him, is ridiculous. However, when he tries to make a positive assertion about what heaven (God’s eternal kingdom) will be like he says the following:

I invite you to read for yourself the scenes of heaven and what is happening there. You will find, in a nutshell, that everyone in heaven is worshipping and praising God, in His presence, continually. Nowhere will you read about people looking for their long-lost pets, asking God lists of questions from their note-pads, golfing, or even looking for those persons they loved more than anything else in life. Why? Because they are so totally overwhelmed with being face to face with God in all His goodness and perfection. All they want to do is give themselves to Him. That’s how great our God is! They have the intense desire to honor Him and nothing else. (p.63)

Here, Harden is making the mistake of applying what we find in the throne-room scenes of Revelation 4-5 (which are also the setting in which the seals, trumpets, & Bowls are presented) to the ongoing eternal experience of life in God’s new creation. I think there is very little warrant to do so. That scene is simply the heavenly occasion that John (author of Revelation) was shown and the manner in which God chose to reveal to him the spiritual realities that he was to reveal to us. Clearly, the scene which John sees is one of paradise - the shared dwelling for the redeemed and God while they await judgment day (see Revelation 6:9-11), and I find little reason to assume this is the ongoing reality of paradise. However, when God describes his new heaven and a new earth in Revelation 21 it is portrayed as a city and as a garden (ch. 22) into which the kings will bring their splendor - - which is far, far from everyone being shut up in a throne room. Harden needs to take a larger view of Biblical theology to understand why God created mankind in the first place and consider how they might be restored to this intention when the stain of sin, wickedness, and death are judged and burned away. As a corrective to Harden’s flawed eschatology, I would point you to “Surprised by Hope” by a preeminent New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright.

Up Next:

I’m going to read ~200 pages of “The New Testament in Its World” by Wright and Bird, but there will be no blog entry until I finish the whole book (hopefully sometime this year). After that, I’ll get to “Live Not By Lies” by Rod Dreher, in fact, I’ve already started a little as it has become my ‘backpack book’ due to the impracticality of carrying around Wright and Bird’s 20lb “The New Testament in its World”