This post is a response to some very good questions to my previous Righteous Activism.
I may misunderstand the question, but let me answer what I believe is the question and we can work from there. God as my witness, I wish it could be shorter, but I’m not smart enough to be more terse and condensed. It’s the function of pastors and elders to do whatever is possible to help people get what they need to serve the Lord.
Our brother Michael offers standard Western reasoning; he is in much good company. I couldn’t answer at all had I not spent so many years of my life wandering in the puzzling world of Western Post-Enlightenment theology. If we step outside the confining limits of that tradition, we stand in a better place to recognize the larger collection of intellectual traditions. While it’s easy to recognize a broad common stream of thinking within the whole of Western Civilization, we find a great many Westerners are encouraged to take Western thinking entirely too seriously, to so deeply identify with it as to take it personally, to be unconsciously offended when something contradicts it. I’m not saying Michael is an idiot, but his objections are very common among those who haven’t become acquainted with the differences between Western Christian traditions and something much older.
I’ve often warned that Western reasoning is built on a rejection of revelation. Christianity and faith are actually quite ill-fitting in Western traditions. Because it’s a bad fit, we end up with a host of problems manifested in the disputes and bloodshed which soaks Church History. We sense that messy history does not reflect what the Apostles gave us, but we are crippled by a lack of documentation. There are some few letters and treatises of those who directly followed the Apostles, but we sense there is some selective record-keeping at work here. Yes, I allege someone in the past destroyed some of that documentation with malicious intent, but I can’t chase that rabbit right now. But, if we take seriously the study of intellectual differences between the Hebrew people and what we have some few centuries later, we see a very huge gap, a really substantial move. I’ve tried to offer at times my best estimate of how that shift came about, and avoid reading back into it my own prejudices. I suggest most of Western Christian scholarship you’ll encounter today has not tried hard enough. That is, a great deal of Western Christian tradition still buys into the false world view, the fundamental assumptions about reality, that are not at all consistent with those who wrote the Bible. I even wrote a book trying to point out how Jesus was a Hebrew man with a viewpoint totally at variance with most of the modern Western church.
So a great deal of Western reasoning is not wrong as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. If you stay within those boundaries, revelation will never make sense. To some degree, it’s not supposed to make sense, but I believe we can come closer by moving from our Western rational tradition back to the ancient Hebrew intellectual roots. As it is, I often warn the truth of God cannot really find a home in our human understanding. It requires a separate, higher faculty in the Spirit, something which does not dwell in the conscious intellect. Our problem is the barrier between the spirit and mind, and our knee-jerk reflex to keep the mind in the driver’s seat. The mind is not competent, and where the spirit has been brought to life by God, we dare not rely on it for anything more than merely organizing our response to things mandated from the Spirit in our spirits. There must ever be a thousand unanswered questions. That was the overall meaning behind the symbol of sheol. We cannot know what’s beyond this life. Much of what I have encountered in my years of study in theology and philosophy assumes too much, trying too hard to make faith cerebral. The Hebrew intellectual traditions are truly different from that. Sometimes I still struggle with it.
The justice/injustice standard is based on obeying God’s revelation. Justice is what God says it is; it reflects His divine character. God built the Hebrew intellectual culture by His own hand as the one context fit for revelation. We are forced to assume that legacy is as close as human minds can get to His truth on this earth. By contrast to the Hebrew concept, if efficiency was part of the standard, then it’s best to die and not be here in the first place. I don’t pretend to know when God deems a child accountable in the course of human development. The Hebrew culture never nails it down beyond a nebulous comment in passing about knowing to do right from wrong. It assumes there is such a point without trying to calculate. They wouldn’t pretend to speak for God on something like that because He didn’t say, but they did notice when things got dicey dealing with a particular child. We don’t know the absolute truth of such things; all we know is what we can read in God’s revelation about what we should do about it.
Take a look at how David handled the death of his first son by Bathsheba. His sorrow was for himself and he said so, not for the child. “He cannot come to me; I must go to him.” The Hebrew understanding of reality is darker than ours. There is an overwhelming sense that this life makes no sense, nor can it. There is really nothing to accomplish — “All is vanity of vanities.” You really don’t want to be here, but God is the one who decides when it’s over. Until then, you have little choice but to obey or suffer the consequences. Even in the matter of consequences, much of it is incomprehensible. God dumps His wrath on sin and the guidelines for avoiding His wrath are ill-defined by human standards. It’s not supposed to be easy. And even if we do stand before Him relatively clean-handed by His Laws, we still have to wade through the common sorrows of all the rest of humanity. In other words, it’s very tempting to try to come up with a matrix of reasoning that ignores God’s infuriatingly fuzzy revelation and just work it all out on the human level.
So yes: Who wouldn’t choose death as soon as they could? Except, it’s not ours to choose. We are obliged to stay here and endure the sorrow until God is pleased to let us go. Could you take your own life? Sure. Suicide is not horrifying in Scripture; there are times it is the only thing left to do when a man has gone too far in miscalculating the vagaries of this life. He realizes his mistake too late to undo the damage. If your mission here is destroyed, it’s possible for you to realize it’s time to go. But there again, Hebrew culture assumes it becomes obvious that you are simply carrying out your own just death sentence, not simply because you are sad. Your pain is not reason enough; it has to be calculated with dispassion whether you sense God has said you have failed your mission. It’s all about mission and calling, not your happiness. Still, the whole question remains vague and so it must be, but I assure you our modern Western horror about suicide is not at all from Scripture. The mainstream Western Christian reaction on that question is actually from pagan European backgrounds. We have this reflex of reading our cultural assumptions and feelings back into the Hebrew people, and it’s wrong.
As Michael noted, the Hebrew Scriptures don’t present a very good view of the afterlife. Now, we do have a pretty good pile of Jewish traditions regarding what was taught but not recorded in Scripture. Unfortunately, it’s not uniformly trustworthy. Jesus rejected most of it with just a few words about “traditions of men.” But then His disciples did dredge up oral traditions from the Hebrew culture and put them in Scripture, so we have no simple standard, no good solid feel for how to handle the apparent difference between what is obvious from Hebrew Scripture and what it seems the New Testament does to clarify. We know in theory they were guided by the Holy Spirit, but we find ourselves with a sense we can’t be quite so sure from where we stand now. If we read through the Jewish traditions, we would probably seize on the wrong thing.
So I read back into Hebrew culture what Jesus said about these things, simply because He was the final revelation of what was not so clear as before. It is Jesus who says so much more about the afterlife, but we know He says it based on Hebrew assumptions. If it seems He adopts imagery from, say the Persians, and maybe a few other cultural backgrounds, it is not because He is a syncretist, but because He found a handy image people would understand. Everyone wants to ignore how the Hebrews readily borrowed from other cultures if it was a good way of expressing something far beyond words and images in the first place.
This is the biggest stumbling block of all: Hebrew language is not descriptive, but indicative. Hebrew intellectual efforts are not aimed at resolving human questions, but at providing some bit of traction for obedience. It’s impossible to overstate what a radical difference that makes when you start trying to think about things. It was always assumed you cannot understand with your mind. Jesus said parables were necessary for His teaching because the truth cannot be told, only indicated by imagery and symbols. The writer of Hebrews rather bluntly states the real world is at best only a shadowy copy of ultimate truth, in describing how Moses commanded the design of the Tabernacle as a shadowy representation of God’s throne room in Heaven. He then talks about how faith is a form of perception which fills in the blanks for the intellect: It is the substance of things we wish we could understand, but those things are rooted in another realm.
So while the Hebrew Scriptures make passing references to sheol and how death is more like sleep, it’s totally consistent to read back into it things Jesus taught. It is not consistent to read back into it anything else from any other human source. Jesus is the one who said dying in righteousness brings us into Paradise, whatever it was He meant by that word. This counters somewhat the Hebrew image of death as a place of sleep, of knowing nothing (we could burn up a lot of time chasing the inherent meaning of “knowing” in that context). And I fully agree the idea of dying and going into the torments of Hell is missing in the Hebrew Scripture. Again, Jesus brought up the idea of Hell as one of the two alternatives, the other at one point described as the Bosom of Abraham. He reveals what was incomplete in ancient Hebrew understanding. Maybe it was there but never explained, or maybe it was simply missing altogether, but Jesus completes the picture.
A major point of confusion is the Hebrew assumption of Two Realms, an understanding utterly missing from Western Civilization. We have words for it, but the matrix of understanding is missing. We end up with “eternity” meaning “time without limit” whereas the Hebrew conception is totally outside the time-space continuum. Even if I can get those words into a nice Sunday School lesson in your average mainstream evangelical church, the intellectual background is missing. There is almost no place to hang such a thought, and people unconsciously dismiss it. So it tends to come off as mythical and not real. Just listen to how people talk about eternal things and you’ll see a serious tangled mess in which the Two Realms are confused. The Law Covenants together reflect a moral regime which carries us through this fallen existence. It manifests deeper truths about things in the Spirit Realm, but by no means answers all the questions. Rather, the Laws put us on track to discover as much as any human mind can grasp about eternity.
God does not explain why He chooses some for citizenship in His Eternal Kingdom and not others. He never explains the basis for how He decides to give some spiritual life and others remain spiritually dead. He does say some part of the process is our witness, but He pointedly warns us no part of the eternal change is in any human hands at any point. We participate in revealing or manifesting His decision from before Creation — that’s how it’s presented to us. Even then, I can’t be certain I’m saying it right. Yet Paul warns nothing in humanity is capable of even wanting eternal life, but that our nature is implacably hostile to it. Whatever it is God does, it counts as a miracle totally from His initiative. There is sufficient space in Heaven for every soul born on earth since the beginning and until the end. It’s where we belong, but we won’t all get there. Scripture hints at the notion the majority will not, yet it asserts rather clearly it’s possible in some sense all could theoretically make the grade. There is no effort at all to explain why.
There is a lot of talk about the Law Covenants and how they make life better here below. We are left to recognize how that picture symbolizes something of the inexplicable spiritual reality somewhere beyond the shadowy mess we have here. All we can pin down is this: If there is anything we can do about gaining eternal citizenship, it begins with repenting under the Laws of God. The connection is not defined, merely asserted. We do understand it somewhat from the other side of things, in that we know those who come into spiritual life and the attendant awareness it grants will find the Laws winsome and irresistible, though not always fitting every occasion. The Laws taste a bit like our spiritual inheritance. The problem is our human mind getting in the way. If your spirit is dead, you don’t have much else to work with except your mind. But if the spirit is alive and aware, then it takes over and mind serves instead of ruling. That is by far the most difficult transition to make, and most of the Western church never even tries, because they are so deeply pickled in Western assumptions that there can be nothing above the intellect. Western Civilization disembowels faith before you ever get there.
In the Realm of the Spirit, a child born on this fallen plane has their citizenship in eternity. It’s our birthright under Creation. But at some point, the poison of the Fall takes hold. I don’t have the words to explain it, but the penalty of the Fall is not applied until sometime after birth and well before adulthood. There is a period of moral innocence recognized in the Law Covenants, but not explained. Killing an unborn baby sends that baby to Heaven. That reflects God’s justice. Killing them after that indefinable point risks sending them to Hell. God says that’s justice, too. It’s offensive to our Western notions, but that’s because we are pickled in the lies of Satan — AKA, Western Civilization. Can’t get your head around that? I’m not sure what I can do to help, but I’m trying. If we could choose to die in innocence, we would. But by the time we know enough to make the choice, we cannot. Why it is the innocence dies in so many people and never comes back to life in spiritual birth, I cannot say. The Bible makes no attempt to explain it, only asserts just enough for us to get a few pointers.
We aren’t allowed in on the divine counsels of such matters. We are permitted to realize our own spiritual birth, but even that is really tough. We need a lot of help from others to explain what to make of that in itself, never mind all the other particulars. What I can say is the logic of doing right to win Heaven is false logic. It results in “works righteousness” and a wealth of error and sin. The most dangerous people in the world are those logically certain of their righteousness while spiritually dead (or at least ignoring the Spirit). We see that exemplified in the Jewish persecution of the New Testament.
Confusing things considerably is how the Jews themselves had corrupted their understanding and left behind their Hebrew intellectual heritage. Scripture doesn’t document it. Oddly, the Talmudic records do document that intellectual shift, but try to justify it. The point is, that shift from Hebrew Mysticism to Western Rationalism was morally fatal, and deeply confused what little understanding of spiritual matters was possible. I know the Bible teaches us that this life is supposed to be miserable. By His mercies, we can work towards a certain measure of mitigation by observing the Law Covenants as whole. We can even abstract the underlying logic, but that underlying logic is not at all amenable to Western minds. We are not subject to something so neat and clean as a body of objective truth within our theoretical reach. We are subject to a living Person. If I could point to one heresy most seriously threatening to obeying Jesus Christ, it is the assumption God cannot defy logic, when “logic” is cast in Aristotelian terms. Aristotle went to Hell, folks. He refused to accept the message of the Old Testament and refused to repent of his sins. We know he encountered that message, yet his work reflects a clear departure from it. You cannot learn God’s ways from someone like Aristotle, nor can we pretend to somehow recast God’s revelation in Aristotle’s frame of reference. That frame of reference is behind the “traditions of men” Jesus warned about when He disputed with the Hellenized Jewish scholars of His day.
When God says something is just by His standard, it’s our job to reach for as much understanding as possible about that. Most important is not that we somehow figure it out in its essence, but only so much as need to formulate our obedience. The injustice of abortion is rejecting God’s moral standards regarding conception of life, and refusing to accept the burden of responsibility for raising that child — refusing to adhere to God’s moral standards in the first place. Sending that unborn child to Heaven is not the problem, but virtually no one involved views it that way. They dehumanize the child by making it a mass of tissue. This is pretty much the same thing as Cain killing Abel — it’s murder. It’s taking life for any reason short of God’s justice. The problem with most anti-abortion activism is focusing on the loss of the child, as if it’s somehow unjust to the child. That’s wrong. It’s a sin against themselves by refusing to take the path God prescribed, and a sin against God for rejecting His ways.
It’s not about the child, who suffers no loss. Allowing the child to live is a virtual guarantee it will end up in Hell as a sinner later in life. The question is not justice for the child. Was not Abel taken into Heaven? Didn’t Cain do him a favor? Cain sinned against the moral fabric of universe. I can’t explain why God insists we all pass through this horrible existence and then for most of us (apparently) to end up in Hell. But that’s what He has ordered, and we are damned if we argue with His plans. The sin of abortion is arguing with God.
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The reason I keep coming back is …. you are always an interesting read.
Keep those fingers writing. 😉
Thanks Mark. If I can at least entertain, that’s an accomplishment in itself.
Ed, I’m not sure if the title of this post refers to my fuzzy reasoning or your own, but maybe I can be clearer. I think we may agree more than you presume, (especially about whether or not abortion is ‘murder’—it is), but I don’t believe you effectively answered my concerns. And I only voice these concerns, because as a product of the Western ‘church’ (I’m a recovering Anabaptist myself) I’ve likewise been steeped in the error of Christian mythology…to be distinguished, of course, from Christian Truth. So I know of where I speak when I ask a specific question.
I think you adequately explained the whereabouts of injustice in your answer, “The question is not justice for the child”(a somewhat stunning admission). But that’s what I assumed you meant…I just wanted you to clarify. The term “injustice” means “who was wronged”. The injustice then is with God, according to your understanding, because HE is the true injured party in abortion. But you muddle things here a bit when you say those who cause the abortion wrong “themselves by refusing to take the path God prescribed”. This doesn’t follow. If they haven’t “wronged” the child, then it was not murder. (Moreover, the only sin against “one’s self”, according to Paul, is fornication (1 Cor 6:18)) But this is an especially important point that you make (intentionally or not) that the death of the child is NOT the wrong. Maybe you can step out of your own perception for a moment and imagine how shocking that statement may be for most of your churched audience. Having said that, however, I must disagree with this point. The child was indeed wronged.
Which brings me back to my greater point in questioning your notion that “babies go to heaven”.. You further state that “Abel was taken into heaven”! I asked, sincerely, how you were sure of that. Where is that truth specifically taught in scripture? Though you spoke eloquently and sincerely in attempting to address this—and I appreciate that, you nevertheless come across as evading the question. I understand you BELIEVE this to be true, but your belief is no more valid than a Muslim’s, or a Mormons, or a Paul Crouch’s if you don’t have the witness(es) of scripture to back it up. On the question of the ‘afterlife’, you say, “Scripture doesn’t document it… The Bible makes no attempt to explain it.” But this doesn’t satisfy a thinking man, Ed. The one and only portion of Hebrew scripture you reference is David saying his dead son will not return to him, but that David would go to his son. But his son was dead (not in Heaven). David was only acknowledging that he too would “sleep with his fathers”. Well after Christ’s resurrection, scripture confirmed David was (still) dead: “Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day.” (Acts 2:29)
This is important because if aborted babies are not in heaven, then they are dead. And if they are dead, they were murdered, therefore they were WRONGED. On the other hand if they are alive in Heaven, having never LIVED (breathed) upon the earth, then they never died, so abortion is not murder, nor can it be an injustice. See where this convoluted nonsense leads?
Ultimately this discussion points to the greatest injustice ever conceived, and is no doubt the greatest stumbling stone to all would-be believers (those whom God may be calling in this age), myself included. That being, why it is a Creator, who calls Himself “Love”, would condemn most of his creatures to an ETERNAL torment, apart from Him, without any hope of salvation, in response to a TEMPORARY life of sin/rejection of God (which you acknowledge no one really has any ability to avoid), all when He clearly had it in His power to save them all. And in fact, the scripture does exclaim that He IS the savior of all mankind and ALL will come to Him (eventually). How can both of these ideas be true? Again, we have a major incongruency. Either God is true and “every man a liar” or not.
“Jesus brought up the idea of Hell,” you say. You seem sure Aristotle is there. But you make no effort to explain your basis for this notion (from when comes Hell? Why teach something you have no scriptural backing for?). Ah, but “Maybe it was there but never explained, or maybe it was simply missing altogether…” Or maybe it was and is another of Satan’s lies. I know the scriptures pretty well, and I find any idea of an Afterlife completely missing. That is why I asked you where you had found it. Furthermore, any sense that Christ is NOT the Savior of ALL mankind directly contradicts pretty much the entirety of the Bible. Regarding Hell, you mention one PARABLE Christ told, the meaning of which you completely miss (the common Christian refrain that he spoke more of hell than of heaven is a rank lie—check it out for yourself) and with that you aver, “but Jesus completes the picture.” …That’s hands down the most confusing thing I’ve heard yet. Help me out here, Ed.
My confusion, like yours, and all other ‘seekers’, was induced by the lies of men and devils. Once God began pointing those out to me, the scales fell from my eyes. I don’t yet see clearly—I merely see “men as trees walking”, yet I can sense confusion now. I say all this to hopefully induce you to re-think some of your assumptions. Because many times, when your audience (or your flock) have questions, you can inadvertently lead them AWAY from God by following down your own rabbit trails which are, in fact, the very “traditions of men” which you decry. The organized church teaches the Confusion of Babel. I think most of your readers come here in an attempt to escape Babylon. I say this in love—stay mission oriented.
Michael, I folded in answers to your questions with a lot of other questions I’ve had myself, and been asked by others, over the years.
Hebrew reasoning is fuzzy. Having adopted it as much as I can, mine would certainly appear so to anyone with a Western approach. I’ll keep researching it until I’m dead because I’m never satisfied that I get it all. On the other hand, I tend to absorb some things and I really am not a footnote kind of guy. Once I find peace for my own questions, I tend to quit pushing on something. That makes it hard to recognize when I don’t quite hit the sweet spot for someone else. For this, I apologize humbly to you.
Some of this hinges on what you make of what Scripture is there. I’ve written much about that in other places, but I can’t easily go back and point them out to you. I write a lot. Jesus remains the definitive answer on what to make of that Hebrew writing, but I have no reason to doubt any of the New Testament writings fail to reflect what Jesus taught on the questions. Having passed through so very much scholarly debate on canon many years ago, I found a place of rest for my spirit and I’m not willing to revisit the question: The current Protestant canon is my answer. The question becomes one of making sure we get what they were saying, and on that I may continue struggling about some things until I die. I report where I am now.
The New Testament writers clearly believe they find in the Old Testament religion sufficient justification for asserting a distinct afterlife, that period between death and resurrection. What we make of this depends on the context in which we find the data. The Hebrew people had no problem mixing metaphors, throwing in facts into parables and parables into factual discussions. It drives Westerners nuts. Those of us who try to make sense of this will hardly agree on all points. Images attached to the word Sheol vary wildly. My frame of reference is this: Every religion Hebrew people encountered uniformly asserted an afterlife with some level of consciousness.
Abraham’s educational background, so near as we can estimate, would uniformly assert there was something there. While some of those other religions poked at it with vigor, Abraham and his descendants didn’t seem all that interested in trying to nail down the specifics. The one thing I can’t possibly footnote is the broad impression that religions and religious philosophy rooted in Mesopotamia asserts there is an entirely different plane of existence outside this one. I would go so far as to suggest they felt it so obvious they seldom bothered to discuss it directly. Yet we see from their writings, they assumed it, because they mention it in passing. That comes from reading literature not so easily accessed as our Bible, so I’m hard put to give you references. I have no access to the huge libraries I used in college. I suppose if you spent some time just chasing the appropriate search terms on the Net, you may run across at least secondary references to it.
First, a few references I know we both can easily find. Daniel 12:1-2 — the afterlife is sleep, not obliteration. Similar thought in Psalm 17:15, Isaiah 26:19 and others. The Jewish scholars of Jesus’ day argued about it still, but we have to realize by that point they had become Hellenized (Westernized), having embraced Aristotle and his epistemology. Aristotle rejects an afterlife, and folds the higher plane of existence into this one in a multi-graded continuum. If you assume a continuum, then afterlife has to mean a return here in some sense. If you assume a totally different level of existence, afterlife means that other place. This is a truly earth-shattering difference in all those unspoken assumptions held by nearly everyone else in the world (so far as Hebrew people had encountered). The shift in Jewish scholarship is very well documented, as I noted. When you change your underlying assumptions about reality itself, the meaning of your words is totally different. Nit-picking literalism (“propositional truth”) has no place in Hebrew culture. Hebrew language was inherently expressive and indicative. Translators note the words themselves do not lend themselves easily to literal expression. Hebrew logic is symbolic, not analytical at all, though I find reason to believe they were aware of that approach. Grasping Hebrew reasoning as a subset of Ancient Near Easter philosophy requires reading whole shelves of books.
I can’t make Hebrew Scripture address things that would never occur to a Hebrew mind to ask. Their fundamental question in bothering to write anything at all is, “What do we do now?” Despite the heavy dose of mysticism, it’s fundamentally practical, not esoteric and trying to find answers for the sake of simply knowing. There is no attempt to nail down some things in Scripture, though we might find references to it in other forms of Hebrew literature (mostly oral) or we might gingerly infer it from the broader Ancient Near Eastern cultural background they share with others. I don’t think it occurred to them to wonder much about the afterlife until later in time. When they do address it, their address is seldom direct, but in passing. Often the reference is symbolic or parabolic, not literal. I’m the first to admit it’s hard to wade through that from my background.
Jesus spoke to the thief on the cross next to Him, referring to a Persian word we translate “Paradise” — “This day shall you be with me in Paradise.” We recognize Hebrew thinking, and “this day” is a figure of speech, but in this context, seems more literal. He refers to Gehenna and “bosom of Abraham” as symbols. How are you going to talk literally about something you can’t possibly understand with a fallen intellect? Jesus warned Nicodemus that understanding what was behind His teaching required a living spirit, born from that higher plane (above, Heaven, etc.). It required that other faculty I mentioned, the one not included in our consciousness by default.
So what do we make of God shocking that witch at Endor by bringing back the real spirit of Samuel, not some demon faking it? What do we make of bringing back Lazarus from the dead? There are several cases of raising the dead in both testaments. The Sadducees rejected the idea of the afterlife, and Jesus warned them they were wrong about it. Matthew 22, Mark 12 and Luke 20 all record that debate, which Jesus ended with, “For He is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto Him.”
So my answer is: If the context of our discussion is this world, then dead people are dead and gone. They don’t normally come back, though it has happened a few times. The state they enter is ill-defined in Scripture on purpose, but both testaments typically use the image of “sleep.” What was Jesus up to while His body lay in the grave? We can’t know, and any possible reference is parabolic. He came back to an eternal body; all those other folks returned to their old bodies. How the body in the tomb was transformed is not answered, but assumed. My teaching about the Two Realms is my own intellectual organization of how I handle the shocking difference between ANE epistemology and Western epistemology. For me, Jesus went back to His Father’s throne room and did whatever He had to do, something beyond our mental grasp. It’s a figure of speech for pulling His consciousness into that other realm (my own figure of speech), and His resurrection was returning to this realm for unfinished business.
Some element of the human soul continues to exist and there is no way on earth to explain much about it. I use the term “Heaven” as it was in the Bible, the word “sky” as a symbol for “above this level of existence.” I can’t prove that concretely, but I find the wealth of evidence justifies it for my own peace. Besides which, it seems at least partly literal, given the Ascension was a literal drifting off into the sky, and Jesus blunt assertion He would return in the same fashion quite literally. Then there are those references to “coming in the clouds” and the “great crowd of witnesses” watching us here and now and coming back with Him.
Abel going to Heaven I deduce from references to him as righteous. There is precedent for such broad assumptions, not least in the book of Hebrews. Babies going to Heaven, I admit, is not so easily documented, but very few people dispute the notion of moral innocence. I surely overstated the case when I said the primary injustice in abortion is not against the child. But I’m less literal than you are about sins against the self. If you violate God’s moral laws in any way, and Creation reacts, you are hurting yourself. The emphasis of modern day abortion protests putting all the tears and emotion on the bloody fetus is misguided, and I most certainly intend to shock people away from that trend. I find that a poor motivation for stopping abortion from where I now stand. I believe a better motivation is how seeing destructive it is to those still living. One abortion kills us all in some measure. One sin of any sort spreads death on this earth like a cancer, when we already have enough trouble with death. Don’t weep for the baby, but for all us still here.
What the babies miss out on is the sorrows of this life. I think it would be even more shocking if I asserted they lost out on the chance to experience the full effects of the Fall. I can’t present an objective image; I’m reacting to one I find utterly false. If I die, weep for yourself; I’m tickled pink at the idea of getting out of here. I believe I am going to far better situation; I find it impossible to believe otherwise. I would say that’s because the Holy Spirit, whose existence is rooted in that other realm, has grabbed a piece of me and plugged me into that other realm. I can only assume a certain portion of those who share that living connection will recognize what I write as somehow useful in their own mental organization of things. Those without that connection cannot get it — “you have to be born from above” to understand. For them, I offer something else. I can’t hide this message from them, but I focus more in simply loving them with a power from that other realm, a power that ignores all the very good reasons humans have for not loving each other. There is simply no way I can explain to them divine election, all the more so since I can’t explain it to myself, only assert what little I know about it from the Scripture. Even my use of the term “divine election” is guarded, because I find most Calvinists (and Arminians) make huge errors in demanding it all come out logically satisfying. I’m not a TULIP man on either side of that debate. I typically assert that there isn’t anything we can do about our spiritual birth, but we can surely repent and make the most of what we can do here. In the back of my mind, I’m thinking that those who are spiritually dead are unlikely to hear. It’s not my job to make anyone hear, only to offer what I have. The business of divine election saves us having to take responsibility for manipulating folks into conversion.
In other words, I don’t try to answer every big question. All I try to answer is what we have to do in order to carry out our commitment. That’s the bigger point I make. Defining our conduct here must arise from an analysis of the Law Covenants after the Cross, using the example of what we can understand about Jesus to explain how Laws do or don’t apply. The explanations and the psychology are aimed at structuring our conduct, not answering all the pending questions. I’m willing to stand confused and uncertain a lot of things.
Your prodding will surely help me refine my message, and I’m grateful. I consider my blog a place primarily for conversation and refining the verbiage. Keep poking.
I suppose I could call it my final comments on the matter in this post.
You talk a lot, Ed. Maybe too much. “The more the words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?” (Ecc. 6.11 … NIV) With all that verbiage, though, you somehow cleverly ignored the issue. Again. I’ll just come right out and say it: the idea that “babies go to heaven” is patently absurd. And it’s not only erroneous theology, it is actually common to “Western” thought—you must have your head in the sand not to realize that. That a portion of humanity will be saved by faith in Christ, having to “learn obedience through suffering” and having to come to repentance through judgment (all rock solid BIBLICAL teachings) while another portion (babies) altogether avoid that process and become a population of redeemed humanity by a DIFFERENT method (God just waves his hand) is just nuts. It completely denies Christ—and makes void his sacrifice! I’ve asked you to point out the scriptures that support your understanding and all you’ve done is give me page after page of “fuzzy Hebrew reasoning.” You present not ONE biblical teaching that makes sense out of your ‘logic.’ In fact, the only thing that logically follows your argument is that the one sure way to guarantee your child will be saved is to KILL him as a baby! Therefore, abortion doctors actually work FOR the Kingdom of God. So says Ed.
You say, “The New Testament writers clearly believe they find in the Old Testament religion sufficient justification for asserting a distinct afterlife, that period between death and resurrection.” I say, “where?” Assertion is not evidence. You say, “First, a few references I know we both can easily find. Daniel 12:1-2 — the afterlife is sleep, not obliteration.” But that only makes my point, Ed. I never argued for “obliteration”. The scriptures teach a number of resurrections—some to glory and some to judgment (“shame”). All—except Christ, the firstfruits—are yet future. You’re being obtuse. You ASSUME there is some conscious existence of “the soul” between death and resurrection, but I pointed out the scriptures explicitly deny that. You’ve not corrected me with chapter and verse. Still waiting here.
In fairness, you have offered a few references in NT scripture which you presume backs your view—only you use your premise to prove your premise…It’s circular. Again you bring up the parable of Lazaraus and the rich man, with the “bosom of Abraham” and “gehenna”… Symbols indeed. But of what? You don’t say. But you do recognize this is a PARABLE. Contrary to the common (‘Western’) Christian teaching, Christ taught in parables for those to “whom it was given to know the mysteries of God,” NOT so that he would be understood by the “others”. To them that were without—the common masses—he spoke in parables that “they might NOT understand” (Luke 8:10). I never heard that in church, did you?
You mention the instances of the raising of the dead in both old and NT scripture. But they were raised back into their mortal bodies, and they DIED again. Moreover, none gave any recorded account of their “existence” while they were dead. In fact, about the little girl and Lazaras whom Jesus personally resurrected, he directly said they “were sleeping”. He certainly did not drag them out of the presence of God back to this dismal plane of existence just to demonstrate that he could. How capricious! What about Christ himself after his death? You said “For me, Jesus went back to His Father’s throne room”. That’s interesting. Only it flatly denies Christ himself who said unto Mary upon his resurrection, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” Again, the thief on the cross; “Paradise” — “This day shall you be with me in Paradise.” You are wresting scripture here, Ed. The thief asked Christ to remember him, “whenever you shall come into your kingdom. Jesus answers unto him, ‘I say unto you today you shall be with me in Paradise”. There are no commas in the Greek. Jesus was making the promise to the man on that day, at that moment, that he would ultimately be with him in “paradise” (a word used only 3 times in the NT scriptures, of quite unclear meaning in all cases). Your attempt to build a whole theology of an ‘Afterlife’ on a grammatically biased reading of one scripture is dubious at best, especially when your interpretation directly contradicts dozens of other scriptures… Which is why you do not appeal to scripture, but to some nebulous Hebraic mysticism which only you seem to understand.
Finally, and most importantly, “Hell” is frankly, and bluntly a Christian hoax of the most dastardly proportion. Teaching this as a scare tactic to ‘drag people into the Kingdom’ is counterproductive and just plain wicked. It dishonors the Father and utterly degrades Christ’s work. Anyone who has TRULY meditated on this concept of eternal torment becomes overwhelmed with disgust and ultimately becomes revolted at Christianity in general. And this is a natural, healthy revulsion. Anyone sincerely seeking truth can easily find a plethora of scriptural information on this subject just for the asking…What I’ve found though, is that ignorance of this lie is not for lack of available biblical exegesis, but from the willful, carnal wickedness of their hearts. They WANT Hell for their enemies…scriptural truth be damned.
Well anyway, I haven’t the time you’re afforded to continue on throughout the night questioning you. Suffice it to say, I think I’ve adequately pointed out what I consider to be error on your part and I think most of your readers haven’t the time either to wade through another 5 pages of fuzzy Hebraic rebuttals (just honest Bible teaching would have sufficed). In any case, I hope I’ve helped you refine your message, Ed. I’m just still not sure what it is.
Then we’ll have to agree to disagree. We both believe the other brings unrecognized biases to the Scripture, and there’s nothing more I can do. But for my readers, I’ll offer this about children and moral innocence. Scripture does not address it. It also does not deny it. I deduce it based on clues. I offered a frame of reference for it, using what I consider proper Hebrew analysis. I’ll be the first to warn people I can be wrong. The last piece of evidence I offer is Jesus’ comment about letting the little children come to Him because of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Not because I take it as a fully literal statement, but as an indicator.
Thanks for taking the time, Michael.
Actually, Ed, just between us, I do recognize your biases.. they’re Babylonian. (See Rev. 18).
And your disclaimer about “being wrong” should be a great warning for you. (See Deut. 13:1-5)
I’m sure we’ll meet again. Perhaps in the judgement, when the dark clouds of our minds have cleared, and we can sit under our own vine and fig tree and know the truth, and shall be freed from our biases thereby. As will ALL mankind. (Micah 4:3-5)