The Hell of Heaven

"The sinner could not be happy in God's presence; he would shrink from the companionship of holy beings. Could he be permitted to enter heaven, it would have no joy for him. The spirit of unselfish love that reigns there--every heart responding to the heart of Infinite Love--would touch no answering chord in his soul. His thoughts, his interests, his motives, would be alien to those that actuate sinless dwellers there. He would be a discordant note in the melody of heaven. Heaven would be to him a place of torture; he would long to be hidden from Him who is its light, and the center of its joy. It is no arbitrary decree on the part of God that excludes the wicked from heaven; they are shut out by their own unfitness for its companionship. The glory of God would be to them a consuming fire. They would welcome destruction..."

An insightful and interesting quote.

Ashamed of "Christians"

I see this photo* and I shudder. It is an anti-gay sign saying that Jesus’ plan for the lives of gays is hell. I see this and I’m disgusted with how we have perverted Christianity and how we misrepresent Christ. Hell is not the plan Jesus has for anyone – and don’t go add “love” as sarcasm.

These Christians are doing unthinkable damage to the Christian-faith. Their distorted representation of Jesus and God makes me cringe. May God forgive us for such atrocities we do in His name. I look at this and I feel ashamed to be a Christian.

Please do not judge Christianity by such distortions of the gospel. The example for Christianity is always Christ, and not “Christians” that hi-jack the faith for their own agendas.

* The photo is by Tami Barnes and relates to the whole polemic in California regarding gay marriages on which I posted before.

The Comfort of Sleeping the Sleep of Death

“I hope he’s alright,” said a friend (let’s call him Sam), regarding another mutual friend (Conrad) that died a couple of days ago after a caving accident.

The statement just didn’t make sense to me. “‘I hope he’s alright?!’ What do you mean? His dead,” I thought. “‘Alright’ and ‘not-alright’ are irrelevant to a deceased.”

And then, of course, it hit me. We have two completely different paradigms. Sam is Catholic. And in Sam’s paradigm our friend Conrad is most likely now in purgatory burning off his sins.

In my paradigm Conrad is dead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There is no consciousness – no bliss in heaven, nor torture in purgatory or hell. “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead do not know anything, nor do they have any more a reward…” (Ecclesiastics 9:5).

For many people the idea of life after death (i.e. innate immortality of the soul) brings comfort. It is heartening to think that ones departed mom or child or friend is in Heaven. But I guess for many the idea of life after death can also be disheartening, because they might not be in Heaven, but instead experience serious anguish in purgatory or Hell.

Personally I find comfort in the idea that the dead are unconscious – that they are “sleeping the sleep of death” (Psalm 13:3), not suffering in some spiritual realm, and oblivious to the sufferings occurring in this sinful world. Until that wonderful moment at the Second Coming when “…the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise… Therefore comfort one another with these words” (I Thessalonians 4:16, 18).

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop

Imagine my suprise when the one of the highest clerics of the Church of England reiterate somewhat similar sentiments as myself concerning life-after-death. Actually, it shouldn't be surprising. Anyone that seriously studies the Bible has to come to parallel conclusions.

I'm thankful to a friend of mine for sending me this article, even though we are of different opinions regarding the subject.

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop
TIME Magazine - Thursday, Feb. 07, 2008
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1710844,00.html

N.T. "Tom" Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.

It therefore comes as a something of a shock that Wright doesn't believe in heaven — at least, not in the way that millions of Christians understand the term. In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children's book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What's Heaven, which describes it as "a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk... If you're good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]... When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him." That, says Wright is a good example of "what not to say." The Biblical truth, he continues, "is very, very different."

Wright, 58, talked by phone with TIME's David Van Biema.

TIME: At one point you call the common view of heaven a "distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope."

Wright: It really is. I've often heard people say, "I'm going to heaven soon, and I won't need this stupid body there, thank goodness.' That's a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.

TIME: How so? It seems like a typical sentiment.

Wright: There are several important respects in which it's unsupported by the New Testament. First, the timing. In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, "Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven." It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.

TIME: Is there anything more in the Bible about the period between death and the resurrection of the dead?

Wright: We know that we will be with God and with Christ, resting and being refreshed. Paul writes that it will be conscious, but compared with being bodily alive, it will be like being asleep. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jewish text from about the same time as Jesus, says "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God," and that seems like a poetic way to put the Christian understanding, as well.

TIME: But it's not where the real action is, so to speak?

Wright: No. Our culture is very interested in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in what I've called the life after life after death — in the ultimate resurrection into the new heavens and the new Earth. Jesus' resurrection marks the beginning of a restoration that he will complete upon his return. Part of this will be the resurrection of all the dead, who will "awake," be embodied and participate in the renewal. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a priest, has put it this way: "God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves." That gets to two things nicely: that the period after death is a period when we are in God's presence but not active in our own bodies, and also that the more important transformation will be when we are again embodied and administering Christ's kingdom.

TIME: That is rather different from the common understanding. Did some Biblical verse contribute to our confusion?

Wright: There is Luke 23, where Jesus says to the good thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." But in Luke, we know first of all that Christ himself will not be resurrected for three days, so "paradise" cannot be a resurrection. It has to be an intermediate state. And chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation, where there is a vision of worship in heaven that people imagine describes our worship at the end of time. In fact it's describing the worship that's going on right now. If you read the book through, you see that at the end we don't have a description of heaven, but, as I said, of the new heavens and the new earth joined together.

TIME: Why, then, have we misread those verses?

Wright: It has, originally, to do with the translation of Jewish ideas into Greek. The New Testament is deeply, deeply Jewish, and the Jews had for some time been intuiting a final, physical resurrection. They believed that the world of space and time and matter is messed up, but remains basically good, and God will eventually sort it out and put it right again. Belief in that goodness is absolutely essential to Christianity, both theologically and morally. But Greek-speaking Christians influenced by Plato saw our cosmos as shabby and misshapen and full of lies, and the idea was not to make it right, but to escape it and leave behind our material bodies. The church at its best has always come back toward the Hebrew view, but there have been times when the Greek view was very influential.

TIME: Can you give some historical examples?

Wright: Two obvious ones are Dante's great poetry, which sets up a Heaven, Purgatory and Hell immediately after death, and Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine chapel, which portrays heaven and hell as equal and opposite last destinations. Both had enormous influence on Western culture, so much so that many Christians think that is Christianity.

TIME: But it's not.

Wright: Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.

TIME: That sounds a lot like... work.

Wright: It's more exciting than hanging around listening to nice music. In Revelation and Paul's letters we are told that God's people will actually be running the new world on God's behalf. The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the Garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it's a picture like the one that you get at the end of Revelation.

TIME: And it ties in to what you've written about this all having a moral dimension.

Wright: Both that, and the idea of bodily resurrection that people deny when they talk about their "souls going to Heaven." If people think "my physical body doesn't matter very much," then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn't matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of "traditional" Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won't be going up there to him, he'll be coming down here.

TIME: That's very different from, say, the vision put out in the Left Behind books.

Wright: Yes. If there's going to be an Armageddon, and we'll all be in heaven already or raptured up just in time, it really doesn't matter if you have acid rain or greenhouse gases prior to that. Or, for that matter, whether you bombed civilians in Iraq. All that really matters is saving souls for that disembodied heaven.

TIME: Has anyone you've talked to expressed disappointment at the loss of the old view?
Wright: Yes, you might get disappointment in the case where somebody has recently gone through the death of somebody they love and they are wanting simply to be with them. And I'd say that's understandable. But the end of Revelation describes a marvelous human participation in God's plan. And in almost all cases, when I've explained this to people, there's a sense of excitement and a sense of, "Why haven't we been told this before?"

I don't have a soul, I am a soul.

A Time Magazine article, in July 1995 – “Glimpses of the Mind”, reduced the mind to processes of the brain. This is to the chagrin of most Christians who belief that if there is no metaphysical mind, then there is also no metaphysical soul. And to them, it means the end of the Christian religion.

One reader replied in the next August issue as follows: “You do not mention the profound religious consequences of the scientific investigation of consciousness. If it turns out to be true that consciousness, the soul, is not a separate reality, but a consequential phenomenon of the material world, then a fundamental truth of Christianity is shown not to be true because the concepts of heaven, and hell, and eternal life are based on the immateriality and indestructibility of the soul. The scientific demonstration of the material basis of consciousness would seem to mean the end of Christianity.”

I disagree with the reader on two major points. Firstly, Christianity is not centred on the innate immortality of the soul (and heaven, hell and eternal life do not hang on this idea) and secondly, the innate immortality of the soul is not truly Christian. The innate immortality of the soul is not of Scriptural origin, but of pagan origin – or worse yet, of Satanic origin! It was the Snake that said: “You shall not surely die” (Genesis 3:4).

The Scriptural view of the soul is one that is not innately immortal.

Body + Breath = Living Soul

The Bible teaches that God formed man from the dust, breathed life into him, and he became a living soul: “And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).

God did not implant him with an immortal soul. No, the body plus the breath-of-life became a living soul. A living soul is therefore the combination of a body, plus life.

A Soul Can Die

This entity (a living soul) is not innately immortal. The Bible is very clear that a soul can die.

“The soul that sins, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4, 20).

“And the second angel poured out his vial on the sea. And it became like the blood of a dead one, and every living soul died in the sea” (Revelation 16:3).

A soul is not innately immortal. If it were, it would not be able to die.

When the person dies, his life energy (breath) returns to the Life-Giver, and the body returns to the earth, and his consciousness cease: “His breath goes forth; he returns to the earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalms: 146:4).

Scripture and science agrees that there is no separate soul, apart from the living body. This idea of an innate immortal soul that survives the deceased body is unbiblical. God alone is innately immortal (1 Titus 6:16). Everlasting life in the Bible is a conditional gift, given to people only at the Second Coming of Christ.

Immortality is only imparted at the Second Coming

“And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes on Him should have everlasting life. And I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:40).

“For the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. And so we shall ever be with the Lord” (1 Th 4:16-17).

“Behold, I speak a mystery to you; we shall not all fall asleep [die], but we shall all be changed; in a moment, in a glance of an eye, at the last trumpet. For a trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall all be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:51-53).

The Bible is very clear on this teaching – immortality is a conditional gift: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). This gift of everlasting life, though we can accept it now in faith, is only truly received at the Second Coming of Christ. In the meantime those that die, stay dead (or symbolically asleep) until that day when the “trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible…[with] immortality”.

Heaven and Hell

Mainstream Christianity erroneously holds on to the unbiblical doctrines that when a person dies his or her soul immediately transcends from this physical plain to another metaphysical plain – either heaven or hell (or limbo / purgatory).

The Bible teaches that the person stays dead (or “asleep” as the Bible refers to it), until the Second Coming of Christ. My dead mother is not at this moment being tortured in hell, or pampered in heaven. On the day she died her breath went forth, her thoughts perished and a few days later we returned her body to the earth.

Those that are dead “in Christ” will stay dead and unconscious, soulless as it were, until the Second Coming, when the dead in Christ will be raised with incorruptible bodies and with the gift of eternal life (immortality). God will again form their bodies and breathe the breath of life into them as he did with the very first man. And God whom knows everything and remember perfectly will reinstall into them their characters – network of synapses.

The doctrines of Heaven and Hell do not falter before the truth that we do not have an soul, but that we are a soul – and a soul that is not innately immortal. Instead the clear Biblical teaching of Heaven and Hell comes to the fore with this understanding of the human soul.

Science and Scripture in Agreement

Science is confirming Scripture. We are, in fact, bodies that are alive. This does not diminish us, nor does it take away the mystery and wonder of life and consciousness. Rather it enforces that we are holistic beings. Unlike the unbiblical teaching of Dualism, that tries to separate body and soul.

Science and Scripture are in agreement that I do not have a soul, I am a soul, and when I die, I’ll be a corpse.

Ultimates

There is probably a fear that if we do not have some separate soul, then all metaphysical truths will disappear. Whether or not I have a separate immaterial soul does not affect true metaphysical phenomena. “1 + 1 = 2” is still just as logically sound, and philosophically viable as ever. The great morals of not stealing, killing, and so on are still just as sensible as before. These “truths” are true regardless of humanities soulfulness or soullessness. These truths are seated not in the human soul, but in God.

Can a mind exist without a brain?

Scientifically speaking, a mind cannot exist without a brain, because a mind needs the matter of the brain to act as the hardware, whereupon the mind can run like software. The mind is the network of electric pulses acting according to a program. Once the electricity is cut, the program ceases – so too, once life is cut, the mind ceases.

The greatest problem with this understanding does not really involve how our minds work, but how God’s mind work. Are we to understand that God has a physical brain? And if not, does God have a mind? The question is liken to ask if God needs to eat, or sleep?

The answers are “no”. God does not need to function in the same way as we do. God does not need a brain as we do. His mind is different from ours. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways My ways, says Jehovah” (Isaiah 55:8). God is self-sufficient and not limited to our physical limitations. We, on the other hand, are not self-sufficient. For instance we need to eat and drink to live.

Just because we are physical does not mean God needs to be physical as well. Similarly, just because we are not metaphysical, does not mean that God has to be similarly reduced from supernatural to natural. He is the Creator and we are the creatures. Pretending that we are of the same stuff as God is pagan – not Christian.

Talking about the Dead over Pizza

“I don’t believe in death” she said. “Shortly after my father’s death I had a dream in which we strolled on the beach and talked.” My friend and I were walking towards a pizza parlour for dinner when she shared with me this intimate experience she had.

In response I recounted a similar experience. “Just after my girlfriend died in a car accident I also dreamed of having a conversation with her. We were discussing how to plan for her funeral. It felt very real.”

The difference between my friend and I is that that dream about her father confirmed for her that the soul survives death. I on the other hand do not read any supernatural meaning into my dream even though it was extremely vivid and tremendously emotionally touching. If I had to impose spiritual significance on my dream, at most I can believe that God evoked such thoughts in me, as an artificial way for me to say goodbye to someone I loved deeply. I do not believe that I actually spoke to the spirit of my girlfriend, even though the idea might be appealing.

“I don’t believe in the immortality of the soul.” I added.

We kept walking in silence for quite a while. Clearly we were in disagreement. We both had similar experiences, but our interpretations of those experiences differ greatly. The soul survives death and is therefore innately immortal, or the soul does not survive death and is not innately immortal. Those are the two camps.

I thought about sharing with my friend some Scriptural reasons, or even philosophical motivations, as to why I do not believe in the innate immortality of the soul. But almost instantaneously I decided against it.

Her reason for believing what she believes is based on personal experience. The conversation she had with her departed father was overwhelming proof for her and certainly had some therapeutic benefit. I doubt any amount of theological or philosophical discussion, abstract as they are, could easily persuade the subjective conviction of a personal experience.

For me, in contrast, my personal experience did not convince me. If souls are innately immortal, then from my Christocentric paradigm an everlasting hell must exist at this very moment, with loved ones being tortured there at present.

While my friend finds comfort in the idea of the soul surviving death, I’m absolutely horrified by it. I explained in a previous post that the concept of hell, a place where people are burned for ever and ever, requires that the soul be innately immortal.

Because I believe that God is infinitely good, I cannot believe that God would be torturing souls in hell at present. And of course if souls are immortal they have to go one of two places, hell or heaven. Since not everyone will be going to heaven, some must go to hell and must therefore be tormented right now. If you are Catholic you have a third option, which is not that much better either. The soul could instead be in purgatory where it is also tortured for thousands of years until it is cleansed enough for heaven.

The Shaky Pillars of Hell

The idea of hell, where sinners burn through all eternity, balances on two pillars: the immortality of the soul and a vindictive God. Both doctrines are shaky, yet the majority of Christians believe in such a concept of hell, where an angry God keeps people alive for the sole purpose of torturing their souls without ceasing.

A closer look at these pillars foils the problem with this common belief.

We do not have immortal souls. Only God is immortal.

Nowhere does the Bible teach that people have an immortal soul. God, alone, is said to possess immortality: “…the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality…” (1 Timothy 6:15, 16).

There’s no talk of an innate immortal soul that survives death, accept in hyperbolic parables. Immortality is a gift, which is received not at death, but at Jesus’ Second Coming, when Christ returns to pay the wages. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). The Bible teaches us to strife for eternal life (1 Timothy 6:12), to hope for it (Titus 1:2), and to accept it as a promise (1 John 2:25) – a gift we are to receive, which we do not innately posses.

If immortality was inherent, we would not need to strife for it, hope for it, or receive it as a gift later at Christ’s return. It therefore makes sense that the wages of sin should be “death”, not eternal life in hell.

By means of Hebraic parallelism the Bible frequently equates hell with death, for example:

“The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me.”
“Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell…”
“The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me…”
“Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.”
“Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.”
“But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”
“Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement…”
(Psalm 18:5; Psalm 55:15; Psalm 116:3; Proverbs 5:5; Proverbs 7:27; Proverbs 9:18; Isaiah 28:15.)

Hell is not eternal life while tortured, but eternal death. The final end for the unsaved is complete annihilation, called the second death: “And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (Revelation 20:14).

Even Jesus said that hell is not a torture chamber where souls are kept alive, but a place where “both soul and body” are destroyed (Matthew 10:28): “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

The dead are not conscious in some other dimension, either heaven or hell. “The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence” (Psalm 115:17); “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing…” Ecclesiastes 9:5).

The followers of God that already passed away (also known as the “dead in Christ”) will one day be raised from the dead to receive the gift of eternal life. “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Corinthians 15:52).

God is not vindictive.

The second pillar is the idea that God is a vindictive, arbitrary deity that believes it is just to torture people for thousands upon thousands of years, even though they only sinned for a short lifetime. And this counts for both the adult that sinned for seventy years, as for the child that sinned for ten years. Clearly this does not make sense!

No, Jesus came to show us that God is not vindictive and arbitrary. He said: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). At the cross, Jesus was spat upon and cursed, tortured and beaten, yet he forgave his aggressors. This is also the character of the Father who forgives our sins for His name’s sake (1 John 2:12).

God does not now, nor will He in the future, keep souls alive in hell in order to torture them. That is a sick doctrine that brings shame to a loving God.