Christians sometimes talk about heaven as our true 'home'. It may well be true that as the apostle Paul put it "we are in the world but not of it", and we may well find hope and comfort an the anticipation of life in a recreated cosmos which conforms fully to the purpose of God. But it is not true to say that heaven is our true home. Nowhere in the bible are the words heaven and home connected and nowhere are believers encouraged to believe that their eternal destiny lies beyond or outside the world that God so lovingly and carefully created. The creation stories in Genesis remind us that our hope should always be very firmly focused on this amazing and beautiful world, so full of possibilities, beauty and wonder and on the promise that we will once again live life in this world in harmony with one another, with the creation and with God, just as Adam and Eve once did in the garden in Eden. If there is a hope in this story it is that the garden remains somewhere on the earth. The gates are locked and guarded by weapon-wielding angels but paradise has not been "closed down" for good. All those who read this story knew that somewhere on the earth there was a place in which there were no "thorns" or "sweat", and where there grew a tree that gave everlasting life (Genesis 3.22-23). That image was to inspire a hope for better things, a hope for a respite from the struggles and the thorns. But the remarkable thing is that the hope was focused on the earth. Paradise had not moved or been "transferred" to a heavenly location. If the life of thorns and struggle was an earthly one, so too was the imagery of release from those thorns and that struggle. The Eden paradise was not locatable in any known geographical space. But neither was it a spiritual place. It lay at the origin, the reader is told, of the great rivers that watered the known world (Genesis 2.10-14). It is not fantasy or legend, but neither is it fact and geography. It is real but elusive. And, more importantly for every reader of these chapters, it is still there . . . . somewhere
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When the ancient writers of the Hebrew bible and the christian New Testament wrote about a place called heaven they really meant a place up above the sky. That was where God lived. If they wrote about people being dragged down to Sheol or descending to Hades they really did meant a place below their feet in the depths of the earth. For the writers of the bible, heaven and the land of the dead were real places that lay above and below them. Their writings may seem naive and even ridiculous to us because of that but the modern 'scientific' reader must understand that these ideas were shaped in a word that looked and felt very different from ours, a world which had a very different 'shape'. This post tries to describe that 'shape' and understand how a physical heaven above us and Sheol below us were very logical implications of their world view. Such a view of heaven was “upper-worldly” rather than “other-worldly.” Furthermore, the gulf between heaven and earth was constantly bridged by etherial beings. Angels and demons shared the same physical space as human beings. Far from being empty, the upper air was filled with boisterous, contending powers. Angels stood close to hand, to impart comfort and guidance to the faithful. Demons would frequently create chill pockets of moral and physical disorder in the everyday world. Demons, indeed, were believed to occupy distinct ecological niches on earth, lurking in out of the way corners within the settled world and claiming as their own the threatening silence of the desert spaces. In the words of an exorcistic prayer, scratched on a tile in northern Spain, that was where the demons should remain: “where no cock crows nor hen cackles, where no ploughman ploughs nor sower sows.” Peter Brown How big is our God? That is probably the most important question we can ever ask ourselves about our faith. The question isn't "do we believe in God?". Many people believe in a small, mean-minded, culturally bound, limited kind of God, a God who only loves some people, who can only work if we have enough faith, and who is a slave to our desires and longings. But the bible consistently speaks about a God who bursts the limits of our expectation and imagination. The God of the bible constantly surprises and astounds His people by revealing Himself to be much greater than they had thought possible. For some writers and readers of the Hebrew bible there were some places even God couldn't go, for example Sheol, the land of the dead. For these writers that was a place outside of God's view and a place beyond the life-giving grace of God. But for others, with a bigger view of God, there was nowhere beyond reach of their God. Even Sheol was open to His gaze and to his love. The God they believed in was a God who could redeem even those who had passed beyond life. This, I believe, is the God revealed in Jesus who died and rose again as victor over the power of death. In this post I look at some of thse texts which point to that greater faith in God and what they meant for the larger tradition of God's victory over death itself. "It is that vision of the bigger God that serves as the background for the christian belief that Jesus is the manifestation in flesh of this 'bigger God', the God who not only sees into Sheol but who descends to Sheol to bring the dead out of their captivity to death. This is one very early interpretation of the resurrection of Christ. The death and resurrection of Jesus were seen as God entering into the realm of death in order to defeat it and overthrow it's power. Later traditions spoke of Jesus actually going down to 'hell' to rescue the godly men and women who had lived before his coming (the Harrowing of Hell). That's why resurrection is so important to the christian faith. Anything less that resurrection speaks of a small and limited God, a God who rescues the soul out of this horrible world, but who has no power to restore dead bodies or heal a broken world. Resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus and our own, speaks of a bigger God, the only God worth worshipping".
When we think of the afterlife we usually think of some kind of distinction between the good and the bad, between heaven and hell. But in the Hebrew bible no such distinction was made. Everyone went to Sheol when they died. Sheol was a bit like the Greek concept of Hades, the land of the dead. The dead still existed in some sense but only in a very intangible, shadowy way. The dead became mere rephaim or shades (we might think ghosts) and had no meaningful life. Sheol was a land of forgetfulness and sleep. Some texts assume that God had little or nothing to do with Sheol, which at times could come in handy as a bargaining tool with God - if God wanted worshippers he jolly well had to keep them away from Sheol for as long as possible! Sheol was inevitable but no one wanted to go there. Sheol was the universal destination of the dead.
The mother of a friend of mine used to say "dreaming of heaven is all very well but it won't get the dishes done". She was right. We may well have an 'eternal home', but thinking about it all the time won't bring it any closer or make it happen any sooner. and it certainly won't get the dishes done, i.e. help us to live our lives. The ancient Hebrews knew that. They didn't wish their lives away dreaming of heaven, in fact they had no idea of going heaven when they died! They believed that it was enough to entrust themselves into the love and grace of God in the here and now, in the lives they lived with family and friends, on the good land the Lord had given them. This post explores what it was the Hebrews hoped to get out of life and how that related to their expectations of what happened to them when they died. "Ultimately everyone died and so everyone found themselves in Sheol. But Sheol was not hell, it was not a place of punishment and the 'final destination' didn't matter nearly as much as the means of getting there, the path taken. Life was what mattered. A good, rich, long and full life. What lay at the end was a kind of nothingness. It was what happened here and now that really mattered to the Hebrews. I think if we modern day 'members of the covenant' could capture something of that outlook rather than wishing our lives away dreaming of 'heaven', we would not only honour God more by enjoying the richness of the world and of life, but play a much greater part in freeing the world of despair and fear. Instead of planning to run away, we might be better able to show people how to live".
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Archives
April 2016
GalleryThis blog is as much about images as it is about text. Below is a slideshow of the pictures and images used in this blog. Click on any of the pictures to go to the post where that image is featured.
PostsLocating Paradise #1 In a Garden, Far, Far Away
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
The Resurrection According to Rahner
Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #4 'And Who by Fire'
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #3: Held in the Balance
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2: Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #1: The Broad and Narrow Gates
Daily Dante 7: Many Rivers to Cross
Daily Dante 6: 'You Gotta Serve Somebody'
In Hell Everyone Can Hear You Scream. The Vision of Tundale #3
Teeth, Spikes and Cleavers: At the Sharp end of Hell. The Vision of Tundale #2
'No Pain No Gain': The Vision of Tundale #1
'Hellzapoppin':
Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #2 'It's The End of the World as We Know It (and we feel fine)'. Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #1
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #2 Blinded by the Light
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #1: Glorious and Immortal
Daily Dante 5: What the gates said.
Daily Dante 4: When I find myself in times of trouble
Daily Dante 3: I'll take you there
Daily Dante 2: Fierce creatures
Daily Dante 1: If you go down to the woods today
In Seventh Heaven or 'What Enoch Did Next'
A World of Fire and Ice: Heaven according to Enoch
The Power and the Glory: Visions of God as king in the Hebrew bible
The Beautiful Bestiary of Catherine Cleves: Monsters and Demons in detail.
Heaven is for Real: Heaven as a physical space up above the sky
Resurrecting the Dead or Reviving the Flowers? The loss of resurrection faith in Judaism.
The Defeat of Death #1: The promise of resurrection in the Isaiah Apocalypse.
The Defeat of Death #2: Death as a hostile power and promise of God's victory in Isaiah
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The 'Last Judgement' according to Stefan Lochner
Hell in the Hospital: The 'Last Judgement' of Rogier van der Weyden in the Beaune altarpiece.
'Hell' in the New Testament #2: The gates of Hades shall not prevail
The Hours of Catherine Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book
'On Earth as in Heaven': The kingdom of God as a revelation of heaven
'Hell' in the New Testament #1: Gehenna
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version got it so wrong about hell
Heaven is not our home
Domes, Depths and Demons: The cosmology of the Hebrew world
A Bigger God
"See you in Sheol" - Sheol, the common destination of all
Heaven, Hell and Christian Hope
BooksBelow are some of the books which have helped me the most in the research and writing for this blog. Click on any image to find out more about that book at its page on Amazon uk.
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