Hope is a wonderful thing. It sustains us through disaster, grief and disappointment. It inspires change and enables faith to survive through the most appalling circumstances. The three greatest virtues says the apostle Paul are faith, hope and love. And his hope was very firmly based on the resurrection of Jesus. Paul was confident that because his life was inextricably interconnected with Christ's he too would share in a resurrection like Christ's. But that hope was not new to Paul (or Jesus). It was grounded in the ancient Hebrew bible, in passages in Daniel, Ezekiel and Isaiah, where the prophets offered hope to an exiled and oppressed people familiar with death and destruction, that God would, in the end, conquer death and lead them and all the righteous who had died to new life. God came to be seen not only as the God who blessed the righteous in the present, in this life, but as the God who could (and would) revive even the dead, saving bodies as well as minds and hearts and communities. In this post I examine the hope expressed in the remarkable passage sometimes referred to as the Little Apocalypse of Isaiah, where the prophet offers a profound understanding of God's victory over death and where we read one of the most powerful affirmations of resurrection hope in the bible. The reason a belief in resurrection is so important (as distinct from a belief in the immortality of the soul) is that without it, death remains the powerful constant of human life. To emphasise our escape from our bodies into a disembodied state of bliss "in heaven" is to say that death has the final word on bodily life. We have escaped, but we haven't triumphed over death. Death finally got to us - it stopped our lungs from taking in air, our hearts beating and our brains functioning and our eyes seeing etc etc. But we somehow "got away" in some reduced form, to a place where none of those things (hearts, lungs, brains, eyes) matter anymore. If we believe, as Plato did, that the body is a source of trouble and pain, then we might well feel content that death takes away embodied life, as long as it leaves us with our "souls". But if, as the people who put together the Hebrew bible believed (who had no notion of a 'soul'), without the body there is no meaningful human life, then death's continuing power over human bodily existence very much matters. For them, for God to fulfill his great promise to give "life" to his people, meant that at some point, God would have to destroy death itself.
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Today we are encouraged to have a more positive view of death than our forefathers often did. People talk about the appropriateness of death, emphasising that it part of the natural cycle and doctors and therapists dealing with people at the end of life seek to help the dying find what they call a 'good death'. All of this is true and very healthy and where we are able to think in this way and have the resources to plan and arrange our dying it may well help face what is nevertheless a terrifying reality. But it is also true that for millions in our world still death comes as a negation of life, often coming in brutal, painful and úntimely ways. However much we try to accommodate death within our modern culture we are still aware that death represents the antithesis of life, that in death possibilities, ambitions plans and relationships come to an end. In the Hebrew bible there is a similar tension. For some, the 'good death' came at the end of a long and fulfilled life, surrounded by family, followed by burial in the ancestral home. But other traditions, recognising the violence and injustice prevalent within Israelite national life, speak of death as the enemy of life, indeed as God's enemy. Death is pictured as a prison with gates, as a monster with a voracious appetite and terrifying jaws, and as a subterranean menace pulling the unwitting down into its belly with cords and chains. The promise of God's victory over death through the resurrection of the dead therefore depends on God's victory over death. In this post I examine this imagery of death as a life-denying power and reflect on the importance of this imagery for the New Testament understanding of Death as a power opposed to God. "So, when when we read in Isaiah, 'And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever' we realise that Isaiah is playing with the concept of death as the monster with the voracious appetite. On that great Day, when everything is "shaken up" and where everything is twisted out of shape so that nothing is as it was, the tables are turned even on death itself. Instead of it swallowing us, God will do the swallowing, eating up devouring the monster which has bought such distress and misery on the earth. And so with the monster of death/Sheol swallowed up, those trapped in the cords and snares of death, those imprisoned by its gates, can walk free, no longer entangled, no longer held in death's vice-like grip. Now, with the defeat of death, resurrection, i.e. whole, complete restoration of embodied life in all its fullness becomes a possibility, in fact it becomes the hope of the people of God."
Monsters have always fascinated us. For years in the 1960s and 70s every week on a Saturday night I and tens of thousands of British children were delighted and terrified by Daleks, Cybermen and other horrifying aliens in the BBC TV program Dr Who. We were terrified but we loved it and some of those 'monsters' have become part of our national culture! But even in adulthood we continued to relish the experience of being terrified and amazed by horrific depictions of 'otherness', such as aliens bursting out of human stomachs, flesh-eating zombies or the slasher killers such as Freddie Kruger and Jason. There is something about these 'inhuman' creations that continues to fascinate and draw us, partly, I am sure, not just because they represent in a 'safe' form the fear of the unknown, the 'monsters' and the dangers that lie just outside the warmth and safety of human homes and communities but also the darkness within, the monsters who lurk at the very core of human personality and experience. Fascination with monsters dates back to the very earliest human literature and is found in every culture. Jason fought his Minotaur and Beowulf fought Grendel. In the middle ages the artists of the period could indulge that need to thrill and scare their audiences by depicting the monstrous characters inspired by the mythology that surrounded the then prevalent Christian faith; the demons and devils believed to serve as the instruments of the Devil in his war against God and the church. Since the rather thin biblical evidence about such creatures had been the subject of endless speculation by writers and theologians, there was no limit to the kind of monstrosities that could be depicted. Whether depicted as fierce, furry and animalistic or totally bug-eyed and 'alien' these creatures represented the darkness that, in the minds of most people in the period, lay 'all around'. They usually had inhuman, merciless eyes, sharp teeth and bore some kind of terrifying weapon. They were intent upon ruining our path to heaven and dragging us down to the endless torments of hell. Worst of all, they were never very far away. I suspect my very real fear of meeting a cyberman when I went up to bed on a saturday night was not so different from the terror many people then would have felt in venturing too far away from hearth or home lest they encounter the demons and devils who, in that pre-scientic age, were believed to be the cause of human misery. One of the most brilliant depictions of this medieval 'bestiary of evil' comes from the brush of the German artist Stefan Lochner in his glorious Last Judgement. In this post I discuss this amazing picture and highlight some of the ways his version of the demonic hordes and its battle with the forces of good, reflect the prevalent mind-set of the day, in which, for some, the spiritual battle over human souls was terrifyingly real and its outcome dangerously unpredictable. "However they can be compared artistically, the really interesting differences to me are their theological differences. Lochner populates his picture with monsters, devils, demons, blue 'fighter angels' and the infernal city. Instead of a judgment, there is a battle. The serene Michael disappears to be replaced by a scene of violence and uncertainty. The fate of the dead is partly undecided (unless you are a Muslim, or overweight, or both!). Hell is all about torments and pain inflicted by the hellish hordes. Gone is the sense of personal emotional connection that the viewer makes with van der Weyden's characters. Lochner's painting doesn't challenge the viewer to engage with the scene but rather offers the "feel good factor" of seeing the heathen, corrupt churchmen and the corpulent rich consigned to the unspeakable horrors of hell."
Hospitals are usually places where people are offered medical care. At their best they may also offer psychological and spiritual care for patients and support for families. Most of the information supplied by hospitals today has to do with visiting hours, procedures for complainst and information on how to use the TV. But in the 15th century one hospital offered, in addition to care for the bodies of its patients, a powerful warning about their eternal fate. The most important information it provided was a theological statement about the need for repentance to avoid the horror of being damned. There was no need for translation into different langauges (or to assume any standard of literacy) because this warning came in the form of a magnificent painting. Above the altar in the chapel of the Hospices de Beaune, within sight of all the patients, hung a magnificent painting by the flemish paínter Rogier van der Weyden, depicting the Last Judgement. The message of the painting was clear. Those who believed in Christ would, at the Resurrection, enter into a joyful life as fully individualised human persons in the eternal city of God, while those who rejected Christ, would find themselves lost in an undifferentiated chaos of broken humanity in an eternity of separation from God. The painting is not just visually striking but psychologically and spiritually profound. Anticipating the insights of modern depth psychology and existential philosophy Van der Weyden depicts the misery of the lost as the fundamental loss of human identity. While those who walk joyfully towards their eternal home with God become more fully human as they approach the gates of the city of God, those who are cast away to the darkness at the edge of the picture become less than human, lost amid a chaotic jumble of limbs and anguished faces. There is no devil and there are no monsters here. The tormentors are the monsters who live within us. Those declared righteous are judged suitable for heavenly bliss and head towards the new Jerusalem, the city of God to the left of the painting (Christ's right). Initially as they come out of their graves and begin to head toward the heavenly city they gaze up at Christ and in attitudes of faith, wonder and gratitude. As they make their way from their graves towards the heavenly city their gaze turns from Christ to the city itself. As they rise and move away from their graves they become more individual and "human". The damned on the other hand, emerge from their graves and as they move towards hell they become hunched, bowed and less human in form. Their individuality begins to disappear. They become part of a mass of undifferentiated humanity. In hell, the damned become a chaotic mass of limbs and body parts.
In Matthew 16.18 Jesus tells Peter that "the gates of hell will not prevail" against the rock that is the church. Many of us imagine that what Jesus meant was that the forces of hell (i.e. the devil and his demonic hordes) will never be able to overcome the church. The devil and his demons will try but the rock-like church will withstand their onslaught. The problem with this interpretation is that the word translated as 'hell' in the King James Version is the greek word Hades, which meant simply the land of the dead. In this light his statement seems rather odd. Is Jesus saying that the dead will not be able to destroy the church? The statement makes more sense when we realise that usually gates don't move. They are normally to be found in a fixed spot keeping people out, or in. So, Jesus is saying that the gates of death's kingdom will not be able to withstand the onslaught of the church! Jesus is not painting a picture of his church under siege, but rather of the church triumphant, breaking down the doors of death and proclaiming the hope of resurrection to those within. However much the church might enjoy living under a siege mentality, the reality is that the church is invested with great power, the power of the gospel to utterly transform the landscape of human existence. If we can rid ourselves of the unbiblical and medieval notions of 'hell' and understand what Jesus really meant the church might reclaim it's confidence in the power of Christ's resurrection to overthrow the reign of death with all its terror, despair and hopelessness. "So, when people read or heard Jesus telling Peter that to him and the church has been given dominion over the gates of Hades, they would have had a clear understanding of what Jesus meant. Now, the eschatological fulfillment had arrived. These were the last days, the days of the defeat of death, the end of the darkness which had become the paramount enemy of God and of his purpose of life. It is not a text about Satan, the powers of evil or "spiritual conflict". It is not a text about a place called hell. It is a text about resurrection, triumph and the gates of death/Hades being burst open. It is a text about the hope for a world in which there is no more mourning and no more tears." The Hours of Catherine of Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book6/16/2015 Hell as a place of torment and punishment is fundamentally an horrific concept. And yet for centuries the idea has fascinated generations of believers and non-believers alike. In different ways, through literature, art and film, people have tried to depict what a place such as hell might look like and to imagine the fearsome creatures who might administer punishment in such a place. Just us we, in a more secular age, are still fascinated by monsters, aliens and mass murderers, so in the medieval era people were fascinated by the monsters from the 'other side' - the demons and terrible creatures who, they believed, populated hell. And surely the most brilliant visual depictions of the terrifying and fascinating creatures of hell were created by the unknown artist responsible for the illustrations in the Book of Hours of Catherine Cleves. In his illustration of hell's castle he (presumably a he . . . but who knows?) created a bestiary of weird and wonderful demons and devils of wit, invention and imagination unrivalled in medieval art. In his illustrations of hell and purgatory, he not only horrifies but manages to delight and amuse the viewer too. Those who first read the book would have been duly horrified and frightened by the depictions of the tortures in hell and the agony of purgatory but I am sure that like us they would also have closed the book with a knowing smile on their faces too. Whoever he (or she) was, the illustrator was having great fun! "But the point of the Hours of the dead was to pray for those who languished, not in hell (it was too late for them), but in purgatory. The belief in purgatory (which I will come to - I promise) had by this time become the main focal point of the church's teaching on the afterlife. Most people who died were thought to have gone to purgatory. Few were considered good enough to go straight to heaven, and similarly not many were considered bad enough to be consigned to the castle of hell for eternity without any chance of remission! So the great majority went to purgatory where through the torments and suffering they experienced there were purged of their sin until they were ready to be led to heaven. The more the living prayed for those in purgatory the shorter the time they stayed (potentially thousands of years)."
When we imagine heaven we think of somewhere remote and far away. Whether we imagine it (wrongly) as our eternal destination or (rightly) the abode of God and the angelic host, it is still somewhere of which we have no direct experience. But it is also true that we have all seen heaven, at least those familiar with the ministry of Jesus have. When Jesus began his ministry he proclaimed the arrival of the kingdom of God. Through his words and deeds people around him saw the will of God being done, God's kingdom in action. People were healed, the demons were exorcised, the lost sheep were saved. Jesus walked on the water and stilled the storm. Here, in these actions and in this man, God's kingship could be recognised. In other words what was happening around Jesus on earth was exactly the same as what happened in heaven all the time. The ministry of Jesus was 'heaven on earth', a glimpse of what the world would be like when renewed and restored at the end of history. So if we have seen Jesus we have all seen heaven, at least in sense that the kingdom of God on earth is a mirror reflection of the kingdom of God in heaven. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", this is exactly what he had in mind, of the church on earth expressing the divine rule that takes place in heaven. 'Heaven' is not so far away after all. "Where and how will these things happen? When the earth is remade and reborn as the paradise of God. Then the meek, the powerless, the downtrodden, the victims of the ambitions and cruelty of others will inherit the earth. Their earth. The earth they were born into, the earth whose blessings they were not allowed to enjoy, the earth which was denied to them by violence and injustice. The gospel hope says nothing about going to heaven when they die. It is the earth, this earth, that is the focus of their longing and hope, and it is the earth that is the focus of God's promise and salvation. This is where the kingdom "happens" - now, through the life and work of the church of Christ, and "then" when all things submit to the will of God, when the creation will "be set free from its bondage to decay". In the meantime we wait and work and pray "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"
When we think of hell we usually think of fire. Somewhere deep within the bowels of hell we imagine there is a fiery furnace stoked by demons waiting for the ungodly. Interestingly, in some conceptions of hell the opposite is true. In Dante's poetic vision of hell, despite its name (Inferno), the lowest depths of hell, where Satan is held, is a place of icy coldness. There is no fire, there is no energy. Here, the essence of hell is not flame but lifelessness. But the reason we associate hell with fire is probably because in the New Testament the word often translated 'hell' is actually the word Gehenna, a word which originally conveyed the meaning of the terrible fiery furnace of apocalyptic judgement. Jesus makes frequent references to Gehenna, warning his listeners that their behaviour may well lead them there on the last day when he returns to judge the world! The problem is that by translating the word as 'hell' modern day readers associate his warnings with the kind of hell with which we are familiar; a post-mortem place of punishment and torment inhabited by the devil and his demons. But Jesus had no such notion in mind. For him, as for the Hebrew prophets and the Jewish pseudepigraphal writers before him, Gehenna meant fiery destruction, God's incinerator, where all the rubbish all that opposed the good purposes of God would be burned up. "In these writings Gehenna has become a metaphor for the fiery judgement of God on the wickedness of the earth. When God's great eschatological judgement comes, all that is wicked and defiling will be thrown into the great lake of fire of Gehenna. Once, that had been a place where wicked people lit fires to sacrifice their children to Molech. Now, in these visionary, imaginative documents, it has become a place where the fire of God will consume all wickedness. So, when Jesus warned his hearers that by their actions they risked Gehenna, he was warning them that they risked finding themselves on the wrong side of history, being part of that part of the cosmos that will have no place in the new creation of God. Beware, says Jesus, lest you find yourself on the wrong side of God, for ultimately only God's purposes will last. Everything else will be "burned up". In the end, only God and those things conformed to his love will remain".
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version of the bible got it so wrong about Hell.6/10/2015 So often, when we try to express ourselves in a foreign language, the true intended meaning gets 'lost in translation'. As an English man living in Sweden trying to express myself in a foreign language I know how hard this can be to make myself understood. Sometimes although we are using a form of words that should accurately express what we want to say we are missing the idiomatic way of saying it and our words come over as clumsy and strange. Sometimes it is simply because there is simply no word or concept in the other language for what we mean. Similar problems confront translators of the bible. Their intention is to translate into a modern, living language, texts written in languages no longer spoken (modern Hebrew is different in many significant ways from biblical Hebrew) and written by people living in a very different world. When the translators of the new English version of the bible commissioned by King James in 1604 started work, they adopted a very important principle that was to profoundly influence the character of the work they produced, namely that consistency was less important than clarity. So the same Hebrew or Greek word could be translated by different English words depending on the context. One of the most significant results of this approach was that the Hebrew word Sheol was sometimes translated grave or pit but in the great majority of cases as hell. Sheol really means something like the land of the dead (like the Greek Hades . . . but different) and 'grave' or 'pit' is therefore quite an accurate translation, but their principle of inconsistency meant that many generations of readers found in the King James version Old Testament references to 'hell' where none was intended in the original Hebrew. This has had an enormous (and deleterious) influence on present day assumptions about the biblical teaching on hell. The concept of Sheol as the land of the dead, or as the grave, was simply 'lost in translation'. Thus inconsistency in translation was then, a deliberate policy and implied a rejection of the advice of one of the greatest English Hebrew scholars of the age, Hugh Broughton, who although not invited to join the panel of translators, nevertheless gave them his advice in a letter, where, among other points, he urged them to translate words consistently. In his opinion the same word or phrase in the original Greek and Hebrew should always be translated by the same English word. This was advice they ignored. So, the translators felt at liberty to translate Sheol sometimes by grave or pit, but more often by hell. They seem to have used grave when there was an overwhelmingly clear reference to death, especially as expressed by a biblical hero (such as Abraham). They used hell in the great majority of cases.
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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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