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."
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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".
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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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