We are justifiably afraid of fire. Fire burns and when things burn they are damaged or destroyed. Fire has ravaged powerful cities such as ancient Rome and seventeenth century London. Wildfires have recently destroyed huge areas in drought-stricken parts of the world, bringing destruction, death and terror to the people who live there. Fire hurts and burns, leaving terrible scars and injuries. Fires destroy our homes and possessions. But the destructive power of fire is also something that can produce life. I was struck recently by the comments of a friend here in Sweden talking about the positive impact of a large forest fire which swept through the forests in the north of Sweden some years ago. It was horrendously destructive, destroying tens of thousands of trees and injuring and killing wildlife and people. And yet my friend, who at that time worked for the organisation that manages the forests, explained to me (an ignorant city dweller) that the forests depend on fires like these to grow and develop. Usually of course the fires are managed and kept within safe bounds and clearly this one wasn't! But the effect of such fires, controlled or not, is to is strip away the dead and old material in the forest, to allow new, young life to emerge. And the trees grow back, stronger and better and the wildlife returns and and forms a new ecology. And life goes on and flourishes better and stronger because of the fires. Something like this effect of fire, the rooting out and burning up of the old and tired, lies as the background for the trial scene in the Testament of Abraham, the ancient Jewish comic novel which describes the attempts of Abraham to escape the inevitability of death. Abraham's angel guide, Michael, shows Abraham what happens to souls after they die and Abraham passes through the gate of heaven at the East of the world, where he sees the souls of the dead being judged. He discovers that their eternal fate is decided partly on the basis of how the record of their lives responds to the divine fire blown from a trumpet held by Puriel, the 'angel of fire'. Their record of actions while alive, their 'works', are subjected to a 'trial by fire'. Good deeds survive the flames. They are clearly made of solid stuff, worthy and true, like a precious metal. Bad deeds are consumed by the flames, burnt up entirely, reduced to ashes. These are the deeds done in disregard for God's Law, the deeds born of selfish desire and Godless passions. So, as the dead and ancient material of the forest which inhibit the growth of the new are stripped away by the forest fires, here Puriel's fire consumes the dead and dying parts of individual human lives. The Testament of Abraham of course is not trying to say that the souls so-judged pass through to Paradise, better and wiser people; rather that those who see their life's work burn up pass directly to a place of horrendous torment and punishment (without passing go!). There is no sense here that these flames are intended to purify the souls who pass through them but, like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, they decide where the souls belong, in Paradise or in the 'other place'. But it was this very idea of flames that consume the dross, the old, the broken and the godless and leave the good and the new and the Godly unharmed that led some in the early church to imagine that what might happen after death is that souls would face the fire of judgement, not to destroy them but, like the beautiful forests of Sweden, to make them better. It was ideas like those we find in the Testament that led eventually to the birth of the idea of purgatory, to the idea of the flames that purify. In this post we come close to that place where such powerful ideas began to emerge.
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So, how do you imagine heaven? Green meadows? Rolling hills? Golden cities? Cloudy vistas? I imagine we all have our own personal vision of what heaven might be like, but I doubt if anyone reading this would have gone for the 'alien mothership' vision employed by Francesco Botticini in his masterpiece The Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven now on display as part of an exhibition in the National Gallery in London. Like a great otherworldly vessel, the huge resplendent 'dome' appears to hover over the earth, its insides open to view from below. Inside we can see row upon row of 'superior beings' sat in an ordered hierarchy of importance watching the action in the centre - a human being is physically being lifted up (on what appears to be a magic carpet) to the apex of the structure where she is greeted by the 'supreme being' (seated but also seated on a magic carpet). The human being of course is Mary the mother of Jesus and it is the risen and exalted Jesus himself who greets her. This is no medieval representation of alien abductions or a foretelling of the invention of hover boards, but rather a vision of heaven, heaven as the destination of the righteous and the home of God and the angels, but a heaven which is a truly 'alien' physical space just beyond the stars. Colourful, magisterial, bizarre, and, in the views of some of that era, heretical, this painting (also known as the Palmieri Altarpiece) is one of the strangest and most imaginative depictions of heaven ever attempted in art. In this and the following posts I want to explore this wonderful painting in some detail especially looking at the ideas about heaven and paradise that might have influenced Botticini. When people talk about being in the 'seventh heaven' they mean they are as happy as they can possibly be. But where did the notion that there are seven heavens come from? What does the seventh heaven contain that should make us so happy and what are the other six like? Sadly there is no one definitive source book we can turn to to explain this but there are some ancient writings from the Jewish-Christian tradition that reveal that during the first century A.D. (if not earlier) some people believed that there were multiple levels of heaven. In the pseudepigraphal writing known as Slavonic Enoch (or 2 Enoch), the writer describes the ascension of Enoch to the throne of God in heaven but in his version, (unlike that of the Book of the Watchers discussed in the previous post), Enoch ascends through seven heavens to find God. Each heaven has its own distinct identity, purpose and occupants. Like the apostle Paul, the writer locates paradise, i.e the garden of Eden, in the third heaven. Alongside paradise, on the same level, there is a place of terrible punishment reserved for the wicked, and staffed by specially prepared 'torture angels'. On other levels Enoch sees the workings of the cosmos, the legions of weeping angels (long before Dr Who was ever thought of) and the gates and galleries where the weather is stored. His may not have been the first account of multiple heavens but the author(s) of Slavonic Enoch provides a fascinating insight into how some Jews and Christians imagined heaven in the first centuries of the Common Era. "At last Enoch arrives in the seventh heaven and sees God. God, of course, is seated on his throne and attended by a vast number of angelic beings, the divine council or court. It seems that their chief job is to come forward in designated ranks and orders to bow before God. This is an image of God as supreme potentate, the imperial ruler, receiving obeisance from the subject kings and potentates. The heavenly beings here represent the 'powers and principalities' who govern the affairs of the cosmos. These are the forces that shape human destiny. What Enoch sees is that they bow before the authority of the Almighty. Enoch reports that they do so 'in joy and merriment'. There is laughter in heaven!"
The introduction to the 1960s American TV series Star Trek announced every week that captain Kirk and his crew were journeying to places "where no man had gone before". Rather disappointingly (to me as a young boy) the Enterprise usually found itself locked in battle with all too familiar aliens or visiting far-flung human outposts. But over 2000 years ago, an ancient Jewish writing known as The Book of the Watchers, described a remarkable 'otherworldly' journey by the legendary biblical hero Enoch, to a place where truly no man (or woman) had ever "gone before" - to heaven, the dwelling place of God. According to the Hebrew Bible, heaven, the home of God, is not normally accessible to human beings. But Enoch was an exception. An suggestive verse in the book of Genesis stated that Enoch, after three hundred and sixty five years of life, had been 'taken' by God. Assuming that Enoch, instead of dying, had been 'taken up' into heaven by God, the writer of The Book of the Watchers describes Enoch's ascension into heaven. In this, perhaps the earliest written account of a journey into heaven, heaven is described as a terrifying place of extremes, of lightening and hail stones, of fire and ice, in other words, a place totally inhospitable to human life and totally alien to human experience. This is God's home, not the home of human beings. "Strangely (we might think) that house in heaven inspired dread rather than joy. There is no "delight of life" there. This is not a warm and welcoming vision, and there is nothing here of the self indulgent, wish-fulfillment that defines so much of modern day speculation on heaven! Like all prophets before him who see or encounter the divine, Enoch falls on his face. It's strangeness and 'otherness' overwhelm him This is an acknowledgment that no human eyes should ever behold this place, the divine habitation. The home of God was never intended for human eyes."
What does God do? It might sound a strange question to ask, after all God is simply God. The good theological answer is probably just to say that God simply is (we can think of the Lord's reply "I am who I am" to Moses at the burning bush!). But throughout the Hebrew Bible there is another very clear answer - God rules, i.e. God is king, ruling over the cosmos, the creation. And because heaven is God's home, heaven is imagined in the Hebrew Bible as a divine, cosmic throne room. In accounts of visions of God, God is almost always shown seated on a throne, surrounded by angelic beings who represent the powers and forces that govern the cosmos. Heaven is the kingdom of God, the place where God's rule is absolute and unquestioned. In contrast to the earth where so often sin and rebellion defy the purpose of God, in heaven God's will is done. That's why Jesus taught his disciples to pray"thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven." In this post I discuss these visions of God in the Hebrew Bible and try to show that rather than being the eternal destination of the righteous, heaven was seen as a real, functioning work space where the real (i.e. hidden) business of the cosmos was being conducted. "The throne was a reminder that God ruled, that God was ultimately sovereign that the universe did not behave in a random way nor that the heavenly forces (the 'powers and principalities') were allowed to run free. The idea of the heavenly court elaborated that, with the added benefit that the thought of all angelic beings belonging to the divine court/council (even such dubious characters as the Satan and the lying Spirit), meant that they too fell under God's authority and control. In other words nothing bad could happen in the cosmos without the authorization of God. Now that might not bring much comfort to Job when he is devastated by his sufferings or to the friends and family of king Ahab when he dies in battle, but for the faithful community, who were usually on the wrong side of the power dynamics in ancient Israel, the thought that God was a king like, but much bigger and more powerful than the kings and rulers they knew, could be a powerful, even revolutionary idea."
Many christians say that they believe heaven is 'real'. By that they mean it really exists, somewhere, in an invisible, spiritual dimension. But even the most fervent believer in heaven probably doesn't think heaven is as real as the ancient Hebrews did. For them heaven existed up above their heads, on the other side of the sky. Heaven was the home of God and he lived up there where he could be close to his creation and watch over his creatures. Heaven was not far, far away in a place beyond space and time: it was very firmly located in space and time, just beyond the solid (if a bit see-through) blue 'firmament', its doors opened to let the weather through and it could be reached by ladders (well, if you were an angel). When the Hebrews said 'heaven is for real' they meant, (as Genesis tells us) that it is part of the creation, just as much a part of the creation as the earth on which we stand. Only if we understand this can we begin to understand what heaven is for and so begin to grasp how impossible it is for heaven to be 'our eternal home'. Heaven is God's home. Just like the earth, heaven was made, created. And one day, heaven will be destroyed a new heaven created. In the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament heaven is as real and physical as the earth beneath our feet. "This is the point. In the ancient world the spiritual and the physical were two sides of the same thing. The one could never be divorced from the other. God was as real as the ground on which people stood, and God's home was visible, 'up there' above the sky. God was near. Living life as a human being was to live under the watchful gaze of God. But in our age we have spiritualised religion, and therefore God, thereby negating the importance of God for daily life. Heaven belongs to a level of reality 'far, far away' and is somewhere we go when we die. Whether it's the 'popular' view of heaven as sitting on clouds holding harps or the view espoused by Colton Burpo and Don Piper of a far away land of make believe and wish fulfillment, we have pushed heaven as far away from our everyday lives as possible. And that's not good."
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"
Hello and welcome to the first post of the new blog. The subject of this blog is heaven and hell, and my focus is on how the biblical picture of the afterlife has been shaped by the various cultures in which the christian tradition has developed. Ideas such as 'going to heaven when we die', the existence of a domain of evil (hell) lorded over by Satan and his demonic horde, and the belief that the wicked will be punished after death in such a place, are not found in the bible. And yet these beliefs hold a strong place, not only in the in the beliefs of millions of christians but also in our popular culture. In this blog I want to explore how these unbiblical ideas became part of the fabric of christian reality. I am fascinated by the ways in which the early 'tours' of heaven and hell, medieval art and literature and a modern day pietistic individualism have shaped our Christian hope so that it becomes 'all about me' and my immediate post-mortem future, rather than about God, the creation which God made and loves, and the promise, clearly expressed in the Hebrew bible and the New Testament, that God's future involves the recreation of the heavens and the earth and the resurrection of the righteous to fill and inhabit that newly renovated creation. At the heart of my concern is that the resurrection of Jesus has become less and less central to the Christian hope. If my hope is simply to 'go to heaven when I die' then Jesus needn't have risen from the dead. But he did rise, and that fact stands as the central point of human (indeed cosmic) history. And it does so precisely because the resurrection of Jesus is the revelation in the present of God's promised future. The Resurrection is not just some interesting miracle that God performed for Jesus, but rather, in the resurrection of Jesus we see the beginning of the fulfillment of God's promise of redemption for the whole of creation. So, this blog is about the afterlife, but actually it is much more about the Christian hope and about how that hope is focused on the risen Lord of life Jesus Christ. I am not writing this just because I want to knock a view of heaven and hell with which I disagree but because I am passionate about the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus for our life in the church and for the life of the world, the creation. I invite you to read to share and to comment.
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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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