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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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".
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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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