The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'3/30/2016 The film Terminal, a film directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, is about someone who, for political and bureaucratic reasons, becomes a resident of the airport terminal at J.F.K. airport in the U.S.A. The story is that Tom Hank's character, Victor Navorski, arrives in the US from an unnamed eastern European country to discover that the U.S. authorities don't recognise the government which has just taken power in his country and that consequently his papers have become invalid. Because the authorities at J.F.K. airport won't allow him into the US and he because he can't go back home he has to live in the International Lounge of the airport. There he makes friends, learns English and falls in love! It is fascinating idea, that someone can become legally stateless, able to live only in that legal 'no-man's land' between countries which is the airport terminal. The film mirrors the true story of Merhan Nasseri who lived in the airport terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport airport in Paris from 1988 until 2006 after his papers were stolen while travelling from Belgium to the United Kingdom. Charles de Gaulle spokesman Danielle Yzerman said of Nasseri's plight, "An airport is kind of a place between heaven and earth. He has found a home here." That description "a kind of place between heaven and earth" sums up exactly the situation of someone we read about in the ancient Jewish text, the Testament of Abraham. In this comic novel dating (probably) from some time in the late 1st century A.D., the great and righteous patriarch Abraham, the 'friend of God', visits the 'great assize' on the other side of the gate of heaven where the dead are judged. He is taken there by his angel-guide Michael, in order to grasp the cold, brutal severity of true justice. There Abraham sees the dead being judged in three ways; by means a great book which contains the infallible record of each person's life; by a balance, a set of scales held by an angel known as Dokiel, 'the angel of righteousness'; and by the testing fire held in the trumpet of the 'angel of fire', Puriel. In these three ways each soul is measured, weighed and tested and an unerring, precise measurement of their righteousness and wickedness is made. There is no room here for compassion, for mercy or for mitigation. One by one the souls are judged and taken either to paradise or to a place of torment and destruction. In this way Abraham is confronted with the consequences of his desire to call down the punishment of God upon the unrighteous people he has seen during his tour of the earth. But there is one individual for whom the system doesn't seem to work. In the case of one problematic soul no decision can be made. The lists of their good and bad 'works' are of the same length in the Great Book and their good and bad deeds are finely balanced in the scales. They don't fit - no decision can be made on them; they must wait until the coming of God at The Arrival, when the final infallible decision on all mankind will be made. Just like Viktor in Terminal this soul must remain at heaven's 'arrival lounge', unable to go further but equally (because she or he is dead) unable to return to the world to carry on with life. This unfortunate soul too is stateless, stuck 'in-between', inhabiting that 'no-souls land' between this life and the next. And so it would have remained had it not been for the intervention of Abraham. The plight of this one poor soul and the realisation that perhaps he could make a difference, inspires something new and wonderful in Abraham's heart. In this post I explain what that change was and what it meant for Abraham . . . . and for early Christianity.
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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 |
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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