The Living God?

I found myself wondering about the nature of God the other day. Specifically, what does it mean when the Bible (e.g. Deut 5:26, Josh 3:10, 1 Sam 17:26, 2 Kings 19:4, Psalm 42:2, Isaiah 37:4, Jer 10:10, Dan 6:20, and elsewhere) describes God/YHWH as 'The Living God'?

One of the problems here is that it is actually really hard to define 'life'. Dictionary.com offers a huge list of definitions, the first two of which are:

1. the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally. 
2. the sum of the distinguishing phenomena of organisms, especially metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation to environment.

Other definitions are a bit woolier than those. Basically, when we apply the word 'life' to an animal or plant we are talking about something which is growing, adapting, consuming, excreting, changing, etc.

But what happens when we apply that same word to God? Is God growing? Does he adapt? Does he consume and excrete? Fundamentally, does he change? The book of Hebrews suggests that he does not. So if he never changes, in what sense can we claim that he is alive?

Growing up in church I heard sermons claiming that the emphasis here was to contrast our God, who is real and alive, with the gods of the surrounding nations, who are dead or imaginary.  But, of course, I eventually realised that nobody believes their own gods are dead or imaginary, surely everyone believes that their own gods are real and alive? It really wouldn't surprise me to discover that worshipers of Dagon (or whoever) back in OT times made jokes about worshipers of YHWH following an imaginary or dead god. If that's the point, it's just propaganda.

But suppose that's not it. Suppose the point is not to say our God is alive and yours is dead. What would the meaning be then? If a god is worth worshiping, surely we can assume that he's alive, we don't have to keep repeating it? One possible meaning, that I've heard discussed on podcasts, but have not found much about in written form, is perhaps that there was a dying-and-rising-god mythology about Yahweh long before anyone told stories about Jesus dying and rising. The story goes that the dying-and-rising myth was a common trope in many cultures and religions, and it's possible that it was part of the pre-exilic Hebrew religion as well. Yahweh was considered 'the Living God' because for a time he was believed not to have been living at all, but came back from that, and that is something worthy of worship. It's not just 'our God is alive, your god is dead', but rather 'our God has power over death, can you god do that?' Of course, this is all speculation, but it is interesting.

Beyond the question of 'in what sense is God alive?' lies the opposite question of 'in what sense was Jesus dead between Good Friday and Easter Sunday?'

I think most Christians have never really thought this through - I certainly didn't when I was a Christian. If they'd stop and think about it, I think most believers probably would come up with something like this: The man Jesus, before crucifixion, was made up of a living body and some form of indwelling soul or spirit. When he was crucified, the indwelling soul or spirit left the body and the body died, but the indwelling soul or spirit didn't die and went somewhere else for a few days. When the resurrection happened, the indwelling soul or spirit was put into a renewed (and improved)  reanimated version of the human body and Jesus became a walking, talking, living being once more. I guess for most believers in that sort of thing, the indwelling soul or spirit is the real person of Jesus and the body was just a body. So in this picture of things, the real Jesus didn't die on the cross. The real Jesus just went somewhere else for a few days. Either to harrow hell, as some would have it, or to go to paradise as Luke's Jesus says from the cross, maybe both, I don't know how long it takes to harrow hell. But if he didn't really die on the cross, then how can his death atone for anything?

The more I dig into it, the less sense concepts of living and dying make in the Christian worldview. Maybe I need to read some Thomas Altizer and get to grips with the idea of what would happen if God really died on the cross, and stayed dead! But that's something to think of some other time.

Dr Sean George’s miracle and the God behind it

On a recent edition of the Unbelievable show, the story of Dr Sean George was presented by Sean himself and then discussed with some sceptics. I’ve mentioned this story before when it was on the Hinge podcast, but this new show goes into the story in far more detail. To get the whole story, you’ll need to listen to the podcast. But, in brief, Dr George’s story goes like this:

He had a heart attack in a remote part of Western Australia, staff at a small medical clinic tried CPR, etc., to revive him for an extended time, but eventually gave up and declared him dead. When his wife turned up, she prayed for him and his heart restarted. Despite being dead for an extended period of time, and having multiple organ failures, he eventually made a full recovery with no brain damage. He is back to being a professional medical doctor. There are a few other details in the story about third parties receiving ‘revelations’ and knowing what would happen apparently in advance of the events.

So it sounds like a miracle happened. Dr George certainly believed that God did it. But let’s think about this.

Suppose, for a moment, that Sean George is right in his belief. God intervened, restored him to life and miraculously prevented all the problems, loss of brain function, etc., that usually follow from lack of oxygen flow to the brain for multiple minutes. What does this tell us about God? It tells us that God can intervene and over-ride human physiology, saving those who would otherwise die. It tells us that God can and does give direct revelation to individuals about the future, and about things happening elsewhere in the world. It tells us that God can do these things, but that most of the time he doesn’t do them. He can, but he doesn’t. Most people who experienced what Sean George did have simply died. Even though some of them had someone praying for them. What does this tell us about God? It tells us that he has power, but generally chooses not to use it. He probably won’t save you when you ask. He’ll probably let bad things happen to you, even when he could stop them. That doesn’t actually sound like a God worthy of worship. Would you worship and pray to a God who, most likely, will not act upon those prayers and will, most likely, let you suffer and die, even though he could intervene? Why worship a God like that?

I guess the reason most Christians worship a God like that is because of a future, post-mortem hope in the resurrection. The belief that God can and will raise them to glory, even after they have died. There’s a huge assumption here. We’ve already seen that God generally does not do the things that he can do. So even if he raised Jesus to a resurrection body and glory in heaven, this is absolutely no guarantee that he will do the same for them, or for you. Sure, some of the bible writers made statements that make the ‘evidence’ of Jesus’ resurrection sound like a promise to do the same for you, but a written document is no guarantee, even if it claims to be. The same document says that if the church elders pray for you, you will be healed. Time and time again this promise has been proven false.

So if Sean George’s miracle working God is real, this in no way guarantees anyone will get healing in this lifetime, or a glorious afterlife in the future!

But if that God doesn’t exist, isn’t Sean George’s story so remarkable that it must prove that something ‘supernatural’ is going on? Even if that God isn’t real, surely the truth is out there?

I guess that depends on what you mean by ‘supernatural’. Certainly something weird and unusual happened, but was it beyond natural? In other words, was it impossible by natural means?

The thing is, it certainly happened. I'm not a hyper skeptic. I think that enough people have confirmed the story to demonstrate its overall reliability as a real event. Sean George's heart stopped for an extended period of time. Most other people who have heart stoppages for that length of time do not recover and live fully restored lives. But was he properly dead?

I'm currently writing another blog post about what it means to be alive and what it means to be dead. It'll get published eventually. The problem we face is that it is actually quite hard to define life and death. Life is often defined in terms of death, and death is often defined in terms of life, it's confusing. Clearly, if you define 'death' as 'the state from which no return to life is possible', then Sean was never truly dead. He may have exhibited no bodily (or brain?) function, but that does not mean that return to life is impossible, and Sean is an example which proves that. Sean George's return to life and full health is certainly remarkable, definitely rare, but seems merely to be right at the tail end of the bell curve of possibility. As I say, it certainly happened. And because it happened, it is clearly not impossible. It was exceedingly unlikely, but still on the bell curve of possibility, so could be still within the remit of nature. We don't need to look for a supernatural agent, we simply need to redefine our bounds of knowledge of what is natural.

But. Other weird things happened around the extremely unlikely but still naturally possible resuscitation. People claim to have received revelations from God which seem to have come true, the resuscitation itself occurred coincidentally (as in, at the same time as) with Sean's wife turning up and praying, and so on. Does that not suggest something supernatural was going on?

I'm not going to go as far as 'supernatural', but I'll certainly go as far as 'not currently explained by science'. The problem with science is that it can only be used to investigate the repeatable and the fairly frequent. You can't form and test scientific hypotheses based on a one off event. Weird and rare things happen all the time. Charles Fort and the Forteans who came after him have chronicled loads of weird and inexplicable stuff. Is it supernatural? Probably not. Is it rare? Yes.

But I don't think you need to invoke an infinite, all powerful God to explain the inexplicable. For me, the key to this story is that Mrs George initiated the healing. Doctors and nurses couldn't do it, but she turns up and - wham - he is healed. Why do we need to invoke God here? At face value, Mrs George seems to be the one with the healing power (as I said before).

Maybe we'll never know what actually caused the healing. But one thing is clear to me, if it was a God who intervened here, and yet choses not to intervene in millions of other, similar situations, then that God is not a God worthy of our faith.

"If Christianity is true, then people don't really die..."

I heard the Unbelievable radio show featuring David Smalley and Frank Turek last month. It annoyed me as both contributors seemed to keep misunderstanding and misrepresenting the views of the other. Possibly deliberately. But for some reason I then went on to download the Dogma Debate episodes that were recorded after this, which again featured Smalley (he's the host of Dogma Debate) and Turek. That's episodes 298 and 299 of Dogma Debate. Once again they seemed to misunderstand each other, although I think that for the most part it was Smalley who did most of the misunderstanding. But anyway, I don't want to review either show, I just want to mention one thing that Turek said in part 2 of the Dogma Debate show. About 1 hr, 16 minutes into episode #299, Turek says:

"If Christianity is true, then people don't really die, they just change location."

Wow. That's a strong statement. And I know exactly where Turek is coming from here, I used to believe much the same thing myself. But when I heard it expressed this way, coming just a few minutes after the discussion of what Christ achieved by dying on the cross, I suddenly saw a problem. 

Using the logic of the above statement, if Christianity is true, then Jesus did not die on the cross, he merely changed location. It suddenly seems a lot less of a thing that Jesus changed location for your sins, how could changing location atone for anything?

Where was Jesus in the days following his death 'at the ninth hour' on Good Friday, and his resurrection at dawn on the first day of the week? The harrowing of hell isn't actually in the Bible (there's a compelling case that the 1 Peter 3 verse is a mistranslation, and refers to Enoch, not Jesus). If Jesus changed location, where did he go? Does it actually matter where he went? Surely what matters is whether he lived or died?

Was he actually dead? Did the Trinity become a Duality for 2 or 3 days? I don't know anyone who would actually claim that. Fundamentally, Christians believe that Jesus was somewhere and was (in at least some sense of the word) alive during that time. So, essentially, Jesus did not die on the cross. Sure, his earthly body died, but his Spirit remained alive somewhere, and then changed location back into his resurrection body a couple of days later. So what was the sacrifice? Jesus took on flesh when he incarnated, and that flesh died on the cross, but Jesus himself was eternal, did not die, and lives eternally, at least if we believe some of the claims of the NT.

Sounds to me that if the above claim of Christianity is true, then other claims of Christianity must be false...

Richard Carrier's very human Jesus

I've just been listening to a debate on YouTube between the noted atheist Richard Carrier (pictured) and an apologist called David Marshall. You can watch it here. Its fair to say that Carrier wins this debate. Its also clear that one of his arguments against Jesus being divine is very strong and appears not to have an adequate rebuttal by Christian apologists. The argument is basically as follows (my summary):

Jesus is depicted in the gospels as having direct revelatory knowledge from the creator God. He is also depicted as being someone who cares about people and miraculously heals some of them. Given these two observations, why does Jesus do nothing to inform his disciples of a few health related things which could prevent disease? For example, he could have instructed his disciples in the merits of properly washing your hands before eating. He appears to actually do the exact opposite to this, by telling them that hand washing before meals is not important (Matthew 15:1-20). We know (from science) that washing is important and this simple action can prevent disease and infection, etc. Jesus does not know this. He appears to have no conception of germs. This is no surprise if he was merely a human being, but is very surprising if he was sent on a mission - which involved healing - by the creator God.

Furthermore, Carrier claims, the three most prevalent fatal diseases in the first century CE were tuberculosis, malaria and typhoid. Jesus is never recorded as healing anyone with any of these. Also, there are simple steps which can be taken to minimise the risk of catching these, such as mosquito nets and avoiding stagnant water. Jesus does not advise these actions, so clearly he has no divine knowledge of disease transmission.

Carrier has more to say, but you get the gist. I have to say that it seems like a very strong argument to me. But there are apologetic responses to it, for example this one.

As I see it, if Carrier is right, then there are only two options:

1. Jesus was a man with no divine knowledge, or
2. God doesn't care about the life and health of people.

When I say "doesn't care" what I mean is that God must have another - more important - agenda that would be hindered by healing more people and giving them advice that would prolong their lives and ease their suffering.

Let's think about these options, I'll take the second one first.

Healing and God's Agenda

The standard apologetic argument to the problem of pain is that God must have a morally sufficient reason for allowing this, and that even though we can't know what this reason is, we should trust God for other reasons and leave this in the hands of faith. I must say, this strikes me as yet another instance of the 'unseen infinite' argument that I've blogged about before. If prolonging people's lives and easing their suffering is not part of God's plan, then why does Jesus heal anyone? Why feed thousands of hungry people, why raise some from the dead? Again, apologists and preachers will tell you that Jesus did all these things to reveal aspects of the character of God, to reveal the heart of God - to show that God wants to heal. But if God wants to heal, then this must be part of his agenda. And if healing is part of his agenda, then he should have been able to do more, much, much more than is recorded for us in the bible.

But suppose we look at this the other way around. If God's agenda was not primarily to heal, but was to come to earth and suffer and die, and in this way to bring about post-mortem salvation for people, then surely he didn't need to spend 30 years doing nothing worthy of note, then up to three years of ministry in which he did not explain that this was his agenda. Why didn't he just come quickly, die quickly, and also hasten the deaths of all people, so that those who he would save would get to heaven more quickly?

Clearly, this is not consistent with what Christians believe, or what the bible apparently teaches. So I think we can say with reasonable certainty that Jesus simply did not know any more about disease and illness than his fully human contemporaries, and that if a modern day doctor were able to be transported back in time to the 1st Century, then they would be able to do many more kinds of 'miraculous' healing than Jesus is recorded as doing - because they have a far greater understanding of illness than Jesus. Which brings us to the second option.

Jesus was just a man
Is it conceivable that Jesus was genuinely divine in nature, but had no divine knowledge? We can discount the option that he had no inherent divine knowledge but God revealed things to him, using the reasoning above - if God revealed his agenda to a human Jesus, then we face the same problems as we have above with the question of God's agenda. If God only revealed part of his agenda and didn't empower Jesus to heal many multitudes of sick and dying, then we end up with a truly unbelievable or evil God. So barring this possibility, the only option we are left with is that Jesus simply didn't know more than his contemporaries about disease, and also didn't know any more than them about God's agenda. If Jesus was just a man without revelation, then nothing he said or did had divine authority, even if he truly had a divine nature. In this option, all of Jesus' teaching goes out the window as worthless, and all of his commands and life examples become meaningless. He becomes just an ordinary guy, and no more worthy of following than anyone else. Any good teaching he gave and any great insight he had came from human means, and other humans have just as much access to such wisdom as Jesus had. Indeed, the flip side is true, Jesus could just as easily have been wrong about a great many things. Even if he was right about some things, we have no reason to trust his claims about things he could not demonstrate, such as what happens after death. he knew no more about that than you do.

No, if the words and works of Jesus have any value, then he must have had knowledge and wisdom which transcended those of humanity. But in that case, we see a God who can only heal in limited measure or doesn't value the health and wellbeing of his people.

I can't see a way out of this conundrum except to say that the claims of Christianity about Jesus must be false or at least very flawed. It is much easier to suppose that these stories are simply that: stories, and that Jesus was no divine Son of God.

Jesus, if he lived at all, was just human. No more than that. If following his teachings bring you joy and happiness in this life, then all's well and good, follow him. But if following his teachings leads you into suffering and possible death, then be careful, because nothing promised after death is anything more than guesswork or wishful thinking.

The atoning death of the 2nd person of the Trinity...

Christianity (or at least most branches of it) claims that God is three persons in one being, the Trinity. And it (or at least most branches of it) also teaches that Jesus Christ, the second person of this Trinity, died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice on our behalf, and was resurrected to life three days later. Christianity (or at least...) also teaches that there is a part of a person which survives death, that is, the soul. Now some (but by no means most) versions of Christianity claim that Jesus went to hell during his three days dead, while some (but...) claim that hell, by definition, is a place where God is not.

So put all that together. The result is incoherent.

Who or what really died on the cross? The one being of the Godhead? No, merely one of the three persons. But if that person is inexplicably and inseparably linked to the other two persons, then how could he die without them also dying? Or did the Trinity get reduced to a Binity for three days? Surely nobody who holds to the idea of the Trinity could accept that? But if the second person of the Trinity didn't separate from the life of the other two, then what was it that died?

And what was actually sacrificed? Jesus was apparently without a physical body for somewhere less than 36 hours, and then got a better body. That doesn't actually seem like a sacrifice, more like an inconvenience. An exceptionally painful inconvenience, I'll give you that, but not actually a sacrifice. The whole point of sacrifice is to give up something that you don't get back again. Ever. So the resurrection completely undoes the sacrifice. Its like me putting a tenner in the offering plate on a Sunday and then coming back on Wednesday to reclaim the tenner, and actually getting fifteen pounds back. No significant sacrifice, certainly not when viewed on the eternal timescale.

And what about the 'harrowing of hell' thing? If God went to hell, then surely hell ceased to be hell. By definition. Maybe Rob Bell is right and

everyone

gets

to

go

to

heaven?

I've got no major point to make here other than that when you scrutinise some of the doctrines of Christianity, they don't actually work. And especially, when you try and harmonise them, they don't always work together.

For what its worth, having wrestled with both issues over the past few years, I no longer find either the doctrine of the atonement or the doctrine of the Trinity actually makes sense. It may be that someone died on a cross two thousand years ago, but I can no longer accept that that person was inseparably part of God or that there could be any transaction in that death which took my place in some death that I should actually have died myself. There would be no justice in such a deal.

Jesus: his death, resurrection, and the evidence from the gospels

Originally I was going to write a few blog posts, on related issues, but they seem to have coalesced into one. So this post addresses the issues "Did Jesus die on the cross?" and "The Gospels as history"...

Everything we know about the facts of Jesus's life death and resurrection comes from the four canonical gospels.

That's not to say that the other NT writings don't mention these events, but Paul is much more concerned about the theological implications of the events rather than the details of what actually happened. For example, you'll never find from reading Paul anything about where Jesus was crucified, when this happened, who witnessed it, etc. Nothing that Paul says about the earthly Jesus is not mirrored and expanded in the gospels. Paul says that Jesus was 'born of a woman', but not which woman. For those details we need to turn to the gospels.

Apologists often make a great deal of the secular writings about Jesus, such as Tacitus, Seutonius and Josephus, but all of these date to times several decades after Jesus, and all of the information in them merely confirms that there were "Christians" at the time of writing, and don't really tell us anything about Jesus himself.

So. Everything comes back to the gospels. How reliable are the gospel documents? Can we trust them to contain history? Who wrote them and when? These are all important questions, and we may never know the answers to them all. I've already discussed the Synoptic Problem at length, so I don't need to go into that here. But here I'll go into a couple of other questions:

1. Did Jesus die on the cross?

The first thing to say about this is that all four canonical gospels agree on this point - Jesus was crucified and died. The problem faced by anyone trying to defend the theory that Jesus was crucified but survived is that they have to show that the gospel writers were correct in some facts and wrong in others. If the gospels got the plain fact that Jesus died wrong, then how can we believe anything else in the entire story? Jesus death is the central event in all four gospels, if he hadn't died, then there is no gospel. To the writers of these stories, Jesus life only makes sense in the context of his death. If we assume that the gospels are in any way reliable, then that leads us to the conclusion that the authors of these documents were utterly convinced that Jesus died on the cross.

I have to say that if you want to doubt the gospel writers belief in Jesus's death on the cross, you also have to doubt everything else they say about Jesus's life as well.

Did Jesus die on the cross?

• If we accept the testimony of the gospels, then yes.
• If we don't accept the testimony of the gospels, then we don't know.
• I'd say that there is no way to conclude 'no' based on the available evidence.

There is really no way to honestly use the gospels to conclude that Jesus - the man who taught in Galilee, had 12 disciples, performed miracles, and so on - did anything other than die on the cross.

Of course, using the same reasoning, we must conclude that - if the gospels are trustworthy - that Jesus also was raised from the dead (as attested in all four gospels) and appeared in physical form to his disciples after this (as attested in 3 out of the 4).

Its an all or nothing thing, as far as I can tell. And it probably works the other way around for most people - those who presuppose the death and resurrection of Jesus regard the gospels as trustworthy, those who presuppose the non-resurrection of Jesus must therefore regard all the information in the gospels as potentially untrustworthy. I can't really see a good case for the middle ground of accepting that the gospels got some details (such as the main topics in them!) wrong, but were otherwise accurate in terms of what they say about Jesus (his teaching, healings, etc.).

Now, I've come to the conclusion - in other posts - that the gospels do contain errors and misinformation, which - using the reasoning above - must lead me to the conclusion that we simply can't know whether or not Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected a few days afterwards.

The best I can conclude is that IF Jesus was crucified by the Romans, then there is an exceptionally high likelihood that he died on the cross, as history (Josephus) only records one survivor of crucifixion, and that only after being quickly taken down from the cross - a very rare event indeed.

The only thing we can really say with any certainty is that Christians in the late 1st or early 2nd century believed that Jesus was crucified, died and rose again, several decades before their time. This doesn't count as evidence one way or the other, I'm afraid.

2. The Gospels as History

I'm about to make the same point again, but in a different way.

As I see it, there are really only two options, and they don't start with the historicity of the gospels, they either end up there, or they don't. The starting point is the resurrection of Jesus.

IF Jesus was resurrected (raised from death in a physical and 'super-human' body) then the central beliefs of the Gospel writers are fundamentally true, and there is a good chance that the biographies of Christ that they wrote are grounded in reality and may contain useful historical details.

IF Jesus was not resurrected, then the apparent central beliefs of the Gospel writers are false and the Gospel writings are, at best, the writings of honest but gullible people who had been told a bunch of myths and believed them, or, at worst, complete and intentional fiction. In this case, there is no reason to suppose that any of the material in the gospels is good historical data.

Yes, I know that the gospels contain at least four secularly attested historical characters - Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas the high priest. I would argue that these characters, while they do feature in the plot of the story, are more part of the setting of the gospels than integral to the story. In much the same way, Jerusalem and Galilee are part of the setting of the stories, the fact that we know there was a Jerusalem does not in any way provide evidence that the stories in the gospels which are recorded as happening in Jerusalem actually happened. There are numerous historically verifiable locations and characters in the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but that doesn't imply that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, only that the stories about him were set in a real historical setting.

So where does this leave us? I think it means we can't use the internal evidence of the gospels to prove the resurrection of Jesus. Or the death of Jesus. Or even the life of Jesus.

Without external 'secular' evidence for the person of Jesus, not merely evidence that there were believers in Christ Jesus a generation or two after the alleged events, we really cannot be sure of anything to do with Jesus in history. Anything you want to claim about him (for example that he claimed to be the 'Son of God' or that he was an apocalyptic prophet, or that he was born of a virgin, or that he had 12 disciples) relies, primarily, on the assumption that he was resurrected from the dead. Without that fundamental assumption, we cannot 'know' anything at all about Jesus.

Lazarus

A stray thought occurred to me the other day. There is a pervasive belief in modern evangelical Christian circles that this life is kind of insignificant compared to 'eternal life in heaven' - the bit of life which starts after we die. This bit of life is really just to give us the chance to get to know Jesus so that we can be saved and then go to heaven when we die. Then the fun begins.

If that's the case, the story of Lazarus raises two problems.

1. Why does Jesus cry?
2. Why does Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead?

I mean, clearly Lazarus had the thing which modern evangelicals believe to be required for salvation, he had a personal relationship with Jesus. The text makes it absolutely clear, Jesus loved Lazarus (John 11v3&5). If anyone's salvation was assured it was this friend of Jesus's!

But Jesus cries at the news and then goes on to raise Lazarus from the dead. Why would Jesus cry if Lazarus going to heaven was an entirely good thing? Why would Jesus choose to pull Lazarus back out of eternal life into this fallen world?

OK, so some would say that the point is that Jesus is here demonstrating his power over death, but why restore someone destined for heaven? Why not give life back to someone who had died in their sins and give them a second chance? I'm sure there are countless ways Jesus could have demonstrated his power over death without pulling his friend out of paradise and back into this fallen world.

Or are we missing the point? Is life in this world more important than we have been led to believe? Did Jesus bring Lazarus back to this life because this life is good?

Perhaps we should focus more on this life than we sometimes do?

Wine and Heaven

Kind of out of character for me on this blog, but I listened to a downloaded sermon by Rob Bell yesterday which was just great. Its on 'Wine and Heaven'. There was so much insight and interesting stuff crammed into it that I thought I'd encourage you all to listen. Sadly the sermon in question has dropped off the bottom of the Mars Hill downloads page (they only list the most recent 12 sermons) but I have put it on my website for your edification: [click here to download] (12Mb). I can't actually remember the last time I heard a sermon go well past the hour mark and still be interesting...

Communion of the saints?

Last week, the guy who was leading communion in church said something and I've been mulling it over all week without really getting anywhere.

He said that once he was praying for something personal and he had a strong sense that God said to him something along the lines of "you're not the only person praying for this, others are praying for you about this matter, and you do realise that not all of those praying for you are on earth..."

I'm really not sure what to make of this.

I know that Catholic doctrine asserts that the departed saints watch over us and may intercede on our behalf, but I also thought that this was one of the things that got thrown out by protestants in the reformation.

This thought ties in with my earlier thought on what happens when you die. Are dead people really in a position to view what is going on on earth?

Where does this belief come from anyway? Well, the Catholic encyclopedia is quite handy at this point, it says:

"The communion of saints is the spiritual solidarity which binds together the faithful on earth, the souls in purgatory, and the saints in heaven in the organic unity of the same mystical body under Christ its head, and in a constant interchange of supernatural offices. The participants in that solidarity are called saints by reason of their destination and of their partaking of the fruits of the Redemption. The damned are thus excluded from the communion of saints. The living, even if they do not belong to the body of the true Church, share in it according to the measure of their union with Christ and with the soul of the Church..."

But I am slightly concerned that the first passage cited to support this statement comes from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas.

But biblical origins of this doctrine seem to be based largely in Hebrews 12v1, where it talks about us being surrounded by a 'cloud of witnesses'.

Blueletterbible.org tells me that the word translated as 'witness' here is the Greek word 'martus' which is frequently translated as 'witness' in the NT but is also occasionally translated as 'martyr' (Acts 22v20 when referring to Stephen) or 'record' (Philippians 1v8 - 'For God is my record...'). So it is possible that the Hebrews passage speaks of a cloud of departed souls who are watching us, but it is equally possible that it is saying that we are not alone in our struggle - that we follow in the footsteps of those who were witnesses (and, indeed, martyrs); not that they're witnesses of us now, but they were witnesses for God and Christ.

Surely that is the point of the passage in Hebrews? Not that Abraham and the other heroes of faith are sitting up there watching us now, but rather that when they were alive they lived the life of a witness - they did something. I have always interpreted this passage to imply that given that there were witnesses in the past, there are others like them today - we are still surrounded by living witnesses, even if we don't realise it.

But are the dead witnesses of us now? If so, how can we know that?

What happens when you die?

What happens when you die? I mean, where do you go?

The bible seems to imply that you go directly from death to the judgement, but it also implies that the judgement is at the end of all things.

If time is linear (and I'm not altogether certain that it is), then where do you go between death and judgement? Does anyone actually hang around as ghosts?

My default belief up to this point was that when you die, the part of you that survives the death of the body is somehow taken out of space-time directly to the judgement and the start of eternity, whatever that is. But this is not explained in the bible, this was just the position I came to from various chats and thoughts over the years.

But. Something odd happened a few weeks ago which challenged this view.

Last month, an elderly relative of mine died. The following week three inexplicable things happened to three of her close relatives. Basically in each of the three cases, at night, in locked-up houses, while the folk were asleep, things were moved in inexplicable ways. Each of the three events was totally consistent with the character of the lady who had died. Those involved are quite certain that their Granny came back to visit them.

The thing is, as one relative put it: "If anyone is going to heaven, she is" - she was a committed, faithful and prayerful Christian.

I have always been skeptical of the notion of ghosts. Or rather, I have always been skeptical that the phenomena labeled ghosts are the disembodied spirits of deceased people. Sure, there may be spiritual beings around, but I have never believed that they actually were dead people. But when stuff like this happens in your family, you have to wonder.

What does happen when you die?