Chapel at LCS

Given at LCS on 11/30 for 6th-12th grade...

You may put away your Bibles. Please take a hymnal from the pew in front of you and open with me to the following numbers:

533

Sing the wondrous love of Jesus, sing his mercy and his grace, in the mansions bright and blessed He’ll prepare for us a place When we all get to heaven What a day of rejoicing that will be When we all see Jesus we’ll sing and should the victory

311

This world is not my home I’m just a passing through my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door an I can’t feel at home in this world anymore O Lord you know I have no friend like you if heaven’s not my home then Lord what will I do? The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore v.4 Just up in glory land we’ll live eternally The saints on every hand are shouting victory Their songs of sweetest praise drift back from heaven’s shore and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

536

Don’t think me poor or deserted or lonely I’m not discouraged I’m heaven bound I’m just a pilgrim in search of a city I want a mansion a robe and a crown I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop In a bright land where we’ll never grow old And someday yonder we will nevermore wander But walk the streets that are purest gold.

What’s going to happen to you after you die?

Most Christians, including myself for a very long time, have assumed that the great question about death is how to get to heaven when we die—to escape this earth and to go off somewhere else to live eternally. Yet the New Testament says very little to support this idea. Before we get into the New Testament we’re going to get some context from other ancient literature about life after death. The first example is the Iliad, which many of you have been studying recently. If you don’t know about the Iliad, it was one of the most important texts for the ancient Greeks. This is the view of death in the very beginning of Iliad chapter 1.

1) Iliad

 Sing, O goddess, the destroying wrath of Achilleus Peleiades, which brought innumberable woes upon the Achaians, and flung forth to Hades many valiant souls (psuchas) of heroes, and made the men themselves (autous) spoil to all vultures and hounds, and accomplished the will of Zeus.

When we use the word “soul” in English, we use it to refer to the “real” person, to which the body is an outer shell. We call the soul immortal, and the person that is “Mr. Smith” or “Mrs. Wendlant” or “Ethan Paszko” dwells within the flesh and blood that we see. In the ancient world, it was very much the other way around. Homer says that the souls of the heroes went to Hades and when he writes a visit there later in Odyssey book 11 he describes not disembodied “persons,” but merely echoes—they’re often translated as “shades.” They can’t speak in anything but gibberish unless given an offering of human blood—sort of like my percussionists--and their dwelling is in Hades, which is the home of both the righteous and the wicked, not at all like our heaven and hell. It’s a permanent stupor where only the faintest memory of the real person carries on. By contrast, the men themselves (autous) lie on the battlefield being picked apart by vultures and dogs. Do you see what’s happened? The ancient world has it the other way around from us. The physical body is the real person, and the spiritual substance that survives is only a grotesque memory, like bones in a grave. Next is a passage from Plato’s Apologia. The philosopher Socrates has been put on trial before the Athenian senate, and has just received news that his death sentence was confirmed. This is an extraordinarily sad and beautiful passage as he reflects on his own imminent death.

2) Apologia

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good…as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another…if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good can be greater than this?

Socrates’ description sounds quite a bit like what most Christians believe! Does the soul pass on from this world to a spiritual place the dead live together in peace? We don’t have time to examine the rest of Plato’s writings, but if we did we’d find them to be dualistic. That means this world, the visible, physical world is bad, and the spiritual world is good and desirable. In short, the goal of a dualist/Platonist is to escape this world and to become more and more spiritual until passing off into the spiritual world altogether into death. This is the sort of view you’d expect from the hymns we read, isn’t it? “This world is not my home?”  “I’ll see you across the golden shore?” “We’ll meet when we all get to heaven?” Dualism is the view of life after death we have accepted in place of the New Testament view.  The New Testament view is all about one thing: resurrection. We’ll get to that in a moment, but we’re going to look first at one more ancient text, chapter 7 of II Maccabees, a Jewish book about the defeat of the Syrian megalomaniac Antiochus Epiphanes IV, who was the sort of man you might expect to be the child of Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort. Antiochus defiled the Jewish temple, in this rather grisly story about seven brothers and their mother being tortured to death for their faith you’ll hear what the Jews of the 2^nd century thought about life after death.

3) II Maccabees

The king brought the brothers and their mother before him and tortured them, and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly. The king killed the first brother, and then did the same to the second, who with his dying breath said to Antiochus: ‘You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.’ When the third brother was brought forward he held forth his hands and said ‘I got these from Heaven, and because of [God’s]  laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again. Then the dying fourth brother said: ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’ And all the rest died similarly…
To sum up, we read a passage from Homer which expressed a belief that the soul only carried on as an echo. We read a passage from Plato that said the disembodied soul was the real self and the hope for eternity. And last we read of this Jewish hope of a great resurrection of the righteous at the end of history. It’s expressed in the dry bones of Ezekiel 37 and the dead rising to shine like stars in Daniel 12, and it was, until the 1^st century, unique to Judaism. And then, something happened that Death did not expect. A small group of peasants and fishermen, after their leader was executed under Pontius Pilate, came out and declared that one man had already been resurrected from the dead right in the middle of history, and they began to write and talk about their own resurrection as well. Let’s take a look at what St. Paul says about resurrection in I Corinthians 15. (p. 1139 in your pew bibles)
³ For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time,
We don’t have the time to do a full analysis of of Jesus’ resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—a difficult task anyway—but remember three points about Easter morning. 1) Jesus really was dead on the cross and in the tomb. 2) Jesus was bodily raised. His hands can be touched. He was recognizable to those who know him. He could eat a piece of boiled fish. 3) Even though he returned in his body, it was changed in strange ways—Jesus apparently traveled great distances instantly, passed through a locked door, and could disguise his physical appearance and “reveal” it to the disciples he encountered—but it was a physical body, which was witnessed by well over 500 people. Let’s return to the text in verse 12.

The Resurrection of the Dead

¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? Paul goes on to argue that if there is no resurrection, therefore Christ was not raised, and then in verse 17: ¹⁷ And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. ¹⁹ If in Christ we have hope^[b] in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
I don’t doubt that you all believe in the resurrection, but if we buy into what some of those hymns are saying we are passing on the resurrection—we are passing on reclaiming our physical bodies.
²⁰ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the (first installment) of those who have fallen asleep. ²¹ For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. ²² For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive……²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death
Note that through Adam came the curse of the body dying.  Jesus works out that problem, defeats death, and offers the promise that our bodies will be made alive. Now you and I will all die at some point, because we still must pass through it—but the promise of Jesus is that we’ll come out the other side. That’s what resurrection is.
²⁹ Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? ³⁰ Why are we in danger every hour? ³¹ I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! ³² What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” ³³ Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”^{[d] 34} Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.
Ask me about vv. 29-34 sometime in private for an explanation

The Resurrection Body

³⁵ But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” ³⁶ You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. ³⁷ And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. ³⁹ For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. ⁴⁰ There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. ⁴¹ There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.
Paul compares it to a seed that goes into the ground and dies.
⁴² So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. ⁴³ It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. ⁴⁴ It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵ Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”;^[e] the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶ But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. ⁴⁷ The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. ⁴⁸ As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall^[f] also bear the image of the man of heaven.
So what about natural and spiritual? Is Paul saying that the resurrected body is spiritual only? If you are reading from your own bible and have a pencil with you, you might want to take it out and make some notes about these words. Verse 44 reads that “it is sown a natural body,” and the word that the translator has rendered “natural” is psuchikon. In contrast, it is raised a spiritual body, which is a translation of pneumatikon. If you’re reading the RSV or NRSV, I believe that your translator decided on physical, and then spiritual. No matter what translation you’re holding there’s a twofold problem that’s led to some confusion about what St. Paul is really saying. The first problem is just deciding on how to take the word Paul was using in the 1^st century and then to translate them in a way that conveys the closest possible meaning in 21^st century English. The adjective psuchikon in the first part of the verse comes from the Greek noun psuche, which is translated throughout the rest of the New Testament as “soul” or “life.” (As in, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his psuche? Or, you fool this very night your psuche is required of you) Psuche is the same word that we heard in the Iliad passage we read, when we heard that the souls of the warriors—the echoes of them—went down to Hades while the men survived. The second word, pneumatikos, is an adjective from “pneuma,” which is spirit throughout the New Testament, as in the Holy Spirit, the hagia pneuma.  The most literal translation you can get of this verse is “it is sown a soulish body, but raised a spiritual body.” This brings us to our second difficulty in translating this passage—there’s no clear way to render in English that Paul is describing the animation, and not the composition of the bodies. For example, when I offer you a balloon, I can describe the composition of the balloon by calling it a rubber balloon or a leather balloon, but I can describe it’s animation by calling it a helium or a hydrogen balloon. What Paul writes in vv. 44 is that even though our bodies are sown with the soul—our own broken personhood and frailty as its animating principle—the animating principle when it is raised will be the Spirit, with a capital S. Please read it again with me in this light. It is sown a body animated by ourself our own soul, but it is raised a body animated by the spirit. And if there is a body that is animated by the soul, there will be a body which is animated by the spirit. The first man Adam became a living life…a living soul…a living being psuche. And the last Adam became a life giving pneuma. But it isn’t the spirit first and then the soulish, rather the soulish, and then the spiritual can come. The first man was animated from the dust of the earth, but the second man from heaven.

Mystery and Victory

⁵¹ Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, ⁵² in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. ⁵³ For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. ⁵⁴ When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
⁵⁵ “O death, where is your victory?
    O death, where is your sting?”

Death must be swallowed up in victory. It is not a victory to jettison our bodies and exist only as disembodied spiritual vapor. That is the definition of death. Victory over death is to undo what death and corruption tried to do, not only in us but in all of God’s good creation. Victory over death, which we share with the death-conqueror Jesus, is the ultimate undoing of Death and eternal life in the resurrected body and the restored creation.

III.

So what? Here are six thoughts about what this means for you who are sitting here in the pews.

1. First, your ultimate hope is not to escape from this earth when you die and to live in heaven forever. Your ultimate hope is that after you’ve died God will resurrect you from the dead, just as he resurrected Jesus. These hands, these faces, and these fingernails have hope for eternal life. (The idea that you’re the steward of a body with an eternal future ought in itself to convince you to never eat fast-food burgers again)
2. Secondly, we’ve pushed back hard against the idea of heaven as a final destination, but this is not to distress those of you who have lost a loved one or know Christians who have passed away. While the New Testament doesn’t have anything to say about a disembodied heaven as our ultimate home, it does promise very clearly that those who die are “with Christ” in some sense, basking in the comfort of his presence. Life after death for the believer absolutely involves heavenly comfort. What we’re talking about when we discuss the resurrection is life after “life after death.”
3. Thirdly, it is your task going forward from here to think about this stuff again before Easter 2013. You need to be, in a humble and loving way, critical thinkers when you sing worship songs, listen to sermons, and read jokes about three men standing before St. Peter and pearly gates. Study the relevant biblical passages, and—again, in humility and gentleness—examine every lyric you sing and every book you read to see whether it is in harmony with Biblical theology or dualism.
4. Fourthly, if you take seriously the notion that God will resurrect not only your own bodies, but will also fulfill his promise s in Romans 8 and Revelation 20&21 to restore all of creation, the task of caring for God’s good earth is much more important and interesting. I know that many to most of you in this room are Republicans, and American Republicans have not always done a very good job acknowledging the real dangers to God’s creation. Environmental concerns are thought to be the business of the Left. If God wants to redeem and remake and heal his whole creation, we can’t treat it like it’s all going to be chucked into dustbin, as if therefore strip-mining and whaling and polluting don’t matter
5. Fifthly, on a related note, a robust resurrection theology makes some punctures in the Left Behind view of the end times, where we all get raptured away from the Earth, and it doesn’t matter since God blows it up at Armageddon anyway. This is deeply controversial stuff, and I won’t pretend to have all the answers. I will say, however, if staying faithful to I Cor. 15 is damaging to our assumptions about the end times, so much the worse for our assumptions about the end times—let’s begin reworking them in light of the resurrection hope we share in Jesus.
6. Finally and most importantly, it all comes back to Jesus. Read the gospel accounts of his resurrection. That’s the hope we have. That’s what we believe is going to happen to us and to the world. And what happened to Jesus wasn’t just a divine magic trick to pull one over on the Pharisees who thought they’d finally gotten the best of him—the resurrection of the crucified son of God was and is the key to God’s plan to rescue us and creation. If escaping off to heaven isn’t the name of the game, what is it? It’s the stone rolling back and the resurrected Jesus coming out of the tomb.

I’ve covered quite a bit in the last 20 minutes, and I’ve done so with very broad-brush strokes. This is such explosive stuff, and I’ve left out and summarized so much, there must be some questions. We’re going to pray, and then I’d like you to take 30 seconds to buzz with the person on your left and 30 seconds to buzz with the person on your right about one or two things you found interesting, exciting, confusing, or heretical, and then we’ll gather in again and have a few minutes for questions and comments.

Heavenly father, we praise you for the mighty victory you have won over death for us and for all your creation in raising your son Jesus from the dead. We pray that you would give us wisdom and understanding to work this amazing event out in our own lives and in the world around us. Help us to be resurrection people, and sustain us in our hope that you will one day clothe us with immortality and animate us with your holy spirit. We thank you for the incredible hope with which you have blessed us, we thank you in all the joy that comes with that hope, but most of all we acknowledge your great and eternal love made manifest in your Messiah. Bless us and our work this day. We pray these things in the mighty name of Jesus the death-conqueror and our great King, Amen.

LCS Devotions

To many or even most of you, what I’ve brought in to speak about may be so rudimentary that it is either boring or laughable. For me, this was a revelation which re-charted my worldview quite dramatically, but for you who discovered it long ago, or perhaps even had the good fortune of never needing to “learn” the lesson at all, having grown up in nutritious soil, what I have to say may be like going back to multiplication tables. Still, if there is any one of you who has not given contemplation to this thought—and it is certainly not a sin if you haven’t—I encourage you to work out the wondrous consequences.

The truth, previously hidden from me, to which I refer, is this—that this body, according to St. Paul, these very hands and this hair and these fingernails, is in some mysterious way, headed towards immortality. Again, this would seem too obvious to merit comment, but it is a resounding note indeed to someone who, all his life, has assumed that only his disembodied consciousness was eternal, to which the body was but a temporary husk.

This all began to boil when I undertook to answer the question “What was it exactly that the first apostles brought to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean when they announced the euangelion for the very first time?” How would any of you choose to summarize the Christian gospel to those who have never even heard of it? Would you start with the Creator God, as Genesis does? Or the Ten Commandments, the natural law imprinted on the heart of humankind? Perhaps Yaweh’s dramatic actions on behalf of Israel? The foretelling and incarnation of Jesus? His moral teachings? It is certainly typical of modern evangelists to start with the actions on the cross, especially as they concern our atonement theology. All of these threads are found in the kerygma of the first apostles, but there is one idea super-eminent, to which these truths are but supporting points; important structural pieces to the central fact which the apostles made their theme to the Gentiles: The Resurrected Christ. When Paul entered the agora, before he discoursed on propitiation or justification, he announced that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. I Corinthians 15:3-4 says “for I entrusted to you in the foremost, even what I received, that the Messiah died for the sake of our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.”

It is fitting here to open I Corinthians 15, Paul’s defense of and treatise on the Christian resurrection doctrines. It is often quite correctly said that the Jewish hope of the 1^st century, while widely expecting a Messiah, did not expect one that would mildly dismiss their revolutionary hopes by ordering them to “render unto Caesar.” It is similarly true that the Jewish hope of the 1^st century, while expecting, at least among the Pharisees, some sort of universal resurrection of the dead, did not anticipate the Messiah to be slain, and then, before the general resurrection, raised himself. This is why Paul calls him the aparche, the first-portion of the general resurrection. “For since through a man, Death, even through a man, the resurrection of the dead. For just as in Adam all died, thus even in the Messiah all will be made alive.” Jesus is therefore the archetype to which we look for our own hope, and the means by which that hope will be realized.

What can we know about our own hope? The accounts of his early appearances are certainly stranger than fiction. The Lord’s body and countenance were changed, but also recognizable. He passed through doors and over long distances in the manner of a ghost, but it is clearly recorded, in each account, that his body carried on normal functions. It could touch, be touched, and eat a piece of fish. N.T. Wright, the Anglican theologian, has suggested calling this state “transphysical”—the body which is a human body, but no longer subject to death, corruption, or apparently, some of physical laws which otherwise govern us. Our hope is our own body, but changed. Paul says “it is sown in corruption, but raised in incorruption, sown in dishonor, but raised in glory, sown in weakness, raised in might, sown a soulish body, raised a spiritual body. If there is a soulish body, there is even a spiritual, and thus it is written the first man Adam became unto a living soul, the last Adam unto a life-making spirit.”

I have neither the time nor the expertise to give a full analysis of this passage, but I ought to say that there have been some very bad mistranslations of this passage, given precedent by a liberty in the KJV for psuchikon as “natural” instead of “soulish” which has led to some confusion on what sort of hope we have. Neither was the psuche, in Paul’s language, an eternal consciousness which was merely housed in the body before its release at death, but it was rather the animating principle of a man’s “natural” and “supernatural” existence. What Paul says in these few verses is not “through Adam we exist in bodies, through Christ we will exist without bodies in heaven.” If so, he would contradict 41 preceding verses on the importance of the resurrection! Paul says through Adam we are creatures whose existence is “animated” by our own souls now…through Christ, we will be made alive by being “animated” by God’s Spirit.

What then, are we able to take from this? First, we ought to rethink our future hope, especially as it’s expressed in our hymnody. We are neither “going to a golden shore,” “escaping this world of woe” or “going to the blessed land.” A great deal of our talk about “getting to heaven” has to be rethought and reinterpreted through the resurrection of the body. It would be much more to St. Paul’s point to suggest that heaven is coming to this flesh, this hair, these kneecaps.

Secondly, we shouldn’t give any ground to the Platonic dualism in which the body/matter is evil, and the spirit is good. There are some passages in John’s writings that lean towards this, but his indictment of the flesh, or sarx, never goes so far as to say that it is irredeemable. In other words, we mustn’t think that the Messiah came only to save our souls…he came to save our lives, body and soul, and we don’t help ourselves by attempting to scapegoat the one and sever ourselves. This world, this whole cosmos, is promised a redemption/resurrection as well, and there is likewise no place in Christian political theory for writing the whole thing of as a doomed venture headed for destruction. Whatever destruction does come, there is a revivification to be had afterwards.

And lastly, the doctrine of the resurrection gives enormous dignity to what you and I are doing. You see, if the extent of our future hope is to simply exist as disembodied vapors of personality (and I realize I’m considerably underselling the reality that, even in this theory, we would be vapors in the presence of God’s throne) there would be very little point to whatever we do on this physical earth. St. Paul would suggest we ought to be pitied above all men, if there be no resurrection. D.L. Moody, laboring under this mistake, once suggested that he was aboard a sinking vessel and his task was to get as many souls into lifeboats as he could. But what if we were not only to save souls, but to salvage the ship itself? And, to extend the analogy, what if the repaired ship might some day come into harbor? If the dead are raised, let us write symphonies, let us teach children about the Pythagorean Theorem, let us read Herodotus and build universities. “Where then, O Death, is your victory, and where is your sting? But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

An Email

Sent to several friends regarding this column:

http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html

This was an interesting read. I'm writing straight from my notes here instead of organizing a true written response, so please be patient if it comes a little scattered.

First, I'd like some more clarity on what Green means by "not a place" but still "real experienced conditions." Does he mean, then, that heaven and hell are states of mind detached without any physical conditions? (i.e. in eternity we are disembodied, and our minds/consciousnesses are the only conduits of perception) This will lead quickly back to talk of the resurrection of the dead, which I didn't find much developed in this article, but in the way I understand heaven and hell, is the central fact. I can entertain the notion that hell is more a state of mind than a plotted place on a map, but whether its experienced with or without the body (i.e. whole person) is very important to distinguish.

Second, I think that Green overplays his hand very badly on two points. First, that the Western Christian imagery of hell-as-a-place was nowhere to be found before the Great Schism, and second, that the biblical language supports his pet theory that hell is within the presence of God. More on these later as well.

He's probably right that Sheol ought to be transliterated. That's about as much as I'm able to say, with my very little Hebrew, about translations in the O.T. He's certainly right about the Greek view of Hades paralleling that of the old Jews; Hades/Sheol is the abode of the ghosts of both the righteous and the wicked, but these ghosts are not whole people. They are echoes of the men, while (as it says in the Iliad) the men themselves lie in their graves. This is all quite different than the Platonic notion that the body is merely a temporary home of the real person, the leaving of which will provide a higher, more spiritual existence. To nearly all ancient people there wasn't really a life-after-death to speak of. With time, the Greek view became more nuanced. The particularly wicked had punishments imagined for them in Hades, and something like Elysium (still in the same "locality") was imagined for the blessed. The Platonic philosophers talked about the soul as the seat of existence, and believed it to be immortal, while other schools dabbled in something like re-incarnation. (You see this in Virgil, which I blogged about here.) And of course, as was often the case in Greco-Roman religion, none of these contradictions really bothered anyone. There was a comfortable jumble of possibilities in Hades, and no one really had anything staked on it. Life (except for a very few, like Socrates) was only really had in the body, and what came afterwards was a number of varied, but ultimately inconsequential possibilities.

In Jewish thought, hints of resurrection creep in by the late psalms and minor prophets, and there is a full blown expectation of it (though it wasn't the center of their religious hopes) by the time of the Maccabean uprising. Indeed, it was the subject of their dying words as they were executed in the temple. It's fairly well established that by N.T. times, the Pharisees and Essenes represented religious interests whose defining dogmas concerned the resurrection. For the Jews of Jesus' time, Hades was still the abode of the righteous and the wicked after death, but it was a stopping-house before a bodily resurrection. (And when I say Jews, I should note that there was pluriformity in Israel as well, although not to the extent of the rest of the Hellenistic world)

So, then for the Old Testament. Again, I can't speak for his specific accusations about bad translation and word study, but I think he's generally on the right track in his representation of the Jewish/Hellenistic interplay. I would make, in transitioning to the New Testament, one observation about Gehenna: no one seems to be able to mention the word (which appears in Hebrew and transliterated Greek) without the obligatory explanation about how it was Jerusalem's burning garbage heap, therefore the association with fire, therefore hellfire, etc. I can't find any evidence of this "fact" before the 19th century. It isn't present in the scriptures, the early church fathers, or any of the rabbinical literature I've read. I wonder if, like the bell attached to the high priest's ankles when he entered the Holy of Holies, or the low gate in Jerusalem that was called the Eye of the Needle, it's actually a Christian urban legend, something that might've come from the 19th century version of Wikipedia. All three of these "facts" would make sense given their context and clarify a confusion, but without seeing any real historical evidence for them, I think we have to leave them as theories. (If anyone has any solid historical evidence, please let me know, and I'll be happy to be corrected)

What then, do we know about fiery Gehenna? It might have actually been a burning rubbish-heap, or perhaps "going to Gehenna," like "going to Timbuktu" might have meant exactly what one would think it means from it's N.T. context. (Not going to the place per se, but to a separate, excluded place of eternal torment.)

I don't know how much we can take from the Lazarus parable. I strongly suspect that it tells us only that a locative heaven and hell were used as a story-telling device (like we use St. Peter at the pearly gates as a joke-telling device) and is not Jesus' systematic exposition of his views on the subject. Also, I'd like to know which passage in the Retractions of Augustine he's talking about. I don't remember anything about this, and don't have a copy at hand.

Onto some Greek...I make no claims to be anything other than barely competent, but I can spot a quack when I see one. Mr. Green is either overreaching his capabilities, or was taught very poorly. The preposition apo, in all dialects of Greek, means "from"/"away from," or "by means of." (It matches the Latin preposition ab/a almost exactly) Just this morning in reading Luke I translated verses saying "full of many people from (apo) all Judea and Jerusalem and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, they came to hear him and to be healed from (apo) their sicknesses. The passage from II Thess. could be read with a sense of apo instrumentally (the word from, with it's locative/instrumental vagueness would be the closest match) but to change it to the meaning of kata or dia (because of, on account of ) is to take a very bold liberty with the text. It's an interesting theory, but it's far from the closed case he makes it out to be. Calvin might be able to clarify this further if he has his Wallace Grammar nearby, which I do not.

Similarly, all of his talk about Tartarus is misrepresenting. Tartarus, in Homer, is just lower hell. Yes, it is the home of the banished Titans, but it is also the abode of Sisyphus and Tantalus. It's the seat of Tisiphone...it is Hell, if ever there was a Hell with a capital H. (I wrote about it in the Aeneid here).

In addition to his interesting but hardly conclusive theories about God as fire, Green does his worst work talking about energeia. Yes, energeia sounds like energy, and the two words do have common relatives. But translators are absolutely right to translate the word the way they do; it is most often the verb ergo (work, accomplish) with the preposition en tacked on. The Holy Spirit energei is the Holy Spirit working in us, and that, not some kind of electrical force, would have been the most accurate connotation. All of his talk about the energies of God is a retrojection of 20th/21st century language on texts that had no clue about them.

All of these language discussions don't really come together into anything more profound than "there appears to be variegated language in the New and Old Testaments about hell." This is not new information. The leap from all which is discussed before to Green's own theory rests entirely on the syllogism: God loves all unconditionally; Unconditional love couldn't possibly lead to separated eternal torment; Therefore God would not torment anyone eternally. Now, I probably wouldn't choose the word unconditionally here. God's love is unconditional, but in the same sense that his justice and his holiness are unconditional. If God is the great First Mover, he doesn't require "conditions" to fully be any of the essential qualities of his person. So in that sense, yes, God loves unconditionally. But does it mean that God will disregard all acts of choice, righteousness, wickedness, virtue, vice, and circumstance in his dealings with mankind, both corporately and person to person? I don't think there's any evidence that's true.

Here are the two things we know for sure from the New Testament: 1) There will be a resurrection of the dead. (1 Cor. 15 for an explicit account of this) and 2) Everyone will appear before the bema seat of Jesus. (A judge's bench) (Rom 14:10, 2 Cor. 5:10). We don't know what the judgement of Jesus will be, and we don't know who will get what. We should, if we have any decency, pray regularly for universal mercy. Wouldn't it seem wonderful to us if all was forgiven everyone? It may even be hard for us to imagine how a God whose essence is love could do anything otherwise, but consider our circumstances: We live in an age in which the principal measure of a person's life-story is success or failure in romantic love. (Try to imagine any novel without this as the driving theme if you don't believe me; now try to imagine inserting that theme into any ancient text.) Couple that with our profound ignorance of fear and evil. When was the last time any of us were truly afraid? We do, I believe, all remember some moment of real fear, perhaps being alone outside in the dark, or hearing footsteps downstairs that shouldn't have been there. Yet most of the time we eat safe, sanitized food, and we can drive out darkness with electric lights, stave off the cold with gas heating, and lock our sturdy doors to the conditions of most of historical humanity. And despite our wish to ignore it, there is evil. Indeed, if we let down our puffery and pride for half a moment and look honestly at how we've cheated and deceived, we can acknowledge how each of us really are split ourselves, not to mention the corporate (oppression by a group of people) or natural (tsunamis, hurricanes) evils. And thus we stand, an age living in denial of danger or evil, and overly enamored with shallow meanings of "love." Is it any surprise that we should be discomfited by the idea of real danger in the beyond, or of a containment of evil?

Again, let us pray for universal mercy. But let's not think that just because we don't like the idea of hell that we can erase it from our theology, just as we've done to the angels. (Another topic that was vague in the scriptures, over-played in the Middle Ages, and now written of as superstition today.) It's in thinking about the angels that I almost would subscribe to Green's theory, that the presence of God (see, by the way, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, on the terror of the numinous is a searing pain to the mortal eye and mind. Anytime an angel enters the pages of scripture, his first words must be Fear Not...they certainly inspire fear! Yet does this mean that hell is the experience of our own poor choices? It is just as likely it means that the Holy, even when it comes in peace, is a terror...so what about when it comes in judgement?

Here's an interesting idea of what Hell might actually look like from N.T. Wright: Our distinguishing characteristic as living organisms is our partly divine heritage. We are animals, like mammals in most outward respects, but partly descended from the gods. We are, being made, in imago Dei, bearers of a divine likeness. The principal effect of sin (original and otherwise) is a defacing of that image. In fact, the further one is given into sin, the less Divine and more animal he becomes; the more he begins to bear the image of the idol he worships, be that lust, greed, or sloth. Wright suggests that Hell might be the final removal of the divine image...a giving over unto animal nature, to be tormented forever by being subjected to their own idolatry. (Like in Narnia, when the beasts that are given speech revert back to being just dumb beasts.) I like the reasoning behind this idea, though of course it's just a theory and no more absolutely proven than Green's...but isn't it curious that they move in such opposite directions? That one is the removal of the divine and the other is it's nearer presence?

The curious thing about this whole recent muddle over hell (and I still haven't read Rob Bell's book...is there anyone who has a copy?) is that it isn't nearly as controversial or interesting as the muddle we should be having over heaven. There may or may not be human souls in hell following the end of all things, but there certainly won't be human souls in heaven...the astounding truth of the resurrection of the dead is that heaven is coming here.