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Heaven in Ohio?

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 06:00:00 -0400

The Heavenly Table
by donald ray pollock
doubleday, 384 pages, $27.95

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I suppose it is appropriate for a book on eternal life to be long. Given the ground Alan Segal, a professor of Jewish studies at Columbia University, covers, Life After Death had to be long. Ten years in the making, Segal’s book explores the development of belief in the afterlife in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Israel, Iran and Greece. He continues the story by examining the period of the second temple in Jewish thought, the rise of apocalypticism and millenarianism, sectarian life in New Testament times, New Testament views of afterlife, pseudepigraphic literature, the Church fathers, the early rabbis, and Muslim views of the afterlife..

Through the course of this investigation, the author appears to discuss nearly every ancient text that has anything of interest to say about afterlife in the cultures that he covers. And to illumine these ancient texts, Segal examines modern apocalyptic movements as well as contemporary literature on mystical experiences, near-death experiences and the like. By any measure, this book must be recognized as an extraordinary achievement.

The author’s professed aim is to produce a work of social history. Early on he writes: “We will not ask theological questions so much as the basic question of a historian: ‘ cui bono ’? To whose benefit is this belief in the afterlife?” However, readers are clued in right away that this book is not concerned simply, or perhaps even primarily, with answering questions about ancient history. On the first page, after a brief look at Hamlet’s reflections on revenge and suicide, Segal turns to consider the Muslims who perpetrated the tragic events of September 11, noting that in the minds of some they will receive special rewards in heaven for their uncommon piety and commitment.

The intersection of belief in life after death and political activity, dramatically illustrated by September 11, is not foreign to American culture. As Segal observes, the return to religion and church membership by baby boomers in the 1980s corresponded to a dramatic upswing of political action by conservative religious groups. Intimately involved in these political controversies are beliefs about life after death. As our author puts it, “Asking about an afterlife still defines a crucial and very conflicted battlefield in American life, one that challenges our political as well as religious convictions.”

More Americans say they believe in life after death than say they believe in God, and there is a fundamental divide over how Americans conceive of the nature of resurrection and life after death. Liberal believers hold either to the immortality of the soul or, at best, a spiritual resurrection, but others, including Christian evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, insist on a bodily resurrection. Indeed, Segal suggests, the “distinct line” that divides conservative believers from liberal ones is “the big story in American religion at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” It seems clear that he intends his book to address this divide and its practical implications, not the least of which are social and political.

Segal finds the story of the afterlife in Egyptian history particularly telling, because there is a clear record of change and development. Initially, it was only the pharaoh who was believed to be blessed with immortality, but over the centuries, as social circumstances changed, more and more people were included in the Egyptian vision of the afterlife. Segal takes this as vivid support for his thesis that views of the afterlife invariably mirror the values of the society producing them. Another interesting example is the difference between the social contexts where belief in immortality of the individual soul thrived as opposed to the social contexts where belief in bodily resurrection was dominant. “Immortality is the ideology of the rich” contends Segal, because it “valorized their intellectual pursuits.” Belief in resurrection, by contrast, flourished in a context of persecution and deprivation, appealing particularly to activist groups by giving martyrdom a transcendent justification.

Segal thinks it likely that the notion of resurrection was originally a Zoroastrian idea, but he is cautious in his judgments about how different religions influenced each other (because of difficulties in dating various documents), and he suspects that there was cross-fertilization among Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity. Jewish adaptation of the idea of resurrection took distinctive shape as a tool to explain the martyrdom of righteous persons: “The doctrine of judgment and rewards and punishments in the afterlife was first articulated because it was necessary that the doctrine develop to help people understand the implications of their faith. Wherever the idea comes from, it was tailored to Jewish sensibilities by the time it appeared in Jewish culture.”

Some of Segal’s historical judgments are tendentious. For instance, traditional Christian readers will take exception to the wedge he attempts to drive between Paul’s account of the resurrection and that of the gospel writers.

He spends an entire chapter on Paul and argues at length that he was a mystic whose witness to the resurrection was based on his visions of Christ in Heaven. “In flat contradiction to Paul, the Gospels (when they discuss the process of resurrection at all) strongly present a physical, fleshly notion of Jesus’ bodily resurrection.” Moreover, Segal asserts, “neither body of writing gives us what actually happened.”

Despite his professed intention to provide a social history and to avoid theological questions, Segal ventures squarely into philosophical and theological territory in the afterword to his book. There he offers his reflections on our prospects for knowing the truth about the existentially vital and inveterately controversial matter of life after death. The prospects as he sees them are not good. Moreover, this is a good thing.

First, he rules out the possibility that religious belief can be confirmed in anything like the scientific sense. Rather, belief in God and the afterlife are human ideals that give meaning to our lives, and as such they exist in our minds more than in the objective world. This does not make them less important for Segal, but it does mean that God and the afterlife should not be taken as literal truths.

Next, he contends that history cannot show the truth of the afterlife. The conflicting claims among different religious traditions necessarily relativize all such claims and underscore his central thesis that “afterlife notions are mirrors of our cultural and social needs.” Moreover, diversity within the canonical tradition of the various religions”such as the alleged contradiction between Paul and the Gospels”shows that someone must be wrong, and we have no way to determine who is right. Indeed, Segal contends that “history is, in fact, a construction of our minds, as redactors and editors of all the reports.” This makes it extremely dubious that we could ever get at what “actually happened.”

Finally, Segal dismisses the suggestion that we might be able to know the truth about the afterlife through divine revelation. “God may be sending revelations but we are talking to ourselves when we interpret our scriptures.” Apparently our hermeneutical biases are such that we have no more hope of getting straight a divine revelation than we have of getting an accurate picture of past history.

So where does this leave us? Here is Segal’s answer: “Either we must view the beliefs selectively, taking seriously only the one that appeals most to us, convert, and become true believers of that religion”any religion”or we must face the surety that all are, at best, but approximations of what may await us. Or maybe nothingness awaits us.” Notice, for Segal, it is a “surety” that all religions are at best approximations of what may await us, even if that is nothingness. We can be sure that no religion gives us a true account of God and the afterlife and if anyone is sure of the opposite, they have a faith that is not properly chastened by doubt. As Segal puts it in a nutshell, “Doubts complete faith and keep it from becoming fanaticism.”

He is prepared to go even further. In the last pages of his book, he returns to Shakespeare and suggests that our religious values should be understood “as a script for the performance of a life.” As such, they are important and meaningful and even true “in their own way, even if they are fiction.” Fictional faith, or faith completed by doubt, are Segal’s antidotes to fanaticism.

While perhaps most will agree that fanaticism is a bad thing, Segal’s recipe for avoiding it requires true believers to invert what we can be sure about. If there is no God and nothingness awaits us, then Segal is surely right that we are hardly in a position to be sure about either God or the afterlife. But if there is indeed a God and He has revealed to us the crucial truth necessary for eternal salvation, then it is much more likely we could know this and even be properly sure of it.

Moreover, if the Christian revelation is true, we can know that God forbids murder and requires us to love even our enemies. Such knowledge, I would argue, is a better antidote to fanaticism than pervasive doubt that God even exists. In any case, it remains to be seen whether those who are sure that the truth about God and the afterlife eludes us will be more tolerant of those who insist otherwise, than the latter have been of them.

Jerry L. Walls is professor of philosophy of religion at Asbury Theological Seminary .

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Purgatory for Everyone

Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0500

A few years ago, the journalist Philip Nobile wrote an article near the first anniversary of the death of Princess Diana in which he raised what he termed “an indiscreet theological question.” “Where is she now?” he asked. According to Christian theology, the options were heaven, purgatory, or hell. Given Diana’s well-publicized lifestyle, Nobile suggested that the case for heaven was weak. A better case could be made for hell, given the likelihood that Diana was in a state of mortal sin at the moment of her death. Nobile thus found it curious that the Pope gave positive indications about Diana’s salvation when the following message of condolence was sent on his behalf to Queen Elizabeth: “The Holy Father has offered prayers summoning her to our Heavenly Father’s eternal love.” As Nobile observed, this remark implied Diana was in purgatory.

Now Nobile certainly did not intend his article to serve as a defense of orthodoxy. Yet it raises a substantive issue that Christians who take the afterlife seriously cannot evade. Many believers have attended funerals in which the deceased are declared to be enjoying all the glories of heaven, regardless of their somewhat less-than-saintly behavior in life. At best, such occasions are examples of understandable pastoral efforts to comfort grieving loved ones. But at worst, they may be sentimental exercises that trivialize the most central beliefs of the Christian faith.

What I have in mind are the many beliefs shared by Roman Catholics and evangelicals concerning, in particular, the nature of salvation. This growing consensus was expressed most notably in “The Gift of Salvation,” a document signed by a number of leading Roman Catholic and evangelical spokesmen, which reiterates the classical view that there is a close relationship between justification and sanctification. Salvation, in this view, is far more than forgiveness of our sins; it is also a matter of thorough moral and spiritual transformation. The document stresses this point by denying that faith is mere intellectual assent and asserting that it is “an act of the whole person, involving the mind, the will, and the affections, issuing in a changed life.” It then goes on to insist that Christians are bound by their faith and baptism “to live according to the law of love in obedience to Jesus Christ the Lord. Scripture calls this the life of holiness or sanctification.”

It is here that “an indiscreet theological question” must be faced. If salvation essentially involves transformation—and, at that same time, we cannot be united with God unless we are holy—what becomes of those who plead the atonement of Christ for salvation but die before they have been thoroughly transformed? These people will have accepted the truth about God and themselves through repentance and faith, but their character will not have been made perfect. Their sanctification has begun but it remains incomplete. Such people do not seem to be ready for a heaven of perfect love and fellowship with God, but neither should they be consigned to hell.

It is this basic difficulty that led to the formulation of the doctrine of purgatory in the first place. While the doctrine was not fully developed until the Middle Ages, the seeds from which it grew go back at least to the Church Fathers, if not to Scripture itself. Cyprian (c. 200–258), for instance, struggled with the question of what to think about Christians who had weakened under persecution. Likewise, Augustine (354–430), the fountainhead of Western theology, reflected in several passages on the kinds of issues that would eventually be resolved in Roman Catholic theology by the doctrine of purgatory. (Of course, the doctrine also has roots in the popular conviction that the living might in some fashion influence the dead, particularly by prayer.)

While the doctrine is most fully developed in Roman Catholic theology, a version of it is also affirmed by some Eastern Orthodox theologians. The main difference between them is that Roman Catholics have traditionally viewed purgatory as a place of temporal punishment for individuals who have not sufficiently repented before death, whereas Eastern theologians view it as a process of growth and maturation for persons who have not completed the sanctification process.

Despite widespread acceptance of the doctrine of purgatory in some form, Protestants, by and large, have traditionally rejected the notion out of hand. The roots of this rejection go back, of course, to the Reformation, and it is well known that purgatory was deeply connected with the most basic and bitter disputes that split the Western Church. Among these disputes is the Protestant notion of sola scriptura , the view that Scripture alone is the source and authority for doctrine. Many Protestants would summarily dispense with purgatory on the ground that it is not mentioned in Scripture, at least not obviously so, a point that is generally conceded even by the defenders of the doctrine.

The fact that purgatory is not expressly present in Scripture is not enough to settle the issue, however. The deeper issue is whether it is a reasonable inference from important truths that are clearly found there. If theology involves a degree of disciplined speculation and logical inference, then the doctrine of purgatory cannot simply be dismissed on the grounds that Scripture does not explicitly articulate it.

Moreover, the prevailing doctrine of purgatory at the time of the Reformation was related to some of the worst abuses in the Church, particularly the sale of indulgences, a practice that many saw as a denial that we are saved through faith in Christ. It is no wonder, in light of this history, that the doctrine has provoked such strong reactions among Protestants. The larger issues and passions involved in this controversy are reflected in the words of Calvin, who wrote that “we must cry out with the shouting not only of our voices but our throats and lungs that purgatory is a deadly fiction of Satan, which nullifies the cross of Christ, inflicts unbearable contempt upon God’s mercy, and overturns and destroys our faith.” The attitude had not changed much in Reformed theology by the nineteenth century when Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian, wrote his classic systematic theology. Hodge noted that Roman Catholics tended to vary their account of purgatory depending on the audience. Protestants were presented with a mild form of the doctrine, while Catholics depicted it for themselves in severe terms. Hodge thus saw purgatory as “a tremendous engine of priestly power. The feet of the tiger withdrawn are as soft as velvet; when those claws are extended, they are fearful instruments of laceration and death.”

In the past few decades, by contrast, purgatory has lost much of its controversial edge. This is no doubt largely due to the decline of interest in the doctrine among Catholics, even among those who continue officially to affirm it. And while Protestants still generally repudiate the notion, the matter incites much less fervor than it did in previous generations.

In my view, it is long past time to reassess purgatory and the theological problems it was originally intended to solve. I write as a member of the Wesleyan tradition, a strand of Protestantism that emphasizes sanctification and moral transformation in its account of salvation. In agreement with the Great Tradition of Christian teaching, Wesleyans reject the notion that salvation is only, or even primarily, a forensic matter of having the righteousness of Christ imputed or attributed to believers. Wesleyans insist that God not only forgives us but also changes us and actually makes us righteous. Only when we are entirely sanctified or fully perfected in this sense are we truly fit to enjoy the beatific vision in heaven.

But what of Protestants who emphasize the forensic aspect of salvation? How have they resolved the problem of sin and moral imperfection that remains in the lives of believers at the time of death? They agree, after all, that nothing impure or unholy can enter heaven and they also typically hold that most, if not all, believers are far from perfection when they die. The typical answer echoes the view eloquently expressed by Jonathan Edwards.

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Doing Theodicy

Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil
by john g. stackhouse, jr.
oxford university press, 190 pages, $25

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Do Only Christians Know?

Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics
By Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches University of Notre Dame Press. 230 pp. $29.95

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The Formation of Hell

Sat, 01 Oct 1994 00:00:00 -0400

The author of this book did not intend to write it. Originally this material was supposed to be merely an introductory section of a one-volume history of hell in the Middle Ages. But his fascination with a collection of literature that was both richer and more abundant than expected led him to a larger project. Thus, the present work is just the first installment of what is to be a multivolume history of hell from the Bible to Dante.

Bernstein emphasizes at the outset that he is concerned neither to defend nor to attack the notion of hell, and he claims no prior assumptions about its nature, value, or reality. His purposes are purely historical, and he aims to reach conclusions that can be verified by a close reading of the relevant texts.

Bernstein’s story begins with an introductory chapter on the afterlife in ancient Babylonia and Egypt. Neither the authors of the New Testament nor later Christian apologists lived in a vacuum, and Bernstein stresses that we cannot have a correct understanding of hell unless we take into account the conceptual background of the world in which Christianity arose. This chapter sounds some of the main themes that are developed more fully in the four main parts of the book. One such theme is the distinction between “neutral” death and “moral” death. The first notion appears in written records from Mesopotamia by the middle of the third millennium b.c. According to this view, “the dead survive en masse in a pallid half-life without either reward or punishment.” On the other hand, the moral view of death is registered in Egyptian texts by the middle of the second millennium b.c. This view, which later informed ancient Greek culture, maintains that “the dead are judged by the standard of known criteria and then rewarded or punished.” This later view of death is, of course, particularly relevant to the doctrine of hell since hell involves some form of punishment.

In Part One of the book, which deals with “The Netherworlds of Greece and Rome,” Bernstein gives us a detailed discussion of these two views of death as reflected in such authors as Homer, Virgil, Plato, and Plutarch. It is noteworthy that so-called “neutral” death is not always strictly neutral. For instance, one of Homer’s characters experiences the continuance of a painful emotion he felt at the time of his death; some are depicted as feeling pride in the accomplishments of their progeny, while others experience shame.

A particularly interesting account of moral death is drawn from some of Plato’s dialogues. He tells of four possible fates ranging from that of the holy to that of the incurably wicked. While the former receive eternal rewards, the latter are cast into Tartarus where they are punished eternally. Between these extremes are those of indeterminate character and those who have committed sins that are curable. The Christian reader will immediately see here certain parallels to heaven, hell, and purgatory.

Other chapters in Part One deal with “Porous Death” and “Useful Death.” In the first of these, Bernstein cites numerous accounts of interaction between the living and the dead which illustrate that for the ancient Greeks and Romans the boundary of death was not always distinct. “The dead were neither as fully dead nor as fully alive as the living might wish.” The chapter on useful death is a fascinating discussion of different ancient opinions about the social utility of various views of death. Threats of eternal punishment and promise of reward were often seen as a positive reinforcement of moral behavior and a support for a stable society.

The second part of the book covers the other major source of background material for the Christian concept of hell, namely, the Jewish tradition. The story Bernstein tells here will be familiar to students of Scripture. The possibility of divine punishment is rooted in the covenant God initiated with the Jews, which promises not only rewards for obedience, but also punishment for disobedience. In the Deuteronomic model, however, these consequences are very much confined to this world. Destruction is the ultimate penalty and sheol is morally neutral. It was dissatisfaction with the Deuteronomic model that was the first stimulus to the doctrine of hell. Increasing awareness of the injustices of this life led to calls for moral death, of which the book of Job is a particularly eloquent expression. “The key to Job’s despair is his realization that not even death provides escape from life’s injustice.”

Some early Hebrew expressions of moral death occur in passages such as Ezekiel 32 and Isaiah 14. Here we see the wicked experiencing both shame and segregation in sheol, a combination that represents the earliest reference in the Bible to what would come to be known as hell. And later there are references to a double resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked after which the wicked would be punished. The symmetry of this description would be an important theme in subsequent Jewish and Christian writings where eternal punishment is explicitly articulated. Bernstein makes clear, however, that the notion of postmortem punishment is a late concern in Hebrew thought and is only a minority position.

In the third part of the book Bernstein makes the case that there is similar diversity in the New Testament. Following some recent trends in New Testament scholarship, he argues that Paul did not have a clear concept of hell. Paul never mentions gehenna and his only reference to hades celebrates its defeat. He is notably reserved when speaking of the wicked and refrains from characterizing their fate in parallel fashion with that of those who receive eternal life. Although Paul was attracted to universalism, Bernstein maintains that in the end the Apostle opts for the view that the wicked will be annihilated. On the other hand, the symmetrical position with eternal punishment as the alternative to eternal life appears clearly in the Gospels and Revelation.

The fourth part of the book is an intriguing discussion of how these options played out in the early centuries of Christian theology through the time of Augustine. At one end of the spectrum, eternal punishment was elaborated with much more detail, imagination, and color than appears in the biblical text; at the other end, universal salvation was defended with philosophical sophistication by Origen. Stopping short of universalism, the Apocalypse of Paul depicts God as extending mercy to the damned by allowing them periodic relief from their suffering. And over against all of these, Augustine articulated his conception of eternal damnation, which would prove to be highly influential in western theology.

The story Bernstein tells is an interesting one, and he does an excellent job of telling it clearly despite the considerable complexity of his subject matter. This is fortunate, since the story is not merely a matter of historical concern. Indeed, this material is highly relevant to a lively debate on hell currently being waged among theologians and philosophers. Traditional views of hell are again receiving serious attention, and the discussion is being further stimulated by the fact that even in conservative Christian circles the options of universalism and annihilationism are attracting a growing number of adherents. All who are involved in this debate would profit from Bernstein’s informative work.

Precisely because of such theological relevance, however, one might raise a question or two. In particular, I would challenge Bernstein’s claim to have written a purely historical work devoid of theological judgment. Ironically, the doubtful nature of this claim appears in some of the very passages where he aims to distance himself from theology. For instance, consider his comment on Isaiah 66:18-20, an admittedly difficult and paradoxical passage. Bernstein insists that we should not try to achieve a synthesis or explain the paradox. “To interpret this passage further would be to theologize and to insist on a more systematic statement than actually exists.” I would suggest that when someone draws lines for legitimate interpretation of a biblical text he is theologizing, whether he owns it or not.

A similar point applies to Bernstein’s treatment of the diversity he details in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. With respect to the variety in the Old Testament, he offers the following advice: “Rather than theological consistency in Scripture, it is better to search instead for the conflicts of opinion that energized religious life and existential feeling about God, oneself, and the world.” Likewise, he remarks that to reconcile the passages of the New Testament with one another is to write theology. “By contrast, looking ‘in the other direction,’ at its underlying perception, the existential aspiration for justice which these texts seek to articulate shows how they reflect different aspects of a broader vision that informs them all.”

The preference to leave the diversity as it stands rather than to seek a synthesis or some other interpretation that would achieve consistency is hardly theologically neutral. Those who look for theological consistency on these matters typically do so because they believe Scripture is a revelation from God and that what it teaches about the afterlife is true. The recommendation that we should seek conflicts of opinion rather than a fundamental consistency is easily read as an implicit claim that Scripture is only a collection of various fallible human perspectives rather than truth from God revealed to us. At any rate, such a recommendation is surely not a merely historical claim, innocent of theological insinuation.

It should also be emphasized that Bernstein suggests his own account of the unity underlying the diversity of the texts, namely, the “existential aspiration for justice which these texts seek to articulate.” Elsewhere, he explains this aspiration in more psychological terms: “Belief in future punishment is a manifestation of the sublimated desire for vengeance. Belief in punishment after death becomes necessary when no sign of restoration is visible in this life.”

Bernstein gives this suggestion a utilitarian twist in his discussion of how the restraint of Paul gave way in later New Testament writings to the explicit teaching of eternal punishment: “My hypothesis is that postmortem sanctions became more dire as internal sanctions because more necessary. Between 1 Thessalonians and Revelation, the church came to be in need of an avenger, whether against wayward members or outside oppressors.” This construal of hell is reminiscent of Bernstein’s discussion of “Useful Death” among the ancient Greeks and Romans. There are, of course, differences, but the idea that the threat of hell served as a moral sanction in the Christian community is surely an example of hell playing a useful role. The similarity is noteworthy because in his earlier chapter Bernstein maintained that the utilitarian approach to death is absent from early Jewish and Christian literature.

As Bernstein sees it, then, the doctrine of hell is primarily a logical implication of believing in a just God in the face of obvious injustice in this life. The doctrine also has existential and psychological roots insofar as it arises from a sublimated desire for vengeance and even makes a nod to utility to the degree that its development was spurred on by the exigencies of persecution and the need for discipline in the early church.

This history of hell is not necessarily incompatible with the belief that the Christian doctrine of hell is actually true. But some of its conclusions do raise questions about the credibility of the doctrine. For instance, if belief in hell does indeed spring from a suppressed desire for revenge, the belief has suspicious roots. Those who believe the doctrine is true would insist that Jesus’ teaching on hell, as recorded by the New Testament authors, did not arise from a sublimated desire for revenge, but rather came to us as part of the highest revelation of a loving God.

Bernstein would likely see such a suggestion as an obvious move from the province of the historian to that of the theologian. I have been arguing, however, that Bernstein’s history itself crosses this boundary.

Clearly, the distinctions between history, theology, and metaphysics are neither simple nor uncontroversial. It is not obvious that those who write history in terms of human motives, aspirations, intentions, and intellectual development are writing pure history over against those who believe God is the central agent of history and that his activity, intentions, and revelation are the key to understanding the literature of Judaism, and ultimately Christianity. Neither of these can rightly claim metaphysical or theological neutrality. And neither of these approaches, when dealing with a subject like hell, is indifferent with respect to its credibility or reality.

Jerry L.. Walls teaches Philosophy of Religion at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky.

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