Paul Baxter

I'm not convinced that our views of the nature of man are quite as different as you believe them to be. Here's what I mean. The doctrine of the "immortal soul" as it base more of a greek one than a jewish-christian one. I realize that it is believed by a great number of xians, but bear with me for a sec. The burden of xian belief about the future, drawing of course on the pharisaic belief, is the hope of resurrection. It is not that we have an immortal spirit which will go off to heavenly bliss when we die, though again this is a popular view. The spirit or soul (which I believe are sometime synonymous in ancient literature, but with some differences), is the inward essence of a person. It is not some sort of immaterial substance, as was popularized in 19th cent spiritualist teachers among others. It is a description of one's thoughts, emotions, as well as a sense of what makes one human.

All of which is to say that your brief but elegant description of your inward thoughts doesn't at all, in my mind, get at the theist/atheist divide. Or to put it another way, ancient atheists (were there many? I dunno), would not have necessarily felt that having a "spirit" themselves implied a god.

I realize now that I have rambled, and probably opened a can of worms I won't be able to get back to for a couple of weeks. Sorry. I suppose I represent a small minority of xian thought on this matter, so just ignore me

Stephen T-B

As CJD expected, this might, in the end, have less to do with Biblical Criticism and Archaeology than would entitle it to remain here. But as long as it’s not moved to “Elsewhere” I don’t care where it goes.
So anyway...
PB’s cleared something up for me, ie why my Christian parents were so opposed to Spiritualism. I never quite got it because it seemed to me that they and the Spiritualists both believed in an immortal soul. But my parents’ belief, I now realise, was informed by the essential doctrine of the resurrection, as stated in the Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”
The “world to come” meaning the Kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.
“Spirits” and souls for them were not at all the same things; indeed, I think their hostility to the Spiritualists was based on their belief that the “spirits” with whom mediums communed were demonic.
Still, it is also the case that after my mother’s death, my father struggled to convince himself that her soul was in Heaven. He certainly wanted to believe it, but I know, from a poem he wrote, that he shied away from the practicalities of it.
Perhaps he had never quite resolved the difficulty of believing in Heaven, as the Blesseds’ final destination, and the words of the Creed which he had been intoning since early childhood and which had instilled in him the idea that one way or another - (the Bible, I think, speaks of a “great mystery”) - we shall actually “rise from the grave” even though our bodies be corrupted and eaten by worms.
Not believing any of this, I can afford to stand to one side as the arguments proceed.
(Perhaps, after all, this does have something to do with Biblical Criticism since the Bible should tell us if our souls (or some of them) go to Heaven or whether we (or some us us) are destined for a prolonged existence on Earth after Christ’s Second Coming..)

Paul Baxter

Of course the flip side, as you have alluded to, is the idea or doctrine or speculation about what happens to one immediately after death. Paul seems to indicate spending that time with Jesus in heaven, or something like that, but that was not viewed as the ultimate goal, just a resting place along the way. The parable or Lazarus and the rich man also alludes to this idea, using what I assume was a popular myth of the time to illustrate a point.

Stephen T-B

So is there any Biblical justification for the belief that our souls have the potential of spending an eternity in heaven?

CJD

. . . eternity in heaven?

I don't think there is warrant to suggest it's an eternity. There is reference, however cloudy, as P. Baxter mentioned, to an intermediary state of disembodied souls existing beyond the phenomenal world. But everywhere in the bible, the end-game is far more "earthy" than that. In other words, the entire cosmos—and especially the earth—lies at the center of the inheritance. According to the text, I suspect that eternity will be spent in a tangible reality, not an ethereal fourth dimension.

I imagine this sounds quite silly to those outside of the faith community.

CJD

Paul Baxter

I agree, apart from the phenomenal/noumenal part. I know people here like late dates for things, but I don't think anyone argues that Kant had a part in writing the texts. I would imagine that people in that period would think of the distinction as a locative one rather than a dimensional one.