kimvall

I can't really seems to make the idea of Heaven and Hell coincide with the notion of the second coming of Christ.

See, I always thought that according to orthodox Christian dogma, when you die, you either go to Heaven or Hell (or purgatory), all depending on how you've lived your life. And then you're stuck in that place forever (except for purgatory, I guess), right?

But according to the Books of Revelations, Jesus is supposed to come back, kill the Anti-Christ (and so forth) and the dead shall come back to life (I guess it's only the ones who deserve it) and Jesus is supposed to usher in a whole new age.

But then, some people are already i Heaven... So does Jesus yank them back to Earth and create a new Heaven there?

Are we talking two different postmortem beliefs being merged here? One in Revelations (where you stays dead after death until the Second Coming) and one based on the rest of the NT (right?) where you are send off to Heaven or Hell depending on your actions in life.

Or perhaps I've misunderstood something?

Please enlighten me! :constern01:

- J

Montgomery Scott

I have always been confused on that myself.

Take for instance Lazerus, to whom Jesus brought back from the dead after being in a tomb for several days. Question, where was Lazarus for those three days? Was he in Heaven? If he was in Heaven, I am sure that coming back would of been a drag. If he went to Hell, then he would not be returned at all, or if he did, he would of went insane and told everyone about his experiences. Maybe Lazarus drank too much wine and passed out and simply woke up in a haze four days later.

Jesus on the cross telling one of the other dudes hanging on the cross that before the day ends, you will be with me in Paradise. OK. That's interesting since Jesus died and was in the grave for three days. Where was Jesus during those three days? Was He sleeping, or in hell?

Jesus arose from the dead and defeated Satan. Well, Ok. If Jesus was God, it wasn't much of a trick to arise from a state of nothingness. If the soul never dies, then Jesus was somewhere in the Heavenly Plane. Jesus died for your sins, but he arose from the dead. No duh. Jesus is God, was he supposed to remain dead? Why doesn't God/Jesus give us humans some PROOF of their existance besides faith, which is a shaky belief system.

----------------

Concerning what happens to people after death, I have heard these things growing up in the South and listening to mainly Baptists, basically affirming everything below, even though the beliefs are contrary to each other and does not make much sense.


*I have heard that as soon as one dies, they are consigned to Heaven or Hell in an instant. "Lifting one's eyes, being in torments." No soulsleep, just bam, welcome to hell. The Bible speaks about a rich man who ended up in Hell begging Abraham for a drop of water to cool his tounge, and was denied. So, the Bible states that there are souls in Hell.

*I have heard that there will be a Judgement Day where all people will be personally judged by God. Question, when is Judgement Day? Is it the day you die? After the Rapture? If I am already in Heaven or Hell, then I have alreasy been judged. Is God always judging, or is He waiting for this One Particular Day to open the books and pass sentence? Some might say that to God, 1,000 years is one day, but even with that logic, there would still be more than one Judgement Day.

*I have heard that when Jesus returns for the Rapture, the dead will be raised from the graves. That is contrary to the belief that one goes to heaven or hell immediately. It can be inferred I guess that the "saved" are sleeping in their graves to be awakened by the Trumpet on the Last Days. But then, this is a contridiction, since people like Abraham and the beggar are already in Heaven. The thief on the cross is in Heaven, according to Jesus' promise to him.

The soul will die, the soul never dies, I have heard both.

rizdek

It seems to me one or more predictions of what's to come must not true...more than likely all of it is not true. I'm sure there are some who believe it and resolve it with the "god is outside of time" mantra. So, you know so how we think of things happening in sequence, for god they happen all at once. So, for example, it is true that someone dies and is in hell instantly AND will be judged along with everyone else at judgement day, it all happens instantly and at the same time.

I certainly don't believe that, but I'm sure if you posed this type of question at some pro-christian website (TWEB etc) you'd get some answers like that.

OneInFundieville

Here's what Ehrman writes in God's Problem (or via: amazon.co.uk):

What happens to a belief that is radically disconfirmed by the events of history?

What happened in this instance was that the followers of Jesus transformed his message. In some ways the apocalyptic hope can be understood as a kind of divine time line in which all of history is divided into two periods, this wicked age controlled by the forces of evil and the coming age in which evil will be destroyed and God’s people will rule supreme. When the end did not come as expected, some of Jesus’ followers transformed this temporal dualism (this age versus the age to come) into a spatial dualism, between the world below and the world above. Or put differently, they shifted the horizontal dualism of apocalyptic expectation of life in this age versus life in the age to come (horizontal dualism because it all takes place on this plane, here on earth) into a vertical dualism that spoke instead of life in the lower world versus life in the world above (with an up and down). In other words, out of the ashes of failed apocalyptic expectation there arose the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell.

Another interesting perspective on this comes from N.T. Wright, principally his book Surprised by Hope (or via: amazon.co.uk).

The following is from a Publisher's Weekly review:

Wright, one of the greatest, and certainly most prolific, Bible scholars in the world, will touch a nerve with this book. What happens when we die? How should we think about heaven, hell, purgatory and eternal life? Wright critiques the views of heaven that have become regnant in Western culture, especially the assumption of the continuance of the soul after death in a sort of blissful non-bodily existence. This is simply not Christian teaching, Wright insists.

To your question, "But then, some people are already i Heaven... So does Jesus yank them back to Earth and create a new Heaven there?," Bp Wright more or less replies with, "yes."

In line with what both Ehrman and Wright point out, "orthodox" beliefs seem to have significantly morphed over time.

See, for instance, what many of the early Church Fathers had to say on the Resurrection of the Body:

http://www.catholic.com/library/Resu...f_the_Body.asp

Beliefs seem to have drifted significantly on this one away from what the Creeds might have originally meant to more dualistic and Platonic beliefs about the after life that certainly don't have their seeds in the texts of ancient Judaism or even likely those of the apocalypticist Jesus of Nazareth or his contemporaries.

It seems there are multiple and varying traditions of belief at play here, even within the canonical authors, and for anyone to come up with a systematic theology they need to appeal to one at the exclusion of the others. That said, it seems historically most believers have approached these things with their own metaphysical presuppositions of their day and age rather than taking on the authors' historical beliefs.

Personally I find the mythical symbolisms, by author, more interesting than trying to rationalize systematically.

Self-Mutation

Do not trust the Book of Revelation. The Anti-Christ is not real. We have people in existence today that think Obama is the Anti-Christ and he is a secret Muslim and will take over our country.

The book is not literal. We, the people as a whole, are the Anti-Christ because we disobey God and simply don't care. When fellow Americans think our own President is the Anti-Christ and would rather badmouth him than stick up for him, we abandoned the godly principle of sticking together for the better.

jaguar

the moment you reject one word of the Bible is the moment you reject all of Christianity.

Sheshbazzar

There are many Christian denominations that either outright reject, discount, or 'reinterpret' a good many words of the Bible to hold to their own peculiar forms of Christianity.
The hard part would be to find any Christian that beyond the paying of 'lip service' to Bible accuracy, actually does accept what the Bible says literal word by word.
As the Books DO contain many contradictory statements, 'explanations', and apologetics abound.

kimvall

Thank you for all your input. It seems that I perhaps on the right track with the two different postmortem notions (at least that they're somewhat incompatible, yet attempts have been made to join the two).

Failte

I love this. It reduces the number of 'christians' to a bare handful.

So are the remaining 1 billion or so christians now apostates? What an amazingly arrogant belief.

rizdek

The only coherent position from christianity's perspective is jaguar's. Since one of the pillars of christianity is that humans are fallible, due to the fall of AnE, our ability to figure things out...like the bible and what it means...is fallible and the only correct thing to do is accept the entire word of god as it is presented in the bible. J is right, the moment you start inserting your own interpretation, excluding some things and accepting others as having more importance is when you open the door to agnosticism and atheism...it's just one step away. That would be my message to SM as well.

Of course, I am coming from the other view point. I'm not christian. I don't believe the bible in any way portrays a god or god's actions. Jesus, if any such person existed, wasn't a god. Revelations is the rantings of an insane person. Most of the NT is ramblings of well read philosophers who regurgitated things they had read and put sayings in the mouths of either made up people or people who they diefied/glorified.