What about the BC's

filbert the fox

Christianity is only 2000 years' old. Mankind is around say 150,000 years. There's a lot of people who died BC.

Will we expect that they get a free pass to heaven or where did their souls end up?

Peregrinus

Mainstream Christian belief is, and always has been, that they too are saved by the sacrifice of Christ.

Google "Harrowing of Hell" and you'll find loads of artistic representations of Christ preaching salvation to the souls of the righteous deceased. The idea turns up in the Apostle's Creed which say that, after being crucified and before rising again, Christ "descended to the dead" or "descended into hell", which is understood to have been for the purpose of bringing salvation.

filbert the fox

Peregrinus wrote: »

Mainstream Christian belief is, and always has been, that they too are saved by the sacrifice of Christ.

Google "Harrowing of Hell" and you'll find loads of artistic representations of Christ preaching salvation to the souls of the righteous deceased. The idea turns up in the Apostle's Creed which say that, after being crucified and before rising again, Christ "descended to the dead" or "descended into hell", which is understood to have been for the purpose of bringing salvation.

So what you're saying is that some of these poor souls were in hell for 148,033 years? Just because they were "unaware" of Christianity?

Peregrinus

filbert the fox wrote: »

So what you're saying is that some of these poor souls were in hell for 148,033 years? Just because they were "unaware" of Christianity?

No, I'm not saying that.

Couple of misconceptions here. First of all, in the Christian view time is an earthly construct. It has no meaning as regards heaven or hell, so it's meaningless to speak of anyone being in hell for a length of time, or at a particular time.

Secondly, "hell" here isn't the business with the lakes of fire and the devils and the pitchforks and whatnot; it's the condition of being cut off from God by the fallen nature of humanity, and there being nothing you can do about it.

So the point here is not that the righteous who died before Christ were punished anyway, despite their righteousness, until Christ died too; it's that the whole of humanity is affected by the Fall and that the sacrifice of Christ is effective for the whole of humanity.

filbert the fox

Peregrinus wrote: »

No, I'm not saying that.

Couple of misconceptions here. First of all, in the Christian view time is an earthly construct. It has no meaning as regards heaven or hell, so it's meaningless to speak of anyone being in hell for a length of time, or at a particular time.

Secondly, "hell" here isn't the business with the lakes of fire and the devils and the pitchforks and whatnot; it's the condition of being cut off from God by the fallen nature of humanity, and there being nothing you can do about it.

So the point here is not that the righteous who died before Christ were punished anyway, despite their righteousness, until Christ died too; it's that the whole of humanity is affected by the Fall and that the sacrifice of Christ is effective for the whole of humanity.

Is eternity not some sort of time concept?
And Hell is useless if there's no concept of time. Sure you would be in Goldfish territory then.

Peregrinus

filbert the fox wrote: »

Is eternity not some sort of time concept?

No. Eternity is more like the absence of time.

filbert the fox wrote: »

And Hell is useless if there's no concept of time. Sure you would be in Goldfish territory then.

We're into brain-aching metaphysics here, but time is the measure of the rate at which things change. In an unchanging state there is no time.

Leave religion and philosophy aside for a moment. The standard response of cosmologists to the question "what was there before the Big Bang?" is that time (like every other aspect of our universe) originated with the Big Bang. Therefore there was no "before the Big Bang"; the words do not mean anything.

Right. Even in a purely naturalistic account of reality time is a limited and temporary (Ha! See what I did there!) phenomenon which is only relevant to certain conditions. Then if you add supernatural concepts like "heaven" and "hell" and even "God" you can see that time definitely has no meaning with respect to them. They fall completely outside the conditions that must be satisfied before we can speak of time, if only because any reality they may have does not originate with the Big Bang.

filbert the fox

Hang on , I thought that Christians believed in the bible description that God made the earth. No big bang in Scripture.

Anyway, it appears that only the righteous were redeemed by the soul of Christ when Jesus was dead.in the tomb . To Hell with the others who didn't know the criteria so they suffer. for eternity(my idea of a very very long time). So unfair - I'd be really pissed off if i was sent off in a match for doing something i didn't know was illegal. And there were no guidelines to start with.

Did heaven exist before Christ came down from it? (sic)

I have just read that supposedly everyone BC went to Hell or the underworld when they died and that there was an impenetrable wall between the Righteous and well the others.
Really? How is this explained if heaven was already there?
So many questions for a Friday night!

branie2

Very deep stuff here

filbert the fox

branie2 wrote: »

Very deep stuff here

Any thoughts?

I'm curious as to Religious belief/thinking that a lot of people are happy with but I'm not.

branie2

I believe that AD meant years going forward after Jesus was born

Fourier

filbert the fox wrote: »

Hang on , I thought that Christians believed in the bible description that God made the earth. No big bang in Scripture.

He's making an analogy with cosmology, i.e. even naturally there are things to which time doesn't apply, so it is with God and Heaven etc.

Whether one accepts the Big Bang into a Christian account is besides the point.

Anyway, it appears that only the righteous were redeemed by the soul of Christ when Jesus was dead.in the tomb . To Hell with the others who didn't know the criteria so they suffer

Peregrinus's point is that Christ preached to the dead during the harrowing, so none were unaware of the criteria or choices available to them.

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

We're into brain-aching metaphysics here, but time is the measure of the rate at which things change. In an unchanging state there is no time.

True, but time also orders the sequence in which events occur. Without time, you can't have a sequence of events. Any domain without time by definition is static without possibility of before or after, cause or effect, thought or action. Notionally, I would have thought that heaven and hell require a time line, albeit a different one from our own. So for example, the war in heaven is described as a sequence of events therefore heaven must have happened at a time.

antiskeptic

filbert the fox wrote: »

Christianity is only 2000 years' old. Mankind is around say 150,000 years. There's a lot of people who died BC.

Will we expect that they get a free pass to heaven or where did their souls end up?

Abraham's case is given a model of the way of salvation. He is referred to as "the father of the the faith", in that his line connects to Jesus, in whom this mechanism of salvation is centred.

Abraham lived long before Christ or his gospel, yet he was saved by the same mechanism as those who would be saved after Christ came: believing what God said God, or more pointedly, trusting in God.

The essential mechanism of salvation was available before Christ. God communicates with man and man either does or doesn't believe God and is or isn't declared righteous on account of his decision. Christ's coming, whilst it enabled the mechanism (back and forward in time) isn't relevant to the availability of the mechanism. The mechanism was always available, from the moment Adam fell, we might suppose.

The difference post-Christ, is that we understand the workings of the mechanism better. But whether we understand or don't understand the mechanism of an internal combustion engine doesn't alter its ability to carry us from A to B.

Where the saved are (whether before or after Christ) I don't know. But saved by the same mechanism I consider them to be.

Okaham's Razor and all that.

filbert the fox

antiskeptic wrote: »

Abraham's case is given a model of the way of salvation. He is referred to as "the father of the the faith", in that his line connects to Jesus, in whom this mechanism of salvation is centred.

Abraham lived long before Christ or his gospel, yet he was saved by the same mechanism as those who would be saved after Christ came: believing what God said God, or more pointedly, trusting in God.

The essential mechanism of salvation was available before Christ. God communicates with man and man either does or doesn't believe God and is or isn't declared righteous on account of his decision. Christ's coming, whilst it enabled the mechanism (back and forward in time) isn't relevant to the availability of the mechanism. The mechanism was always available, from the moment Adam fell, we might suppose.

The difference post-Christ, is that we understand the workings of the mechanism better. But whether we understand or don't understand the mechanism of an internal combustion engine doesn't alter its ability to carry us from A to B.

Where the saved are (whether before or after Christ) I don't know. But saved by the same mechanism I consider them to be.

Okaham's Razor and all that.

Some of us are pre destined to be non accepting of the word of others. it's in our nature.
That should not decide our final destiny.

The Sun was for the most part God in the early days of mankind. It made sense then and it makes sense now.
Nothing exists without the Sun.

But whether we understand or don't understand the mechanism of an internal combustion engine doesn't alter its ability to carry us from A to B.

Yes agreed but there are those of us who need to know.

antiskeptic

filbert the fox wrote: »

Some of us are pre destined to be non accepting of the word of others. it's in our nature.
That should not decide our final destiny.

Not to sure if you're referring to Calvinism (predestined not to believe). In which case, I don't hold to Calvinism

If it's not accepting my word that such and such is the case, then fine. The working of the mechanism of salvation (if it indeed works this way) doesn't depend on your accepting what I say.

Yes agreed but there are those of us who need to know.

Need to know or what? The mechanism won't work without that need being fulfilled? Hardly, so long as the mechanism's working doesn't depend on your needing to know how it works. That's the mechanism's business, not yours. In other words, you are subject to the mechanism and it's workings - which may or may not involve you needing to know how it works.

Peregrinus

filbert the fox wrote: »

Hang on , I thought that Christians believed in the bible description that God made the earth.

And everything else. God created all things that exist.

filbert the fox wrote: »

No big bang in Scripture.

Not a problem, unless you are a biblical literalist, which is only a minority of Christian. Most Christians don’t have any problem understanding the Big Bang as an aspect of creation.

filbert the fox wrote: »

Anyway, it appears that only the righteous were redeemed by the soul of Christ when Jesus was dead.in the tomb . To Hell with the others who didn't know the criteria so they suffer. for eternity(my idea of a very very long time). So unfair - I'd be really pissed off if i was sent off in a match for doing something i didn't know was illegal. And there were no guidelines to start with.

Not unreasonably pissed off, I think.

But, in the Christian conception, God is just. Therefore, God doesn’t behave like this. “Unrighteous” is not the same as “unaware”. It’s wrong to say that “there were no guidelines to start with”; in the Christian view one of the characteristics of humanity is a sense of right and wrong; moral reflection and moral judgments are open to everyone, and they don’t require any special or supernatural revelation. As antiskeptic points out, scripture is full of stories of people who made moral discernments and moral judgments before any moral “commandments” were given. In the Christian view, things are not right or wrong because there are commandments enjoining or prohibiting them; rather, the commandments enjoin or prohibit them because they are right or wrong.

filbert the fox wrote: »

Did heaven exist before Christ came down from it? (sic)

Put in those terms, logically, it must have done; he could hardly have “come down from it” if it didn’t exist to come down from.

filbert the fox wrote: »

I have just read that supposedly everyone BC went to Hell or the underworld when they died and that there was an impenetrable wall between the Righteous and well the others.
Really? How is this explained if heaven was already there?
So many questions for a Friday night!

The Fall. The idea is that human nature became corrupted, and this cut humans off from God. Since heaven is the condition of being with God, no fallen human could be in heaven. The Fall was redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ. Thus someone who died before Christ couldn’t be said (from the perspective of someone alive at that time) to be in heaven, since the redemption had not yet happened. If they weren’t with God, they were cut off from God, which is the definition of Hell. So, they were in Hell, but not in the punitive Hell of the unrighteous. Hence the metaphor of the wall dividing Hell.

This is all metaphorical language, since we have no language to describe the reality of the situation, which is beyond our experience. Plus, it describes affairs from out time-bound perspective, not from the perspective of those actually involved which, as already noted, is timeless.

smacl wrote: »

True, but time also orders the sequence in which events occur. Without time, you can't have a sequence of events. Any domain without time by definition is static without possibility of before or after, cause or effect, thought or action. Notionally, I would have thought that heaven and hell require a time line, albeit a different one from our own. So for example, the war in heaven is described as a sequence of events therefore heaven must have happened at a time.

The war in heaven (which, NB, is not scriptural) is also metaphorical. The theologians will tell you that Satan’s non serviam was an immediate and instant state; not an event; still less a sequence of events.

Infernal Racket

You die, you're put in the ground or you're burnt to ash. The end

filbert the fox

Gerry G wrote: »

You die, you're put in the ground or you're burnt to ash. The end

Thank goodness for some straight talk. Pity that 2.19 Billion people don't agree.

However my original post was about the 150,000 years before Christ and the options for the living and the dead and the explanation of their fate.

filbert the fox

Most Christians don’t have any problem understanding the Big Bang as an aspect of creation.

Of the 2.19 Billion on earth how many have you asked?

Peregrinus

Well, how many have you asked?

Biblical literalism as regard creationism is in fact a modern phenomenon; it emerges in the US in the early nineteenth century and, ironically, it's a distinctively "modern" approach to religion, in the sense that it requires a modern mindset in which the highest, most authentic readinig of a text is to read it as an objective and literal account of reality.

In pre-modern days, this wasn't an issue, as least as regards the creation of the earth. Most Jews and Christians probably did accept the Genesis account as a statement of how the world came into being, mainly because there was no rival alternative account that they took seriously. But they wouldn't have regarded this as a badge of authenticity or orthodoxy and in relationt to other matters, where scientific observation did contradict a literalist reading of scripture, they had no difficulty accepting the scientific version.

For example, scripture indicates that the earth is flat (and, indeed, that it has corners). But educated people have known since the time of the ancient Greeks that it is round - this knowledge certainly predates Christianity. And this was never an issue in the first 1500 years of Christianity - we have no records at all of anybody being criticised or condemned for believing the earth to be round. On the contrary, we have St. Augustine pointing out that, although scripture appears to say that the earth is flat, it is in fact round, and drawing conclusions from this about how scripture needs to be read, and about the stupidity of attempting to read it as a geographical treatise.

Right. Skip forward to the early modern era, and to Galileo, who gets into fierce trouble for teaching that the earth goes around the sun, rather than the other way around, as scripture suggests it does. But a large part of the reason why he gets into trouble is because he not only teaches this, but ridicules attempts to defend the earth-centric view that are being promoted by powerful churchmen (including the pope of the day). The churchmen are doing this because, in keeping with the spirit of the day, they are attempting to read scripture as an objective scientific text, and to defend that reading. And it's really Galileo's head-on challenge to these churchmen that gets him into trouble; others who promote the heliocentric view, but don't attempt to draw religious or theological conclusions from it about the reading of scripture, are left unmolested.

The next big conflict comes along a couple of hundred years later, when scientific evidence challenges the view that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. The Catholics, having learned something from their encounter with Galileo, largely stay out of this; biblical literalist creationism is mainly a protestant phenomenon and, even then, is mainly an American one, or at least originates in and is strongest in the US, which is noted for developing forms of religion marked by the modern mindset.

What we also get from the US in the nineteenth century, interestingly enough, is the atheist myth that the church for a long time taught on scriptural grounds that the world was flat, and punished those who taught otherwise. This is complete fiction; there isn't a word of truth it it, but it became widely accepted (and still hasn't entirely died out) because it depends on modern assumptions about what texts mean and how they should be read. In this mindset, if the bible referred to a flat earth, then Christians must have believed that the earth was flat and must have taught this as a matter of faith, because their entire belief system must otherwise collapse. But the theory overlooks the fact that, for most of history, Christians didn't have this mindset; it hadn't been invented.

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

The war in heaven (which, NB, is not scriptural) is also metaphorical. The theologians will tell you that Satan’s non serviam was an immediate and instant state; not an event; still less a sequence of events.

Hmmm, still rather confused. If heaven doesn't have anything analogous to sequential time or sequenced events how can God have created the universe? From a heavenly perspective, surely it must always have been there and remain so, or have been created, where the words have and been require time. Is there no order (as in sequence) in Christian belief outside of our own universe? So for example, when one dies and goes to heaven, while you perhaps join your loved ones, you don't actually get to meet or interact with them as these are actions that demand sequential time.

antiskeptic

Peregrinus wrote: »

And everything else. God created all things that exist.


Not a problem, unless you are a biblical literalist, which is only a minority of Christian. Most Christians don’t have any problem understanding the Big Bang as an aspect of creation.


Not unreasonably pissed off, I think.

But, in the Christian conception, God is just. Therefore, God doesn’t behave like this. “Unrighteous” is not the same as “unaware”. It’s wrong to say that “there were no guidelines to start with”; in the Christian view one of the characteristics of humanity is a sense of right and wrong; moral reflection and moral judgments are open to everyone, and they don’t require any special or supernatural revelation. As antiskeptic points out, scripture is full of stories of people who made moral discernments and moral judgments before any moral “commandments” were given. In the Christian view, things are not right or wrong because there are commandments enjoining or prohibiting them; rather, the commandments enjoin or prohibit them because they are right or wrong.


Put in those terms, logically, it must have done; he could hardly have “come down from it” if it didn’t exist to come down from.


The Fall. The idea is that human nature became corrupted, and this cut humans off from God. Since heaven is the condition of being with God, no fallen human could be in heaven. The Fall was redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ. Thus someone who died before Christ couldn’t be said (from the perspective of someone alive at that time) to be in heaven, since the redemption had not yet happened. If they weren’t with God, they were cut off from God, which is the definition of Hell. So, they were in Hell, but not in the punitive Hell of the unrighteous. Hence the metaphor of the wall dividing Hell.

This is all metaphorical language, since we have no language to describe the reality of the situation, which is beyond our experience. Plus, it describes affairs from out time-bound perspective, not from the perspective of those actually involved which, as already noted, is timeless.


The war in heaven (which, NB, is not scriptural) is also metaphorical. The theologians will tell you that Satan’s non serviam was an immediate and instant state; not an event; still less a sequence of events.

Two things I would add.

The first would be to examine the idea that salvation / not salvation is centred on and confined to straightforward morality - which, as you say, is something accessible by all.

Abraham, it seems, occupied a position of desparation relating to the lack of an heir. That lack might not matter to all people did seem to matter greatly to him. Each has his own personal entry to desparation. The sick or the bereaved, oft documented in scripture, are too in a position of desparation.

Desparation, whether brought about by the lack of heir, sickness, bereavement, addiction and of course, straightforward moral corruption seems to lie at the very nub of a person turning to God.

This desparation is always rooted in a reliance on self rather than on God. The man who relies on God is content in every situtation, the lack of heir, for example, might matter still but not unto desparation.

It can be said that reliance on self is a moral issue: a person is breaking the first commandment. But I just wanted to draw the distinction: desparation, not classic morality, seems to be the pointiest end of the mode of salvation.

-

I would think we have some language to describe Hell, if Hell is where God isn't. We know enough about selfishness, spite, envy, greed to know what God-absence tastes like. If we project those things onto an environment were there are only those things we might begin to approach the environment of Hell. I would only supposing adding the inability to actually action such horrible traits in completing the picture of agony. Selfish by desire, but constrained (bound up) from actioning that desire.

It would be as agonising as loving but being constrained from expressing that love to towards the beloved. One only has to imagine not being able to express love towards a much loved child in order to know something of the agony rendered by being bound.

Peregrinus

smacl wrote: »

Hmmm, still rather confused. If heaven doesn't have anything analogous to sequential time or sequenced events how can God have created the universe? From a heavenly perspective, surely it must always have been there and remain so, or have been created, where the words have and been require time. Is there no order (as in sequence) in Christian belief outside of our own universe? So for example, when one dies and goes to heaven, while you perhaps join your loved ones, you don't actually get to meet or interact with them as these are actions that demand sequential time.

From our perspective, the universe was created, or the big bang occurred, at a point in time - e.g. we calculate that the big bang occurred about 13 billion years ago, or that a Genesis-like creation occurred around 6,000 years ago, etc. But the time within which we locate this point itself originated at that point; regardless of whether you’re uantum physicist or a biblical literalist or anything in between, from a perspective outside the universe we cannot date the origin of the universe or locate it in a sequential order of events.

Is it possible that our universe arose within another universe - let’s call it a metauniverse - which has its own “time”, or something analogous to time, and that the origin of our universe could be placed within the “time” of the metauniverse? Well. both the creationist and the quantum physicist will say that we can’t say not, simply because we can’t say anything meaningful about that metauniverse - for the creationist, because it’s beyond our experience and we have no language that can meaningfully speak of it and, for the quantum physicist, because no information can pass from the metauniverse to our universe. And, just to make your head hurt a bit more, the creationist would argue that, if there were such a metauniverse, it too would be a created thing (since God is the creator or all things other than himself) and likewise its “time” would be a created thing with a definite origin, and we’re back at the same conundrum.

When you go to heaven, in Christian thinking, do you get to “meet or interact” with your loved ones? Well. that’s the way we tend to imagine it, since what we can imagine is necessarily shaped and constrained by our experience of the universe we of which we are a part. But, logically, if heaven is timeless, then there are no meetings or interactions, as you point out. We’re with them, but that’s not necessarily the same thing. What’s that like? We can have no idea.

Peregrinus

antiskeptic wrote: »

. . . I would think we have some language to describe Hell, if Hell is where God isn't. We know enough about selfishness, spite, envy, greed to know what God-absence tastes like. If we project those things onto an environment were there are only those things we might begin to approach the environment of Hell. I would only supposing adding the inability to actually action such horrible traits in completing the picture of agony. Selfish by desire, but constrained (bound up) from actioning that desire.

It would be as agonising as loving but being constrained from expressing that love to towards the beloved. One only has to imagine not being able to express love towards a much loved child in order to know something of the agony rendered by being bound.

We do have language to talk about hell - and about heaven - but since it's language rooted in our own experience it is necessarily inadequate. Aquinas would say that everything we say about God (and heaven, and hell) is necessarily metaphorical; we simply have no language to say anything directly about such things. And if it's not Aquinas it's some other theologian of the period who argued that a necessary element of the pain of hell is a full awareness of God and of heaven - those in hell have been shown heaven, and therefore know what they have lost, whereas we don't have that revelation or that knowledge.

(As to your point about desperation, thanks for this. I don't have any immediate response to it, but it does give me much to think about.)

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

When you go to heaven, in Christian thinking, do you get to “meet or interact” with your loved ones? Well. that’s the way we tend to imagine it, since what we can imagine is necessarily shaped and constrained by our experience of the universe we of which we are a part. But, logically, if heaven is timeless, then there are no meetings or interactions, as you point out. We’re with them, but that’s not necessarily the same thing. What’s that like? We can have no idea.

Thanks P. Timelessness is something I struggle to conceptualise as ever being part of first hand, no doubt because my notion of subjective existence demands time in which to think where thought is a sequential process. Without thought, we lose subjective existence, which in turn makes heaven (to my mind) no different from this poor atheist's notion of death being the termination of self. My understand, which could well be a misunderstanding, was that most Christians took heaven, and hell for that matter, to constitute the continuation of self in some form or another beyond death.

Peregrinus

smacl wrote: »

Thanks P. Timelessness is something I struggle to conceptualise as ever being part of first hand, no doubt because my notion of subjective existence demands time in which to think where thought is a sequential process. Without thought, we lose subjective existence, which in turn makes heaven (to my mind) no different from this poor atheist's notion of death being the termination of self. My understand, which could well be a misunderstanding, was that most Christians took heaven, and hell for that matter, to constitute the continuation of self in some form or another beyond death.

Most do, but a lot gets wrapped up in those words "in some form". For a lot of people, "in some form" means in a form quite like this form, but without such negative experiences as pain, death, squalor, misery, loss, shame, boredom, etc. It's fair to say that this line of thinking focusses on all the bad stuff we won't have in heaven, leading to an implicit assumption that what we will have will be a lot like the better bits of what we have now. This is where images of heaven as a golden city or paradise as a perfect garden are coming from.

At the other extreme, we have those for whom "in some form" means "in some form that we cannot possibly imagine, since it is utterly unlike anything we have ever experienced or observed". And this tends to default to "we don't think too much about this, because what would be the point? Whatever we might imagine would be wrong."

Also relevant here is the fact that the afterlife - heaven, hell or anything in between - wasn't (and indeed still isn't) a major preoccupation of the Jewish religion from which Christianity emerged. For a long time the Jews didn't believe in an afterlife at all. By the time of Jesus the idea had entered Judaism and was widely accepted, but the notion of an afterlife wasn't very well defined and not much emphasis was placed on it - whatever the point of life is in Jewish thought, it certainly isn't "getting to heaven".

Which means, of course, that there's very little about heaven or hell in the scriptures - nothing at all in most of the Old Testament, and very little in the later books of the Old Testament or in any of the books of the New Testament. Which in turn means as the Christians developed their thinking about this, they were on the one hand largely unconstrained, but on the other hand largely unguided, by scripture or by their Jewish heritage.

So Christian ideas about the afterlife mainly emerge from Christian reflections about (a) resurrection (which, remember, is promised to everyone, not just Christ), (b) salvation and (c) incarnation (in so far as this provides a way of thinking about an intersection between the limited, timebound material existence that we have and the transcendent supernatural reality of God). And since those are each fairly mindbending concepts on their own, they tend not to lead to any very specific or concrete notion of heaven or hell.

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

So Christian ideas about the afterlife mainly emerge from Christian reflections about (a) resurrection (which, remember, is promised to everyone, not just Christ), (b) salvation and (c) incarnation (in so far as this provides a way of thinking about an intersection between the limited, timebound material existence that we have and the transcendent supernatural reality of God). And since those are each fairly mindbending concepts on their own, they tend not to lead to any very specific or concrete notion of heaven or hell.

But surely incarnation would require a heaven that has something analogous to time, on the basis that incarnate flesh can move and movement requires time. I'm thinking of this in comparison to traditions such as pantheism where heaven and God is the universe which includes time. The idea of not being able imagine these things is entirely reasonable given that we're comparatively infinitesimal in the universe and smaller still if you consider domains beyond that. What strikes me as unusual is that if God created this universe, why do it with at least one more dimension than heaven, i.e. time?

antiskeptic

Peregrinus wrote: »

From our perspective, the universe was created, or the big bang occurred, at a point in time - e.g. we calculate that the big bang occurred about 13 billion years ago, or that a Genesis-like creation occurred around 6,000 years ago, etc. But the time within which we locate this point itself originated at that point; regardless of whether you’re uantum physicist or a biblical literalist or anything in between, from a perspective outside the universe we cannot date the origin of the universe or locate it in a sequential order of events.

Is it possible that our universe arose within another universe - let’s call it a metauniverse - which has its own “time”, or something analogous to time, and that the origin of our universe could be placed within the “time” of the metauniverse? Well. both the creationist and the quantum physicist will say that we can’t say not, simply because we can’t say anything meaningful about that metauniverse - for the creationist, because it’s beyond our experience and we have no language that can meaningfully speak of it and, for the quantum physicist, because no information can pass from the metauniverse to our universe. And, just to make your head hurt a bit more, the creationist would argue that, if there were such a metauniverse, it too would be a created thing (since God is the creator or all things other than himself) and likewise its “time” would be a created thing with a definite origin, and we’re back at the same conundrum.

When you go to heaven, in Christian thinking, do you get to “meet or interact” with your loved ones? Well. that’s the way we tend to imagine it, since what we can imagine is necessarily shaped and constrained by our experience of the universe we of which we are a part. But, logically, if heaven is timeless, then there are no meetings or interactions, as you point out. We’re with them, but that’s not necessarily the same thing. What’s that like? We can have no idea.

What if there is a new heaven and a new earth in which dwelleth only righteousness? The idea being that we return to a perfect earth and that God walks with us there. Its not that no eye has seen (in the sense that we have absolutely no idea at all as to the environment) but that such an earth (in which dwelleth only righteousness) is beyond our ability to comprehend, surrounded without and within, as we are, by both righteousness and unrighteousness.

We have now the language and experience to be able to know something of the flavour (through a glass darkly) even if that be utterly confounded by the scale of the actual experience.

I'm reminded of a hike I was on on which a youngster tired and I carried him on my shoulders for miles. Initially I felt the weight but after a while I got used to it, the way an overweight person presumably gets used to carrying that excess. It's analogous to the weight of our falleness, that weight. We know its there but get used to it.

I knew I was carrying extra weight. I knew a time was coming when that weight would be removed (at the end of the hike). Nothing though, could have prepared me for the utter feeling of lightness experienced when finally I put the kid down. I felt like I was floating over the ground. My mind had an idea of what was to come, but couldn't really conceive of what it would be like when the weight was finally removed.

My sense is that heaven (the new earth in fact) will be like this. Much will be recognisable and can be envisoned now. We can have an idea of say, love unfettered (since there are areas where we are less fettered in this life, say, the love of our children). What will be the surprise, what no mind can conceive of, isn't that what we will experience is utterly foreign, but like that removed weight, it is the sheer scale of the unburdening that will produce the surprise and joy - as it did me that hiking day.

antiskeptic

I wonder too, where the idea that 'heaven' (that place we go and experience unfettered God(liness) which I think will be a restored earth) will involve timelessness.

God might occupy a timelessness. For him a day is like a thousand years.

But need that be our heavenly experience? We won't be God afterall.

smacl

antiskeptic wrote: »

I wonder too, where the idea that 'heaven' (that place we go and experience unfettered God(liness) which I think will be a restored earth) will involve timelessness.

God might occupy a timelessness. For him a day is like a thousand years.

But need that be our heavenly experience? We won't be God afterall.

Even a day like a thousand years isn't timelessness, more like an instant being all of eternity. I struggle to imagine a notion of timelessness, as opposed to say time travel, that isn't entirely static. How do you join an omnipresence that covers all of time and space and yet also be part of a distinct space-time continuum?

antiskeptic

smacl wrote: »

Even a day like a thousand years isn't timelessness, more like an instant being all of eternity. I struggle to imagine a notion of timelessness, as opposed to say time travel, that isn't entirely static. How do you join an omnipresence that covers all of time and space and yet also be part of a distinct space-time continuum?

Since I can engage with him now (though he timeless and me timebound) I don't see any issue with that situation carrying on 'in heaven'. He continues to be as he is. And so do I, even if somewhat ++-ed.

I wouldn't sweat timelessness. If the heaven-bound entered that realm it would merely be a fringe thing, some kind of means to an end. The end is love, joy, rightness, contentment with God and others.

Peregrinus

smacl wrote: »

But surely incarnation would require a heaven that has something analogous to time, on the basis that incarnate flesh can move and movement requires time. I'm thinking of this in comparison to traditions such as pantheism where heaven and God is the universe which includes time. The idea of not being able imagine these things is entirely reasonable given that we're comparatively infinitesimal in the universe and smaller still if you consider domains beyond that. What strikes me as unusual is that if God created this universe, why do it with at least one more dimension than heaven, i.e. time?

The incarnation happens in our universe, rather than in heaven, so it involves the incarnate God being subject to the time of our universe. The incarnation happens at a specific time and place.

The question of why God would create a universe “with one more dimension than heaven” implies that you see time as an expansion or enhancement of the universe, whereas it’s more usually seen as a limitation. The fact that we can only move in one direction through time accounts for why we can no longer experience the past, nor be aware of the future. If we were not time-bound, all things would be immediately present to us, as they are to God.

So, yeah, incarnation involves God making himself time-bound, just as it involves him accepting all the other limitations of the fallen human condition. But since we conceive of heaven as a place for redeemed, perfected humans, it makes sense to imagine those in heaven not being time-bound, even if we can’t really imagine what that might actually be like.

antiskeptic wrote: »

What if there is a new heaven and a new earth in which dwelleth only righteousness? The idea being that we return to a perfect earth and that God walks with us there. Its not that no eye has seen (in the sense that we have absolutely no idea at all as to the environment) but that such an earth (in which dwelleth only righteousness) is beyond our ability to comprehend, surrounded without and within, as we are, by both righteousness and unrighteousness. . .

This brings up - for me, at any rate - a mystery separate from the question of whether there is time in heaven. In the Christian view, we are creatures of both matter and spirit; we are not spiritual creatures temporarily hampered by a mortal body, which will pass. The redeemed human is a material being as well as a spiritual one; we are, after all, promised the resurrection of the body. Which means that heaven is a material as well as a spiritual reality. You can think of it - we mostly do think of it - as a perfected version of the Earth that we now inhabit, but that is necessarily speculative. And it’s hard for us to imagine living in a way that is in any way meaningfully analogous to our current earthly existence, and yet is not time-bound.

Take the story you tell of going on a hike; hiking involves going from A to B over a period of time. Central to the experience of a hike is that at the start you are at A but not at B; a certain time later you are at B but not at A; and during the intervening time you have had a gradual unfolding of locations and experiences and awarenesses. None of this could happen in a world without time. In a world without time you are always at A and always at B and always at every point in between, and always experiencing together every experience that, when experienced in sequence, made up the hike.

Or, take the simpler experience of spending time with someone you love. In a world without time, you can’t do that.

Of course, we can imagine that a world without time opens up possibilities that completely eclipse any need for going on hikes or spending time with loved ones, and supply all the fulfilment and satisfaction and enrichment and flourishing etc that we seek through these mundane, timebound, limited experiences. We just can’t really picture what that’s like.

Which brings us to smacl’s problem:

smacl wrote: »

I struggle to imagine a notion of timelessness, as opposed to say time travel, that isn't entirely static.

The medieval answer - or, at least a medieval answer - is that in heaven we are eternally in the presence of God, contemplating the face of God, and this is completely fulfilling and satisfying. And you’ll have seen those medieval paintings and frescoes depicting heaven as concentric circles of angels, archangels, apostles, prophets, saints, etc. all looking into a central point where God is represented. And it’s because this might seem a bit, um, sterile and/or unattainable that this image of heaven is perhaps less common in the later artistic tradition, and recedes a bit in the popular imagination.

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

The medieval answer - or, at least a medieval answer - is that in heaven we are eternally in the presence of God, contemplating the face of God, and this is completely fulfilling and satisfying. And you’ll have seen those medieval paintings and frescoes depicting heaven as concentric circles of angels, archangels, apostles, prophets, saints, etc. all looking into a central point where God is represented. And it’s because this might seem a bit, um, sterile and/or unattainable that this image of heaven is perhaps less common in the later artistic tradition, and recedes a bit in the popular imagination.

Thanks again P. Looking for some examples of this I still don't see a notion of timelessness though. e.g. in the picture below (source) we see an arrangement close to your description but a number of the apostles seem to be talking among themselves.



Not a bad opinion piece on the notions of heaven over time here. I do rather like The Last Judgement (1425-30) by Fra Angelico linked in the article, where you can see the start of a transition to a more interactive heaven such as Bosch's. I suspect that most of today's Christians think of heaven more like the latter.

Peregrinus

Didn't mean to suggest that the medieval artists were explicitly or consciously promoting the notion of a timeless heaven; just that they depicted a heaven, the main characteristic of which was endless contemplation of (an unchanging) God. As for characters in heaven being depicted as talking to one another, or otherwise in a relationship with one another, I think the medieval mind would have seen this contemplation of God as a collective contemplation rather than a multitude of invididual contemplations - the communion of saints, and all that. So there's no tension between characters in heaven talkign to one another while participating in the beatific vision. An individualistic approach to religion (indeed, individualism more generally) is I think one of the hallmarks of the modern era.

The Newsweek article is interesting; thanks for the link. One aspect of this that occurs to me is the thought that we need to bear in mind, as the modern era progresses, the declining influence of the church in intellectual, artistic and cultural life. Heaven as a literary or artistic concept becomes less and less conformable to the official teaching of, or the dominant theological currents in, the churches. But of course art and literature will certainly influence popular conceptions of heaven and hell, so there may be a growing gap between "official" teaching on the subject and what ordinary Christians believe or absorb or imagine. I think it's trite to observe that popular conceptions of hell owe a great deal more to Dante and Milton and Dürer than they do to any pope, bishop or theologian, and something similar same is probably true of heaven as well.