Gabriel Fackre

Everlasting Death?

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:27:00 GMT

Everlasting Death?

All biblical images of life everlasting imply, indeed even portray, its opposite. What would that contrary be?

The Yes of “life together” would face a No of “life apart,” everlasting estrangement from the relationships God intended for the world: no blessed participation in the Life Together of the triune Being; no joyful celebration of the same; no rapturous bonding in the unities God intended for us—familial, ecclesial, political; no reconciliation with or of the natural cosmos. So understood, everlasting death is more horrible than popular portrayals of fiery pain; our worst anthropomorphic imaginings seem far short of the hell of…life apart.

The fearsomeness of everlasting death, however conceived, has prompted some to argue for more hospitable endings. The most generous is that of universalism in which all will be brought to eternal life, given God’s universal desire for all to be saved (1 Tim 2:4) and every hellish region disallowed. The case for such is made variously: because God is too good to consign anyone to perdition; because humans are too good to be so consigned; the fires of hell are real and lasting but not everlasting for their role is rehabilitation where the dross is burned away in preparation for the purity of heaven; with or without such cleaning the trajectory of God’s story cannot be end with the fulfillment of God’s promise that God shall be all in all none excepted. Karl Barth’s thesis that all have died with Christ, and all have been exalted in him, sounds like that, moving ineluctably to the doctrine of universalism, but not so. Barth’s commitment to the divine sovereignty rightly will not allow us to tell God what must finally be done. But we do have “a command…to hope and to pray cautiously…that His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is “’new every morning He will not cast off forever (La. 3:22f, 31). [Karl Barth, CHURCH DOGMATICS, IV/3/I, trans., G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961), p. 478.]

Yet others, believing that the fearsome portrayals of hell do not comport with divine love, and seem an inordinate recompense for the outcome the damned do deserve, propose annihilation as their prospect, everlasting death as simply the end of our life in time, the “perish" of John 3 16 understood as extinction.

To be continued.

Eschatology, Ethics and Summary Comment

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:26:00 GMT

James Luther Adams taught a generation of his students that what we hold to be true eschatologically will be what we work for ethically. In this case it means that a passionate ecological ethic rises out of a conviction that God will bring a nature renewed.

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Miroslav Volf summarizes the comprehensive Christian belief in life everlasting we have been describing in this way" "the final reconciliation of 'all things,' grounded in the work of Christ the reconciler and accomplished by the Spirit of communion, is the process by which the whole creation along with human beings will be freed from transience and sin to reach the state of eternal peace and joy in the communion with the triune God." [Miroslav Volf, "Enter Into Joy! Sin, Death and the World to Come," in THE END OF THE WORLD AND THE ENDS OF GOD: SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY ON ESCHATOLOGY, ed. John pOlkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press, 2000), P. 278.]

Nature's Destiny

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:50:00 GMT

The life that lasts forever includes the redemption of a fallen nature. We have to do in the end with "a new heaven and a new earth" (Rev. 21:1) as well as a New Jerusalem and new saints. The latter live in a new kingdom settled on a new earth under a new heaven. In such a redeemed creation the struggle for survival will be over, for "the wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the kid" (Isa 11:6). The animosity between human nature and cosmic nature is finished for "the nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adders den" (11:18).

While the Western tradition had a place for the natural dimension of everlasting life, certainly so in its teaching on the resurrection of the body, it was the Easter Church that gave it special accent: "The whole of nature is destined for glory....The divine Spirit which in its fulness is poured out from Christ on all who believe in him, whose spirits are thereby kindled anew, does not only fill their bodies with new life, making them transparent for what is heavenly, but transforms nature and the cosmos too." [ D. Staniloe ORTHODOX DOGMATIK
, pp. 294, 368 quoted in Juergen Moltmann, THE COMING OF GOD: CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 273]
For all its limitations (the missing Lutheran stress on the annihilation of the old or the Calvinist transformative theme, matters to which Moltmann points, the Orthodox reminder cannot be forgotten. In contemporary terms, in "the Shalom that shall be , there is no fellowship with Christ that is not fellowship with the earth ." [Moltmann, THE COMING OF GOD, p. 279.] Biblically stated, how can there be solace for a "groaning" creation (Rom 8:22), one that "waits with eager longing" (6:19) for freedom from "its bondage to decay" (8:21) if there is no cosmic life that last forever rather than a destiny of death?

Urban Eschatology and Ethics

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:11:00 GMT

We look forward, as Christians, to an "everlasting" kingdom come, and in it the ultimate city of God (2 Peter 1:31; Luke 11:2, 13:29, 18:25, 22:16; 2 Timothy 4:18; Rev.21:10-26). Again the qualifier about the eschatological commonwealth, for we have to do with a realm like nothing we've seen on ourearth of ordinary flesh and blood (1 Cor. 15:20), a new Jerusalem "coming down out of heaven from God" (Rev. 21:10), not of human manufacture. The light imagery contrasts with the shadowy structures we inhabit: "It has the glory of God and a radiance like a rare jewel....And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb (Rev. 21: 11,23). And the coming together of waring states is so new to us, for "the nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it" (21:24). In every systemic setting, justice will "roll down as like waters, and rightesousness like an ever-flowing stream" (Amos 5:24) Every social flaw shal be mended, the mighty brought down and the lowly exalted (Luke 1:52) Shalom, as the peace of a new world, will come to be. All social suffering will come to an end, the tears from tyranny, war, hunger and poverty wiped away, for "they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy moutain for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as waters cover the sea" (Isa. 11:9).

The last scene of the final act of God's drama speaks to the age-old issue of theodicy, the problem of evil. The question is: How can we hold together the three Christian nonnegotiables, God as all-good and all -powerful and evil as real? The Holocaust? Millions starved, killed in wars, oppressed by the malice of the fallen powers that be? The answer, surrounded though it be with mystery for those still in not-yet times: nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 8:39) Paul's future tense tells us that the absolute power of God is in the future: the all-good God will prevail in the End, mending every flaw in creation's sin-wracked and painful history.

Pie in the sky bye and bye? Compensation in heaven for earth's travail that prompts us to accept without protest the world's wrongs (Marx's famous charge that religion is "the opiate" of the people)? Nothing could be further from the truth. The world we anticipate eschatologically makes us restless for what will be. It calls into question the things that are and drives us in turn to critique, challenge and overturn those circumstances short of God's intended and promised purposes. Social eschatology is inseparable from social ethics. Hence the importance of a full biblical vision of what is to be, the corporate as well as the personal End, with the moral mandates consonant therewith. (a theme driven home by Jurgen Moltmann)

Social Destiny

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:13:00 GMT

Time in Eternity: the Lively Life to Come

Mon, 25 May 2009 11:38:00 GMT

Life together in the triune Being is love in its purity. What else can communion with Christ everlasting be than eternal love? Indeed, a life together with the ultimate Life Together is one in which "love never ends" (1 Cor. 13:8).

The love of Christ for us in this world is a busy one. In the Gospels he reaches out ever and again to those with manifold needs. So too at the end he will "wipe away every tear from our eyes" and "mourning and crying and pain will be no more," for life everlasting has come when "death will be no more" (Rev. 21:4). He does this as the 'Alpha and Omega" who promises that "to the thirsty I will give water as a spring from the water of life" (21:6).And our response is one of unending praise and thanksgiving to God (7:15), and a loving outreach to others ( a christologically read Isa 11:6-9; 40:31). Can the never-ending love not include loving God with the mind, as well as heart and soul (Matt:22:37), perhaps sitting under one's " vine' and "fig tree" with a good theological book? :) Or in our association with others, as Barth once remarked: his anticipation of a vigrorous give-and-take with Schleiermacher, getting things cleared up?

Such rich images suggest a lively world to come. Serenity and contentment surely, but no bovine serenity or armchair contentment. Isaac Dorner, an earlier theologian who thought much about "the future state" puts it this way:

"The highest activity of the will is to be in perfect worship (Rev. 7:12, 22:3), consisting in adoration, thanks and praise, and also in joyous obedience, making itself in godlike love an organ of God's continuing work. This leads to the relation of blessedness to rest and enjoyment on the one hand, and on the other to action....It follows then from this, that in the rest, which is conceived as the goal, as an eternal Sabbath (Heb. 4:11, Rev. 7:16, 17, 21:4) there will be no inactivity; and also no unrest in activity (DORNER ON THE FUTURE STATE: THE DOCTRINE OF LAST THINGS, translated with an introducution by Newman Smyth (new York: Charles Scrpbner;s Sons, 1883), p. 141.

In a similar vein, a contemporary theologian, Miroslav Volf, questions the erasure of time from eternity: "Ultimate fulfillment is not only compatible with temporality but also unthinkable without it, partly because any notions of both reconciliation and contentment in fact, presuppose change. ....with the erasure of temporality in 'he "life" of the world to come', it takes away the possibility of communal peace and personal joy." (Miroslav Volf, "Enter into Joy! Sin, Death and the Life of the World to Come," in IN THE END OF THE WORLD AND THE ENDS OF GOD:SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY ON ESCHATOLOGY, ed. John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA:Trinity Press International, 2000, p. 27) Even Edmund Fortman, a Roman Catholic theologian who strives to stay close to magisterial teaching, says "But a more recent theology is moving in the direction of a more 'dynamic heaven' that admits growth and progress in perfection throughout eternity. Is such a view compatible with the teaching of Sacred Scripture and of the Church? It seems to many of us that it is." (E. J. Fortman, S.J. , EVERLASTING LIFE AFTER DEATH: Alba house, 1976) pp. 313-140)

To be continued.

Life and light through Jesus Christ in the world to come...seen now "through a mirror dimly"

Thu, 21 May 2009 19:47:00 GMT

And just what is "life"? The Greek terms zoe and psyche are used throughout the New Testament, the former tending to be associated with our physical life, and the latter our life with God, though the former can sometimes include the latter (see Theological Dictionary of the Bible) Our focus is the person's life with God in its ultimate sense, the final act in the creedal drama. A thread of New Testament allusions to personal life everlasting speak of "seeing" and "knowing" God "face to face" ( 1 Cor 13:12; Rev. 22:4). But what poor words we have in speaking of this encounter. How different and deeper is it than our conventional seeings and knowings. Hints of it do exist in our Christian life, yes, for eternal/everlasting life begins in time, even as it comes to flower in eternity. As we see and know Jesus, God is among us as the Son...in his promised real presence in Word and sacrament..in ad hoc encounters of eternal life. But all this is seeing and knowing "in a mirror dimly." What surprises we have in store!

Probing another biblical metaphor, theologians have spoken about the unspeakable in terms of "light"--seeing it, radiated by it (Rev. 21:23-25; 22:50), the "beatific vision" of the Catholic tradition. Yet even Protestant Charles Hodge speaks this way of the "radiancy of glory....the incomparable blessedness of heaven shall arise from the vision of God. This vision is beatific." The Orthodox tradition has its own depiction, life eternal as participation in the very being of God as theosis, deification. All this stirs the heart while it boggles the mind.

A refrain in the theologians of the church, and giving it body (literally), is the assurance that we have to do with Jesus Christ himself in his "glorified humanity." What better finale than to meet our Lord, not now in the end as judge of "the quick and the dead" but as 'friend" (John 15:14-15), even as we bow the knee to the "King of King and Lord of lords"? Life everlasting is life together with Jesus Christ!--life together in the body, dimly seen and anticipated in eucharistic communion with the risen Lord, yet now in everlasting life in the "spiritual body"with the eyes of heavenly sight entranced by the one known to us on earth by the eyes of faith as the body and blood given in the bread and wine. Again, we are thinking the unthinkable about what is to be, or seeing infinitude from finite perspective, not through transparencies but translucencies.

Life Everlasting

Sat, 16 May 2009 20:12:00 GMT

Everlasting life in classical Christian teaching is multi-dimensional--personal, corporate and cosmic. We begin with the personal

A Taxonomy of Christian hope

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:53:00 GMT

This week is an exercise in further sorting of the elements of Christian hope that have arisen in the exploration so far with more to come. This in preparation for a brief engagement with Donald Bloesch’s chapter on “The Dawn of Hope” in the final volume of his 7 volume systematics series on Christian Foundations, entitled The Last Things . As a leading evangelical thinker, Bloesch roots his eschatology in Scripture, taking up in this section some of the specific texts that allude to hope. I want to apply the schema that follows to those texts and see what can be learned from the interchange. But first the taxonomy of Christian hope that follows.

A Ultimate Hope is the eschatological finale. It is divided into two parts

1) Last Things: The creedal foursome with which we have begun: the resurrection of the body, the return of Christ, final judgment, everlasting life

2) Next to Last Things. This the variously identified as “the interim state,” the intermediate state,” “life after death.” But N.T. Wright in his passionate defense of final destiny as the Ultimate future, not the preacher’s “heaven” to which all/or some finally go after death, as necessarily a conjunction, that state being the last in the sequence “life after life after death”

B Penultimate Hope. Christian hope is for this life as well as the next. However, it is always a sober hope, qualified by an awareness of the fall that persists through time, all expectation tasking into account this “Christian realism” about the ambiguity in future possibilities. These possibilities occur in two forms.

1) Historical events. These occasions of hope for better things to come may be in history-- human natural, cosmic, albeit always incomplete and ambiguous.

2) Personal events. These occasions for hope occur in the self’s inner or outer life, albeit, simul iustus et peccator.

C The source of Hope, ultimate and penultimate

1) Warrant. The grounds for Christian hope are Jesus Christ, his Person and Work

2) Empowerment. The power that makes both ultimate and penultimate hope possible, and also the virtue of hoping is the Holy Spirit…the triune Spirit of the Son of the Father.

The Life Everlasting: Hope Fulfulled

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:51:00 GMT

Life Everlasting...

The last of the four great creedal affirmations. But what about “hell”? You left off earlier promising to deal with it And now you are going on to everlasting life instead of facing into “hell and damnation.” One more example of how “hell” has dropped out of the vocabulary of the mainline Christians today?

No, but a different way of approaching it. To get some glimmer of what “everlasting death” is, we must first fix our gaze on “everlasting life.” While whatever we claim to see is through a mirror dimly/glass darkly, surely the former must be the absence of the latter. So our fourth stained glass window is the place we shall both begin and conclude. Conclude the Grand Narrative, but also begin to glimpse what its alternative might be.

For this section, I shall adapt some of what I’ve already written in the chapter “The Life Everlasting: Et vitam aeternam” in a book edited by Roger Van Harn, Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles Creed (Eerdmans, 2004), a collection of essays and sermons on each sentence of the Apostles Creed. And what a great book it is on the themes we have been discussing , plus the other creedal affirmations, with authors Colin Gunton, Marguerite Shuster, Philip Butin, Frances Young, Richard Norris, Jr., Robert Wilken, Cornelius Plantinga, Leslie Hoppe, David Ford, Scott Hoezee Thomas Long. George Hunsinger, Richard Burridge, Daniel Migliore, Ralph C. Wood, Lois Malcolm, Fleming Rutledge, James Kay, Scott Black Johnston, Richard Hays, William M Shand III , Susan Wood, William C. Turner, Walter R. Bouman, Richard Lischer, Steven Paulson, Cynthia Rigby and Craig C. Hill. I urge those following this blog to also read that work.

The ancient creeds—Nicene and Apostles—are really dramas in three acts—creation reconciliation, redemption, the acts being the sequential missions of the three Persons as the “economic Trinity,” albeit as immanent Trinity all are involved in every act as this is the drama of the one triune God. With biblical specificity in mind, the theatre metaphor can be transposed to that of literature and conceived as a narrative with 7 chapters. I have tried to do this in the various volumes of The Christian Story series as creation, fall, covenant, Christ, church, salvation consummation. Whatever the genre we are now at the end of the final act or chapter, the finis that fulfills the divine telos. Using the language of the Apostles Creed, we have to do with the bold Christian affirmation of “everlasting life.”

The portrayal in Scripture —yes through a glass darkly—of this final state is rich and varied. Sometimes it is described in cosmic terms as “a new heaven and a new earth.”(Rev.21:1) At other times it is visualized politically and socially as the Kingdom of God come to earth (Matt 6:10). And yet other times, the focus is on persons and their fulfillment. And in every case it is clear that the alienations that mark our fallen world of Now are overcome with a reconciliation of all the broken and separation parties to God’s purposes. Thus what God finally wills and achieves is the very reflection of who God is: an everlasting life together that mirrors the eternal Life Together.

At the very center of Things to Come is the Person through whom the triune God will make such possible. The assembly of Christians at the second World Council of Churches in 1954 declared such with special power.

He will come [not only as] Judge [but as] King to bring all things to their consummation. Then we shall see him as He is and know Him as we are known. Together with the whole creation we wait for this with eager hope, knowing that God is faithful and even now He holds all things in His hand. (“A Message from the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, “The Evanston Report: The Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1954
(London: SCM Press,1955),1.

To the varied dimensions of that consummation Hope we shall presently turn. But before that I want to examine some biblical texts that use the term, as an entry point.