Part Two: Historical and Theological Overview

 

Chapter  6 – Death, the Intermediate State, and Judgment

      In examining the teaching of Jesus we observed that he had not a little to say about the universal, final judgment at the end of the present age.  “All the nations will be gathered before the Son of Man and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (Matt. 25:32).  The same emphasis is found in the Letters of the New Testament, culminating the vision of “a great white throne” with the dead “great and small, standing before the throne” in order to be judged and appropriately rewarded (Rev. 20:11–12).  Because of this scriptural teaching our creeds declare that Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead” (Apostles’ Creed) and also that “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end” (Nicene).

      As the primitive and early Church came to terms with the delay in the Parousia and accepted the obvious fact that many of the faithful believers would certainly die and be buried before the end of the present age, it had to adjust its eschatological teaching.  While the belief in God’s future judgment executed by the Son of Man was retained, the result of that assize was effectively brought forward to the moment of death.  Thus it was emphasized that a relationship which a person had with God and the Church at the point of death determined his or her everlasting destiny, since “where” he went immediately after death reflected the future verdict.  Though this adjustment helped to make sense of the delay of the Parousia, it also, at the same time, raised to greater prominence the interim period between the judgment at death and the final judgment at the Parousia.  Obviously the latter was seen as confirming the verdict already given and also adding to it in terms of providing a new immortal body in which to enjoy the full communion of saints and the vision of God.

      Generally speaking, the Greek (Eastern) Church showed a healthy reluctance to speculate about this interim period and, while praying for the souls of those who had died as baptized Christians, sought to preserve the idea of final and determinative judgment for the Parousia.  In contrast the Latin (Western) Church not only prayed for those who had died as baptized Christians but also gradually developed, in the later patristic and medieval periods, a doctrine of the intermediate state which included the way to heaven via purgatory.  Both the Greek and Latin approaches were based on the idea of the conscious existence of human beings as “souls” or “real persons” or “substantival selves.”  In contrast there were minority groups who held that there is no conscious existence between death and the Parousia, and they followed suggestions in Scripture and called this state psychopannychy, soul-sleep.  Such teaching has continued in Protestantism, to which we shall return below.

      Our task in this chapter is (a) to note how death has been understood in the Christian tradition, (b) to trace the origin and development of the doctrine of purgatory, (c) to explain the orthodox Protestant view of the intermediate state, (d) to comment upon the doctrine of soul-sleep, and (e) to state the orthodox Protestant teaching on the final judgment.1

 

Death

      Much has been said and written about the supposed distinction between the so-called “Semitic totality concept” of man as a unitary being and the Greek dualist view which divides the human being into body and soul.  Put in such stark contrast the former is then associated with the resurrection of the body, as the result of God’s gracious action, and the other is associated with the natural immortality of the soul.  It is, of course, wrong to assume that in the Old Testament there is no indication of self-identity, self-awareness, and self-consciousness through memory and inner experience (all of which point to what we may call “soul”).  And it is false to assume that all Greek thinking about what happened at death was dominated by belief in the immortality of the soul (Stoics held that the individual was absorbed by death into the cosmic process, and the Epicureans taught that the individual was totally dissolved at death – cf. Acts 17:32).

      Thus while the early Christians inherited from Jesus and the Old Testament scriptures a strong sense of man as a unitary being, they also could think in terms of the separation of soul and body (as is suggested by Wisdom 3:1 and 4 Maccabees; and cf. Matt. 10:28 and Luke 12:4–5).  In other words they had the concepts and the vocabulary to think and speak of a person existing through both death and the interim period until the Parousia, without a physical body.  Certainly as the early Church made more use of Greek philosophy in its apologetics and theology, it spoke more readily and naturally both of the body and soul and of the immortality of the soul.  However, there remained the question whether this immortality of the soul (= substantival self) was natural (having been so created) or was by grace (dependent in a particular way on the word and action of God in Christ).  The majority opinion from the later patristic period through to the nineteenth century seems to have been that immortality belongs to the human soul because in creating each soul God created it immortal.

      Though physical death is obviously a part of the cycle of life as we observe it in nature, its universal existence in the human race is interpreted in biblical teaching and in traditional theology as the tragic and unnecessary result of human sin and satanic strategy.  Only the incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and Parousia of the Son of God can effectively halt, reverse, and transform the power and finality of death; and not until the end of the age will the victory of the Son of God be wholly manifested.

      Thus the separation of body and soul at death creates an abnormal situation.  Unlike the angels who are pure spirit, the soul/human person functions normally and fully only in, through, and with a body – be it a physical or a spiritual body.  So in a certain sense, the interim period between death and the Parousia represents an “inferior” or “diminished” mode of existence when compared with the final state after the Parousia and general resurrection of the dead.  In other words we would expect that the experience of God and the transcendent realities of heaven and hell will be necessarily limited because of the nature of the human receptivity, as well as by the fact that the culmination of God’s purposes has not yet arrived and thus the communion of the saints has not reached its final form.  Nevertheless, much church teaching over the centuries has treated the intermediate state as if it were, to all intents and purposes, identical with the final state.  This is probably best explained in terms of the heavy commitment to the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul and the viewing of the soul as the essence of whatever it is to be human.2

      In both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, as both followed the medieval teaching, death has been seen as that which brings an end to our condition as pilgrims.  With physical death human destiny is fixed irrevocably.  No person can any longer influence that destiny any more than the runner who has finished the mile race can continue the race when the mile is completed.  It is the outward sign of an inward finality; with death a person attains his or her final mode of being; his development ceases, for when the soul leaves the body it has already taken all the decisions it could have taken.  So after death the person remains the same but is constituted in a different way: He is a disembodied self but the same self.  He awaits the resurrection of the body.

      At death there is, according to traditional teaching, a particular judgment which anticipates the universal judgment at the Parousia.  The dead do not ascend into eternal life or descend into everlasting darkness simply in virtue of the state of their souls.  God in Christ passes a verdict upon them, and thus it is for each person as if the Parousia occurred for him alone.  For Protestants the possibilities of this particular judgment are two – heaven or hell; for Roman Catholics they are heaven (with purgatory as a non-direct route into heaven) and hell (with possibly the limbo for unbaptized children, who suffer the results of original but not actual sin).3

      In much modem theology, as we shall note below, death has not been afforded the finality that it has held in traditional, orthodox theology.  Especially within the last century various reasons have been offered to suggest that there will be opportunity after death for most if not all people to respond afresh or anew to the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

      Before looking at the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, it is salutary to observe that a possible weakness in the exposition of traditional orthodoxy can be that the vital emphasis goes where the writers of the New Testament do not actually place it – i.e., at death instead of at the Parousia.  This changed emphasis for judgment can have the effect of diminishing the sense of the corporate, cosmic, and teleological dimensions of the last judgment and, in practice, simply making the last judgment into a reason for living righteous lives.4  In this way of thinking, final judgment is effectively and only particular judgment at each person’s death, with the final judgment as the public and universal proclamation of all the individual judgments already executed.  Such doctrines as the “sleep of the soul” and “conditional immortality” (on which we shall comment in the chapter on hell) at least have the merit of placing the vital emphasis upon the final judgment at the end of the age.  Later in this chapter we shall return to this discussion to note how the relation of individual and final, universal judgment have been reconciled.

 

Purgatory5

      In 1563 the Roman Catholic Council of Trent approved the Decree concerning Purgatory, which was intended to have pastoral implications, while confirming the received doctrine.  It reads:

Whereas the Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has, from the Sacred Writings and the ancient tradition of the Fathers, taught, in sacred Councils, and very recently in this ecumenical Synod, that there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar – the holy Synod enjoins on bishops that they diligently endeavor that the sound doctrine concerning Purgatory, transmitted by the holy Fathers and sacred Councils, be believed, maintained, taught, and everywhere proclaimed by the faithful of Christ.6

We shall look later at the biblical texts (Sacred Writings) and the teaching of the patristic period (ancient tradition of the Fathers).  Here it may be noted that the Councils which had set forth the doctrine of purgatory were the second Council of Lyons (1274) and the Council of Florence (1439).  Earlier in the work of the Council of Trent the doctrine of purgatory (understood as the place where the debt of temporal punishment is discharged by those in the process of being justified) was assumed in the Decree concerning Justification (1547).7

      The teaching of Trent is restrained when compared with the contents of the sermons of some medieval preachers, whose imagination served to exaggerate aspects of their theology, e.g., of purifying fire.8  It is, however, in accord with the noblest representation of purgatory – that of the poet, Dante Alighieri in his remarkable Purgatorio, written about 1319 and extremely important in the popularization of the doctrine of purgatory and its related piety.9  In Roman Catholic teaching, purgatory was understood as the state, place, or condition which will exist until the last judgment; here the souls of those who die in a state of grace (but not yet free from all imperfection and sin) make expiation for unforgiven venial sins or for the temporal punishment due to venial and mortal sins that have already been forgiven; thus they are purified before they enter into heaven, the only place of exit from purgatory.10  The classic expositions are by Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621) and Francisco de Suarez (d. 1617).

      1.  The origin and development of the doctrine.  Through the doctrine that came to be called purgatory was within the tradition of the western Church from the patristic period, the word, purgatorium, was not used until 1254 in an official letter sent by Pope Innocent IV to the Greek Church.  Purgatory referred to a “temporary fire, where slight and minor sins (which could not have been forgiven on earth through penance) are purged.”  The same letter also states that the souls in purgatory may be helped by the suffrages of the Church on earth.11

      Moving back through eight centuries, we can see the origins of this concept.  In the writings of Augustine, bishop of Hippo, we find both the idea of the temporary fire of purification/purgation and the commendation of suffrages for the dead.  This outstanding theologian prayed for his own mother, Monica, that she would rest in peace with God with her husband, who had died before her, and he also prayed that God would inspire readers of his book to pray for her, when they attended the Eucharist (Confessions 9:13.34–37).  He fully accepted the liturgical tradition not only of praying for baptized Christians who had died but also of offering the Eucharist to God, especially for the dead in Christ.

      Augustine’s references to a period of purification by fire after death are of a tentative rather than a dogmatic kind and are usually reflections on 1 Corinthians 3:10–15, a much-quoted text in later discussions of purgatory.  Of the fire mentioned in this text, Augustine wrote: “The fire may be experienced perhaps only after this life, or both in this life and hereafter, or in this life only and not hereafter” (City of God, 21:26).  He held that this fire of purgation worked only on “lesser” sins (venial sins had not yet been defined) and that, while it was a fire that the faithful might pass through in the sufferings of this life, it was also a fire that some might expect to experience intensely after death and before entry into heaven.  It was these two points that were developed in the centuries after the death of Augustine in 430.

      It may be asked, “Since Augustine was such a careful student of the Scriptures, where did he find scriptural support both for prayers for the dead and for purging fire after death before entry into heaven?”  Three chief biblical texts were cited by Augustine, his predecessors, colleagues, and successors.  It must be remembered that the Bible is always understood and interpreted in a specific situation and within a tradition of meaning.  Thus, since the Church prayed weekly for the Christian dead, the Bible was understood as supporting this practice, directly or indirectly.  And since a very serious view was taken of sin committed after the “washing of holy baptism,” to die without either having been forgiven for that sin or having done the appropriate penance for it posed a theological problem; purgation after death en route for heaven seemed to solve it.

      The first biblical text was certainly a scriptural source for the Church of the patristic period even if it is not so for Protestants today.  It is 2 Maccabees 12:39–46, found in the Apocrypha.

On the following day, since the task had now become urgent, Judas and his men went to gather up the bodies of the slain and bury them with their kinsmen in their ancestral tombs.  But under the tunic of each of the dead they found amulets sacred to the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear.  So it was clear to all that this was why these men had been slain.  They all therefore praised the ways of the Lord, the just judge who brings to light the things that are hidden.  Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out.  The noble Judas warned the soldiers to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen.  He then took up a collection among all his soldiers, amounting to two thousand silver drachmas, which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice.  In doing this he acted in a very excellent and noble way, inasmuch as he had the resurrection of the dead in view: for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been useless and foolish to pray for them in death.  But if he did this with a view to the splendid reward that awaits those who had gone to rest in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought.  Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from this sin. (NAB)

Here we find both prayers for the dead and the offering of an atoning sacrifice on their behalf.  Thus a scriptural proof was available both for prayer and the Eucharist being offered for the Christian dead.

      The second text was Matthew 12:32 and is part of the teaching of Jesus concerning blasphemy against the Holy Spirit:

Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

What was of interest here was the possible suggestion that forgiveness might occur in the age to come.  Certainly this is not directly taught, but in the general mood described above such a conclusion was not irrational.

      The third text was 1 Corinthians 3:10–15, in which Paul insists that Christ is the foundation of the Church, and thus all must be built upon him and be worthy of him.  The language recalls Malachi 2–3, especially 3:1–3. Paul wrote:

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it.  But each one should be careful how he builds.  For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.  If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light.  It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work.  If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward.  If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. (NIV)

We now understand that Paul intended that the “fire” belonged to the Last judgment at the end of this age, but as suggested by Augustine and developed by those who followed him, the “fire” was also taken to be applied by God to baptized but imperfect souls after death and before their entry into heaven and the arrival of the final judgment.  In this interpretation the Latin West differed from the Greek East, where it was generally agreed that the “fire” belonged uniquely to the last judgment (a fact, however, which in no way hindered their offering of prayer for the Christian dead).

      During the thirteenth century there is an acceleration in the commitment of the western Church to the idea of purgatory.  There is the scholastic exposition of the doctrine (e.g., by Aquinas in the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae) in the context of such themes as the distinction between mortal and venial sin, prayer for the dead, and indulgences; there is the new Feast of All Souls (the commemorating of the souls of the faithful departed) and there is the greater use of indulgences, given a boost by the famous jubilee Indulgence of 1300, which made provision for the promotion from purgatory to heaven of certain classes of the faithful dead.  Therefore, it is not surprising that doctrinal definitions are provided by Councils (Lyons, 1274; Florence, 1439) and that there was a flowering of a piety which was geared to the virtual certainty that after death almost all the baptized would spend a certain period in the process of purification.12

      Such developments were open to distortion, exaggeration, and abuse, and it can be seen that much of the negative protest of the Protestant Reformation was directed against not only the doctrine of purgatory (for lack of basic support in the New Testament) but also the abuses and excesses connected with belief in it.  In 1523 Zwingli asserted that, “The true Holy Scriptures know nothing of a purgatory after this life.”13  Though wholly rejected by Protestants, the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed its commitment to the doctrine at the Council of Trent (as we noted above) and at the same time made great efforts to remove some of the obvious abuses connected with it.  Even so, the careful explications of the teaching of Trent did not convince Protestant theologians.  Only in the mid-nineteenth century, with the birth of the Anglican Anglo-Catholic movement, did the practice of praying for the dead and belief in purgatory enter in a small but significant way into the Protestant Church.14

      2.  Recent Expositions of Purgatory.  It is not surprising to find in the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church a variety of approaches to purgatory, ranging from the traditional and orthodox to the open-ended and liberal.

      (a) The orthodox doctrine is clearly presented in the substantial article on purgatory in the New Catholic Encyclopedia by R. J. Bastian.  He admits that “in the final analysis, the Catholic doctrine on purgatory is based on tradition not Scripture,” though it is in harmony with the Bible.  Further, he explains that underlying this doctrine are two presuppositions: (1) the great difference between mortal sin, which unforgiven leads to hell, and venial sins, which do not cause damnation but still need to be forgiven; (2) the punishment due to sin is not always forgiven along with the guilt of sin; hence this punishment is to be paid by the forgiven sinner either in this life or in the next before he can enter heaven.  However, Bastian recognizes that questions relating to the punishments of purgatory are more obscure than the question of the existence of purgatory.

      The length of time spent in purgatory is not known in ad­vance, for “the separated soul no longer lives in the time of this world, but in aevum, where duration is not measured in days and years.”  Thus in our understanding of time the punishment/suffering could be over in a moment or last for a longer period.  It is best to think of the punishment in both its negative (deprivation of the beatific vision of God) and positive aspect (some actual experience of divine chastisment).  As to the purpose of suffering, the soul in purgatory has to be set free of three basic defects: the guilt of venial sin, the inclination towards sin, and the temporal punishment due to sin.  Nevertheless, purgatory is a sphere and place of grace where there is certitude of salvation and anticipation of the pure vision of God.

      (b) Michael Schmaus, formerly professor in Hamburg, may be called an orthodox Roman Catholic theologian who has a particular sensitivity to Protestant and Greek Orthodox teaching.  Thus in his chapter on purgatory in his book, Justification and the Last Things, he attempts the presentation of purgatory in an attractive dress.  It is, he explains, “to be understood as a way of life after death wherein man has a particular relation to God.”  His decision for life with God was made on earth but he is not yet ready for the unmediated, face-to-face dialogue with God.  Though sin has been forgiven, maturity of character and personality have not yet been attained, and therefore further grace is needed:

When a person arrives after death at the full realization of what God means for him and is at the same time aware that he is not yet ready for face-to-face dialogue with God, the experience is full of pain.  It is the ardent love he now feels for God that causes him to feel this anguish.

However, as purification proceeds he feels a greater joy, and through true and perfect love he becomes his true and proper self, mature in the grace of God.

      Schmaus rejects the idea of punishment by fire (real or metaphorical) since he sees fire as a symbol of the Holy Spirit as the purifier of souls.  However, he is happy with both the practices of prayer for the faithful dead and of applying indulgences to the dead, for they can help, through God’s ordination, in the process of purification in purgatory.

      (c) Anton van der Walle, the Prior of the Dominicans in Brussels, is less committed to orthodox and traditional Roman Catholic ideas on purgatory than the German, Michael Schmaus.  In fact the former believes that the development of the doctrine in the Western Church has been too legalistic and juristic, with too much emphasis upon undergoing punishment and providing satisfaction.  He thinks that the Greek patristic emphasis upon purifying mercy is better.  In From Darkness to the Dawn, he writes:

We may see purgatory as an encounter with God in which God gives risen humanity the chance to make amends for wrong doing towards him and creation; it is not just a demand of divine righteousness ... but a revelation of his immensely great mercy.

He holds that the resurrection occurs at death and is thus able to write in this way of the experience of purifying mercy immediately after death.  Further he is happy with the definition of Karl Rahner that heaven, purgatory, and hell are not places; rather they are different designations for God.15  Heaven is God who has finally become our own; purgatory is God who goes through us to purify us, while hell is God as the opportunity we have lost.  Finally we may note that he thinks that prayer for the dead is wholly appropriate because of solidarity within the body of Christ, the inter-connection and communion between the members of the one Christ.

      In terms of the interpretation of the presence of fire in purgatory, there has been a major swing away from understanding this as real fire, instead explaining fire in terms of purification by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

 

The intermediate state in Protestant teaching16

      All the Protestant Reformers rejected the doctrine of purgatory but continued to hold to the view of an intermediate state between individual death and the last judgment.  John Calvin actually wrote against the doctrine of the unconscious “sleep” of the soul in his book, Psychopannychia.  His view was that the intermediate state is to be understood in terms of both blessedness (or misery) and expectation of greater fulfillment.  Thus the blessedness or the misery is incomplete and provisional.  The clarity of the Protestant view will be communicated best by selections from Confessions and Catechisms as well as from liturgical texts.

      In the Scottish Confession of Faith (1560), chapter xvii we read:17

The chosen departed are in peace, and rest from their labours: not that they sleep and are lost in oblivion as some fanatics hold, for they are delivered from all fear and torment, and all the temptations to which we and all God’s chosen are subject in this life, and because of which we are called the Kirk Militant.  On the other hand, the reprobate and unfaithful departed have anguish, torment, and pain which cannot be expressed.  Neither the one nor the other is in such sleep that they feel no joy or torment, as is testified by Christ’s parable in Luke xvi and his words to the thief; and the words of the souls crying under the altar, “O Lord Thou that art righteous and just, how long shalt thou not revenge our blood upon those that dwell in the earth?”

Interestingly this chapter is given the title “Immortality.”  The texts quoted are Luke 16:19ff.; 23:43 and Revelation 6:9, which are all obviously understood as pointing to the intermediate state.

      Six years later the authors of the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) wrote as follows in chapter xxvi:18

The State of the Soul Departed from the Body.  For we believe that the faithful, after bodily death, go directly to Christ, and, therefore, do not need the eulogies and prayers of the living for the dead and their services.  Likewise we believe that unbelievers are immediately cast into hell from which no exit is opened for the wicked by any services of the living.

No scriptural texts are given in this Confession.  Nearly a century later in answer to their question, “What is the communion in glory with Christ, which the members of the invisible church enjoy immediately after death?” the Westminster divines answered thus in the Larger Catechism (1647):19

The communion in glory with Christ, which the members of the invisible church enjoy immediately after death, is, in that their souls are made perfect in holiness, and received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies, which even in death continue united to Christ, and rest in their graves as in their beds, till at the last day they be again united to their souls.  Whereas the souls of the wicked are at their death cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, and their bodies kept in their graves, as in their prisons, till the resurrection and judgment of the great day.

The texts quoted for heaven are Hebrews 12:23; 2 Corinthians 5:1, 6, 8; Philippians 1:23 (compared with Acts 3:21 and Ephesians 4:10); 1 John 3:2; and 1 Corinthians 13:12.  For hell those quoted are Luke 16:23–4; Acts 1:5; Jude 6, 7.

      Doctrine is usually communicated more by the content of the services of worship than by confessions and catechisms.  If we look at the services for the burial of the dead produced by the Protestant churches we find that they are written for the faithful (or on the charitable supposition that all die as Christians), and they assume that the soul has gone or is going immediately to heaven.  For example, the Burial Service of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, published in 1549 (and reissued in the 1662 edition) has this prayer:

Almighty, God, with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity, we give thee hearty thanks that it had pleased thee to deliver this our brother/sister out of the miseries of this sinful world.

At the same time there is the expression of hope for the resurrection of the body at the last day.

      The orthodox Protestant position has held and holds that at death God’s judgment comes into effect and that where the disembodied person spends the intermediate state is determined by where he will be after the last judgment.  Thus in popular speech people are said to have gone to heaven or to hell at their death.  However, since the late nineteenth century, a growing number of theologians and Christian leaders have taught that death is not necessarily followed by immediate judgment and that there will probably be an opportunity, especially for those who never properly heard the good news of the kingdom, to respond to the grace of God before the final judgment.  This is rarely argued on the basis of biblical exegesis (i.e., the citing and explaining of specific passages) but is more usually a deduction from beliefs about the character of God, e.g., his justice and love.  And of course a strong case can be made out that people do not have equal opportunities either to hear or to respond to the gospel in this life before death.  What of millions in China, of babies who die in infancy, of the mentally retarded and those who for not obvious fault of their own do not hear the authentic message concerning Jesus, the Christ.

      Writing in 1918, the Scottish theologian J. H. Leckie observed that “the majority of evangelical teachers at the present day hold some form of the doctrine that is commonly called ‘Future Probation.’”  Leckie was well read in German divinity, and he certainly had in mind such well-known names as I. A. Dorner (1809–84), Julius Müller (1801–78) and F. J. Delitzsch (1813–90), all of whose primary works had been translated into English.  He also referred to F. L. Godet (1812–1900), the Swiss biblical scholar, as holding to “Future Probation.” Leckie explained:

Their argument is that, since the New Testament asserts that there is no salvation except through Christ, it implies that every soul of man must have an opportunity of accepting him.  But this again involves the conclusion that the ministry of the Saviour continues beyond the grave.  If he is to draw all men to himself, then he must be lifted up in the sight of all men; and those who have not seen him in the days of their flesh must be enabled to see him hereafter.  If this be not true, then the teaching of the Apostles is meaningless: their claim that he is the appointed Saviour of all men is altogether vain?20

With increasing discussion of the fate of souls after death not only in Christian theology but also in the teaching of the great religions of the world, the word “pareschatology” has been introduced to denote discussion of the “next to last things,” that which happens in the intermediate state before the final consummation.  In his much-used book, Death and Eternal Life, John Hick has a chapter on pareschatology in which he delves into various religions and makes his own suggestion based on “insights” from a variety of religious traditions.  Brian Hebblethwaite also uses the term in his book The Christian Hope, but he seeks to fill it with Christian content.  Like many before him Hebblethwaite believes that considerations of theodicy and moral and religious plausibility, not to mention the revealed nature of God, cause the theologian to envisage further opportunities beyond the grave for those people who were denied genuine opportunity of receiving God’s love and grace on earth.

      In particular, Hebblethwaite is conscious that the “main problem for a Christian theology of religion has been that of doing justice both to the spirituality and faith manifest in all the great religions and to the uniqueness and finality of Christ as summed up in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.”  Thus he writes: “To postulate further salvific encounters with God in Christ beyond the grave is to envisage space and time for non-Christians to come to recognize the human face of God uniquely in the risen Christ and to find in him the universal focus of God-man encounter, after which, in their different ways the religions of the world have been feeling”.21

      To find top-grade theologians of recent decades who follow the Protestant Confessions in their basic theology of death and the intermediate state is not easy.  One such is the late G. C. Berkouwer of the Free University in Amsterdam, who discusses this question in his The Return of Christ, chapter two.  However, Berkouwer is conscious of (a) the tension between individual and corporate salvation raised by the twofold expectation of encountering Christ individually at death and then with others at the Parousia, and (b) the danger of building theories of the intermediate state which rest on a particular doctrine of man as immortal or of the relation of time and eternity.  Further, he has nothing to say about the position of those who die without having confessed Christ as their Savior.  Rightly, in our judgment, he sees the central thrust of the position of the Reformers as being that a believer is “in Christ” before death, in death, and after death.  Thus as Paul declared we are convinced that “neither death nor life” nor anything else in the creation “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–9).  Thus being “in Christ,” the believer looks with Christ toward the fulfillment of God’s purposes in the Parousia, the Last Judgment, and the New Creation.

      Another theologian within the Reformed tradition, who, like Berkouwer, admires Calvin and Barth, is Thomas F. Torrance of Edinburgh University.  He differentiates between “the time of the new creation” of the exalted Christ and that time in which we live on this earth.  Thus of the death of the believer he writes:

When the believer dies, he goes to be with Christ and is in his immediate presence, participant in him and made like him.  That is to each believer the parousia of Christ to him.  Yet when this is regarded on the plane of history and of the on-going processes of the fallen world, the death of each believer means that his body is laid to sleep in the earth, waiting until the redemption of the body and the recreation of all things at the final Parousia.  Looked at from the perspective of the new creation there is no gap between the death of the believer and the parousia of Christ, but looked at from the perspective of time that decays and crumbles away, there is a lapse in time between them.

But how do you think these together? asks Torrance.  His answer is “by thinking of them exclusively in Christ, in the one Person of Christ in whom nature and divine nature are hypostatically united, and in whom our human existence and history are taken up into his divine life.”22  This position, arrived at from a Christological perspective and a particular view of God and time, is much the same as that arrived at by biblical exegesis, especially the exegesis of 2 Corinthians 5:1–10, by both Dr. Murray Harris and Professor F. F Bruce: They believe that at death the believer is clothed in his new resurrection body of glory.23

      While the teaching of Torrance, Harris, and Bruce, together with others who think as they do, cannot be called heresy, it certainly does not seem to give sufficient prominence to the fact of the End and the great consummation of God’s salvific work.  The position of Berkouwer is to be preferred in that, whatever its difficulties, we do have to accept the fact of the intermediate state and the expectation therein for the Parousia and the new order.  As Calvin said, there is blessedness and anticipation.24

 

Soul-sleep

      The description of the state of physical death as “sleep” is found in a variety of languages and cultures.  It is the kind of metaphor that springs to mind to describe the state of a dead physical body, especially when that body lies with eyes closed and in an apparent state of peaceful contentment.  Therefore it is not surprising that sleep is used figuratively in the Old Testament, New Testament, and intertestamental literature.

      In the Septuagint the phrase ekoimēthē meta tōn paterōn autou (he slept with his fathers) is fairly common in 2 Kings and Chronicles (see e.g., 2 Kings 14:16, 22, 29; 15:7, 22, 38).  It means that he died an honorable death.  The NIV translates the Hebrew as “he rested with his fathers.”  In 1 Enoch “sleep” refers to the intermediate state between physical death and the resurrection: “And the righteous will rise from sleep and wisdom will rise and will be given to them” (91:10); “And the righteous man will rise from sleep, will rise and will walk in the path of righteousness, and all his paths and his journeys will be in eternal goodness and mercy” (92:3).

      In the New Testament the following chief texts use sleep in a figurative sense:

Matt. 27:52, “saints who had fallen asleep were raised” (RSV).  NIV has “had died.”

John 11:11–12, “Lazarus has fallen asleep.”

Acts 7:60, “When Stephen had said this, he fell asleep.”

Acts 13:26, “David fell asleep; he was buried with his fathers.”

1 Cor.15:6, 18, 20, “Those who have fallen asleep in Christ:’ (See also 7:39; 11:30)

1 Thess. 4:13, 14, 15, “those who have fallen asleep in Christ.”

2 Peter 3:4, “Ever since our fathers fell asleep” (RSV).  NIV has “died.”

In these verses the verb is koimaō (passive), the same verb as used in the Septuagint to render sakab (Hebrew, to sleep).

      In general these texts have been interpreted in the Church over the centuries as referring to death and the person who has died being at peace with the Lord.  However, there have been those within the Church (that is, mainline churches/denominations) as well as within certain sects (e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons) who have developed a doctrine of soul-sleep (= psychopannychy) from these texts.  Usually they have denied the immortality of the soul, argued that sleep refers to the cessation of conscious existence, and pointed to the last judgment as the moment when eternal destiny is decided.  Thus soul-sleep has been understood either as extinction or as a kind of suspension of existence in anticipation of the last day.”  As we have noted Calvin saw this teaching as a denial of the scriptural emphasis that the believer dies in the Lord, for death cannot separate him from his Lord.  Further, we may note that the Confession of Faith of the Church of England, The Forty-Two Articles of 1553 (later shortened into the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1562), contained in Article 40 a condemnation of soul-sleep:

They which say that the souls of such as depart hence do sleep, being without all sense, feeling or perceiving until the day of judgment, or affirm that the souls die with the bodies, and at the last days shall be raised up with the same, do utterly dissent from the right belief declared to us in holy Scripture.26

Whatever precisely is the nature of the intermediate state, it is not the suspension of existence: It is life in Christ.

      Having referred to John Calvin several times, it will be ap­propriate to close this section with a disclaimer on soul-sleep from his Institutes of the Christian Religion (Book III, chap. xxv, sec. 6):

Now it is neither lawful nor expedient to inquire too curiously concerning our souls’ intermediate state.  Many torment themselves overmuch with disputing as to what place the souls occupy and whether or not they already enjoy heavenly glory.  Yet it is foolish and rash to inquire concerning unknown matters more deeply than God permits us to know.  Scripture goes no farther than to say that Christ is present with them, and receives them into paradise (cf. John 12:32) that they may obtain consolation, while the souls of the reprobate suffer such torments as they deserve.  What teacher or master will reveal to us that which God has concealed?  Concerning the place, it is no less foolish and futile to inquire, since we know that the soul does not have the same dimension as the body.  The fact that the blessed gathering of saintly spirits is called “Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22) is enough to assure us of being received after this pilgrimage by the common Father of the faithful, that he may share the fruit of his faith with us.  Meanwhile, since Scripture everywhere bids us wait in expectation for Christ’s coming, and defers until then the crown of glory, let us be content with the limits divinely set for us: namely, that the souls of the pious, having ended the toil of their warfare, enter into blessed rest, where in glad expectation they await the enjoyment of the promised glory, and so all things are held in suspense until Christ the Redeemer appear.  The lot of the reprobate is doubtless the same as that which Jude assigns to the devils: to be held in chains until they are dragged to the punishment appointed for them (Jude 6).

 

Final Judgment

      The Protestant Confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide more detail concerning the End than do the Ecumenical Creeds, but what they say is only an extension of the teaching of the Creeds.  In the famous Lutheran Confession, the Augsburg Confession (1530) we read in chapter xvii:

It is also taught among us that our Lord Jesus Christ will return on the last day for judgment and will raise up all the dead, to give eternal life and everlasting joy to believers and the elect, but to condemn ungodly men and the devil to hell and eternal punishment.

      Rejected, therefore, are the Anabaptists who teach that the devil and condemned men will not suffer eternal pain and torment.

Here we have Parousia, Judgment, and Heaven/Hell.  The “Anabaptists” were such men as Hans Denck and Melchior Rinck.27  In a later chapter we shall examine universalism.

      Six years after the Lutheran Confession came the Swiss Reformed, or Calvinistic, Confession, the First Helvetic Confession, which in Chapter xi, “Concerning Christ the Lord and What we have through Him,” has these two paragraphs:28

This Lord Christ, who has overcome and conquered death, sin and the whole power of hell, is our Forerunner, our Leader and our Head.  He is the true High Priest who sits at God’s right hand and always defends and promotes our cause, until He brings us back and restores us to the image in which we were created, and leads us into the fellowship of his divine nature.

      We await this Lord Jesus to come at the end of the world as the true, righteous judge, who will pass a true judgment upon flesh which he has raised to judgment.  He will lead the godly and believing into heaven, and will condemn and thrust unbelievers into eternal damnation.

Here again we have the Parousia of the heavenly Lord, the raising of the dead, their judgment, and the final destinies of heaven and hell.

      In 1560 the Scottish Confession was published, and this too dealt with the Parousia in the same chapter as the Ascension and Session of the Lord Jesus.  In chapter xi we read:29

We believe that the Lord Jesus shall visibly return for this Last judgment as he was seen to ascend.  And then, we firmly believe, the time of refreshing and restitution of all things shall come, so that those who from the beginning have suffered violence, injury, and wrong, for righteousness’ sake, shall inherit that blessed immortality promised them from the beginning.  But, on the other hand, the stubborn, disobedient, cruel persecutors, filthy persons, idolators and all sorts of unbelieving, shall be cast into the dungeon of utter darkness, where their worm shall not die nor their fire be quenched.

Here we have no specific reference to the Resurrection but instead the words “the time of refreshing and restitution of all things.”  This recalls Acts 3:19–21, where the words “refreshing” and “restitution” are both found in the KJV.  They point to the “new heavens and new earth” and the dwelling there of the righteous in their resurrection bodies of glory.  Further, hell is described in terms of the dungeon (Rev. 20:7), utter or outer darkness (Matt. 8:12), and the imagery of the last verse of Isaiah’s prophecy (66:24).

      The final quotation is from the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chapter xxxiii, “Of the Last Judgment.”  In the previous chapter belief in the resurrection of the dead had been affirmed, and so it is not specifically mentioned in this chapter which reads:30

I.  God hath appointed a day, wherein He will judge the world, in righteousness, by Jesus Christ, to whom all power and judgment is given of the Father.  In which day, not only the apostate angels shall be judged, but likewise all persons that have lived upon earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ, to give an account of their thoughts, words and deeds; and to receive according to what they have done in the body, whether good or evil.

II.  The end of God’s appointing this day is for the manifestation of the glory of his mercy, in the eternal salvation of the elect; and of his justice, in the damnation of the reprobate, who are wicked and disobedient.  For then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive the fullness of joy and refreshing, which shall come from the presence of the Lord: but the wicked, who know not God, and obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, shall be cast into eternal torments and be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.

III.  As Christ would have us to be certainly persuaded that there shall be a day of judgment, both to deter all men from sin; and for the greater consolation of the godly in their adversity: so will He have that day unknown to men, that they may shake off all carnal security, and be always watchful, because they know not at what hour the Lord will come; and may be ever prepared to say, Come Lord Jesus, come quickly, Amen.

Among the verses from Scripture cited in the footnotes are Acts 3:19 and 2 Peter 3:11, both of which in context refer to the new order of reality called the “new heavens and new earth.”

      In the next two chapters we shall be looking at the everlasting order of heaven and hell, as well as at the nature of the resurrection bodies of those who dwell therein.  Here it is necessary only to make some comments on the relation of personal, particular judgment and the universal final judgment.  Particularly judgment deals only with one person at a time with reference to his conscience and life and relates only to his eternal destiny.  The general, universal judgment involves everyone who has ever lived and is the last judgment in that it is not followed by any other and its sentence endures as eternally present to all wherever they are, and it never becomes obsolete.  The judge at each judgment is Christ, acting on behalf of the Father.

      For God himself the general and last judgment is a public vindication of his providence and grace in the world from its creation until its regeneration.  For those who are “in Christ,” their Savior, Mediator, and Intercessor (and against whom God has no wrath for all that could separate them from God has been removed by Christ), the judgment is a time of joyous triumph: They share with Christ in judging of the peoples, and their faithfulness and good works are shown to be the fruit of grace and to have contributed to the growth of the kingdom of God on earth.  For those who have rejected the offer of forgiveness and life in Jesus, the judgment is an exposure of their sins and the evil effects they had upon others, as well as the harm done to the progress of the Gospel.  They are brought to see the futility of their lifelong opposition to grace and to see how they deserve God’s wrath and punishment.31

 

Notes

        1For the biblical material see NIDNTT, vol. 1, 429ff.; also P. Cotterell, What the Bible Says About Death, Wheaton, Illinois, 1979.  For a philosophical introduction see John Hick, Death and Eternal Life, London, 1976.

        2See further James P Martin, The Last Judgment in Protestant The­ology from Orthodoxy to Ritschl, Edinburgh, 1963, chapters 2 and 3.

        3On Limbo see the article, “Limbo,” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia.

        4Martin, Last Judgment, 43ff.

        5I have found Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, Chicago, 1984, illuminating and helpful on both the origins of the doctrine and its development up to the end of the middle ages.

        6In P. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, Grand Rapids, 1977, Vol. 2., 199.

        7Ibid., 89ff.

        8For descriptions see Goff, Purgatory, 133ff.

        9Dante’s trilogy on Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is available in the Penguin Classics series, translated and edited by Dorothy L. Sayers.

        10Venial sins are offenses against God which do not deprive the sinner of the inner grace of sanctification.  They have been called “daily sins” and “light sins.”  Mortal sins are those offenses against God which destroy sanctifying grace and cut the soul off from the grace of God.  They have been called “deadly” and “grave” sins.

        11Goff, Purgatory, 283–84.

        12Ibid., 326ff. for a fascinating section on “Wills and Obituaries.”

        13This is article 57 of Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles (1523) printed in Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century (ed. Arthur Cochrane), Philadelphia, 1966, 42–43.  See also the French Confession (1559), article xxiv, and the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), chapter xxvi, for further Calvinist condemnations of purgatory; both are in Cochrane, op. cit., 153 and 295.  For condemnations in the Lutheran confessions see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ed. T. G. Tappert, Philadelphia, 1959), 184, 185, 199, 202, 205, 207, 209, 261, 266, 294, 306, 307.  Finally see Article xxii of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, found in Creeds of the Churches (ed. J. H. Leith, Richmond, Virginia, 1973), 274.

        14For details see Geoffrey Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, Oxford, 1974, 99ff.

        15Rahner’s views may best be gathered from his Foundations of Christian Faith (1976) and the articles on eschatology in Sacramentum Mundi as well as in his multi-volume Theological Investigations.

        16For biblical studies see A. A. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future, Grand Rapids, 1978, chap. 9, and Karel Hanhart, The Intermediate State in the New Testament, Franeker, Holland, 1966.

        17Cochrane, Reformed Confessions, 175.

        18Ibid., 295.

        19The Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms, Edinburgh, 1967, 174–77, Q. 86.

        20J. H. Leckie, The World to Come and Final Destiny, Edinburgh, 1918, 94–95.

        21Brian Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, London, 1984, 219.

        22T. F. Torrance, Space, Time and Resurrection, Edinburgh, 1976, 102.

        23Murray Harris, Raised Immortal, 159ff., and F. F. Bruce, “Paul on Immortality,” Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 24 (1971) 457–471, and 1 and 2 Corinthians, London, 1971, 204.

        24The text of Calvin’s Psychopannychia may be found in Tracts and Treatises, trans. H. Beveridge, Grand Rapids, 1958, Vol. 3, 413–490.

        25See further A. A. Hoekema, Four Major Cults, Grand Rapids, 1963, 110–11, 135–36, 265–66, 293–94, 345–359.  B. F. C. Atkinson, Life and Immortality (privately printed and published in England in 1967) argues both for conditional immortality and the sleep of the soul.  This is an important book since Atkinson was a leader in the evangelical movement in Cambridge University for many years.  See further John W. Wenham, The Goodness of God, Leicester, 1974, 39–41.

        26The text is in E. C. S. Gibson, The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, London, 1898, 88 in both Latin and English.

        27For the text and reference to these names see Book of Concord, 38.

        28Cochrane, Reformed Confessions, 103.

        29Ibid., 171.

        30The Confession of Faith, 124–26.

        31For further details see H. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, Grand Rapids, 1978, 703ff., where Calvinistic divines are quoted.  See also A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, London, 1972, 574–75.

 

Chapter  7 – Heaven

      As has already become clear, in traditional Roman Catholic and Protestant theology, talk about entering and being in heaven belongs not only to the age after the Parousia but also to the intermediate state.  In Protestant teaching the believer, justified by faith and sanctified by the Spirit, goes via death immediately into heaven; in Roman Catholic teaching the martyrs and saints go via death immediately into heaven, while the ordinary faithful, who need further purifying, go via purgatory to heaven.  Thus any suggestion that Christian believers do not enjoy the true vision of God in the intermediate state was seen as heresy.

      Take the well-known case of Pope John XXII.  In 1331 he preached a series of sermons in Paris.  He did not claim to be speaking ex cathedra but to be expressing his own theological opinions.  As a “private” theologian he claimed that those who die and go to heaven do not enjoy the true and full vision of the Triune God (thereby fulfilling the Beatitude, “they shall see God”) but enjoy only the vision of Christ’s glorified humanity in the intermediate state.  The Franciscans arose to defend the Pope’s views while the Dominicans resolutely opposed him.  There was a fierce theological controversy and it is claimed that on his death-bed John XXII retracted his opinion.1  It was left to his successor, Benedict XII, to set forth the traditional and orthodox position in his Constitution, Benedictus Deus (1336).  According to this authoritative document, the souls of the faithful departed see, on entering heaven, the true vision of the Triune God.  Here, in a rather literal translation, is part of the text:2

According to the general disposition of God, the souls of all the saints who departed from this world before the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those of the holy apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, and other faithful who died after receiving the holy baptism of Christ – provided they were not in need of any purification when they died, or will not be in need of any when they die in the future, or else, if they then needed or will need some purification, after they have been purified after death – and again the souls of children who have been reborn by the same baptism of Christ or will be when baptism is conferred on them, if they die before attaining the use of free will: all these souls, immediately (mox) after death and, in the case of those in need of purification, after the purification mentioned above, since the ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ into heaven, already before they take up their bodies again and before the general judgment, have been, are and will be with Christ in heaven, in the heavenly kingdom and paradise, joined to the company of the holy angels.  Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ, these souls have seen and see the divine essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature by way of object of vision; rather the divine essence immediately manifests itself to them, plainly, clearly, and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence.  Moreover, by this vision and enjoyment the souls of those who have already died are truly blessed and have eternal life and rest.  Also the souls of those who will die in the future will see the same divine essence and will enjoy it before the general Judgment.

The centrality of the beatific vision, the visio dei, for all thinking about the nature of heaven, is obvious here: In fact the beatific vision is central to all medieval and Roman Catholic accounts of heaven.  Apostles, saints, and martyrs of the Christian era, together with the faithful of the old covenant (having previously been in limbo patrum3 until the Ascension) and along with the purified faithful from the Church Militant, enjoy the true vision of the Triune God both in the intermediate state and after the Parousia.

      The Protestant Confessions are equally clear that the vision of God is enjoyed by the disembodied souls of the righteous after death.  This is how the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chapter xxxii puts it:4

The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.

Scriptural texts cited for these lines are Genesis 3:19; Acts 13:36; Luke 23:43; Ecclesiastes 12:7; Hebrews 12:23; 2 Corinthians 5:1, 6, 8; Philippians 1:23 (with Acts 3:21 and Ephesians 4:10).

      Because it is held that heaven is enjoyed by the believer both as a disembodied soul and as a resurrected person with an immortal body, descriptions of heaven in the prose and poetry, confessions and hymnody of both Roman Catholics and Protestants do not always distinguish between heaven as it is now and as it will be then.  Of course heaven is heaven and its essence and nature cannot change: What it is and will be for the redeemed was constituted and fixed by the arrival and coronation of Jesus, incarnate Son, in his Exaltation to the Father’s right hand.5  Forever he is and will be the only Mediator between God and human kind.  Even so, the external relations (as we might call them) of heaven will change.  Now heaven stands in a temporary and ambivalent relation to a universe and age infected by sin, suffering, and death and dominated by Satan, who opposes God’s holy purposes: This universe is under God’s judgment and will be wholly purified.  Then, that is after the Parousia, heaven will have a unifying, controlling, and harmonious relation to the new order/universe/age, being at it very center.  Now heaven is populated by the angels, who are pure spirits, and by righteous, disembodied souls, whose number is ever growing; then heaven, at the heart of the new cosmos, will be populated by the angels and by the total number of the elect in their resurrected bodies of glory.  And it is very important to remember that the incarnate Son, the enthroned Lamb, is always and forever the same.

      As we come to look at the teaching of the Church we shall need to be aware of these two “phases” of the glorious, ongoing life of heaven even though we shall discover that much writing on heaven (e.g., of the beatific vision) applies just as much to now as to then.  In this chapter we shall examine characteristics of heaven.  First, we shall note how the nature of the resurrection body of the righteous has been described.  Second, we shall look at the brief but profound description of heaven provided by St. Augustine of Hippo.  Then we shall explain what is meant by the beatific vision in various Christian traditions.  Finally, we shall provide a general description of heaven as it appears in various writings.

 

Resurrection bodies

      In the Apostles’ Creed the faithful confess as individuals: “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”  The last four words translate the Greek sarkos anastasin, or the Latin carnis resurrectionem, which literally translated are “resurrection of the flesh,” meaning the total physical body of a human being.  The reason the word “flesh” (sarkos and carnis) was chosen instead of “body” (sōma and corpus) is twofold.  The earliest of Christian theologians in the second century wanted to affirm that there would be a real and true resurrection of the self-same body that died, and that in that same body a person would be judged by Christ for what he had achieved in that body.  But later we find that there was controversy in Christian circles caused by some who denied the resurrection of the dead.  This caused Justin Martyr to write: “If you meet the people who describe themselves as Christians ... but dare blaspheme the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and affirm that there is no resurrection of the dead ... do not recognize them as Christians.”6  Tertullian of North Africa aimed his De Resurrectione mortuorum (ca. 210) against Gnostics who denied the physical resurrection of bodies.

      This emphasis upon the resurrection of the flesh, that is, the same body, continues through the patristic, medieval, and Reformation periods.  For example, the Larger Catechism (1647) in its answer to Q87 states: “The self-same bodies of the dead which were laid in the grave, being then again united to their souls for ever, shall be raised up by the power of Christ.”7  John Pearson, Bishop of Chester, wrote this in his classical Exposition of the Creed (1659):8

I am fully persuaded of this as of a most necessary and infallible truth, that as it is appointed for all men once to die, so it is also determined that all men shall rise from death, that the souls separated from our bodies are in the hands of God and live, that the bodies dissolved into dust, or scattered into ashes, shall be recollected in themselves, and reunited to their souls, that the same numerical bodies which did fall shall rise, that this resuscitation shall be universal, no man excepted, no flesh left in the grave, that all the just shall be raised to a resurrection of life and all the unjust to a resurrection of damnation; that this shall be performed at the last day when the trump shall sound; and thus I believe THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY

Though they insisted on the resurrection of the self-same body, patristic, medieval, and Protestant theologians also emphasized, as we shall now see, that this body will be wholly transformed into an immortal body of glory, as also the whole universe is also totally renewed and regenerated by the redemptive power of God (Rom. 8:19ff.).

      Not a few medieval theologians indulged in what we today regard as unnecessary speculation about the characteristics and properties of the resurrection body of the righteous.  Thomas Aquinas believed (based on Ephesians 4:13) that the human body would have the development appropriate to the age of thirty, which was that of the risen Christ in his full, human maturity.  Thus those who were younger and those who were older would be resurrected and transformed to look like what they were when they were thirty or what they would have looked like had they reached the age of thirty.  The point that he and others were making was that the resurrection-body is the perfect counterpart to the glorified soul, and thus it has to be perfect and complete in every respect.9

      In essentials there is agreement among medieval, Protestant, and Roman Catholic theologians as to the “marks” of the spiritualized (= wholly amenable to the Spirit’s action) and glorified (= imbued and filled with the glory of Christ) resurrection bodies.  They insist that each resurrection body will be endowed with immortality and incorruptibility, indestructibility, subtlety, agility, and clarity.  They arrived at these descriptions particularly by reflecting upon Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15 and upon the accounts of the Transfiguration of Jesus in the Gospels, as well as the descriptions of heaven we noted in chapters 1, 2, and 3 in Part One.  They also came to these “marks” by reflection upon the relation of the perfected and glorified soul to the new body.  Thus ‘marks’ which belong to the soul are transferred to the body because the body has become a perfect instrument for the soul.  The marks of subtlety and agility, when applied to Christ on earth after his resurrection, point to his ability to pass through closed doors and sealed tombs as well as his power to move at will to any part of the universe in an instant.  Thus applied to the faithful in heaven they also point to their ability as filled with the Spirit and wholly perfected to be present in any part of the new creation at any time – i.e., they can discharge a cosmic function.  The mark of clarity is the ability to see into things and to see them as they really are; further, as an embodied soul it is the ability to see God.  Thus in the new creation glorified humankind truly has dominion.10

      At the general resurrection human bodies are restored to life and equipped with new senses, qualities, and characteristics.  The sphere in which the redeemed, glorified righteous live is also recreated for the new humanity so that it is truly in all respects the kingdom of God.  Of this new order, the Protestant confessions only supply hints; for example, the Westminster Confession merely states that “then shall the righteous go into everlasting life, and receive that fullness of joy and refreshing, which shall come from the presence of the Lord” (chap. xxxiii).11  And the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) had this answer to Q.123:12

“Thy kingdom come.”  That is, so govern us by thy Word and Spirit that we may more and more submit ourselves unto thee.  Uphold and increase thy church.  Destroy the works of the devil, every power that raises itself against thee, and all wicked schemes thought up against thy holy Word, until the full coming of thy kingdom in which thou shaft be all in all.

Here there is the theme of the fullness of the kingdom, taken primarily from the Synoptic Gospels, and that of God himself being all in all, taken primarily from Paul’s teaching (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:28).

      The reticence of the Protestant Confessions concerning the new, everlasting order, cosmos, and kingdom may be explained in various ways –e.g., the hesitation concerning the interpretation of Revelation 20–21 (Calvin, the great biblical expositor, never wrote a commentary on this book); the fact that the Ecumenical creeds speak only of the communion of the saints, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting; and the great emphasis within theology on heaven as primarily the beatific vision (and thus of heaven as primarily, though not only) of a state.  However, there is no lack of discussion concerning the origin of that new heaven and earth in the Lutheran and Calvinist theologians of the seventeenth century.  They debated whether the new order would be creatio ex nihilo or would be through the renewal of the old order.  Further, they exhibit a certain tension between thinking of heaven as place and as state: This is because their primary definition of heaven is in terms of the beatific vision, which the disembodied soul also enjoyed (as we have seen) in the intermediate state.13

      The words of A. A. Hoekema are worth quoting:

The Bible assures us that God will create a new earth on which we shall live to God’s praise in glorified, resurrected bodies.  On the new earth, therefore, we hope to spend eternity, enjoying its beauties, exploring its resources, and using its treasures to the glory of God.  Since God will make the new earth his dwelling place, and since where God dwells there heaven is, we shall then continue to be in heaven while we are on the new earth.  For heaven and earth will then no longer be separated as they are now, but they will be one.  But to leave the new earth out of consideration when we think of the final state of believers is greatly to impoverish biblical teaching about the life to come.14

The theme of cosmic renewal in and by Christ was often referred to in the debates at the Second Vatican Council.  In The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965), often known by its opening Latin words, Gaudium et Spes, we read this in section 39:15

      We know neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man, nor the way the universe will be transformed.  The form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away and we are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, whose happiness will fill and surpass all the desires of peace arising in the hearts of men.  Then with death conquered the sons of God will be raised in Christ and what was sown in weakness and dishonor will put on the imperishable: charity and its works will remain and all of creation, which God made for man, will be set free from its bondage to decay.

      We have been warned, of course, that it profits man nothing if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself.  Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectancy of a new earth, should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come.  That is why, although we must be careful to distinguish earthy progress clearly from the increase of the kingdom of Christ, such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God, insofar as it can contribute to the better ordering of human society.

      When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise – human dignity, brotherly communion and freedom – according to the command of the Lord and his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.  Here on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present; when the Lord comes it will enter into its perfection.

This is a fine statement built upon the conviction that the new order of the age to come will both fulfill and transcend this present age.

      Not only Roman Catholics but also evangelicals have in recent times emphasised the hope of a new order.  In the Lausianne Covenant (1974), a document which is primarily about evangelism and mission in God’s world, these words describe the Christian hope.

We reject as a proud, self-confident dream the notion that man can ever build a utopia on earth.  Our Christian confidence is that God will perfect his kingdom, and we look forward with eager anticipation to that day, and to the new heaven and earth in which righteousness will dwell and God will reign forever.  Meanwhile, we rededicate ourselves to the service of Christ and of men in joyful submission to his authority over the whole of our lives.16

 

Augustine on heaven

      In closing the last book of his mammoth treatise, The City of God, Augustine of Hippo wrote: “Vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et laudabimus.  Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine.”17  This may be translated: “There [i.e., in our future life in heaven in our resurrection bodies of glory] we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise.  Behold what shall be in the end shall not end.”  We shall take the verbs in this marvelous description of heaven one by one.

      1.  Vacabimus (we shall rest).  Augustine was thinking of the teaching in the Letter to the Hebrews concerning the Sabbath rest of God into which Christ and his people enter (see chapter four for our presentation of the texts).  After six days spent in creating the world, God rested on the Sabbath day.  That is, God took time to contemplate what he had made and rejoice in his creation – just as a painter stands back and looks at his painting when he is finished.  Further, after his great work of atonement on Good Friday, Jesus rested in the tomb on Holy Saturday (the Great Sabbath) as he enjoyed the work of the new creation and looked upon the travail of his soul with satisfaction.  Thus the rest of God into which the faithful enter now (in part) and wholly (at the end) is not a kind of stagnation or inertia; it is not boredom but a perfection of life and holy contentment that we have no words adequate to describe it.

      In his De Catechizandis Rudibus Augustine advises on giving catechetical instruction when many may be joining the church for worldly advantage.  If a candidate desires to become a Christian “for the Rest to come,” then take him at his word, and teach him the faith, saying, “I rejoice for you that in all the perilous storms of this world you have considered the security that is real and certain.”  Later Augustine states:

He who will become a Christian for the sake of the everlasting happiness and rest perpetual promised after this life to the saints, that he may not go into eternal fire with the devil, but enter with Christ into His eternal Kingdom, he is a Christian indeed – wary in all temptation, lest he be corrupted by prosperity or broken by adversity, moderate and self-restrained in abundance of worldly goods, brave and patient in tribulations.  Such a man will yet go forward and attain a better state, in which he will love God more than he fears hell.18

The better state will become the final state in which “we shall have leisure to be still and we shall see that he is God;” and seeing that he is God, we shall be filled with him when he will be all in all.

      2.  Videbimus (we shall see).  In the penultimate chapter of the last book of the City of God, Augustine discussed the visio dei and whether we shall see God with the “physical eyes” of the new resurrection bodies as well as with the inward eye of the spirit/heart.  He believed that the vision of God will be such that he will be seen and known by the whole person, not only in a direct manner but also via his new creation.

It is possible, it is indeed most probable, that we shall then see the physical bodies of the new heaven and the new earth in such a fashion as to observe God in utter clarity and distinctness, seeing him everywhere present and governing the whole material scheme of things.... Perhaps God will be known to us and visible to us in the sense that he will be spiritually perceived by each of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself; he will be seen in the new heaven and earth, in the whole creation as it then will be; he will be seen in every body by means of bodies, wherever the eyes of the spiritual body are directed with their penetrating gaze.19

Then will be fulfilled the text, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

      3.  Amabimus (we shall love).  Augustine has much to say about God’s love for man and man’s love for God.  John Burnaby’s masterly study of Augustine’s spirituality is appropriately titled Amor Dei.  God himself, as Augustine never tired of saying, is the reward of the love which he infuses and inspires in the hearts of the regenerate.  Pure love of God is nothing else but the longing for the vision of God, since nothing that God can promise has any worth apart from himself.  “For God is to be loved freely and the soul cannot rest save in that which it loves.  But eternal rest is only given to it in the love of God, who alone is eternal.”  Thus in that rest

we shall feel need no longer, and therein shall be our happiness.  For we shall be filled, filled with our God, who Himself will be to us all that our longings make us count most desirable here....

      He who has given the promise is himself the end of our longing.  He will give himself, because he has given himself [in the Incarnate Son’s death].  He will give his own immortal being to our immortality, because he gave himself as mortal to our mortality.

Thus in this affirmation that God himself is the reward of the love which he inspires and that love accepted is love gained, Augustine not only makes his special contribution to our thinking on the love of God but shows how love for God in this life is marvelously magnified and rewarded in the life to come.20

      Some of the insights of Augustine are developed in a short but profound treatise on the love of God by Bernard of Clairveaux (1090–1153).21  The life of love is divided into four stages: (1) the love of a man for himself is the realism accepted by the commandment to love others as you love yourself; (2) the loving of God for what he is towards human beings as sinners; (3) the love of God for God’s sake because he is supremely lovable; (4) the love of self only for the sake of God.  Though this scheme – self for self; God for self; God for God; self for God – may appear artificial, it does contain a profound estimate of the love of human beings for God.  The first three stages belong to the life of imperfection as there is growth in holiness; the last stage can be realized only in heaven within the beatific vision and in a resurrection body of glory.  In this final state God is love supremely and alone, for the love of self is only for the greater glory of God.  Thus heaven in a community of love originating in and being fulfilled in the love of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

      During the middle ages the Dominicans and Franciscans debated this question: Will our complete happiness in heaven consist primarily in knowing God (i.e., seeing him) or in loving him?  The Dominicans insisted that the primary aspect of heaven was knowing God through the beatific vision, thereby following their great teacher Thomas Aquinas, while the Franciscans argued that it was loving God and thus sharing in the divine love of the Holy Trinity, as Augustine had written.  Their debate as to whether the supreme ecstasy is more affectional than intellectual was really a waste of time, for they debated that which they had not experienced and could know only in part.  It is a question we need not face; however, this debate is put in some sort of context by the final verb used by Augustine.

      4.  Laudabimus (we shall praise).  At the beginning of the last chapter of the City of God he wrote:

How great will be that felicity, when there will be no evil, where no good will be withheld, where there will be leisure for the praises of God, who will be all in all.  What other occupation could there be in a state where there will be no inactivity of idleness, and yet no toil constrained by want?  I can think of none.  And this is the picture suggested to my mind by the sacred canticle, when I read or hear the words, “Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will praise you for ever and ever!”

Concerning the task of a Christian on earth, Augustine had already written, “What will be your work, but to praise him you love, and to make others share your love of him?”  Concerning the praise of God, which has a highly paradoxical character, we may reiterate the comment of Dr. E. L. Mascall:

The sole justification for praising God is that God is praiseworthy.  We do not praise God because it does us good, though no doubt it does.  Nor do we praise him because it does him good, for in fact it does not.  Praise is thus strictly ecstatic, in the sense that it takes us wholly out of ourselves; it is purely and solely directed upon God.... Praise is entirely directed upon God.  It takes our attention entirely off ourselves and concentrates it entirely upon him.  It neither does God any good, nor does it profess to do so.  Its sole and sufficient justification lies in the fact that God is praiseworthy.  And that is the only justification that it needs.22

In one of his printed sermons Augustine states:

Because our vision of the True will be without satiety, in perpetual delight, because our contemplation will have the perfect assurance of immediacy – kindled, then, by the love of Very Truth, cleaving to him in the pure embrace of spirit, our spirit’s voice will praise him and say, “Alleluia.”  Uplifting one another to the same praise, in most fervent love to one another and to God, all the citizens of that city will say, ‘Alleluia,’ inasmuch as they will say, “Amen.”23

Thus Christians’ activity will be the praise of God – Alleluia – and the acceptance of his will and word – Amen (so be it).  “Let us rest assured, my brethren,” he said on another occasion.

We shall not be wearied by the praise of God, nor by his love.  If your love should fail, so would your praise; but if love will be everlasting, because the beauty of God will be uncloying, inexhaustible, fear not that you will lack power ever to praise him, whom you will have power ever to love.24

 

      This rest, vision, love, and praise will be both personal and communal.  God will be a common vision, possession, and reward, for he will be enthroned in every heart.  “The peace of the heavenly city is the perfectly ordered, perfectly united fellowship in the fruition of God and of one another in God.”25  In this fruitio dei, the fulfillment of one another in God, “the hearts of all will be transparent, manifest, luminous in the perfection of love.”26

      Thus the experience of resting, seeing, loving, and praising will continue forever within the heavenly city of God at the center of the new heaven and earth.  And “what shall be in the End, shall not end,” for such is what the creed highlights in the words, “I believe in the life everlasting:”

 

Visio Dei – seeing God in heaven

      Christians have consistently looked forward to the visio dei in heaven.  Their hope has been fueled by the beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God” (Matt. 5:8), the warning, “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14), the promise, “We shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2), and the Old Testament presentation of both the invisibility of God (Exod. 33:20; cf 1 Tim. 6:16 and Heb. 11:27) and his visibility through his self-revelation in grace (Exod. 33:18ff. and 34:29ff.).  How often have the words of Paul been quoted: “Now we see but a poor reflection; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor.13:12)!  What the “face to face” will mean has been glimpsed not only by the mystics but by the many thousands who have entered into the secret place and prayed to their heavenly Father in secret.

      Since God is Eternal Spirit and not a massive physical reality, no attempt to describe the visio dei has been easy.  The popular way has been to cite biblical texts, explain them by simple illustrations taken from common experiences of “seeing” and “knowing,” and then invite people to use their imagination to think of that seeing and knowing of God which brings perfect happiness.  As Calvin wrote:

For though we very truly hear that the kingdom of God will be filled with splendor, joy, happiness and glory, yet when these things are spoken of, they remain utterly remote from our perception, and, as it were, wrapped in obscurities, until that day comes when he will reveal to us his glory, that we may behold it face to face.

And also:

If the Lord will share his glory, power, righteousness with the elect – nay, will give himself to be enjoyed by them and, what is more excellent, will somehow make them to become one with himself, let us remember that every sort of happiness is included under this benefit.27

As the beatific vision (that vision of God which brings perfect happiness to the elect) was explained in theological terms in the patristic and medieval periods, such expressions as fruitio dei (fruition of fulfillment of the hope of full salvation and redemption and seeing God “face to face”) and sicuti est (from the Vulgate of 1 John 3:2, “as he is”) were used, and to them was added the expression, visio per essentiam (i.e., seeing God as he essentially is as Triune).  Originally the “seeing of God” was understood in terms of the God who fully reveals himself to the body of Christ who are the faithful in heaven: the sicuti est originally was conceived in the dynamic biblical sense of the God of grace who discloses himself in Christ, the incarnate Son, to the limits that redeemed humanity can receive and appropriate.  Yet when sicuti est was interpreted by visio per essentiam, as happened in the late medieval period, then the God who will be seen is not the God who discloses himself fully as Creator, Lord, and Savior but rather the God as he is in himself as holy Trinity.  Because it was recognized that such a vision of God was different than seeing God in, through, and by Christ, as the self-revealer, theologians proposed that a further gift of grace was necessary for these who entered heaven.  They called this extra gift the lumen gloriae (“light of glory” from Psalm 36:9, “In thy light we see light”).

      It was claimed that this knowledge of God is the true fulfillment of this spiritual nature of man.  As the Council of Vienne (1311) insisted it is an absolutely supernatural endowment.  As such, it is the fruit of a sublime, final and permanent enlightment of human nature.  And, as the mystics, Tauler and Eckhart explained, this light of glory transfigures and elevates human nature so that by it we know God direct as we know ourselves, not merely as we know another human being.28

      Though this visio per essentiam and lumen gloriae became part of orthodox Roman Catholic theology, they are not always emphasized by modern Roman Catholic writers and are generally rejected within the Protestant tradition, which has always sought to maintain the emphasis on the visio dei but to interpret it in terms of the biblical sicuti est of the God who reveals himself.29

      Michael Schmaus, has written concerning the visio dei in these words:30

The concept of the beatific vision cannot be understood if it is viewed under its objective aspect; it must be seen as the joy-giving, life-giving exchange between God and man wherein man is liberated from all self-seeking and gives himself to God in total openness, and wherein God on his side gives himself to man without any barrier.  Although the word vision has an intellectual connotation, this seeing of God must be understood in the biblical sense as an act leading to union.  It is a personal, existential occurrence.  A personal God cannot be an object at the disposal of man, the creature: he is always the Lord who gives himself, Love who gives himself freely.

Schmaus proceeds to explain that

it is because man is made in the likeness of God and transformed through his incorporation in Jesus Christ that he is able to attain this vision of the transcendent God.  In this process he is not transformed into God but raised to a higher level in his nature as man.  This, he states, is what the medieval theologians meant by speaking of the lumen gloriae.

      The Christocentric emphasis of Schmaus is dominant in Protestant teaching on the visio dei. In his exegesis of 1 John 3:2 Calvin equates the vision of Christ in his glorified body with the vision of God: In the consummation believers see God in Christ and are thus transformed into the image of God.  “Our glory will not be so perfect as to be able to comprehend the Lord in his absolute Godhead.  Even at the last there will remain an impassable distance between himself and us” comments Calvin.  The visio dei implies fullness of communion and fellowship with God in and through Christ and thus, like Augustine he combines the fruitio dei and the visio dei.  In turn, this means blessedness and complete salvation – perfect release from sin, death, pain, and sorrow and perfect joy in Christ.  It also means participation in the glory of heaven, for the whole of the elect as the church is perfected by being given resurrection bodies of glory and by being united into one people, one body, one temple to praise and magnify the Lord.  And all this will occur in the new cosmos, the perfect place and sphere for the new humanity to enjoy the glorious life of heaven.  “The end of the glorification of man and the world is the glory of God.”31

      Jonathan Edwards, America’s greatest philosopher-theologian of grace, had much to say about heaven and the beautific visio.  In a sermon on Matthew 5:8 he explained not only what it is to be pure in heart but also the nature of the visio dei.32  Of seeing God in Jesus he said:

The saints in heaven will behold an outward glory as they are in the human nature of Christ which is united to the Godhead, as it is the body of that person who is God; and there will doubtless be appearances of a divine and inimitable glory and beauty in Christ’s glorified body, which it will indeed be a refreshing and blessed sight to see.

      But the beauty of Christ’s body as seen by the bodily eyes will be ravishing and delightful, chiefly as it will express his spiritual glory.  The majesty that will appear in Christ’s body will express and show forth the spiritual greatness and majesty of the divine nature; the pureness and beauty of that light and glory will express the perfection of the divine holiness; the sweetness and ravishing mildness of his countenance will express his divine and spiritual love and grace.

And he went on to explain the nature of the visio dei:

It is an intellectual view by which God is seen.  God is a spiritual being and he is beheld with the understanding.  The soul has in itself those powers which are capable of apprehending objects and especially spiritual objects, without looking through the windows of the outward senses.  This is a more perfect way of perception than by the eyes of the body....  The eye of the soul is vastly more perfect than the eye of the body.

To see God implies the sight of him as glorious and gracious – a vision of the light of his countenance, both as it is understood of the effulgence of his glory and the manifestations of his favor and love.

      Edwards proceeded to explain what this intellectual view of God in heaven will be like.  It is called “seeing God” (1) because the view will be very direct, as when we see things with the bodily eyes.  In heaven God will immediately excite apprehensions of himself.  (2) Because the knowledge of God will be most certain, for when people see things with their own eyes they are certain that it is real.  In heaven the sight of God will exclude all doubting.  (3) Because the apprehension of God’s glory will be as clear and lively as when any thing is seen with bodily eyes.  (4) Because the intellectual sight which the saints will have of God will make them sensible of his presence, and give them as great an advantage of conversing with him, as the sight of the bodily eyes does an earthly friend.  In heaven the souls of the saints will have the most clear sight of the spiritual nature of God.  They will behold his attributes and disposition towards them more immediately and with greater certainty than it is possible to see anything in the soul of an earthly friend by his speech and behavior.

      Finally Edwards showed that the visio dei is also fruitio dei, for in seeing God the soul will be wholly fulfilled and made perfectly happy.  Seeing God provides and yields a delight suitable to the nature of human beings, and by it they are perfectly fulfilled in their thinking, feeling, and willing.  Further, since the glory of God is inexhaustible and eternal, it never ceases to shine and thus the fulfillment and delight of the redeemed people of God is also always maintained at the highest point.  “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

 

Heaven – what is it like?

      Heaven is both a place and a state, but it is easier to offer a description of it as a state than as a place.  As a state heaven will be a profoundly richer experience of God and the communion of saints than can be enjoyed in this age on this earth.  As “new heavens and new earth;” the age of the kingdom of God will be a created place/sphere, the like of which we have not yet experienced and concerning which we can have the dimmest intimations.33  Death will be behind (instead of in front of) the population of the kingdom; time and space will not be the same as known here on earth, and relationships will be of a different order.  This being so, it is clear that the life of the new humanity in their resurrection bodies of glory can be described only in symbolic terms, that is, with images and language derived from present day-by-day experience in this world, together with the recognition that the symbols cannot be perfectly adequate to the reality of this life in the age to come.

      For our summary of what heaven will be like we shall rely upon the summaries provided by a Presbyterian of the nineteenth century and an Anglican of the twentieth century.34  What heaven – that is the new order after the last judgment – will be like may be put in one sentence, as did A. A. Hodge: “Heaven, as a place, is where Christ, the God-Man, is.  Heaven, as a state, is one of intimate knowledge of him and of the whole Godhead in him, and of fellowship with him.”  The same writer continues to explain: “Heaven, as the supreme centre of divine revelations and communications through Christ, must pre-eminently bear the characteristics of God.  It will be absolutely pure, majestic, holy, noble, in all its elements and characteristics.”  Yet it will also be perfectly suited for sanctified humanity.

Heaven, as the eternal home of the divine Man and of all the redeemed members of the human race, must necessarily be thoroughly human in its structure, conditions, and activities.  Its joys and activities must all be rational, moral, emotional, voluntary and active.  There must be the exercise of all the faculties, the gratification of all tastes, the development of all talent capacities, the realization of all ideals.  The reason, the intellectual curiosity, the imagination, the aesthetic instincts, the holy affections, the social affinities, the inexhaustible resources of strength and power native to the human soul must all find in heaven exercise and satisfaction.  Then there must always be a goal of endeavour before us, ever future.

Thus the pathway of the redeemed and glorified will always be with Christ Godward.

      B. H. Streeter adds further details concerning the idea of heaven.  Life in heaven must be thought of as life in a society – the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of God, and the communion of saints: “The most conspicuous feature of that society will be not merely that the exercise of active love will be as possible there as it is on earth but that the love will be of an intenser quality, will lavish itself on a wide range of persons, and will always express itself more freely and in more diverse ways.”  And there must be work, for did not Jesus say, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working” (John 5:17).  Though the new humanity will enter into God’s rest (as Augustine emphasized), it is not the rest of boredom, laziness, or inertia, but that rest which, though it does not bring fatigue and tiredness, involves being a co-worker with God himself.

      In the third place there will be profound knowledge and thought (related to the visio dei).  Paul had confessed: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).  Love is higher than knowledge, but love will not be without knowledge, and there will be a constant growth in knowledge of God, his creation, his purposes, and his ways.  Fourth, there will be the full apprehension and enjoyment of the Beautiful: This is suggested by the apocalyptic visions of Revelation.  Then, fifth, heaven will contain humor, that humor which belongs to the true exercise of human nature in human community and which is the spontaneous expression of the joy of living.  We give the final word to A. A. Hodge, who wrote:

The constitution of heaven will be related not only to human nature, redeemed and glorified, but also to angelic nature in all its grades and orders.  Christ and the commonwealth of his redeemed kindred after the flesh will be central.  But with us all holy intelligences in all their infinite varieties of rank and gifts and functions will be comprehended.  Heaven will prove the consummate flower and fruit of the whole creation and of all the history of the universe.

 

Notes

        1For the controversy see History of the Church, Vol. IV (ed. Hubert Jedin, London, 1980), 313–14, and D. Douie, “John XXII and the Beatific Vision,” Dominican Studies 3 (1950), 154–174.

        2The translation is taken from The Christian Faith: Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church (ed. J. Neuner and J. Dupuis, Bangalore, India, 1973), 624.

        3See the article on “Limbo” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia.

        4The Confession of Faith, 123.

        5The fact that heaven was changed by the arrival there of the God-Man is not always made clear in theological text-books.  However, A. A. Hodge of Princeton Seminary did insist upon this point: “It follows that when, on the evening of Friday, the soul of the then dead Christ, personally united to his divinity, entered Paradise, he must have irradiated it with a sudden light never seen there nor in all the universe of God before.  That one moment consummated heaven and revolutionized the condition of the redeemed for ever.  How much more, then, when some forty days afterward, in his completed person, his risen and glorified body united to his glorious soul and Godhead, he ascended and sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high, must the seats of bliss have been transformed and glorified for ever, and made the central temple and cosmopolitan eye and crown of the universe!”  Evangelical Theology, Carlisle, PA, 1980, 369.

        6Cited by J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, London, 1960, 164.

        7The Confession of Faith, 175.

        8J. Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed (ed. T. Chevalier, Cambridge, 1859), 718.

        9See the article on “Resurrection of the Dead” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia.

        10See further Alois Winklhofer, The Coming of His Kingdom: a Theology of the Last Things, London, 1963, chapter 12, and Heinriche Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 707ff.

        11The Confession of Faith, 125.

        12Reformed Confessions (ed. A. Cochrane), 329–30.

        13For further discussion see G. C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1972, chapter 7.

        14A. A. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future, chapter 20, 274.

        15Vatican Council II.  The Conciliar Documents (ed. A. Flannery, 1975), 938.

        16The Lausanne Covenant (ed. John Stott, Minneapolis, 1975), 56.

        17Book xxii, chap. 30.  There are various translations of the City of God, e.g., that of John Healey (revised by R. V. G. Tasker) in Everyman’s Library, that in the Modern Library (New York) and that in the Penguin Classics.  The most accessible Latin text is that by J. E. C. Weltdon (SPCK, 1924).

        18Cited by John Burnaby, Amor Dei (London, 1938), 242.

        19Book xxii, chap. 29.

        20The quotations are from Burnaby, Amor Dei 242–45.

        21St Bernard On the Love of God, translated by a religious of C.S.M.V., rpt. by S.C.M., London, 1959, as On Loving God.

        22E. L. Mascall, Grace and Glory, London, 1975, 68–69.

        23Sermon cccixii, 29.  Cited by Mascall, 71.

        24Enarration on Psalm 83:8.  Cited by Mascall, 71.

        25City of God, xix, chap. 13.

        26Enarration on Psalm 94:33.  Cited by Burnaby, Amor Dei, 249.

        27Calvin, Institutes, Book III, chap. xxv, sec. 10.

        28See further the article, “Beatific Vision,” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia and the illuminating discussion by G. C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ, chap. 12.

        29The concept of the visio dei in the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches is different from that in the Roman Catholic church since the possibility of “seeing” the essence of God is denied.  A distinction is made between the divine essence and the divine energies, as expounded by Gregory Palamas.  The Christian in heaven who participates in the energies of God is believed to be seeing God “face to face.”  See further Kallistos Ware, “Christian Theology in the East, 600–1453;” in A History of Christian Doctrine (ed. H. Cunliffe Jones with B. Drewery, Edinburgh, 1978),181ff.

        30Schmaus, Justification and the Last Things, 266.

        31See further H. Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things, London, 1955,162ff.

        32The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Edward Hickman, Carlisle, Pa., 1974, vol. 3., 905ff.

        33On the question, Where is heaven now? Austin Farrer has written: “According to Einstein’s unanswerable reasoning, space is not an infinite pre-existent field or area in which bits of matter float about.  Space is a web of intersections between material energies which form a system by thus intersecting.  Unless the beings or energies of which heaven is composed are of a sort to intersect physically with the energies in our physical world, heaven can be as dimensional as it likes, without ever getting pulled into our spatial field, or having any possible contact with us of any physical kind.  There may well be contacts which are not physical at all between earthly minds and heavenly minds but that’s another story.”  “Heaven and Hell,” Saving Belief, London 1964, 145.

        34A. A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology, 399–402, and B. H. Streeter, “The Life of the World to Come,” Immortality (ed. B. H. Streeter, London, 1917, 154ff.

 

Chapter  8 – Hell

      Neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creeds mention hell or Satan.  To add to either of these the words, “and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting,” would sound odd; belief in Satan and hell is of a different nature than belief in God and heaven.  The contents of the creeds point to realities which are to lay hold upon us and grip us in faith and love: Satan and hell are to be avoided, not greeted.

      Belief in Satan and hell does, however, come into statements of faith made by the Church over the centuries, as well, of course, in the theological systems of teachers of doctrine and dogma.  Cyprian of Carthage, writing in the third century, said:

The damned will burn for ever in hell.  Devouring flames will be their eternal portion.  Their torments will never have diminution or end.  Their lamentations will be vain and entreaties ineffectual.  Their repentance comes too late.  They will have to believe in an eternal punishment, as they refused to believe in the life eternal.1

And from the fifth century the Quicunque Vult (the so-called Athanasian Creed) has as its opening sentence these words: “Whosoever wishes to be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith, which faith, if anyone does not keep it whole and unharmed, without doubt he will perish everlastingly.”2  In the next century the teaching of Origen and his disciples that the fires of hell were not everlasting and that hell had an end when all, being purged, finally entered heaven, was condemned: “He who holds that the torment of hell are temporary only and will have an end or that the damned will be re-established in the condition in which they were before they sinned, let him be anathema.”3  At the “General Council” of the Lateran in 1215, the faith was defined in these terms: “Christ will render to every man, be he damned or elect, according to his works.  The damned will go into everlasting punishment with the devil, and the elect will go with Christ into glory everlasting.”4  Further, as we noted in chapter seven, the doctrine of hell as everlasting punishment is clearly stated in the Protestant Confessions of Faith of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Following the Parousia, the resurrection of the dead, and the last judgment, hell will become an everlasting reality for the damned.

      This traditional, orthodox doctrine of hell, common to medieval Christendom, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism, has been challenged by two alternative doctrines.  One of these interprets hell in terms of annihilation so that following the last judgment, hell lasts merely for a “short time” before it and its members become as nothing.  The other, known as apocatastasis (as taught by Origen), is the teaching that all free, moral creatures – angels, human beings, and demons – will ultimately be saved, even perhaps after a period of purging in hell.  Thus hell is only temporary in comparison with heaven, which is truly everlasting.  We shall return to Origen in the next chapter when we discuss universalism.  Our task in this chapter is to examine the doctrine of hell as everlasting punishment and then to look at the doctrine of hell as annihilation.  In each case we shall be particularly interested in the way Scripture is used and interpreted.

 

Everlasting punishment

      Medieval theologians distinguished between poena damni (the pain of loss), interpreted in terms of the loss of the visio dei, and the poena sensus (the pain of sense), interpreted in terms of suffering.  This passed over into both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology and was developed in various ways.5  Calvin dealt with the lot of the reprobate in the last section of book three of the Institutes, as well as at appropriate places in his biblical commentaries.  He wrote:6

Now because no description can deal adequately with the gravity of God’s vengeance against the wicked, their torments and tortures are figuratively expressed to us by physical things, that is by darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12; 22:13), unquenchable fire (Matt. 3:12; Mark 9:43; Isa. 66:24), and undying worm gnawing at the heart (Isa. 66:24).  By such expressions the Holy Spirit certainly intended to confound all our senses with dread.... As by such details we should be enabled in some degree to conceive the lot of the wicked, so we ought especially to fix our thoughts upon this: how wretched it is to be cut off from all fellowship with God.  And not that only, but so to feel his sovereign power against you that you cannot escape being pressed by it.  For first, his displeasure is like a raging fire, devouring and engulfing everything it touches.  Secondly, all creatures so serve him in the execution of his judgment that they to whom the Lord will openly show his wrath will feel heaven, earth, sea, living beings and all that exists aflame, as it were, with dire anger against them and armed to destroy them.

Here we have both the pain of loss and the pain of sense imposed directly by God in his wrath.

      The Genevan reformer was certainly not a literalist in his interpretation of the fire of hell.  Commenting upon Matthew 3:12 and recalling medieval theological speculation he wrote:

Many persons, I am aware, have entered into ingenious debates about the eternal fire by which the wicked will be tormented after the judgment.  But we may conclude from many passages of Scripture, that it is a metaphorical expression.  For, if we must believe that it is real, or what they call material fire, we must also believe that the brimstone and the fan are material, both of them being mentioned in Isaiah (30:33).  We must explain the fire in the same manner as the worm (Mark 8:44, 46, 48) and, if it is universally agreed that the worm is a metaphorical term, we must form the same opinion as to the fire.  Let us lay aside the speculations, by which foolish men weary themselves to no purpose, and satisfy ourselves with believing, that these forms of speech denote in a manner suited to our feeble capacity, a dreadful torment, which no man can now comprehend, and no language can express.7

As the founder of the Jesuits and a leader of the Roman Catholic counter-reformation, Ignatius Loyola (d.1556) is justly famous.  He had a vivid belief in the existence of hell and expected his religious order to share it.   This is revealed in his The Spiritual Exercises, a series of meditations and rules designed to lead people to conquer their passions and give themselves wholly to God.8  Beginning with systematic consideration of sin and its consequences, the book culminates in meditations upon the risen, glorified Lord.  The fifth exercise in the book is a meditation on hell:

The first part will be to see with the eye of the imagination those great fires, and those souls as it were in bodies of fire.  The second to hear with the ears lamentations, howlings, cries, blasphemies against Christ our Lord and against all his saints.  The third, with the sense of smell, to smell smoke, brimstone, refuse and rottenness.  The fourth, to taste with the taste bitter things, as tears, sadness and the worm of conscience.  The fifth, to feel with the sense of touch how those fires do touch and burn souls.

It would seem that Ignatius was much nearer to the literal rather than the metaphorical sense in his interpretation of the biblical texts: As such he was in line with most of the medieval writers who believed that the fires of hell had a physical or material character to them since they were directed toward resurrected bodies (which, though incorruptible, could still feel the pain of fire.)9

      We turn next to the Church of England and the classic exposition of the Apostles’ Creed by Bishop Pearson (1659), which we quoted in the last chapter.  After providing arguments against the Socinian doctrine of hell as annihilation, he summarized his explanation of hell in these words:10

That the wicked after this life shall be punished for their sins, so that in their punishment there shall be a demonstration of the justice of God revealed against all unrighteousness of men.  That to this end they shall be raised again to life, and shall be judged and condemned by Christ, and delivered up under the curse, to be tormented with the devil and his angels.  That the punishment which shall be inflicted on them shall be proportionate to their sins, as a recompense of their demerits, so that no man shall suffer more than he hath deserved.  That they shall be tormented with a pain of loss, the loss from God, from whose presence they are cast out, the pain from themselves, in despair of enjoying him, and regret for losing him.  That they farther shall be tormented with the pain of sense inflicted on them by the wrath of God which abideth upon them, represented unto us by a lake of fire.  That their persons shall continue for ever in this remediless condition, under an everlasting pain of sense, because there is no hope of heaven, under an eternal pain of sense, because there is no means to appease the wrath of God which abideth on them.

This is the classic doctrine, but without the commitment to the view that the fire and smoke are to be taken in the literal sense.

      Not only in the teaching of its divines but also within its Prayer Book does the Church of England set forth the doctrine of hell as everlasting punishment.  In the Book of Common Prayer (in the 1549, 1552 and definitive 1662 editions) there is a service to be used on the first day of Lent called A Commination, or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgements against Sinners.  This is based on a similar service used in the medieval Church.  Commination is from comminari meaning “to threaten,” and the whole service is around this theme, containing God’s cursing of sinners and his threat that the unrepentant shall go to hell.  Here is part of the long address read by the minister:

The day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night: and when men shall say, “Peace,” and all things are safe, then shall sudden destruction come upon them....  Then shall appear the wrath of God in the day of vengeance, which obstinate sinners, through the stubbornness of their heart, have heaped upon themselves.... O terrible voice of most just judgment, which shall be pronounced upon them, when it shall be said unto them, “Go, ye cursed, into the fire everlasting, which is prepared for the devil and his angels.”  Therefore, brethren, take we heed betime, while the day of salvation lasteth; for the night cometh, when none can work.  But let us, while we have the light, believe in the light; that we be not cast into utter darkness, where is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

In keeping with the general decline in belief in hell, this service does not appear in the modern Anglican Prayer Books.  Those who read it cannot avoid the conclusion that it certainly teaches both the poena damni and poena sensus.11

      One man who was familiar with this service of commination was that best known of English Puritans, Richard Baxter (1615–1691).  Among his many writings is found his classic, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest: a treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in heaven (1650), which is both doctrinal and practical theology.  It is an extended exposition of Hebrews 4:9, “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.”  Within its pages Baxter also describes hell in order to persuade his readers to long for heaven and prepare diligently to go there.12  In a chapter on “the misery of those who lose the Saints’ Rest” he describes what a person loses by not being reconciled to God in Christ Jesus.  In their loss of heaven the ungodly (1) lose the glorious, personal perfection which the saints enjoy in heaven – “that shining lustre of the body surpassing the brightness of the sun at noon-day”; (2) they shall have no comfortable relation to God nor communion with him – “God will abhor to retain them in his household”; (3) they lose all delightful affections towards God – “God suits men’s employment to their natures”; and (4) they shall be deprived of the blessed society of angels and glorified saints – “they must be members of the corporation of hell.”

      This loss of heaven will be most tormenting because their understandings will be cleared to know their loss, their consciences will make them fully aware of their guilt, and their affections will no longer be stupified.  The memory of their past lives and how they offended God will ever be before them and they will fully recognize the enormity of their sin.  These torments will be the greater because of the actual sufferings of hell.  Baxter insists that “the principal author of hell-torments is God himself,” and “his wrath will be an intolerable burden to their souls.”  Both the place and the state of this torment are “purposely ordained to glorify the justice of God.”  Thus “the everlasting flames of hell will not be thought too hot for the rebellious; and when they have there burned through millions of ages, he will not repent them of the evil which is befallen them.”  In fact, the “torments of the damned must be extreme because they are the effect of divine vengeance.”  Certainly “God had rather men would accept of Christ and mercy, yet when they persist in their rebellion, he will take pleasure in their execution”; thus “woe to the souls whom God rejoiceth to punish!”  And the punishment will be felt by both body and soul, but chiefly the soul.  The torments will be without mitigation and “when a thousand million of ages are past they will be as fresh to begin as the first day.”  Thus “as the joys of heaven are beyond our conception, so are the pains of hell. Everlasting torment is inconceivable torment.”

      Baxter believed it was necessary to speak about hell in order to make people aware of their destiny and cause them to repent of their sin and turn to Christ as Savior.  Jonathan Edwards, who lived a century after Baxter and in a different continent, also shared this conviction and has left us many sermons of this kind.  Obviously Edwards was a man who often thought about both heaven and hell and then wrote and preached on these awesome topics.  His doctrine is that of Reformed theology and traditional orthodoxy, but his treatment of hell is rightly specially noticed because of its intensity, vividness, and comprehensiveness.  He appears to have thought about every aspect and, in his published writings as well as unpublished manuscripts, to have given abundant evidence of this profound thinking and lively imagination.13

      John Gerstner offers this summary of Edwards’ doctrine of hell:

Hell is a spiritual and material furnace of fire where its victims are exquisitely tortured in their minds and in their bodies eternally, according to their various capacities, by God, the devils and damned humans including themselves, in their memories and consciences, as well as in their raging unsatisfied lusts, from which place of death God’s saving grace, mercy and pity are gone forever, never for a moment to return.14

Unlike Calvin, and in a more obvious way than Baxter, Edwards believed that the fires of hell were both physical and figurative (metaphorical).  This is clear in many of his sermons, but it also comes out clearly in his description of hell in his great treatise, A History of the Work of Redemption (1774).  In Part IX on “The General Judgment” he describes the Parousia, resurrection, and judgment.  Then he relates how Christ would ascend again from this earth a second time, taking his mystical body, the whole Church, with him into heaven.  Here is his description of hell:15

When they are gone, this world shall be set on fire, and be turned into a great furnace, wherein all the enemies of Christ and his church shall be tormented for ever and ever.  This is manifest by 2 Peter 3:7....  When Christ and his church are ascended to a distance from this world – that miserable company of the wicked being left behind, to have their sentence executed upon them here – then this whole lower world shall be set on fire, either from heaven, or by fire breaking out of the bowels of the earth, or both, as it was with the water in the time of the deluge.  However, this lower world shall be set all on fire.  How will it strike the wicked with horror, when the fire begins to lay hold upon them and they find no way to escape from it!  What shrieking and crying will there be among those many millions, when they begin to enter into this great furnace, when the whole world shall be a furnace of the fiercest and most raging heat....

      And here shall all the persecutors of the church of God burn in everlasting fire, who had before burnt the saints at the stake; and shall suffer torments far beyond all that their utmost wit and malice could inflict on the saints.  And here the bodies of all the wicked shall burn and be tormented to all eternity, and never be consumed; and the wrath of God shall be poured out on their souls....  And now, the devil, that old serpent, shall receive his full punishment....  This world, which formerly used to be the place of his kingdom, where he set up himself as God, shall now be the place of his complete punishment, of full and everlasting torment.

And in common with other theologians, Edwards pictured the saints in heaven being able to “look down” and magnify the justice of God in the punishment of the ungodly.  But, differing from other theologians who looked for the total renewal of the cosmos to become the “new heavens and new earth,” Edwards placed heaven “above” and saw hell as the continuation of this cosmos but as engulfed in eternal fire.

      In the century after Edward’s died, belief in hell as everlasting evil and punishment declined within the Church.  Nevertheless it was still taught by conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Anglican Anglo-Catholics.  The leader of the latter for many years in the nineteenth century was Professor E. B. Pusey of Oxford, and in 1879–80, as an old man, he arose to defend the doctrine of everlasting punishment in hell at a time when senior churchmen were either questioning it or denying it.16  Unlike the Reformed theologians we have been quoting, Pusey had an “Arminian” (better, Greek Orthodox) view of human free will.  In his book, What is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment (1880), he set out his position in this way:17

      1.  Without freewill, man would be inferior to the lower animals, which have a sort of limited freedom of choice.

      2.  Absolute freewill implies the power of choosing amiss and, having chosen amiss, to persevere in choosing amiss.  It would be self-contradictory that Almighty God should create a free agent capable of loving Him, without being capable also of rejecting His love.

      3.  The higher and more complete and pervading the freewill is, the more completely an evil choice will pervade and disorder the whole being.

      4.  But without freewill we could not freely love God.  Freedom is a condition of love.

      5.  In eternity those who behold Him will know what the bliss is, eternally to love Him.  But then that bliss involves the intolerable misery of losing Him through our own evil choice.  To lose God and be alienated from Him is in itself Hell, or the vestibule of Hell.

      6.  But that His creatures may not lose Him, God, when He created all His rational creatures with freewill, created them also in grace, so that they had the full power to choose aright, and could not choose amiss, except by resisting the drawing of God to love Him.

      7.  The only hindrance to man’s salvation is, in any case, the obstinate misuse of that freewill, with which God endowed him, in order that he might freely love Him.

      8.  God wills that all should be saved, if they will it, and to this end gave His Son to die for them, and the Holy Ghost to teach them.

      9.  The merits of Jesus reach to every soul who wills to be saved, whether in this life they knew Him or knew Him not.

      10.  God the Holy Ghost visits every soul which God has created, and each soul will be judged as it responded or did not respond to the degree of light which He bestowed on it, not by our maxims, but by the wisdom and love of Almighty God.

      11.  We know absolutely nothing of the proportion of the saved to the lost, or who will be lost; but this we do know, that none will be lost, who do not obstinately to the end and in the end refuse God.  None will be lost, whom God can save, without destroying in them His own gift of freewill.

      12.  With regard to the nature of the sufferings, nothing is matter of faith.  No one doubts that the very special suffering will be the loss of God (poena damni): that, being what they are, they know that they were made by God for Himself, and yet, through their own obstinate will, will not have Him.  As to ‘pains of sense’ the Church has nowhere laid down as a matter of faith, the material character of the worm and the fire, or that they denote more than the gnawing of remorse.  Although then it would be very rash to lay down dogmatically, that the ‘fire’ is not to be understood literally, as it has been understood almost universally by Christians; yet no one has a right to urge those representations, from which the imagination so shrinks, as a ground for refusing to believe in Hell, since he is left free not to believe them.

Thus, unlike Calvin, Pusey teaches a doctrine of hell as everlasting punishment which is tied to a strongly asserted doctrine of the freedom of the will to accept or reject grace and to a view of predestination more like that of Arminius and John Wesley than that of Augustine.

      A century after Pusey published his book, it is difficult to find leading Protestant churchmen or theologians who actually believe in hell as everlasting punishment and who are prepared to state that belief in either sermons or books.  Here and there a biblical scholar will express this belief.  For example, C. Ryder Smith, an English Methodist, wrote: “To the present writer it seems impossible, if the evidence is considered objectively, to deny that there is a doctrine of everlasting punishment in the New Testament.”18  And some theologians insist on the possibility of hell but refrain from further definitive comments.19  Even in conservative circles there is a seeming reluctance to espouse publicly a doctrine of hell, and where it is held there is a seeming tendency towards a doctrine of hell as annihilation.20

      Within Roman Catholicism there is still the adherence to the traditional doctrine, especially from the conservative elements within the Vatican.  In 1979 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a document entitled “The Reality of Life after Death.”  In this it is written:

In fidelity to the New Testament and Tradition, the Church believes in the happiness of the just who will one day be with Christ.  She believes that there will be eternal punishment for the sinner, who will be deprived of the sight of God, and that this punishment will have repercussion on the whole being of the sinner.21

In his treatment of eschatology (at which we have already looked) Schmaus is reluctant to say that there will be no hell, for he believes it remains as a possibility.  He calls it a scandal and suggests that “there is no community of the damned; every lost soul exists in such frigid isolation that he is not even aware of whether there are other souls in hell.”22  And Schmaus’s hesitation to speak of hell in objective terms is found in greater measure in other Roman Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Küng.23  There are, however, some Roman Catholic writers, less well known than the ones to whom we have made reference, who do teach a traditional doctrine of hell.  One is Josef Staudinger, S. J., Life Hereafter (1964), whose description of the fires of hell and everlasting punishment and torment is very much that of the older Roman Catholic text books.  Another is Alois Winklhofer, The Coming of His Kingdom: a theology of the last things (1963); though this writer is a biblical exegete and not a dogmatic theologian, he still follows orthodox doctrine in his exposition of hell.

 

Annihilation

      The teaching that the soul and body (i.e., the whole person) ceases to exist at death and will never again exist is certainly held by many people in the West, but it is not a Christian doctrine.  In theological talk the word annihilation is used in two ways.  First of all, it is tied to the doctrine of conditional immortality and the sleep of the soul between death and the general resurrection of the dead; the bodies of the wicked are raised at the last day and, after judgment, punished before passing into oblivion and nothingness.  In contrast the bodies of the righteous live for ever in the glory of the kingdom of God.  We shall call this approach “conditional immortality.”  Second, it is used to describe the fate of those who, though possessing immortal souls, are nevertheless caused to fall into non-existence after a period in hell; this approach, which accepts the reality of hell but presumes that it is not eternal in the same sense as heaven is eternal, is best given the description of “annihilationism.”  Needless to say these two views are often confused and any form of annihilation is often assumed to be based upon conditional immortality.  In fact annihilationism proper, as it is suggested in the writings of recent Anglican divines, appears to be a way of mitigating and lessening the reality of hell which, in the opinion of these theologians, is too strongly embedded in Scripture and Tradition to be ignored or denied.  Thus it is based more on the assumed character of God and ideas of punishment than upon detailed biblical exegesis, which is the method normally used by those who teach conditional immortality.24

      Our interest here is with conditional immortality, which appears to be gaining acceptance in evangelical orthodox circles.  There is a fine exposition of different types of the doctrine of conditional immortality by J. H. Leckie in his The World to Come and Final Destiny (1918); in fact he finds four kinds – that related to evolutionary theory, that based upon philosophical reasoning, that which tends, in varying degrees of definiteness, to move towards the full doctrine, and the biblical, theological, systematic form.  He judges that Edward White’s Life in Christ (revised and expanded edition, 1878) was the most important exposition from a biblical standpoint; it was widely read.  Geoffrey Rowell’s Hell and the Victorians (1974) offers invaluable information and comment on the controversies surrounding conditional immortality.  Finally, the vast work of L. E. Froom on behalf of the Seventh-Day Adventists brings together whatever evidence there is that conditional immortality is a respectable doctrine to hold; it is titled, The Conditionalist Faith of our Fathers (2 vols. and 2476 pages of useful but often undigested information, 1965–66).

      Rather than looking at the tedious contents of the debates of the past, we will look briefly at the arguments for conditional immortality produced by a leading English evangelical scholar.  Basil F. C. Atkinson was an Under-Librarian in the University Library, Cambridge, from 1925 to 1960.  He became renowned in evangelical circles, not least in Cambridge, for his gifts as a leader of devotional Bible readings.  He released in the late 1960s a private publication titled, Life and Immortality: An Examination of the Nature and Meaning of Life and Death as they are revealed in the Scriptures.  Atkinson used all his linguistic gifts to argue that the Bible clearly teaches (1) unconscious existence from death to the general resurrection; (2) the eternal joy of the redeemed in their glorious resurrection bodies from the resurrection and for ever, and (3) the annihilation of the ungodly after they have been raised to appear before the throne of judgment and suitably punished there.  And, he insisted, the Bible does not teach the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

      Atkinson’s arguments for the annihilation of the person after the last judgment are based wholly on biblical exegesis: He refuses to use any arguments based upon the character of God and upon ideas of what is just or unjust punishment.  In the chapter titled, “The Doom of the Lost,” he goes to great lengths to seek to prove that all the key words traditionally used to point to an everlasting punishment are better understood as pointing to a punishment that is everlasting in its effects – that is, they mean extinction, nothingness, annihilation.  In fact, because he has such a high view of the inspiration and authority of the Bible, this is the only way he can proceed.  He accepts all the “severe” sayings of Jesus and his apostles/evangelists and attempts to prove that they have been wrongly interpreted by the majority of theologians because they allowed the doctrine of the immortality of the soul to affect their reading of the words in the sacred text.

      To follow the arguments of Atkinson would prove tedious.  Suffice it to note that, as illustrative of his reasoning, he interpreted Matthew 25:46 and 2 Thessalonians 1:9 in this manner.  On “everlasting punishment” (Matt. 25:46) he commented:

Many have relied on this phrase to support the idea of the everlasting conscious suffering of the wicked, reading it as if it said, “everlasting punishing”.  This is not the meaning of the word.  When the adjective aionios meaning “everlasting” is used in Greek with nouns of action, it has reference to the result of that action, not the process.  Thus the phrase “everlasting punishment” is comparable to “everlasting redemption” and “everlasting salvation”, both scriptural phrases.  No one supposes that we are being redeemed or being saved for ever.  We were redeemed and saved once for all by Christ with eternal results.  In the same way the lost will not be passing through a process of punishment for ever but will be punished once and for all with eternal results.

On “everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9), he claims that this points to total exclusion from the presence of God and that this exclusion is personal extinction and annihilation.

      Nowhere does Atkinson refer to the Jewish apocalyptic sources and their teaching on the doom of the lost.  Two scholars who do refer to these sources and who tentatively come to similar conclusions to Atkinson are William Strawson, Jesus and the Future Life (1959) and J. Arthur Baird, The Justice of God in the Teaching of Jesus (1963).25  However, neither Strawson nor Baird would have called themselves conservative evangelicals in the sense that Atkinson so called himself.  Further, it is not clear whether these two writers actually commit themselves to such doctrines as the sleep of the soul.

      Stephen H. Travis, a conservative evangelical writer, claims “that it is difficult to decide between annihilation and eternal torment on purely exegetical grounds” since terms like ‘Gehenna’ and ‘destruction’ are not precise enough for a clear-cut decision.”  The New Testament writers deal largely in images rather than in precise theological definition, and the issue of eternal torment or annihilation was not in the minds of those who wrote the New Testament.

The most significant thing about the destiny of unbelievers is that they will be separated from Christ.  Compared with this tragic fact, there is little point in asking whether the lost continue to be conscious or are annihilated.  It is because later Christians have been more concerned about happiness and misery than about relationship to God that they have persisted in asking such questions.26

Another respected conservative writer, John Wenham, who knew Basil Atkinson and finds himself attracted to Atkinson’s conclusions, nevertheless is aware that the pursuit of the doctrine of conditional immortality by evangelicals may be a dangerous cut-de-sac.  He offers five caveats to those who might be tempted to abandon the traditional view too easily:27

      1.  Beware of the immense natural appeal of any way out that evades the idea of everlasting sin and suffering.  The temptation to twist what may be quite plain statements of Scripture is intense.  It is the ideal situation for unconscious rationalizing.

      2.  Beware of the pervasive and insidious influence of the present liberal Zeitgeist on all our thinking....  Such a doctrine as unending torment would inevitably be a natural point for merciless attack in a climate of opinion committed to the elimination of everything offensive to modern sentiment.

      3.  Note that the modern revival of conditionalism was pioneered mainly by Socinians and Arians, who rejected such fundamental doctrines as the deity of Christ, and that today it constitutes an important element in the teaching of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians.  Be wary of such bedfellows.28

      4.  Note that the adoption of conditionalism, even if it can be accepted as a possible interpretation of the Bible, does not solve all the difficulties.  It can never be easy to accept the idea that God will decree the annihilation of beings made in his own image, nor that he will decree pain that will be of no benefit to the sufferer....

      5.  Beware of weakening zeal for the gospel.  The gospel should be preached with passionate urgency.  One who has believed that the alternative to faith in Christ is unending misery in hell may well find that the sudden loss of confidence in the doctrine will leave him deflated, with the edge of his evangelistic zeal impaired.

      Let us hope that he will be heard and this matter seriously and reverently discussed by theologians and pastors.

 

Notes

        1Cyprian, Ad Demetrianum, c. 24, cited by J. Staudinger, Life Hereafter, 211.

        2The “Athanasian Creed” is printed in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1662); for a study of it see J. N. D. Kelly, The Athanasían Creed, London, 1964.

        3For the text of the nine anathemas of the Emperor Justinian against Origen see Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Edinburgh, 1900, rpt. Grand Rapids, 1977, 320.

        4 [Typesetter’s error & incomplete:] ument 429.

        5See for example H. Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics, 711–12.

        6Institutes, III, xxv, 12.

        7Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Grand Rapids, 1949, vol. 1, 200.

        8There are English translations of the Spiritual Exercises by W. H. Longridge (London 1919) and T. Corbishley, S. J. (London, 1963).

        9This material fire is taught not only by the academic theologians but also it is presupposed in Dante’s Inferno and in Michaelangelo’s awe-inspiring painting of the last judgment and the fall of the damned into hell, in the Sistine Chapel, Rome.

        10Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, 728.

        11In the Litany or General Supplication, which is also part of the Book of Common Prayer, there is the request, “From thy wrath and from everlasting damnation, Good Lord deliver us.”

        12Baxter’s treatise has been reprinted in its full form as well as in various abridged forms.  I have used the 1928 London edition introduced by M. Monckton.  This has two chapters on the theme of hell, chaps. V and VI.

        13See further John H. Gerstener, Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell, Grand Rapids, 1980.

        14Ibid., 53.

        15Edwards, Works, vol. 1, 614.

        16For the context of his book see G. Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, chap. 7.

        17Pusey, What is of Faith, 22–23.  This is reprinted in H. E Liddon, Life of E. B. Pusey, London, 1898, vol. 4, 350–351, where also is a collection of letters on the same topic.

        18C. Ryder Smith, The Bible Doctrine of the Hereafter, 220.

        19These include G. C. Berkouwer, Emil Brunner, and Karl Rahner.

        20This assertion is difficult to prove, but it is based on the writer’s conversations over a number of years with evangelical theologians.

        21Printed in Vatican II: More Postconciliar Documents (ed. A. Flannery, Grand Rapids, 1982), vol. 2, 502.

        22Schmaus, Justification and the Last Things, 253ff.

        23See the discussion of Roman Catholic theology by B. Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, 153ff.

        24E.g., O. C. Quick, Doctrines of the Creed, London, 1938, 257ff., U. Simon, The End Is Not Yet, London, 1964, and W. Temple, Christus Veritas, London 1924.  It is also suggested in the Commentary on Revelation by G. B. Caird, to which reference was made in chapter five.

        25Strawson, 154–55, and Baird, 233–36.

        26Stephen H. Travis, Christian Hope and the Future of Man, 135–136.

        27John W. Wenham, The Goodness of God, 37–39.

        28Here Mr. Wenham confuses conditional immortality and annihilationism, as we have defined them.  The Socinians taught a form of annihilationism while various modern sects teach a form of conditional immortality which includes the idea of the annihilation of the wicked.  See further A. A. Hoekema, The Bible and the Future, 266, as well as his Four Major Cults.

 

Chapter  9 – Universalism

      The general decline in belief in an everlasting hell has not only contributed to the increasing use of the word “hell” to describe conditions on earth (as in “the hell of Stalingrad” and “the hell of Dachau”) but has also been accompanied within the churches by the assumption that most, if not all, humanity will get to heaven.  Universalism is the word normally used by theologians to describe the doctrine that ultimately and finally all humanity without exception will enter into the everlasting life.  Another way of expressing it is to say that it is the doctrine that since no soul can have been created for final condemnation no soul can in the end be lost.  Not all those who would call themselves (or be called by others) universalists necessarily suppose that there will be no hell (for there may be a “temporary” hell for some) or that the total number in heaven will be equivalent to the total number of human beings and angels originally created (for some angels and humans may be annihilated).  What universalism does require is that finally from everlasting to everlasting there be no person left in hell or not included in the kingdom of heaven.

      The word Apokatastis is sometimes used as the equivalent of universalism.  It is found only once in the New Testament, in Acts 3:21 (a verse that describes the Parousia of Christ and the consummation of God’s purposes), and is translated by such words as “restitution;” “establishing,” and “restoration.”  In fact the expression apokatastasis pantōn in this verse does not mean the conversion of all humankind but the restoration of all things and circumstances which the prophets of the Old Testament had predicted, including the renewal of the earth.  Thus the use of the word by Origen and many after him to point to universal salvation is not a happy one.

      Universalism comes in a variety of forms from the sophisticated to the sentimental and in ancient and modern dress.  Arguments for it change, but it seems to have a constant attraction for the religious mind.  We shall briefly look at some of these types of universalism and then conclude with some remarks on the universal nature of the gospel.

 

Universalism via hell

      From the third to the fifth centuries a Platonic form of Christian universalism lurked in the theological shadows, ready to be seen in the full light of day and be adopted as church teaching.  Augustine’s remarks concerning this possibility and the seriousness with which he treats the topic in his City of God reveal how widespread was universalism in the early fifth century.1  The most important advocate of universalism was Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185–254); see his On First Principles, Book 2, chapters 1–3, and Book 3, chapters 5–6.2  He taught that ultimately all free, moral creatures – ngels, devils and human beings – will share in the grace of salvation.  He built his great system of cosmic evolution on two principles – the freedom of the will and the goodness of God.  According to his Platonic philosophy he understood this world as part of a great cycle of the emanation of all things from God and the return of all things to God.

      God created rational spirits and souls in order that they might contemplate his perfection; but with the exception of a few of the very highest of the angels (rational spirits) and the human soul of Christ, all the rest of the rational creatures declined to some extent their life of pure contemplation and fell away from God.  Those who fell the least we know as angels; those that fell the farthest we know as devils, and in between are what we call human beings, eternal souls in bodies of flesh and blood.  Thus human bodies are a punishment for falling away from God.  Souls were once “minds” but lost their purely intellectual character in the process of falling away from God.  (Origen’s teaching on the pre-existence of the soul was later condemned as heresy.)  The world is God’s provision for fallen creatures.  Here, with genuine freedom of the will, human beings begin the long ascent back to God, the heavenly Father, who gently coaxes them home.  Likewise even the devils are coaxed back to God in the same process which goes on for souls after life in this world.

      Hell for Origen was a different place/sphere from that envisaged by his contemporary, Teтtullian, who in his treatise, On Spectacles, portrays heaven’s great feature as the superb view of the damned frying in hell.  For Origen all punishments are remedial; thus he interpreted the fires of hell as purifying experiences, including torments of conscience, and the outer darkness he saw as deep ignorance of spiritual reality.  Not only the baptized but all people are involved in the cosmic process of sanctification so that at the end they with all purified rational spirits will return to their original condition – the pure and holy contemplation of God.  Then God shall be all in all.

      The doctrine of the final restoration of all souls to God was taught by Gregory of Nyssa (but without much of Origen’s Platonism) and is attributed to Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, while Gregory of Nazianzus believed it was an open question.3  Though a package of Origenist doctrines (e.g., pre-existence of the soul and apokatastis) was condemned at a council in Constantinople in 543, there is some doubt whether the condemnation of universalism as such was repeated by the Fifth Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 553.4  Other teachers of universalism influenced by Platonic philosophy include John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century and Peter Sterry and Jeremiah White in the seventeenth century.5

      Origen was wedded not only to a Platonic philosophy but also to allegorical interpretation of the Bible, which allowed him to reject the literal sense in favor of that meaning he wanted to establish through allegorical interpretation.6

 

Universalism via annihilation

      Already we have referred to this position, espoused this century by leading Anglican writers.  Most recently Brian Hebblethwaite has written:7

If creatures can rebel against the divine ground of their being to such an extent as to render themselves absolutely unredeemable then there seems no point in God’s keeping them in being for ever in such an unending state of deprivation.  It is much more plausible to suppose that the language of damnation and everlasting loss is symbolic language, designed to bring out the awesome possibility that a man may by his actions and his attitudes forfeit his eternal destiny and render himself incapable of being drawn into the love and life of God.  But if such a terrible possibility is fulfilled, it must mean that the lost one brings about his own annihilation and disappears from being rather than that he is raised for ever and held in a state of everlasting damnation.  The sheer pointlessness of such a state being allowed to continue for ever shows clearly that conditional immortality is more religiously and morally plausible than everlasting punishment.

But he really does not want to believe in annihilation, for he continues:

One would like to be able to hope that even the possibility of eternal loss in the sense of annihilation is never in fact realised.  To suppose that there comes a time when the God of love, who went to the lengths of the Cross of Christ to win men’s love in return, has to write off a created person as absolutely unredeemable is a hard supposition for a Christian to make.

In fact he wants to believe in a second chance after death in a process which is like a purgatory for all (baptized and unbaptized alike).  He says:

Once we free ourselves from the old idea that opportunities to repent and respond to God’s love are restricted to a single lifespan on earth, we may be the readier to hope that God’s patient, self-sacrificial love will in the end prevail over even the most recalcitrant sinner.  In other words, the notion of conditional immortality makes greater sense in conjunction with the old idea of the finality of death.  In the context of an extended “purgatorial” phase of experience and growth beyond death, it makes greater sense at least to hope that universalism may be true.

Thus his position is universalism perhaps via annihilation but more probably without annihilation.  We add that when a “second chance” doctrine is proposed in the period of “probation” after death, it is often accompanied by prayers for the dead, which, unlike the traditional prayers for the souls in purgatory en route for heaven, actually request salvation for those who have died without being professing Christians.  The vague and open-ended rubrics of some modern Anglican liturgies can be used in this way.8

 

Universalism decreed by God

      F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is often called the father of modern theology.9  He explained and expounded Christianity as the highest historical embodiment and transmitter of God-consciousness (an immediate sense of absolute dependence).  His argument for personal immortality is not based on philosophical arguments but rather on the experience of redemption and of increase of God-consciousness which Christ makes possible; this experience leads to the accepting of Christ’s own conviction that man’s personality survives death.  Though little of a factual kind can be known about life after death and the consummation of all things, Schleiermacher did believe it right to develop what he called “prophetic doctrines concerning the last things.”  Thus he briefly comments on the second coming, the resurrection, the last judgment, and the visio dei in his The Christian Faith.

      In this book he also explains that there is only one divine decree according to which “the totality of the new creation is called into being out of the general mass of the human race.”  However, he assumed that “the totality of the new creation is equal to the general mass,” which is another way of saying that God has decreed the universal restoration of all souls.10  Among his reasons for holding such a doctrine were his conviction that Christ, having assumed human nature, is truly a universal Savior and that what he came to save is a unity, the one human race.  Another one was that there could not be genuine blessedness in heaven if the redeemed there knew of the pains and sufferings of friends in hell; thus for there to be true happiness in heaven there could not be a hell.  Schleiermacher was of course very much aware of the presentation by many writers of a heaven which included a righteous joy in seeing the wicked justly punished for their sins against almighty God.11  He rejected all this and insisted that human sympathy is real and cannot be avoided even when those suffering actually deserve what they are receiving.  Thus there cannot be any form of hell, for if there is, then there cannot be a real, blessed heaven.

      Since Schleiermacher is vague as to the “intermediate state,” it is not clear as to how and where he envisaged the totality of the human race being fully and finally drawn into eternal blessedness.  Apparently few adopted Schleiermacher’s scheme of universal salvation by the divine decree, but the very fact that such a famous theologian had taught it helped to make the acceptance of universalism easier by those who wanted to express it in a way different from Schleiermacher.  The nineteenth century is the period when universalism gained increasing support within the main-line Protestant denominations, so that in the twentieth century it is hardly seen as a heresy, except in the distinctly evangelical and conservative churches.

 

Universalism as an optimistic hope

      In 1914 H. R. Mackintosh wrote:

If at this moment a frank and confidential plebiscite of the English-speaking ministry were taken, the likelihood is that a considerable majority would adhere to Universalism.  They may no doubt shrink from it as a dogma, but they would cherish it privately as a hope.12

And four years later J. H. Leckie attempted to summarize what he called “Christian optimism” in these words:13

Christian optimism finds its doctrine of the End to be justified from many points of view.  When we think of the Divine character, we see that it is love; and infinite love has an infinite power to save and to reconcile.  When we consider the freedom of the human will, we see that it is limited by the nature of things, by the moral necessity that good should prove itself stronger than evil.  When we reflect on the nature of evil, we see that it is transitory, carries in it the seeds of its own destruction, has no place among immortal things.  Finally, when we think of God as having a purpose, we see that this purpose is universal, and must in the end prevail.

He had found this type of theology expressed both systematically in certain books and assumed or hinted in many other books.”  In fact his summary is not very different from that which is heard expressed in many places, especially seminaries and colleges, today.  And when other religions are being discussed, positions such as this are commonly expressed, often of course along with various theories about the relationship of these religions to Jesus Christ.15

      Most advocates of universalism in the period before 1914 felt it right and necessary to make use of biblical texts (e.g., those predicting the salvation of all – John 12:32; Acts 3:21; Rom. 5:18; those declaring God’s universalist intention – 1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9; and those referring to objective reconciliation – 2 Cor. 5:19; Tit. 2:11; Col. 1:20; Heb. 2:9; 1 John 2:2) as the foundation of their hope and to prove that texts which appeared to suggest eternal damnation did not contain that strong doctrine.  In the twentieth century there has been an increasing recognition that Jesus did actually speak of hell and that there is a doctrine of eternal damnation in the New Testament; however, this teaching has been rejected on various grounds – e.g., it came from Jewish apocalyptic sources and was not authentic Christian teaching, that the higher doctrines (i.e., the supposed universalist ones) are to be followed rather than the lower doctrines (i.e., based on Jewish apocalyptic) and that the spirit of the teaching of Jesus and his apostles is to be followed in preference to the letter of that teaching.

      This latter argument was forcibly made by C. W. Emmet in an important essay entitled, “The Bible and Hell,” published in 1917.16  Emmet was an expert in Jewish apocalyptic literature and made no attempt to deny that Jesus actually used apocalyptic imagery and adopted apocalyptic doctrines.  He argued that modem teaching about the afterlife “must go beyond the explicit teaching of the New Testament.”  Further, he stated that “we are in the end on surer ground when as Christians we claim the right to go beyond the letter, since we do so under the irresistible leading of the moral principles of the New Testament and of Christ himself.”  Here is great confidence to know the “spirit” in contrast to the “letter” (the common-sense interpretation of the texts).

      More recently it has become commonplace to argue that universalism flows from the fact that God’s true nature is that of omnipotent love.  The “hard sayings” of Jesus about hell are not denied, but they are said to belong to what may be termed “existential preaching”; thus they are never more than warnings, threatening people with the possibility that if they continue to refuse to repent (in this life and also in the next), they will be damned.  Omnipotent love, however, will finally win over all people so that hell will not ultimately exist.  The late J. A. T. Robinson, for example, recognized that there were what he called two eschatological “myths” in the New Testament – that of universal restoration and that of final division into the damned and the saved.17  The former is the truth as it is for God and the latter is the truth as it is to us as we are involved in a decision for the Gospel.  God wills universal restoration and thus it shall be; nevertheless in preaching it is necessary to make people face the challenge.  As God is omnipotent love, what he wills he will bring into being by eventually winning the loving response of all people.  A similar position was advocated by Emil Brunner, although when asked, “Is there such a thing as final loss or universal restoration/salvation?” he said that there was no answer.18  This is because the Word of God that addresses us is a word of challenge, not a word of teaching or objective truth.

      This emphasis on the message in the New Testament about judgment and Gehenna as essentially (indeed only) challenge, warning, and existential encounter has become fairly common in recent theology and teaching; with it, of course, goes the further point that it is wrong to “objectify” this material into a doctrine of hell that can be made part of a theological system.

 

Universalism as the election of all people to salvation

      Here we come to the view of the giant of twentieth-century theology, Karl Barth, set forth in his giant, Christocentric Church Dogmatics.19  Since for Barth the whole relation between eternity and time is focused in Jesus Christ, it is also true that all human destinies are fulfilled in him in all eternity.  Having refashioned the Reformed doctrine of predestination by making it wholly Christological, he could affirm that it is Jesus Christ who is both rejected and elected.  God in Christ has taken upon himself the rejection which humankind deserves and also has in Christ elected all people to salvation.  Thus the reconciliation of all to God has occurred, for Christ has died and risen.  This means that the good news is the announcement that in Christ every human being is elected and has salvation.  Logically this appears to mean that whether or not people believe or do not believe, all will be saved, for all are elected unto salvation in Christ.  Though many accused him of being a universalist, Barth denied this charge and maintained that we may only hope that universal salvation remains a possibility.  God, he argued, is truly free and since he has made threats in the proclamation that those who willfully disregard the gospel will be lost, we must allow that freedom to be exercised in the execution of damnation, if God so will: but Barth seems to doubt that he will.

      Geoffrey Bromiley, the translator of the Church Dogmatics, thinks that Barth has a definite tendency to universalism and offers these words of criticism:

What Barth fails to see is that to deny the possibility of salvation of all is no infringement of the divine sovereignty if God himself has made it plain that all will not be saved.  But on any reading this surely is the Bible’s teaching.  We may not know who will be saved, or how many, but we do know that there will be the lost as well as the saved.  Hence the divine sovereignty cannot be invoked in favor of a state of suspense on this matter.  Unless Barth is persuaded, and can show, that the biblical data are different, his hesitation here is a violation of his own Scripture principle.20

Whether or not Barth actually was an universalist is a technical question.  His massive influence has been such that he has helped to make universalism a respectable doctrine to discuss and hold within the Church.21

 

Universalism in the Bible

      Instead of listing arguments against universalism and offering a theology of the relationship of sincere adherents of the religions of the world to Jesus Christ, we shall indicate the “universalism” of the Bible:22 namely, that there is one God and one way of salvation for all.  “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name (i.e., Jesus Christ of Nazareth) under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

      Biblical universalism begins in the book of Genesis with God’s great promise to Abraham that in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed.  God has freely chosen to save the world through the family of Abraham and, as Paul indicates in Galatians 3 and Romans 4, particularly through Jesus the true seed of Abraham.  This promise came from the God who required that his covenant people confess daily that he is one: “Hear, O Israel; the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4).  Thus as there is one God who has made one promise (fulfilled in one Person, Jesus the true seed of Abraham) there can only be one way of salvation.  To say that there are other ways is to deny the uniqueness of Jesus, the Christ, and is to suggest that there is more than one God.  True universalism refers not to results but to marvelous possibilities for all people everywhere, irrespective of race, sex, or status.  In Christ God has revealed the one way of salvation and in the gospel he calls all people to enter that way.  Thus an integral part of the missio dei given to the universal Church is to preach the gospel to every creature so that all hear of what God in Christ has achieved for all humankind and thus all may repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.  The motivation for this evangelization of the world is rooted in God’s love for humankind, revealed in the incarnation and specifically in the sacrificial death of the incarnate One at Calvary.  ‘God, our Savior, Paul told Timothy, “wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.  For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men” (1 Tim. 2:4–5).  Further, this living God “is the Savior of all men and especially of those who believe” (1 Tim. 4:10).

      The passages in the Pauline Letters which appear to point to a doctrine of universalism do, on careful study, refer either to the universal nature of the gospel (it is to be offered to all) or to the completion of God’s purposes in Christ at the end.  These passages are Romans 11:12, 25–6; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Colossians 1:20; Romans 8:21; Ephesians 1:10; together with 1 Corinthians 15:25–8; Ephesians 1:20–23; Ephesians 4:8–10 and Philippians 2:9–11.  Take for example the statement of Paul “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).  In the context this refers to God’s absolute sovereignty, when there will be no more opposition to him or to Jesus, the Mediator.  All people, the godly and ungodly, and all angels, the good and the bad, will be compelled through the person and work of Christ to recognize God as the One and Only.  The end will manifest the total and complete sovereignty of God; Paul cannot go higher than this in his thoughts.  Thus biblical universalism allows not only for the universal offer of salvation but the universal judgment and the declaration there that God is truly all in all.

 

Notes

        1City of God, xxi:17–27.

        2There is a translation of De Principiis (On First Principles) by G. W. Butterworth (SPCK, London, 1936; Harper Torchbooks, 1966).  For an exposition of apokastasis see J. W. Trigg, Origen, Atlanta, 1983, 103ff, and C. Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, Oxford, 1913, 147ff.  The latter also deals with universalism in Clement’s teaching.

        3Trigg, Origen, 249; Bigg, op.cit., 344.  See also E. H. Plumptre, The Spirits in Prison, London, 1893, 138ff.

        4See The Seven Ecumenical Councils, which is vol. xiv of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, edited by P. Schaff and H. Wace, Grand Rapids, 1977, 316–17.

        5For Erigena see the article on him in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, where there is a full bibliography.  For Sterry and White see D. E Walker, The Decline of Hell, chap. 7.

        6Trigg, Origen, has much to say on this topic.

        7Hebblethwaite, The Christian Hope, 216–17.

        8See, e.g., the “intercessions” in the new Prayer Book of the Episcopal Church USA.

        9Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, Edinburgh, 1928), paragraphs 117–20 and 163.  See further Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, Philadelphia, 1973, 145ff.

        10The Christian Faith, 550.

        11Ibid., 720-21. Among those who taught such a doctrine are Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, Aquinas, Baxter, and Edwards.  See further Walker, Decline of Hell, 29.

        12Mackintosh, “Studies in Eschatology, VII, Universal Restoration,” The Expositor, 8th series, 8 (1914), 130.

        13J. H. Leckie, The World to Come, 276–77.

        14Those who Leckie mentions are dealt with in greater detail by G. Rowell in his Hell and the Victorians, e.g., Andrew Jukes, The Second Death and the Restoration of All Things (1867); Samuel Cox, Salvator Mundi (1877); and F. W Farrar, Eternal Hope (1878).  For lists of seventeenth and eighteenth century books espousing Universalism, see the bibliography by E. Abbott in W. R. Alger, A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, New York, 1878.  And for literature on the American scene see the article and bibliography on “Universalism” by D. B. Eller in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (ed. W. A. Elwell, Grand Rapids, 1984).

        15There is a growing literature on the relationship of Christianity and other religions, but among the authors who seem to have encouraged the idea of universalism in this connection are John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (1976), Raymond Pannikar, The Trinity and World Religions (Madras, 1970), and George Khodr, “Christianity in the Pluralistic World: The Economy of the Holy Spirit,” Living Faiths and the Ecumenical Movement, Geneva, 1971.  Those who attend the assemblies and conferences of the World Council of Churches are very familiar with the tendency either to assert or to assume (as probable) universalism.

        16It was published in Immortality (ed. B. H. Streeter, 1917), 167ff.

        17Robinson, In the End, God (revised edition, London 1968).  See the comments by S. H. Travis, Christian Hope and the Future of Man, 125ff.  For a criticism of Robinson’s first exposition of his views in the Scottish Journal of Theology, see his article “Universalism – is it heretical?” in vol. 2 (1949), 139–155 and the reply by T. F. Torrance, “Universalism or Election,” in vol. 2 (1949), 310–18.

        18Brunner, Eternal Hope, London, 1954, 183.  See also his Dogmatics, vol. 3, chap. 10.

        19See especially Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. 4, part 3, 461ff.; also Vol. 2. part 2, 470ff.

        20Bromiley, “Karl Barth” Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology, ed. P. E. Hughes, Grand Rapids, 1969, 54.

        21E.g., D. T. Niles, the influential Indian theologian, taught an incipient universalism that he appears to have learned from Barth; see his Upon the Earth, Madras, 1963, 90ff.

        22In technical theology a distinction has often been made between absolute universalism and relative universalism.  The latter describes the universal nature of Christ’s death and the call of the gospel but does not deduce from these salvation for all people of all time.

 

Epilogue

      We have now surveyed both the teaching of the New Testament and the Church in history on the subject of heaven and hell.  Initially we accepted that heaven is not to be treated as the logical equivalent of hell, since by its very nature as God’s unique abode and the sphere where Christ is exalted it can have no possible equivalent.  Also we noticed that the preaching and teaching of Jesus concerning Gehenna, darkness, and damnation were in the context of his proclamation and exposition of the kingdom of God, salvation, and eternal life; they were never proposed as independent topics for reflection and study.  This latter point has been much emphasized by distinguished theologians both in the Roman and Protestant churches.

      With special reference to P. Althaus, H. U. von Balthasar (Roman Catholic), Karl Rahner (Roman Catholic) and K. Barth, the Dutch theologian G. C. Berkouwer has written: “The preaching of the last things, they argue, must be related to the sphere of faith and responsibility, and is not a matter of objective, theoretical, neutral postulates.”1  Thus they appear to favor universalism.  However, this is not so, states Berkouwer, for their true position is that they reject apokastastis as a doctrine and maintain that “any conclusions outside the realm of preaching and responsibility are to be rejected, and all discussion of the judgment is to be related to the proclamation of reconciliation.”

 

On preaching hell

      Then Berkouwer suggests the proper way to preach hell.  It is certainly to be preached but within the context of the full and universal proclamation of the gospel: Indeed it is part of the whole gospel and thus cannot be left out.  If it is preached outside the proclamation of the kingdom of God, then as an independent topic it lacks genuine seriousness as a message from God.  Berkouwer adds that it is not proper for disciples to want to know who exactly will be the members of the kingdom of God.  He refers to the question put to Jesus, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?” and to the reply, “Strive to enter through the narrow door” (Luke 13:23–24).  He makes the further point that judgment will begin at the house of God (1 Peter 4:17), that “many who are first will be last and the last first” (Matt. 19:30), and that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter into the kingdom.  These comments are important and underline the fact that the gospel calls for obedience, trust, and love, not for discussion of the implications of parts of the message.  Warnings, threats, and exhortations are given to be heeded, not to be treated as access to independent information.

      The good news, we may suggest, is something like this: “Because God in Christ has provided salvation for you, you are to repent of your sins, believe the Gospel, and live faithfully as a disciple: To reject the Gospel is to place yourself in danger of hell, darkness, and damnation.  God does not wish you to be lost but rather he longs that you will receive his offer of grace, pardon, salvation, and reconciliation.”

      So let us recognize and admit that to objectify hell and make it into an independent doctrine, a parallel truth, as it were, to that of heaven, is not encouraged by the way in which hell is presented in the New Testament.  However, to say this does not mean that we are not to have any doctrine of hell: To warn people to avoid hell means that hell is a reality, or can be a reality.  Thus it is unavoidable that we offer a tentative description of hell at least in terms of the poena damni (pain of loss of the beatific vision) and possibly of the poena sensus (pain of sense, i.e., via the senses) but refuse to go beyond the minimum detail and recognize always that we are speaking figuratively.  Further, it is better in any systematic theology to treat hell when treating the gospel and not to leave it to the final section on “the last things,” where it can so easily become a logical equivalent of heaven in the final order of reality.

      A few more observations are in order.  First of all, no person should take it upon himself to say to another person, “You are certainly going to hell.”  God alone passes such a judgment.  Second, we cannot predict how many will go to hell: It may be many, a few, or none.  God alone knows.  Third, we must not deduce a doctrine of hell from a doctrine of predestination, in particular from a doctrine of double predestination.  To do this is to make a logical deduction from an area which, while being a definite biblical theme (i.e., predestination), is also a theme that has the air of mystery in and around it and which is truly doxological by nature.  Thus it is not suited to become the premise of a logical deduction.  Fourth, discussion as to whether hell means everlasting punishment or annihilation after judgment may be interesting but is both a waste of time and an attempt to know what we cannot know.  (Conditional immortality is basically a subject that does not belong to the discussion of hell but to the nature of human beings: Thus it is a legitimate topic for discussion, for it concerns what kind of creatures we are.  As we noted above, while conditional immortality may lead to a doctrine of annihilation of the soul, annihilation as such does not require a doctrine of conditional immortality.)  Fifth, great care is necessary in seeking to justify the need for hell in terms of divine justice and the punishment of sin: This enterprise raises all kinds of questions about retributive and remedial punishment and has to work from certain presuppositions as to the role and nature of God as judge.  And so we could go on.  Sufficient has been said to make the point that belief in hell and description of hell call for great care not only by the preacher but also by the Christian disciple in day-to-day speech.

 

On heavenly-mindedness

      Preaching and teaching and talking about heaven is altogether on a different plane, even though our language remains figurative and our attitude reverential.  United to Christ as his body and filled with the Spirit as the temple of the Holy Spirit, the believing faithful belong to heaven, for there is Christ, and from there comes the Spirit.  They are members of the kingdom of heaven and as such will be part of the new order of reality in the age to come.  They must speak about heaven, for they belong to the heavenly Jerusalem, and the source of their faith, hope, and love is in, with, and through Christ in heaven.  Though they experience heaven on earth through the ministry of the Spirit, this same Spirit makes them long to experience the fullness of the reality of heaven, both in heaven where Christ now is and in the life of the kingdom of God in the age to come.  Thus the household of faith looks up and looks forward when it meets for worship, fellowship, and for the Lord’s Supper (itself an anticipation of the banquet of the kingdom that shall be after the Parousia).

      We live in days when the upward and forward looks often give way to the introspective and existential looks: Christianity often appears to be a this-worldly phenomenon only, where God makes life more joyful and comfortable to believers on earth, as they have little time to think of the heaven above or the heaven to come.  It is here that we can learn from the past the art of meditation and contemplation upon heaven.  This is an important element within both Roman Catholic and Protestant spirituality, but it appears to be neglected today.  For example Calvin has a section upon meditatio coelestis vitae (which for him is the same as meditatio futurae vitae) in his Institutes and sees such meditation upon heaven and the future life as an indispensable part of Christian faith and worship.2  And in The Saints Everlasting Rest, Richard Baxter gives much practical advice on how to begin and continue contemplation upon heaven.  The point is that Christianity which is not oriented towards heaven is hardly worthy of the name.  In terms of the values of the kingdom of God, those who are truly heavenly minded are the ones most likely to do the will of God on earth – a truth which is hardly recognized today within the emphasis upon relevance, social service, and immediacy.  An ancient Collect expresses it in this way:3

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not things eternal: grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord.  Amen.

If the danger in the sixteenth century was to pass through things temporal as though they alone mattered, then how greater a danger it is today with a longer expectation of life in the context of affluence and the consumer society!

      Because they belong both to heaven above and heaven to come, Christians are called not merely into a better life but a different one.  And this life may be characterized in terms of its intensity, vastness, and permanence.4  Let us reflect on each of these:

      Intensity – “I have come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).  True Christians are “not anemic or invertebrate specimens”; rather “they are men and women living with tremendous zest and concentration and, because of this, manifesting the most baffling and kaleidoscopic variety of character and activity, since God has taken over their individual personalities” and is developing them to the full.  However, their lives are not merely activistic for activism’s sake: The source of their strength and energy is in meditation and contemplation on God and his heaven.

      Vastness – “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.  My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).  In choosing to follow Christ, the Christian has chosen to have God, and in having God he has everything in him.  Therefore

the Christian’s horizon is not limited by the short span of seventy years or so that lie between the cradle and the grave, nor are the good things to which he can look forward confined to the prizes of wealth, comfort, power and fame which offer themselves to his ambition, or even to those higher goods of science, art and human friendship which one earthly life can contain.

He looks forward to treasure in heaven and to all that God will freely give him, knowing that he is a member of that vast number of angels and saints who now surround Jesus (Heb. 12:22–4) and who will constitute the membership of the vast new heavens and earth.

      Permanence –“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory” (John 17:24).

The most tragic strain in human existence lies in the fact that the pleasure which we find in the things of this life, however good that pleasure may be in itself, is always taken away from us.  The things for which men strive hardly ever turn out to be as satisfying as they expected, and in the rare cases in which they do, sooner or later they are snatched away....  For the Christian, all those partial, broken and fleeting perfections which he glimpses in the world around him, which wither in his grasp and are snatched away from him even while they wither, are found again, perfect, complete and lasting in the absolute beauty of God with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

Christians who are aware that their life in and through Christ by the Holy Spirit has the characteristics of intensity, vastness, and permanence will also know how to live in this world.  They will treat the world as the creation of God, as truly good because it is God’s handiwork but yet not the highest good because it is not God himself.  They will live in this world as those who know that it is God’s but yet not their true home, for that is with Christ above; in this way this world itself will yield up to them joys and splendors, of whose existence and nature the “worldly-minded” are totally ignorant.  They will experience the world’s transience and fragility, its finitude and powerlessness to satisfy, not as signs that life is a bad joke with men and women as the helpless victims, rather as pale and splintered reflections of the splendor and beauty of the eternal God himself.

 

The meaning of “last”

      We have recognized that because God is eternal and Christ is in heaven, communion and fellowship with God in Christ is possible now, through death and in the afterlife: We have also seen that the full glory of the world and age to come does not exist to be apprehended until God’s purpose in creation and redemption has been fully achieved and completed.  For what is eternal cannot be related to what is temporal in simple temporal terms.

      Christians speak of the “last things;” but there is ambiguity in the word “last.”5  When we think of the Parousia, general resurrection, and last or general judgment, we tend to think of them as the last events in time (the end of the line, as it were).  Yet we recognize as we reflect that the idea of something which happens strictly last in time is self-contradictory.  This is because we go on to think of a time when it will have happened, and therefore of something coming after it.  And we speak of the new age of the kingdom of God with the new heavens and new earth, which follow the last judgment.  This seems to take away from the word “final” or “last” as used of the Parousia, resurrection, and judgment.

      However, the word “last,” as the word “final,” bears another meaning.  Not only does it mean that which comes after everything else but also that which completes a process by bringing it to its purposed end.  In this latter meaning the last event or final act is not merely one event among others, or the one that is the end of a line of events or acts, but it is an event of unique importance.  Its importance is gained not primarily from its relationship to a previous series of events but from the purpose achieved when the series ends.  This meaning may easily be illustrated.  Take the last movement of the brush on a painting or the manipulation of the clay by the potter.  This last event completes the work of art not merely in the temporal sequence but more importantly by bringing into being that which had been in the mind of the painter or potter from the beginning of production.  The last event is also a beginning, the existence of a work of art.  The last event initiates a fulfillment.

      Thus when the word “last” is used in relation to purpose, it carries both the meaning of that which comes after all others and of that which fulfills the purpose of the whole.  This fulfillment is the beginning of that achievement or perfection which is relative to the purpose of the series.  The Christian believes, teaches, and confesses that the “last things” are last primarily because they fulfill the purpose of God, by bringing into existence that final state of the kingdom of God which the Creator and Redeemer originally intended.

      It is significant that Jesus is not only called the Beginning, but also the End (Gk. telos: Rev. 2:16; 22:13) and not only the First, but also the Last (Gk. eschatos: Rev. 1:17; cf. 1 Cor. 15:45, “last Adam”).  The End is also the Beginning, and the Last is also the First in the person and work of Jesus, who shall come from heaven to raise the dead, judge the peoples, and inaugurate the new order of the kingdom of God.  God’s purpose or objective is achieved in, through, and by Christ, as well as with Christ.  Christ himself is the goal in the sense that he is God-with-us, and thus our God, and that he is also the Man, the Representative of the new humanity (i.e., the Representative who makes the new humanity present).  Also Christ has the task given him by the Father of realizing this goal in us and in creation.  His appearance from heaven will not only be the last event of the old order but also the first of the new order; further, by this appearance he will complete God’s work in the old age in order to become the Center of the new age.  In, through, by, and with him the End will be the Beginning and the Last will be the First.

      Amen.  Come, Lord Jesus.

 

Notes

      1Berkouwer, The Return of Christ, 401.

      2Institutes, Book 3, chapter 9.  For a fine exposition of Calvin’s approach to heavenly-mindedness see R. S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Christian Life, Edinburgh, 1959, chap. 4.

      3The Book of Common Prayer (1662): Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity.

      4I follow here my former teacher and now friend, E. L. Mascall, Grace and Glory, London, 1975, 74–82.

      5I take these suggestions from O. C. Quick, Doctrine of the Creed, London, 1938, 246–47.

 

Appendix  1: Encounter With Satan

      It is too easy today, even for those who take the Scriptures seriously, to dismiss either deliberately or unconsciously the presentation of Satan, evil angels, and demons as the mythology (or uncritical presuppositions) of a prescientific age.  Few people in the West today appear to possess either a consciousness of the supernatural/transcendent realm of heavenly servants/messengers called angels or of evil spirits called fallen angels or demons.

      In contrast, Jesus and most of the people he encountered were conscious of another world, an unseen world from which came both good and evil spirits, either to serve the Lord or to oppose him.  It is impossible to understand the New Testament unless it is recognized that angels, good and bad, were deeply involved in human affairs and human lives.  The portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels reveals that though he recognised the reality of sin in human hearts and though he encountered opposition from religious leaders, he was also supremely conscious of being opposed by and fighting a battle against the army of evil spirits led by Satan.  In fact this was the decisive battle of his ministry, for it was the transcendent background to his battle against human sin, false religion, and the curse of death.  Thus it is not an exaggeration to claim that for Jesus himself, as well as for the writers of the New Testament, the future character of heaven and hell was determined by the nature and outcome of this conflict.  If Jesus, the Christ, had not been victorious in this conflict, then he could not have opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.

 

Identity of Satan

      There is no speculation in the New Testament as to the origin of Satan, evil angels, and demons; their existence is taken for granted, just as it was in contemporary Judaism and in the books we call the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.  In the Old Testament Satan appears as an accuser or prosecuting attorney who impugns the integrity of Job (Job 1–2) or who challenges the fitness of Jeshua ben Jozadak to function as high priest (Zech. 3:1–2); his accusation is made to God.  However, by the time of Jesus the belief in Satan as a malevolent accuser and originator of evil of many kinds had developed; the accuser before God had become the obstructor of God’s plans and of human attempts to fulfill God’s will.  And in this role he was assisted by a company of evil spirits, themselves fallen angels like Satan himself.

      Satan was known by a variety of names: the devil (diabolos), tempter (peirazon), evil one (ponēros), accuser (katēgōr), enemy (echthros), plaintiff (antidikos), prince of demons (archōn tou daimonion), prince of the power of the air (archōn tou kosmou toutou), Belial, and Beelzebul.  His army of assistants were called devils, demons, and evil spirits.  Though Jesus taught that God had prepared hell for Satan and his assistants (Matt. 25:41), he knew that a necessary and unavoidable part of his ministry was to overturn the power of Satan so that God’s righteous and saving rule could replace the evil rule and influence of Satan.  God’s decree of hell for Satan and evil angels depended upon the battle being won by his Messiah!

 

Jesus declares war on Satan’s kingdom

      There was no need for Jesus to proclaim his identity to Satan and his hosts, for they immediately recognized him as God’s Messiah and their deadly opponent.  Mark records that “whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God’” (3:11).  Further, Mark records a significant conversation between Jesus and the experts in the Law, called the scribes.  These men from Jerusalem claimed that Jesus himself was possessed by Satan/Beelzebul and that this explained why he could perform exorcisms so successfully.  Such accusations revealed that these men were getting near to blaspheming against the Holy Spirit by attributing to Satan the work of God.  But Jesus showed them how stupid was their position by giving a few simple illustrations/parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan?  If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.  If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.  And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come.”  Obviously the kingdom of Satan, though being invaded, was still intact and so Jesus added: “In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man.  Then he can rob his house.” (3:23–5).  He was giving notice that he would enter Satan’s house to bind him and release the captives.

      At a significant point in his ministry Jesus sent out the seventy-two disciples two by two to proclaim the advent of the kingdom of God.  On their return they told Jesus that the demons submitted to them as they invoked the name of their Master.  Responding, Jesus shared with them a vision which the Father had given to him: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18).  This vision was prophetic, for the exorcisms of Jesus and his disciples were only tokens of victory; the real victory was to occur in Jerusalem in Holy Week.  Perhaps underlying this picture of Satan is the Old Testament idea of him as accusing people before God so as to bring confusion and disorder into the working of God’s will on earth.  This sinister activity will end, for in seeking to accuse Jesus, the Christ, before God and in his efforts to thwart the progress of the kingdom of God on earth, Satan had over-reached himself and declared war on God and his Messiah.  Thus he will fall, and so will his assistants, who are already submitting to the authoritative word and power of Jesus and his messengers.  The latter, however, are not to rejoice that they have power over demons; rather they are to rejoice in the ultimate triumph of God’s kingdom and that, since their names are written in heaven, they will share in that kingdom.

      The gospel of John accepts Satan’s great power in the world, for he is given the title of “the ruler of this world” (12:31; 14:30; 16:11), but that power is an evil power, for he is also designated as “the father of lies” and a “murderer” (8:44).  Thus Satan is seen as influencing Judas to betray Jesus (13:27).  Further, Jesus sees the “hour” of Calvary as the hour when “the ruler of this world” will be cast out (12:31), for his passion and death were to be a confrontation with Satan (14:30).  In and through the suffering and death, Satan will be judged and condemned (16:11), and in the apostolic preaching this victory of Christ will be proclaimed.  So Christ is portrayed as winning the decisive battle but not of concluding the war, which will carry on until his Parousia; however, in his name the disciples will be able to resist the temptations of Satan and deliver people from his hands into the hands of God.

      Mark’s gospel, having told in 1:13 of the initial conflict between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness and how the good angels came to minister to Jesus, describes three hours of unusual darkness as Jesus hung on the Cross (15:33).  The power of Satan’s darkness is revealed as the universe of light mourns the horror of the crucifixion.  The earthly rulers who put Jesus on that cross are themselves the tools of Satan; it is their hour only because it is that of the power of darkness (Luke 22:53).  Even Simon Peter was in great peril, and his own fall and subsequent restoration issue from the struggle between Satan and Jesus (Luke 22:31).  Thus the words, “It is finished” (John 19:30), refer not to submission to death but conquest over the world of darkness.  In expectation of this conquest, Jesus had earlier been able to tell the penitent thief that they would be together in Paradise (Luke 23:43).

      God raised Jesus from death and then received him into glory, thereby vindicating him and demonstrating that he had won the decisive battle with Satan.  So in the first recorded sermon from the apostles, Peter told the large crowd of Jews that “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36).  Salvation from sin, death, and Satan’s power and salvation into the joy and righteousness of the heavenly kingdom was available in the name of Jesus Christ, the Lord.  Thus the ancient canticle, “Te Deum Laudamus” has the verse: “You overcame the sting of death: and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.”

 

Interpreting Satan

      Biblical scholarship generally assumes that angels, good and bad, belong to the realm of mythology.  However, it is also recognized that Jesus either wholly believed in the reality of angels, Satan, and demons or that he cleverly accommodated himself to prevailing views and talked and acted as if he did believe.  It is the more likely that not only Jesus himself but also his apostles had no doubts whatsoever that God had created angels and that some of them, led by Satan, were in open hostility to his will and purposes.  This means that Christians today have to decide whether Jesus was right or wrong.

      Making this decision is not easy for western people, whose ways of thinking are deeply affected by the general view that this world/universe is all that there is and that within it there is or will be a rational explanation for most if not all things eventually.  In western culture angels now belong to the realm of the fairy tale and appear on pretty Christmas cards and in children’s nativity plays.  Few people appear to think that they have any objective existence.  However, there appears to be a minority of people who are prepared to believe that there are evil spirits who inhabit human minds/hearts, influencing them towards wickedness and depravity.  And also there are those who believe that within the universe and especially within the structures of society there are evil principles at work: thus Satan is called “the personification of evil” by some who admit the existence of such evil principles but are not sure whether the principles are personal, invisible beings.

      If we can shed the mental picture of angels gained from Christmas cards and that of Satan and demons gained from medieval painting, then we can seriously face the possibility that God created not only human beings on earth but also another type of beings for serving him in heaven.  If the latter were created with a free will, then for some of them freely to decide to reject the sovereign will of God and go their own ways is relatively easy to accept.  Further, if when God created angels (literally messengers) he made them with the capacity to move freely from heaven to earth and back again, then the involvement of angels, both obedient and rebellious, in human lives and affairs is not incredible.  And it is also reasonable to think that when the kingdom of God is the more intensely being extended on earth, the rebellious angels will seek to oppose it and bring harm to those involved; thus the intense activity of Satan and demons in opposition to Jesus and the apostles.  Regrettably, the spiritual receptivity of most westerners is at such a low level that they are incapable of either feeling the presence of good angels or of recognizing the presence of demons.

 

Appendix  2: He Descended into Hell

      In the textus receptus of the Apostles’ Creed is the clause descendit ad inferna, which has been traditionally translated into English as “he descended into hell.”  A variant reading has inferos, which is used to translate “Hades” in the Vulgate of Matthew 16:18.  Inferna originally meant the underworld, the realm of the dead and came to refer specifically to hell, as the place of punishment within Hades, in the period of the Middle Ages.  However, the English word “hell” likewise had a wider meaning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it has now.  In the AV (= KJV) of 1611 the Greek word, “hades;” is translated by the word “hell” on ten out of the eleven occasions it is used.  And as hell is also used to translate “Gehenna,” the word hell has a wide meaning.  In fact it originally signified “that which is covered over or concealed” and is etymologically related to Höhle, a cave.

      Taking inferna to mean the place of punishment in the afterlife (cf. Dante’s Inferno), medieval theologians portrayed Jesus, as a human spirit, descending into hell in order to triumph over Satan and his demons, and to announce to them the deliverance of the believers of the old covenant from their limbum patrum.  We are all aware of the theme of the harrowing of hell in the art and drama of the Middle Ages.  Calvin rejected the doctrine of the harrowing of hell and took this clause figuratively to refer to Christ’s experience as our Substitute in bearing the curse and wrath of God against guilty sinners, especially revealed in his cry of dereliction on the Cross.  In general this has been adopted by Reformed theology, and G. C. Berkouwer makes much use of it in his reflections upon the preaching of hell today.

      The Lutheran position is stated in the Formula of Concord:

It is enough to know that Christ went to hell, destroyed hell for all believers, and has redeemed them from the power of death, of the devil and of eternal damnation of the hellish jaws.  How this took place is something that we should postpone until the other world, where there will be revealed to us not only this point, but many others as well, which our blind reason cannot comprehend in this life but which we simply accept.

In modern translations of the Apostles’ Creed we have, “He descended to the dead.”  This is an attempt to convey the idea of Hades as the realm of the departed and remove the medieval doctrine of the descent into hell to triumph over Satan.  This is a reasonable translation in that the origins of the doctrine of the descent of Jesus (in his death) into Hades are clearly there in the early Greek theologians, and it was from the Greek-speaking part of the early Church that the teaching was taken and made into an article of this western creed, where it was a late addition rather than an original article.  Thus the original Latin of the Apostles’ Creed translated Hades rather than Gehenna; only within the developing western theology did the idea of a descent into Gehenna become prominent, though it never totally removed the descent into Hades, the place of departed spirits.

      Obviously by inserting this article, those who used the Apostles’ Creed intended that it should add something to “he died and was buried.”  At least it pointed to his death being a real death with the separation of body and soul and the entrance of the soul into Hades.  Thus while Calvin’s explanation is thoroughly biblical, it can hardly be a right interpretation of this article.  The meaning must be sought in the fact that in death, while his body remained in the sepulchre, Jesus in his naked human spirit passed through into that transcendent, supernatural realm of departed spirits.  Whether he did visit as it were the gates of hell or whether he enjoyed the beatific vision without interruption we cannot wholly say.  To be our Savior from death and its consequences he had to endure all that death means and do this really and truly.  He died, was buried, and descended into Hades both as our Substitute and our Representative.  In Resurrection his naked spirit/soul reunited with his body to be raised from Hades to the right hand of the Father in heaven.

      One fruitful line of meditation upon the descent of Christ is to think of Holy Saturday as the day when Christ rested from his work of new creation.  On the Cross he achieved victory of Satan and offered a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world: His redeeming work was completed when he cried out, “It is finished!”  He died, was buried, and in his naked human spirit descended into Hades.  There on the Sabbath, which is the seventh day of the week, he rested, just as God had rested when he had completed the old creation.  Having brought the new covenant and new creation into being, Christ, resting in the peace of Hades, saw what he had made: And behold it was very good.  He looked upon the travail of his soul and he was satisfied (Isaiah 53).

 

Select Bibliography

 

Part One: Biblical

a.  Reference Works

Apocryphal Old Testament, ed. H. F D. Sparks, Oxford, 1984.

Apocrypha and Pseudepigraph of the Old Testament in English, ed. R. H. Charles Oxford, 1913, 2 vols.

Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, by W. E Arndt and F. W. Gingrich, Chicago, 1957.

Interpreter’s Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. A. Buttrick, Nashville, 1962–1976, 4 vols. and Supplement.

New Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas, Leicester, 1982.

New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. C. Brown, Grand Rapids, 1975, 3 vols.

 

b.  General Works

Baird, J. A., The Justice of God in the Teaching of Jesus, London, 1963.

Finger, T. N., Christian Theology: An Eschatological Approach, Vol. 1, Nashville, 1985.

Gray, J., The Biblical Doctrine of the Reign of God, Edinburgh, 1979.

Guthrie, D., New Testament Theology, Leicester and Downers Grove, 1981.

Harris, M. J., Raised Immortal, Grand Rapids, 1984.

Hoekema A. A., The Bible and the Future, Grand Rapids, 1979.

Jeremias J., New Testament Theology, Vol. 1, London, 1972.

Kümmel W. G., Promise and Fulfillment, London, 1957.

Lincoln, A. T., Paradise Now and Not Yet, Cambridge, 1981.

Ridderbos H., Paul: An Outline of his Theology, Grand Rapids, 1975.

Rowland, C., Christian Origins, London, 1985.

Rowland, C., The Open Heaven, London, 1982.

Russell D. S., The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic, London, 1964.

Ryder-Smith, C., The Bible Doctrine of the Hereafter, London, 1958.

Simon, U., Heaven in the Christian Tradition, London, 1958.

Smith, W. M., The Biblical Doctrine of Heaven, Chicago, 1968.

Strawson, W., Jesus and the Future Life, London, 1959.

Travis, S. H., Christian Hope and the Future of Man, Leicester, 1980.

Vos, G., The Pauline Eschatology, Grand Rapids, 1953.

 

Part 2: Historical/Theological

a. Reference Works

Creeds of Christendom, ed. E Schaff, Grand Rapids, 1977, 3 vols.

Creeds of the Churches, ed. J. Leith, Richmond, 1973.

Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. H. Denzinger & J. B. Umberg, Friburg, 1937.

New Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. W. J. MacDonald et al., New York, 1967, 14 vols.

Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, Oxford, 1974.

Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century, ed. A. Cochrane, Philadelphia,1966.

 

b. General Works

Augustine, The City of God.

Baillie, J., And the Life Everlasting, Oxford, 1934.

Baxter, R., The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, 1650, abridged edition, 1928.

Berkouwer, G. C., The Return of Christ, Grand Rapids, 1972.

Buis, H., The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment, Grand Rapids, 1957.

Calvin, J., Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T MacNeill, Philadelphia, 1960, 2 vols.

Edwards, J., Works, Edinburgh, 1976, 2 vols.

Gerstner J., Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell, Grand Rapids, 1980.

Hebblethwaite, B., The Christian Hope, Basingstoke, 1984.

Heppe, H., Reformed Dogmatics, Grand Rapids, 1978.

Hick, J., Death and Eternal Life, London, 1976.

Hodge, A. A., Evangelical Theology, Edinburgh, 1976.

Kelly, J. N. D., Early Christian Doctrines, London, 19684.

—.  Early Christian Creeds, London, 19602.

Küng, H., Eternal Life, New York, 1984.

Leckie, J. H., The World to Come and Final Destiny, Edinburgh, 1918.

Le Goff, J., The Birth of Purgatory, Chicago, 1983.

Martin, J. P, The Last Judgment in Protestant Theology from Orthodox to Ritschl, Edinburgh, 1963.

Mascall, E. L., From Grace to Glory, London, 1975.

Pusey, E. B., What is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment? London, 1880.

Rowell, G., Hell and the Victorians, Oxford, 1974.

Schleiermacher, F, The Christian Faith, Edinburgh, 1928.

Schmaus, M., Dogma 6. Justification and the Last Things, 1977.

Staudinger, J., Life Hereafter, Dublin, 1964.

Van der Walle, A., From Darkness to the Dawn, London, 1984.

Walker, D. P., The Decline of Hell. Seventeen-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment, London, 1964.

Winklhofer, A., The Coming of His Kingdom: A Theology of the Last Things, London, 1963.

 

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