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Subject: Re: Athiests and Hell
Message-ID: <May.9.05.38.49.1993.27375@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 9 May 93 09:38:49 GMT
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In article <May.6.00.35.31.1993.15453@geneva.rutgers.edu>
sun075!Gerry.Palo@uunet.uu.net (Gerry Palo) writes:>Between Adam and Eve and
Golgotha the whole process of the fall of man
>occurred.  This involved a gradual dimming of consciousness of the spiritual
>world.  

This was precisely my point.  From a theological bent, those who lived
immediately after the flood, such as Noah, Ham, his son Cush, and his son
Nimrod had a much stronger appreciation of Divine wrath.  They also had a
stronger understanding of the True God.  In fact, this immediacy was a cause of
hardship for some, so much so that Atlas, who is seen with heavens resting on
his shoulders.  But this is not merely the physical heavens that he is lifting.
 It is to put God and the strict spirituality of His law at a distance, and
thus he became the "Elevator of the heavens."  This "god" made men able to
"feel" as if heaven were afar off and "as if either the God of Heaven could not
see through the dark cloud, or did not regard with displeasure the breakers of
His laws."  It is interesting to see that it was that was titled "Emancipator"
or "Deliverer"  or Phoroneus. It was Nimrod who invaded the patriarchal system
and abridged the liberties of mankind, yet was worship for having given many
benefits.  He was a deliverer all right but not as we think of Christ as a
Deliverer.  One delivered from a conscious feeling of God's wrath, the other
actually performed a delivery from Gods wrath and it is up to us to accept it
as true.

>The question of what happens to human beings who died before Christ is
>an ever present one with Christians.  I am not ready to consign Adam
>or Abraham, or even Cain to eternal damnation.

I don't see the problem.  From the time of Adam, those who looked forward to
the coming "Anointed One" and put their faith in the fact that it was God who
was to do the provision, were accounted as righteous.  But up to the
Crucifixion, their sins were only covered, not taken away.  Therefore, the
dispensation of the Church views the accountability of sin the same, but see it
as a completed action.  Rom's makes it clear that it has always been salvation
via faith and nothing else.

>It is possible to experience eternity in a passing moment.  The
>relationship of eternity to duration is not simply one of indefinitely
>extended conditions of Greenwich mean time. 

I understand what you're trying to convey, but I don't think I'd lay hold of it
because the scriptures do equate the eternality of the second death with the
eternality of, say the Church ruling with Christ.  Jn 17 tells us what eternal
life is exactly, as you are correct that it is much more than non-cessation of
consciousness.  

>It was also a standard belief among many peoples that even the righteous
>were lost. 

It depends upon your def of "lost."  The elect were lost only in time as
outside of time they had been chosen from the foundation of the world. 
Existentially we were all born "lost", but the "righteous" were "in Christ" and
therefore never *assuredly* lost.  
>
>It would be interesting to share in the results of your studies of ancient
>people's ideas of life after death.

Maybe this summer I could find time to put together a paper on it.  I simply
have to buy more books for myself, and these older books are very expensive. 
Either that or countless trips to the oriental museum.
>
>Mankind fell into mist and darkness, and at "the turning point of
>time" a new light entered into the world.  The light still grows, and
>we are developing the eyes with which to see by it.  Much new
>revelation and growth in under- standing lies before us.  Our new
>vision and understanding is still very feeble, but it contains
>something new that will grow in time to embrace that which is old and
>much more as well.


Couldn't agree with you more.  Our understanding, of say eschatology, is
clearly clearer than that of, say Isaiah.  But that is not what I was referring
to.

>(At this point I should acknowledge openly my debt to the work of Rudolf
>Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, for  many insights that have led me to my
>views on this subject).

>The way you refer to it as "doctrine" puts a modern intellectual coloring
>on it. I think it was much less abstract and much more real and spiritually
>concrete, a teaching that struck much closer to home than our doctrines or
>teachings today can be received.

No, I understand it as you have said. This was my point.

>
>I am not so ready to attribute widespread notions in antiquity to
>simple dispersion from an original source.  Even if they were passed
>on, the question is, to what extent did they reflect real perception
>and experience? 

Ah!  This is it.  This is the big question.  However, I would say, again I
think, that the best lie is one that has an appreciable amount of truth to it. 
Look at Satan's twist of God's Word when he coerced Eve.  That is a very
interesting study.

 >The similarity in the midst of great variety of
>expression of the different people's ideas of the time immediately
>after death testifies to the presence of an underlying reality.

Yes, that is my point.  But it is a two edged sword. For some do not want the
underlying reality to be revealed.  They were not known as "mystery" religions
for no reason.  There was the public side of them and there was the private
side, that was so protected that the initiates to an oath of death if they
revealed that private side.  That is why it is so hard to bring their teachings
to light. The "Mystery of Iniquity" that we find in the Bible, correlates to
this I think.  The primary object of the mysteries was to introduce privately,
little by little, under the seal of secrecy and sanction of oath, what it would
not have been safe to openly profess was the true religion.  Case in point
today might be the Masons.  (Just a note, that they too worshipped Osiris in
Egypt, who can be traced to Nimrod, the "husband son.")

>On the other hand, there is one notion firmly embedded in Christianity
>that originated most definitely in a pagan source.  The idea that the
>human being consists essentially of soul only, and that the soul is
>created at birth, was consciously adopted from Aristotle, whose ideas
>dominated Christian thought for fifteen hundred years and still does
>today.

No, I disagree with you here Gerry.  I know what you're alluding to in that the
church, primarily the RCC, did endorse Aristotelian philosophy into their
worldview, but I would disagree with you that it originated in Greece.  If you
are a student of history, you will come to see that much of what Greece came to
expound to the world as their original, was just an adulteration of that which
they had taken from conquered countries.  The soul is clearly mentioned and
discussed at length in the Egyptian religions. As was the unity of God and also
the trinity of God.  See if you can find Wilkinson's "Egyptians."  He really
does a number on what the Greeks did to what they "pilfered" from the
Egyptians. 

> He was at once the father of modern thought and at the same
>time lived during that darkened time when the perception of our
>eternal spiritual being had grown dim.

I'm not knocking Aristotle or Plato or any other Greek thinker.  Its just that
"there is nothing new under the sun."


>Indeed. I should also clarify that I do not deny that eternal
>irrevocable damnation is a real possibility.  But the narrow range in
>which we conceive of the decisive moment, i.e. after the end of a
>single earthly life, is not in my mind sufficient to embrace the
>reality, and I think that is why the early creeds were couched in
>terms that did not try to spell it out.

Each age has its own focus of theology.  The early church struggled with the
Trinitarian formulation.  The reformation dealt with authority.  Today,
eschatology has had much study.  The early creeds do not spell these things out
in detail because, 1) they weren't the topic of concern, 2) there was
insufficient wisdom accumulated, 3) they didn't have the exegetical tools that
we have today.  Also, each age seems to have an air of revelation to it.  One
age has a well tended and cultivated garden in which a particular doctrine is
given growth.  It would be natural for the end of times to have the garden
appropriate for the growth of eschatology, wouldn't it?
>
tangents, never ending tangents,
Rex
