Like most Christians, I believe that — if Christ choses me — I’ll be raised from the dead into a world that might be called ‘Heaven’ where I’ll live with Jesus Christ for time without end. I’ll take this as a typical schizophrenic Christian belief. See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism for a discussion about the general madness of modern human beings, this schizophrenia “characterized by loss of contact with environment and by disintegration of personality.”
In the Bible, we’re told that Christ had risen from the grave. We’re also told that the Jesus Christ had promised to raise from the grave those He chose as His friends, but not here on earth. The Lord will resurrect His own in Heaven.
Where is this Heaven supposed to be? The direct words of Jesus and St. Paul give few specifics for answering this question and the only exception, St. Paul’s talk of ascending through layers of heavens, leads to the concept of the cosmos developed by the great pagan thinkers. And so an answer was taken from those pagan cosmologies: the heavens, an ascending hierarchy of ever purer being, lie on the other side of the moon’s orbit. Moreover, a literalization of some Biblical allegories, such as the story of Adam and Eve, and the apocalyptic tales in such books as Daniel and Revelation gave images and concepts and words to speak of Heaven.
What is this resurrection supposed to be? The Bible speaks of a resurrection in the body but it again gives little for the human mind to work on other than the apparent strangeness of the resurrected body of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some of the early Fathers of the Church borrowed the concept of the soul from pagans, though it’s likely they misunderstood it, especially if they had intended to borrow from Platonic thought. Plato never claimed any direct relationship between the soul he conjectured and the individual human being. (So far as I can tell, most commentators on the Bible who’ve taken the trouble to try to understand the body of thought in which Saul of Tarsus was educated think he meant something by ‘soul’ different from what modern Christians would mean. I’ll leave the matter there.)
Plato would have likely agreed, for the most part, with this statement from St. Thomas Aquinas:
My soul [in Thomas the organ for thought] is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man. [From the Commentary to 1 Corinthians 15 by St. Thomas Aquinas as quoted by Hannah Arendt in “The Life of the Mind” (page 43).]
I don’t know that Plato had such a clear understanding of the soul as Aquinas did and I also think Professor Arendt would have been better to say Aquinas thought the soul to be the organ for abstract thought. In any case, Aquinas clearly located all other human characteristics — including our love, faith, and hope — in the physical human being. I think it also clear that Plato and Aquinas both considered the soul to be something impersonal — to speak a little bit loosely.
In any case, the soul as taken into the thoughts of most Christians was purer stuff and could just ‘float’ up to more ethereal regions when freed from the body — in much pagan thought and arguably in Buddhism where the goal is to release your self from individual existence. That which is released is something more pure than that which struggles to exist in a concrete world.
The above discussions of traditional understandings of Heaven and the possibilities of human life after death are simplistic, to be sure. A fuller discussion would require a library of books discussing both the modern empirical knowledge of the universe (as opposed to the ancient speculations of the cosmos) and the modern empirical knowledge of human nature, as well as the intellectual histories of thought on both those subjects and many related subjects. I’ve presented this summary only to provide some support for the plausibility of this claim:
The post-biblical but pre-modern Christian understandings of the resurrection and of Heaven (where is it?) were linked with, coherent with, even founded upon, Hellenistic theories of the cosmos and of human nature.
Those pre-modern Christians didn’t have to believe in multiple realms of truth. They didn’t have to shed their beliefs about Heaven when they left church because those beliefs were the same they had when looking into the sky, whether they were astronomers or educated laymen or illiterate peasants. The pre-modern ages were not really homogeneous in their beliefs, nor were the inhabitants of all places and times rational within the context of any particular set of beliefs. Admitting that, it was still true that there was a substantial body of common beliefs as to the nature of created being which allowed pre-modern Christians to understand a Bible story or to recite the creed without contradicting their general beliefs about the nature of the only reality they knew — this mortal realm.
So far as I know, I’m the only Christian in the world who actually thinks of Heaven and the resurrection in terms of words and concepts which are mostly the same as, and always consistent with, the words and concepts I use to speak of modern empirical knowledge such as that of quantum mechanics and gravitational theory, transfinite set theory and randomness. I can, somewhat tongue-in-cheek at this early stage of developing this new way of thought, ask What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven? and I even have a very rough beginning of an understanding of the Real Presence in terms of my understanding of this only part of reality we truly know — Abstract Mathematics and the Real Presence of Jesus Christ.
In past centuries, when a parent or clergyman or a teacher spoke of Heaven, they had a clear idea — however wrong — of where Heaven was and what it would mean for us to ascend to Heaven. Nowadays, when a child asks the appropriate questions, what answers do we have? Basically, we have answers that would lead the child to think, “Heaven doesn’t really exist but it’s a nice place.” After all, we tell that child and ourselves: “It’s not a place we can see or reach in this life but it’s also not a place we can describe in any sense.” Unless we go back to the pre-modern descriptions which the child knows to be a lie as soon as he learns that there’s no Heaven in the solar system, nor in the Milky Way, and probably not in any other galaxy.
I don’t have this problem. By simply taking modern physics seriously, I realized that this universe is but a phase of something far greater. Moreover, this universe is highly particular, shaped from something with an abstract sort of being which we wouldn’t be able to directly perceive. By a complex line of speculative reasoning, I concluded that that abstract sort of being is the manifested truths which are the foundation of this universe which becomes a world when seen in light of God’s purposes. Heaven is a particular world shaped by God from the same stuff He used in shaping this particular world, but Heaven would have to be shaped in such a way that a complete order is present from the start or else order evolves in such a way that destruction and decay aren’t side-effects. I can speak of Heaven without having to pretend to enter another realm of being and without having to brush off conflicts between scientific knowledge and Christian beliefs by implausible claims of non-conflict. Of course there’s a conflict involving the beliefs of nearly all modern Christians, including Jesuit scientists, but it’s a conflict between modern empirical knowledge and the pre-modern empirical knowledge which is embedded in our theological systems.
There’s a lot more to what I’ve done than this simple summary can indicate and the interested reader can explore this blog site, starting with the category of Christian in the universe of Einstein. I also have a less intellectually intense website where browsing might uncover possible entries of interest such as Randomness as a Sign of God’s Presence or C.S. Lewis and the World God Didn’t Create. My basic positions can be found in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. My basic positions on the nature of human knowledge can be found in a freely downloadable book (pdf), Four Kinds of Knowledge.
Acts of Being » Blog Archive » Modern Madness and Realms of Knowledge
[…] explanatory space.” That way lies cognitive dissonance. I’ve spoken of this problem in The Only Sane Christian in the Modern World and A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism. Years ago, I also wrote a darkish novel, A Man for […]