magister343
Permanent Fixture
- MBTI
- INTP
- Enneagram
- stupid system (5w4)
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "powered by, "gives the information," or "translates it," but I think it means you missed my point and chose to stay with the traditional sort of dualism. I'm saying that the soul is you. It is everything about you. Its information comes from everything that helped fashion your identity, from God, from your life experiences, from every thing you ever thought, from every choice you ever made, from everything you ever loved. It is not some seperate supernatural agency directing the flow of the material. It might not be wholly physical but is immanent in the physical rather than superimposed. The brain and its structure are part of the soul, not extraneous organs that seem like they could control all our actions on their own but actually only do what a ghost in the machine tells them to do.
The traditional view is not that the soul leaves the body to go to heaven, but that the spirit does.
(Ecclesiastes 3 casts doubt on even that notion, not ruling it out completely but expressing that we have no way of knowing if it is true. Solomon seemed to think that humans are no different from other animals and that we merely pass back into the dust.)
The bible is pretty clear that everyone will take part in a bodily resurrection in the last days. The spirit will be reunited with the body, restoring the soul. In revelation we see that there will actually be two resurrections, one for the saints before the millennium and one for the rest just before the end of the world. The saints will reign on Earth during the millennium, and then in the New Earth (which is almost certainly united with the New Heaven) after the Old Heaven and the Old Earth pass away. (Before all these things pass away exist the wicked will be condemned to the second death, which seems to make more sense as permanent total annihilation rather than eternal torment. Note that Greek does not actually have a word for eternity, and what is usually rendered such actual means "an age" or "of [the next] age.") It is not at all clear if we will ever visit the Old Heaven, and I think it unlikely.
The bible does not really say what, if anything, happens in the interim between death and the resurrection. For that we have nothing to rely upon except human speculation. The simplest answer is that nothing happens, we just don't exist until we are recreated. This is favored by Occam's Razor, as holding it requires only faith that God is able to keep his word rather than positing the existence of many extraneous commonplace but undetectable supernatural phenomena never mentioned in divine revelation. I favor it, as do most modern theologians. It has always been far more popular a belief in Judaism, and those Jews who did not hold it were pretty clearly adopting Greek notions. The biblical claim that Christians are the most pitiable of all men if their hope in the future resurrection is false makes more sense this way. This was taught by some church fathers and many ecclesiastic writers in the early church (most unambiguously by Tatian), and by Pope John XXII in the 14th century. It was not until the next pope's reign that there was any dogma against such a belief.
The more traditional christian belief is that when a man dies his spirit faces Particular Judgement and departs to receive a foretaste of his eternal fate. A tiny minority (saints and martyrs) are allowed to enter heaven and receive direct knowledge of God, while the rest stay in Hades. In the early church Hades was generally viewed more like what Catholics call Purgatory rather than Hell. (Eastern Orthodox Churches still hold that view. In the West the conception of Hades kept getting worse until a seperate Purgatory had to be invented for Christians were not yet holy enough for Heaven, and then various layers of Hell for non-Christians of varying degrees of wickedness and virtue. The modern view of hell is based on Dante's Inferno, a part of his Divine Comedy, a work of fiction that borrowed very heavily from Virgil's Aeneid and so presents an essentially pagan picture of the afterlife. The biblical term Hades was almost certainly being used as a translation of Sheol, a Hebrew term that can mean "Pit," "Grave," or simply "the state of being dead." Ecclesiastes 9 is pretty clear that the dead in Sheol have no knowledge or thought, which seems to rule out any conscious existence. We are most familiar with the Greek term Hades as it is used in Pagan Greek mythology and religion, as either the underworld where the disembodied spirits of the dead go to recieve their rewards or punishments or as the god of that underworld. The term is not however limited to that sense. It can also refer literally to anything hidden under the surface of the earth. The word Hades itself is believed to literally mean "unseen." The god called Hades was also called Pluto (wealthy) because being lord of everything under the surface of the earth meant that all mineral wealth came from his domain. The word Hell is actually not a bad translation of Hades, as it is a Germanic term for the underworld that literally means "concealed," but I would rather avoid it because it has taken on even stronger negative connotations. Literally burying a body under ground is sending someone to hell, but that does not mean eternal damnation or torment.)
Regardless of where ever the spirit goes immediately after death, it does not stay there forever. Complete knowledge of our temporary fate is not something that God chose to reveal, so we probably shouldn't waste too much time or effort arguing over such speculations that distract what what we do know. The Resurrection and the Last Judgement are clear and essential doctrine that all Christians must accept.
Your own fallen nature is the main cause, but outside pressures certainly can contribute. (As an Fe user you should know that.)
