Someone I know who recently read, on my recommendation, the book by Eben Alexander III, PROOF OF HEAVEN (great book, btw), asked me about the timelessness of heaven. Wouldn't one meet oneself in Heaven if there truly is no time? Indeed, I think this very thing is possible and probably happens. I can imagine holding my childhood self up on my shoulders.
You see I think Heaven is timeless, and that things are grown by God 'in time'... in our universes and other places like it where time is real. That which has positive value is retained forever in Heaven. You cannot have any new experiences of your own once you are in Heaven, though you can have the utter joy of sharing in the experiences of others. You have no more to give God once you are dead, you become a co-receiver with God of what comes next for the rest of existence.
This helps us make sense both of the grace of heaven and the experience of death as something terrible. Once I'm gone from this world, I no longer am able to give anything to God. When a baby dies, the family feels that loss deeply. The grief, the pain, these are experiences as real and as spiritually significant as joy and humor and hope. Most Christians' response to that pain is not helpful, it is an attempt to ignore the reality of the evil of the loss by convincing them the baby is not really dead. Nothing is lost for the child, and really very little is lost for the parent: the parent will be without the child and without the gift of life the child could give them but only for a very short period of time, relatively speaking.
So Christianity does to the experience of grief what secular philosophies do the experience of transcendence: they try to get us to ignore it, they deny any underlying reality behind the experience. The irony is thick in this intellectual territory. I would suggest that my understanding of God and eternity speaks and justifies the experience of grief while still holding up a faith in God's grace. For indeed the baby is eternalized as all beings of value are eternalized. But something is genuinely lost: all the baby could've been in the future, and all it could've given to God and Heaven. The baby may be able, like the rest of Heaven, to share in what comes next, but it will remain as a Baby, and all that entails. It cannot become more unto itself in Heaven than it became on Earth. It is not lost, but it has nothing more to give than what it gave. All that it could be, all it could've added to the life of God is lost forever.
This then gives sense and reason to the experience of mourning and loss. The loss may seem from the vantage point of human history to be small: what is one baby in the span of thousands of years, and the mass of infant deaths that have occurred in that time? But from a divine vantage point it is huge: all the baby could've been and could've given to God, all the furniture of Heaven it could've constructed, is lost forever. It cannot be, it will never be. So the feeling of loss is justified on the part of the parents and others: they are simply experiencing the loss God experienced, their grief is 'ultimately true'.
There is a negative consequence to all of this though, an implication that I don't like any more than the next person. For I have said elsewhere that I think that the 'punishment' for sin is the loss of one's self in heaven. A killer cannot make more of himself in heaven than he was on earth, and so a sufficiently evil person may be no more than a baby, for that is as much value as they ever added to God and thus to Heaven. A baby killer, then, suffers the same fate as the one they killed. The punishment they receive is to have robbed from them what they robbed from another. I would like, as I'm sure you all would like, to have the victim receive some special benefit denied to the killer. I want punishment for the wicked as much as the next person. But to believe that God is Christ is to put the Pain of God above the Mercy and Justice of God. There is no real 'punishment', there are just the factual consequences of God being who God is. What is good is retained, what is of value is retained, what is not is lost. No experience of an evil act has any eternity, it is lost forever. No experience of an evil and unredeemed heart has any eternity, it too is lost. Yes, the murderer's fate is the fate of the person murdered, at least in some sense (there are probably many murder victims that are much farther along the line than those who murder them, so there is a greater gain for God in Heaven and the victim when they get there, but still what is lost is the same: new experiences for God and Heaven).
However, might there not be a profounder truth in this? For to murder another is really to kill yourself. What is lost is the same... the murderer murders himself, if even for a moment. These thoughts are relatively unformed. I think they contain truth though, and perhaps a lot. Will they be lost to all but God when I am gone from this world? Will I be able to spread the Gospel as I believe it is meant to be spread to any more than a select few?
Once more in four-part harmony and feelin'...
ReplyDeleteLet me try to ask this question again. Each time I go to publish it, *POOF* it is gone.
This argument implies that the consequences of murder can be worse for the victim than the perpetrator. Let's say I live a pretty good life, however imperfectly, but that I'm adding value to God's existence. Then I decide I'm tired of living that way, give over to licentious living and eventually murder an infant.
That infant is stopped cold in their progression. They are never other than an infant. I however, due to my previous contributions to God, am greater. How can that possibly be just or merciful?
Removing the emotional argument of murder: in the basest case, Death has the final say on what a person may ever be. That is not up to them, nor even up to God. All of the countless children who died in infancy, through no one's fault are arrested at that point of departure. They are barely even self-aware and now will be like that for all eternity?
Please tell me I'm missing something here. Usually when I ask a question like this, you do show me where I missed something. I'm hoping this time is one of those times.
I don't have any easy answers for this, and as with any ideas mine aren't perfect or complete. Maybe I'll have a more satisfactory answer later on, but here are a few preliminary thoughts. It isn't strictly true that a person has nothing to gain for themselves in Heaven once they are there. They gain, perhaps over time the totality of God. It is simply that what they gain is by sharing, not by giving. I mean even animals, I think, go to heaven. But that brings up a whole range of questions, doesn't it? What does it mean for those animals who have died to 'share' in my direct experience right now? I don't know. But it is probably infinitely greater than my own experience right now, wouldn't you think? Does an animal have self-awareness in heaven, share in mine? Who knows? What I do have confidence in is that what is lost in this world is genuinely lost. That our grief is not some selfish game of people unable to be happy for others. Death wins its spoils, I don't know how we can deny that. But what is that victory, next to the sharing in the life of God that comes next? Who is the loss really for? More for God, than anyone else, and our own loss becomes a sharing in His.
ReplyDeleteI think there is also a mistake in the way you treat selfhood. I don't believe in a single, persisting self that maintains through a lifetime. If a person changes from someone committed to the good to a person who is willing to commit infanticide, then in that change what really happens is a kind of death. The person that was is no more, someone new has taken their place. There is something to be learned from Buddhism here, and process thought takes some of its insights into selfhood from Buddhism. Buddhism is probably wrong that there is NO persistent selfhood, that I am someone new every moment, but it is right that there is not one persistent selfhood throughout the life of the individual. I die and am reborn many times in my life. That speaks to the experience I spoke of at the beginning of being able to 'embrace myself' in Heaven.