A Survey of My Non-Western View of Hell (Miniblog #136)

Preliminary question: When you talk about the eternality (or non-eternality) of the soul, is your usage meant to encompass the totality of the human person–heart, body, mind, soul? Or are you distinguishing the spirit as distinct? Not trying to put words in your mouth. Wanting to make sure we’re on the same page before moving forward.

We must remember, however, that the Jews of the 1st century were Hellenized, as are all Jews today.

And those of the 1st BCE.

and 2nd.

and 3rd.

And even when we examine the state of absolute death in ancient Semitic and other near-eastern thought, you do not have “non-existence”. You have this sort of shady existence of rot and gloominess and being a “meat hanging on a hook” to quote one Sumerian text I like.

So even when the animative faculty/constitution/nephesh/whatever is no longer present, there is this sort of continuation. And it is a continuation of the dead. The ancients never defined immortality as ‘not ceasing to exist’; I think the Greeks may have come up with that one.

Perhaps this is because without the Divine, there is no existence, and no non-existence, either, but only an oblivion beyond the two. That is just conjecture, but how disturbing!

So for Christianity, which emerged out of the Jewish milieu of the 1st Century, “eternal life” would not have been considered synonymous with mere “perpetuated existence”. I think St. Paul draws a nice distinction between the lingering nephesh existence of the dead and corruptible, vs the Holy Spirit existence, in 1 Corinthians 15.

I don’t think there is a distinction between mostly dead and all dead.

I think that if you are dead, you are dead, and if you are alive, you are alive. We differ in that you believe “completely dead” means “annihilated”, whereas I don’t see any evidence of such a belief among the Hellenistic Jews of Christ’s time or among the ancient Semitic peoples, the Hebrews included. Now, certainly they did not believe that a “mind/soul” was somehow “surviving” in the afterlife, of course, but rather that there was this gloomy, rotting state in which the dead were dead, being dead. Being meat on a hook. They were there, but they were dead.

It’s a bit difficult to convey.

Satan lingers, but is in no wise immortal.

Now, back to today. I do not believe that those who have died in Christ are disembodied souls, or that they are “unconscious”. Instead, I believe they are fully alive and already mystically entering into the Age to Come, which is why we proclaim:

“Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb.”

That means the state of being dead which functioned before Christ no longer functions.

You refer to “biblical evidence”, but the fact is, where we differ is in how the passages relating to pre-Christ death are to be interpreted, rather than whether or not we accept the “plain reading” of the “biblical evidence”.

I think it most sensible that, as the Hebrew cosmology had many similarities with the “standard” Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, descriptions about the Pit of Sheol, the state of a giddim/shade, etc. most likely fit into a similar understanding. I see no reason to come up with some sort of alternate interpretation when examining OT passages about death.

Just as we must resist the temptation to read Neoplatonism back into ANE thought, we must also avoid reading reactions to Neoplatonism back into ANE thought. ANE thought can stand on its own.

So you choose not to interpret Sheol/the Pit, and the descriptions of the dead in the Bible, within the greater context of Near Eastern cosmology. Rather, you choose to understand “Sheol/The Pit” to mean “unconcious/ceased to exist” based on the “plain reading of Scripture” which just happens to line up with the late stoic understanding of immortality and mortality.

Well, I’d say that’s a rather biblicist way of looking at things, but this is a free country.

Also, your low view of “superstition” is quite depressing. The meat on a hook is not an analogy, it is a reality. It is how they encountered death.

“I acknowledge that the New Testament evidence is inconclusive as to
whether we have a conscious afterlife between death and the final
resurrection.”

Oh, I am not talking about an intermediate state. I’m talking about being in the Coming Age.

“I do not see conclusive biblical evidence for a conscious afterlife for the unredeemed. Do you?”

Well, unless one believes that the Greek Christians didn’t know their own language and thus didn’t understand what The New Testament means by “destruction unto the ages”, I would say that mentioning the eternality of the state of gehenna would be sufficient. Of course, fussing over “concious torment” is really a fuss only important to American Evos and their opponent of the day.

We don’t have a clear picture of “the damned” in the Coming Age. It is a Holy age, which means that it is constituted in a distinct Otherness. Who can say what that mystery will hold, and what mercies are already at work?

It is the ancient Christian conviction that Christ raised all the dead. It is not to be quickly dismissed.

” Reasonable scholars dispute, and Greek usage is ambivalent, as to
whether ‘aionion’ refers to something “eternal” as in “final,
irreversible” or “continuous, eternal.”

I don’t know any historians who believe that early Greek Christians understood things this way. And it’s rather silly to believe they all got it wrong straight off the bat.

“No, not the point at all. I choose, rather, to accept that the Biblical
writers used images and language familiar to the ANE folks, but in
lacking (possibly pointless) detail, they clearly didn’t put much stock
in the minutiae. The fact that they didn’t go into detail is my
evidence for it’s *being* minutiae.”

I find it childish that you relegate those things you disagree with to the realm of “minutiae”. The fact is, you take on faith that the Scriptures do not operate within the Near Eastern understanding of death, and your only evidence for this is a supposed lack of detail, from which one could draw several disparate conclusions.

“I assume you mean this as an insult. I accept the label willingly.”

Enjoy your inerrant, self-interpreting text.

“But ‘destruction’ almost always means ‘destruction,’ not ‘miserable existence that makes you wish you could be destroyed.”

Once again, you are applying Hellenistic terminology to an ancient near eastern culture.

For them, destruction did not mean “cease to exist” in the stoic sense of immortality/mortality. This is well documented. Read an account of Kigal/the realm of the dead. The Scriptures certainly do not take the time to explicitly define what “destroyed” means, so you have to apply what’s called a hermeneutic. We disagree on the hermeneutic. So we have to work on the level of hermeneutics.

“But it says the damned are destroyed [meaning cease to exist]. That’s why it’s called the ‘second death.”

That would be one 19th Century interpretation. There are many other interpretations that take into account the interpretations of the earliest Christians, the surrounding near-eastern culture, etc. To dismiss these evidences is to disincarnate the Scriptures.

Fair enough.

But you cannot encounter the Scriptures except through hermeneutics. So it is not “ANE texts vs. the Scriptures”, it is “ANE hermeneutic vs. stoic hermeneutic”.

” To what sources are you referring to obtain your ANE perspective?”

Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hebrew and Arab sources and commentaries and analyses on them, for one.

“To what evidence do you point to determine whether those who followed
YHWH accepted, or held in strong counterpoint to, the ANE beliefs in
question?”

Comparative mythology.

” Perhaps most importantly, what’s your basis for determining that the
question we are debating as 21st-century Westerners even was part of the
consciousness (or concern) of those ANE folks?”

One of my points was that the immortality/mortality of the mind/hellenistic soul wasn’t even part of their consciousness or concern.

” In short, I hold that scripture must be “rightly divided” to determine
what within the text represents itself as the word of God…”

Well, that sounds rather un-poetic and dry.

“we know, conclusively, far less than many of us think.”

That’s a given regarding most history.

I’ll defer to Fr. Bozeman on that one.