Will despicable people make it to heaven?
A few days ago, Trump, in an interview with Fox News stated he hoped his efforts to bring a peace between Ukraine and Russia will help earn him a place in heaven, because he is hearing he is at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to being in that line.
Just a few days ago when someone posted James Dobson had died, someone else posted an obituary saying Dobson should burn in hell. Granted, to me, Dobson is very despicable for what he advocated in regards to discipline, gender identity, and sexuality. Many people have been hurt by his teaching. But I found the obituary very jarring.
Do we really know people like these will not make it to heaven?
Goes to the same question is Hitler in heaven
An article in the current Christian Century addresses this issue. Basically, it says we are being like the Pharisee who condemned the tax collector if we condemn people to be in that pit of fire. I am glad there is no one like me who is seated on that judgment seat. What say you.
Just a few days ago when someone posted James Dobson had died, someone else posted an obituary saying Dobson should burn in hell. Granted, to me, Dobson is very despicable for what he advocated in regards to discipline, gender identity, and sexuality. Many people have been hurt by his teaching. But I found the obituary very jarring.
Do we really know people like these will not make it to heaven?
Goes to the same question is Hitler in heaven
An article in the current Christian Century addresses this issue. Basically, it says we are being like the Pharisee who condemned the tax collector if we condemn people to be in that pit of fire. I am glad there is no one like me who is seated on that judgment seat. What say you.
Comments
For example, even if you believe in good works, you have no way of knowing how anyone's life balances out, because people don't advertise all their actions. Nor do you know how God quantifies eg. getting up at 4: 30 AM to volunteer as a Little League hockey coach, VS. spending a comfortable afternoon at the country club helping to write fundraising letters for cancer research.
As for faith-alone, well, I guess if you know for an absolute fact that someone died having not accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal saviour, you know that he does, indeed, fit that tradition's definition of "reprehensible". But I don't think most people would have more than a couple of associates they could say that about.
re: Dobson, I think he had a reprehensible influence here on Earth, and assuming God shares my understanding of good/evil rather than Dobson's, he shouldn't get into Heaven, or at least not without a long stay in Purgatory. Not sure how he breaks down on faith-alone, though I guess if he DID, as seems likely,
accept Jesus as his LAPS, he should logically get in.
A pretty obvious foil for Dobson's agenda, and some of the case-against seemed outta-context and sensationalized. Though I will also say that, while I don't share the horrified-dystopian view of the school in question, the more I hear about it, the less impressed I am.
They will have repented.
I believe they will experience a balancing of the kinds of energies they put in motion through their intentions and actions.
Whether it's through a stint in an infernal or purgatorial realm or though a cycle of incarnations, it doesn't matter. Hell is, after all, other people.
AFF
I've heard a number of preachers say that if/when we get to Heaven, we'll be surprised to see who's there. The biggest surprise will be that we ourselves are.
That's not to promote an entirely individualistic approach but it is to acknowledge that we all need to 'work out' our own salvation with 'fear and trembling' as it were.
We aren't dogmatic about these things in the Orthodox Tradition but there's a strong view that the coruscating brightness of God's eternal presence - the 'Uncreated Light' as it were, the light of Tabor and the Transfiguration - will be a source of great joy and bliss to those who love God and have sought to please him, but the opposite to those who haven't.
We can't say who that is or isn't.
'As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord' - by God's grace.
What is sincerity anyway? If I genuinely hold the belief that I'm the centre of my moral universe and everything should be arranged for my benefit is that sincere? If I don't consciously or explicitly believe that but all my conscious and explicit beliefs are arranged around that central belief are those conscious and explicit beliefs sincere?
I suppose however that we will mostly be in for a dose of Purgatory to heal us, the more unpleasant among us longer than others.
But it seems to me that the basis on which someone would or would not go to heaven would be of at least some consequence to anybody who is concerned with the issue of whether or not people go to heaven.
There appears to be a mode of thinking about heaven which gives rise to a bit of a void between "it's none of our business" and "it's not individualistic".
I'm more and more drawn to the inevitability of universal salvation with some kind of Purgatorial process as the only possible resolution to the massive justice problems of Hell.
We then hit the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Abraham says there is a void. The rich man goes to hell. There is nothing in between. We have argued over Universalism a good few times on here. The workers in the vineyard argues those who gain salvation late will get the same as those who gained it earlier, but says nothing about those who don’t gain salvation at all
The point of Dives and Lazarus isn't eternal destination. It's always risky to go beyond the central point of a parable - they're neither allegories nor literal
“The bosom of Abraham” was understood as a place within hades, not separate from it. Again as I understand it, Hades (Greek)/Sheol (Hebrew) in Second Temple Judaism was understood as the place where the dead went to await resurrection/redemption. “The bosom of Abraham” was the part of hades where the righteous waited.
@KarlLB is right. It's always risky to go beyond the central point of a parable. It’s also risky to read them through a lens based on assumptions that aren’t actually in the text and that differ from the assumptions the original audiences would have brought to the text.
Are you making an argument from silence?
@Hugal is coming at this from a fairly evangelical direction so he 'sees' am evangelical take on these verses within the verses themselves.
Someone coming at it from the perspective of a different Christian tradition such as a liberal one, for instance, would read those verses differently.
There's a lot of medieval elaboration around the story of Dives and Lazarus, as per the old folk song on that theme.
I'm not a card-carrying universalist but I do believe in a 'wider hope' on the basis of Romans 2 and the latitude my own Tradition allows without going into full-blown universalism.
As the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of blessed memory used to say, 'We may hope that all might be saved. We cannot say that all will be saved.'
Or as Barth said (though not as succinctly as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware): (Church Dogmatics, IV.3.2)
By the way, is "despicable" a well-defined term?
Existing "in an afterlife" doesn't necessarily mean one is coexisting in the same one as everyone else.
Supposing everyone somehow arrives in the afterlife they were expecting, I don't think it takes too much imagination to see the things that one thought of as paradise actually being the opposite. Maybe Stalin is in the afterlife but that involves him constantly experiencing holograms or avatar of all the people he hurt on a loop forever. Maybe they're even really nice to him.
My main problem with the concept of an afterlife is that it seems pointless. Reincarnation makes more sense, although cycling through thousands of lives also seems a bit tedious.
Entry to God's Kingdom is a gift. The Pharisees et al were 'moral'. Our Lord seems to have been much happier with us immoral sinners ready to accept His gift.
Good point. If the only human point of reference is the self, sincerity in your beliefs can get you anywhere. (I think Dobson's sincerity was pretty central to his persona, his message, and his entire politico-religious business endeavour.)
For Gil Alexander-Moegerle (author of James Dobson's War on America), the big problem was Dobson's lack of accountability. This does suggest one way of avoiding an entirely individualistic approach to the question of who goes to heaven.
Indeed.
But as soon as they knew him they changed their ways.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that 'good behaviour' qualifies us for our destiny in the after-life but the scriptures do say a lot about the need for good behaviour.
I seem to remember a certain Jewish teacher and healer having a fair bit to say about that.
My own Tradition doesn't go in for the 'solas' of course - sola fide, sola gratia, sola dei gloria - nor sola scriptura either.
And those Christian traditions that do go in for them don't tend to do so - at a mainstream level - at the expense of good behaviour.
I'd agree that a certain amount of Victorian moralism has lingered on within most Christian churches or cultures influenced by Christianity, but there is a balance between liberty and license, between the 'letter of the Law' on the one hand and outright Antinomianism on the other.
Does anyone think that? Surely religions which believe in an afterlife reserve it for fellow believers?
The only religion I can think of where belief is not enough is Islam, where it seems the deity is picky and will decide later whether the believer's actions and faith are sufficient.
I think Paul and the Epistle of James and many of Jesus' parables are careful to show that faith leads towards loving ones neighbour. Even Luther would agree with that. What I don't think is that one's place in the afterlife is a reward or punishment for one's morality in this life.
And there is certainly more hope for the sinner who wants to repent than for the self-righteous one who has no intention of repenting.
I'm not sure that this would necessarily lead to a positive difference that is noticeable from the outside -- and in cases where people were previously doing the right things for entirely the wrong reasons, I could even see them seeming to 'get worse'.
Opinions in Christianity have varied, and the Gospels can offer passages in support of either belief or behaviour being vital. Judaism similarly has sects who believe that there is an afterlife open to gentiles who follow the 7 laws given to Noah. Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism don't have an afterlife as a permanent state, though reincarnation seems to be more affected by behaviour than belief.
Heck, there are plenty if medieval frescoes that show bishops, priests, monks and nuns among those cast into Hell in those scary depictions of the Last Judgement.
The Orthodox and mainstream Protestants don't resting Heaven to their own co-religionists either.
Meanwhile, @Pomona, I can see why you'd have difficulty with the idea that we might be surprised to find ourselves in heaven - it's something of a pietistic trope.
Rather like those Orthodox who sign themselves as 'The ignorant and unworthy servant of God So-and-So.'
By the same token, we aren't judhe and jury on whether we ourselves or anyone else does or doesn't get to go there - if it is a 'there'.
For all you know you might be pleasantly surprised to find James Dobson ready to greet you there and apologise.
I don't know. None of us do.
We do seem to be asked to forgive others if we are to expect to be forgiven ourselves.
But it's not for me to suggest that in any specific instance.
The idea that a loving, divine creator is sufficiently petty and vindictive to make the afterlife conditional strikes me as repellent. So no, I don't believe it is reserved on that basis.
This is not to say that there will not be a lot of finishing creation, and that this process won't be painful for many, if not for all. But the idea of eternal damnation is simply not one I am able to entertain.
What I think is notable is that the doctrine of salvation through faith alone became popular with English-speaking Protestants around the same time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was starting off. It seems like a very convenient theology for those who want to commit despicable acts (like being slavers) and still be assured of salvation.
Well, I'm trying (very)!
Amen to that!
Meanwhile the doctrines of salvation through faith alone arose in southern Germany and Switzerland which not being sea-going parts of the world didn't have much involvement in the start of the trans-Atlantic slave trade compared to Iberia, which was consistently hostile to the doctrine.
Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhism is according to wikipedia the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in Japan, and basically has a doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Japan was not involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Moreover, the chronology seems off. Salvation through faith alone was already important to English-speaking Protestantism from the reign of Edward VI in England - perhaps a bit later in Scotland - and became more so during Mary Tudor. Major English involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade took off during the seventeenth century.
I'm reminded of the joke about the Calvinist minister lying on his deathbed and taking comfort that, looking back on his life, he'd never done anything that could be considered "good works".
One of the things that's always perplexed me about this strain of amoral Christianity is that scripture is filled with various exhortations towards moral behavior, yet the doctrine of faith alone assures us that morality is pointless and irrelevant in God's eyes.
Indeed. I think you've got the causality of my argument backwards I'm not claiming that salvation via faith alone led to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, just that it seems like the kind of theology that would be very attractive to someone who wanted to be a slaver. In other words, people didn't become slavers because they believed in sola fides, a lot of folks came to believe in salvation through faith alone because they wanted to be slavers.
Catholicism has a variety of mechanisms for the absolution of one's sins. Replacing that with the doctrine that your sins simply don't matter if you're sincere enough in your faith seems like a logical adaptation once the church hierarchy was rejected as a mediator with God.
Can you cite any source that actually says “the doctrine of faith alone assures us that morality is pointless and irrelevant in God’s eyes”? Having spent my entire life in a tradition that subscribes to that doctrine, I’ve never heard it suggested that morality is pointless and irrelevant to God.
I have never wondered before about the beliefs of the slaves taken from Africa, but it seems like many of them in the Caribbean were or became Christians.
Wouldn't it also be "very attractive" to a slave to believe that they would be destined to a happy afterlife based on what they believe rather than anything they did or didn't do?
Slavers mostly didn't seem to see anything wrong with what they were doing regarding involvement in the slave trade, so I'm not sure how that argument holds anyway.
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
At least when it comes to the question of salvation, isn't that the whole point of this thread? For example:
I suppose someone could argue that the question of salvation is some minor bit of adiaphora of little importance to the overall teachings of Christianity, but I've never heard anyone actually do so. I guess at its root the doctrine of sola fides sounds to me like God doesn't care how we treat our fellow humans, just how well we kiss his metaphorical ass.
Bear in mind that the version of Christianity most slaves were exposed to was somewhat selective. As for whether they thought their tormentors would receive a divine pardon, I'm not so sure how much comfort that thought would be to them. I would say that most of the significant theological differences between white Protestantism and black Protestantism in the United States can be traced to disputes over slavery. The black Protestant churches in the U.S. have usually been more active in their pursuit of justice and good works than their white counterparts, which typically take a more lackadaisical approach to those things. As an illustration of this, during the civil rights movement Billy Graham wanted to avoid confronting segregation because he thought doing so would distract from the Gospel message. Martin Luther King, Jr. disagreed and believed that freedom, equality, and the brotherhood of men were the Gospel message. If faith alone is the focus of Christianity you can see Graham's point. If what we do actually matters in the divine scheme of things, then King has the right of it.