For all who were in last week’s open house, and for those who missed it, here are the little mini-presentations I gave regarding the future of this class.
For anybody else familiar with this site, this is my “boss blog” for the folks taking the Believer’s Life Institute classes at Calvary Chapel. Feel free to listen in and enjoy. But if this bores you, sorry.
Don’t have much to say on this first post except that we’re planning to talk a lot about Heaven and Hell over the next six or seven weeks. The next class will feature a video: The Search for Heaven. Here’re my open house talks.
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You can also download them here, here, and here.
[tags]BlogRodent, podcast, heaven, hell, heaven-and-hell, mp3, doctrine, theology, afterlife, death[/tags]
Fundamentalists often claim that the story of the rich man and Lazarus is some supposed prooftext that there is soem sort of endless torture of the dammed in the afterlife .
There are indeed serious problems with interpreting the story of the rich man and Lazarus *as if* it were some sort of supposed prooftect for the notion of some sort of eternal torment in the afterlife .
One serious problem is that if the story were an actual disclosure of actual torment in some sort of irreversible hell in the afterlife–then why would a man who is being tormented IF he is being tormented in some sort of adterlife body—merely want his toungue to be cooled.
In the story found in Luke , the rich man asks for Abraham to send the poor beggar Lazarus from paradise to cool the rich man’s toungue for he is tormented in the flame . To say it is not very plausible for someone in a Hades of fire to merely want someone to cool their toungue if their whole body is tormented with some sort of burning –is a colossal understatement !!!!!
It is far more plausible to interpret the story as signifying that the greedy ,venal rich who show no compassion for the poor —like the rich man who did NOT show any compassion for the poor beggar named Lazarus during his earthly life—who waited outside the rich man’s gate for food while the rich man lived a life that was uncharitable and unconcerned by the poor man’s needs —-would have a reversal of fortunes during the Kingdom of God that Jesus sought to establish *ON EARTH *..
That the greedy, shallow, uncharitable rich people would see that they were NOT in harmony with the covenant established with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob , and that the poor were the ones especially cherished by God and , hence, the rich would see the shallow lifeworld that they had made exposed for the hollow , pathetic affair it was , is the interpretation of the story of the rich man and Lazarus which makes far more sense then the notion of some permanent torture in the afterlife .
There is other use of hyperbole in the New Testament to describe fire and torment on the greedy rich .The epistle called James tells the rich ,
‘ Your gold and silver is cankered and their rust shall be a witness against you and shall eat your flesh as if it were fire’ (James 3:3 ).
But are we to imagine that the rust on the rich mens’ gold and silver literally ate their flesh like fire ?
So why then think that the story of the rich man and Lazarus revealed an actual frire burning torment for someone in the afterlife ? Unless , the torment were somehow limited to the toungue of the people in such a hell and not to the rest of their afterlife bodies …..