Yes, I want to go back to heaven. It is not me that wants all the fallen souls back in Heaven, that is why God sent His only Son - to restore the Kingdom.
Will you first reject the false teaching that you’re a fallen angel thus completely renounce that gnostic fascination?
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Just one thing: I have yet to respond to you, Roy and Gerhard. The three of you wrote me a post that I have left without answers. I told you I would have done that today but I couldn’t, I will do it over the the next few days.
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- In my non-professional opinion, he doesn’t have to. I’m one of those who happens to believe that, after death, there’s only Heaven, unless of course you don’t want to be there, in which case, until you change your mind or God unmakes you, Heaven’s going to be Hell.
- If, however, you decide to stay, you may have endure some purgatory first.
It’s key to reject the teaching because the distinction it erases carries everything.
Man is made in the image of God (Genesis 1.v27), and Scripture never says it of angels. When the Word became flesh, He took the nature of the children not of angels.
Sriptures made sure to tie the destiny with our nature. Those who are conformed to the image of the Son are called to be partakers of the divine nature so when He appears we shall be like Him. Scriptures do not leave room for any other interpretations.
“It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.”
1 Corinthians 15.v44-49
The angels who fell hold another word altogether, reserved in everlasting chains for the judgment (Jude 1.v6 again). If this is true there are no incarnation offered, no promise of union attached. The teaching that we are ‘fallen angels’ does not merely miss a detail, it erases the image in man and the destiny of man in one stroke. An angel in chains is not a child on his way home.
Whether Shawn renounces anything is between him and God. I have said in all honesty what I hold for true from a Biblical perspective.
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- I’m sure you have and I won’t ask, much less, expect anything more. That said, I take my stand on Christ’s crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension and his mercy.
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I find your perspective genuinely interesting, and I think there’s a substantial theological insight behind it.
There is a well-established tradition in Eastern Orthodox theology, associated with figures such as St. Isaac the Syrian, according to which Heaven and Hell can be understood as two profoundly different experiences of the same divine presence. Those who love God experience His presence as infinite joy, while those who reject Him experience that very same love as torment.
This interpretation is explicitly presented in the Orthodox Church in America’s explanation of Heaven and Hell.
And although this understanding is particularly characteristic of Eastern Orthodox theology, I don’t think its central insight is necessarily incompatible with Catholic theology either.
In fact, Pope John Paul II explained in 1999 that Hell should be understood primarily as a state rather than a physical location. The Catechism as well describes Hell in terms of definitive exclusion from communion with God.
And there’s also an important distinction to be made here: being in God’s presence is not necessarily the same thing as enjoying blessed communion with Him. God’s omnipresence doesn’t imply that everyone experiences the beatific vision or participates in divine life in the same way.
So I actually find this aspect of your interpretation quite compelling, or at least worthy of serious consideration.
Where I do see a problem, however, is with your suggestion that this condition lasts only “until you change your mind or God unmakes you.”
Neither possibility necessarily follows from the theological understanding we’ve just discussed.
Indeed, the Orthodox Church in America’s discussion of the Last Judgment explicitly affirms the continued existence of both the saved and the damned. I brought up the Orthodox tradition because they have made the strongest case for understanding Hell as God’s presence experienced as torment by the damned.
And Scripture itself distinguishes eternal punishment from eternal life (Matthew 25:46), as well as the resurrection of life from the resurrection of condemnation in John 5:28–29. Actually John is the passage I find most problematic for the second part of your comment, because it’s hard to see why God would resurrect both the saved and the lost if His plan for the lost would be “unmaking” them.
My difficulty, in short, isn’t with your understanding of how God’s presence might be experienced differently, It’s with the additional possibilities you introduce.
Aside from the Bible there is a philosophical difficulty with your position that I think deserves some consideration.
If after death there is the possibility of changing one’s ultimate orientation (the souls in the state of purgation don’t change their fundamental orientation, they are have already made their choice, they are just being cleansed), wouldn’t the same principle apply to the blessed in Heaven?
After all, they retain their free will too (In fact, they are free in the fullest and most perfect sense, because genuine freedom shouldn’t be confused with libertas indifferentiae, understood as the mere ability to choose between good and evil. In the classical understanding freedom is perfected through adherence to the Good, not through the perpetual possibility of rejecting it)
Your suggestion that one could change their own fundamental ultimate orientation post-mortem wouldn’t imply that someone in Heaven could eventually turn away from God, lose salvation, and become damned?
I’m asking you this because if you acknowledge that the blessed can remain eternally and irrevocably oriented towards God without losing their freedom, then you’ve already conceded that free will doesn’t necessarily entail the perpetual possibility of changing one’s ultimate orientation. And if you reject the idea that salvation in Heaven is definitive and irrevocable, in what sense could Heaven truly be Heaven if even there we could still fall away from God?
There is also another philosophical and theological problem, I think, with your suggestion that this condition might last only “until they change their mind”.
First, retaining free will doesn’t necessarily mean retaining the ability to convert to God.
Christian theology has traditionally distinguished between merely regretting the consequences of one’s choices and genuinely repenting out of love for God. The latter requires prevenient grace, we cannot bring ourselves into a saving relationship with God through our natural powers alone. That would be pelagianism.
Even the very beginning of conversion is already the work of grace, although we have to respond to it.
Aquinas addresses this difficulty in his Summa contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 93, §4:
“Voluntatem a peccato mutari in bonum non contingit nisi per gratiam Dei.”
In other words, the will cannot turn from sin to the good without God’s grace.
He then adds:
“Damnatorum animae a gratia totaliter excluduntur.”
That is, the souls of the damned are entirely excluded from grace.
His conclusion is that they cannot change their fundamental orientation toward God.
You can read the argument in its original context here.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you must accept Aquinas simply because he is Aquinas, but i’m interested in the underlying philosophical and theological problem.
Are you proposing that God continues to offer the damned prevenient grace after death, enabling them to undergo a genuine conversion?
If so, a couple of questions arise.
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If this grace really makes conversion possible, in what sense has their eternal destiny already been established in the particular judgment?
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And if no new grace of conversion is offered, how could the damned turn to God merely by exercising their natural free will?
Ultimately, I think the difficulty lies in reconciling the necessity of grace for genuine conversion, the definitive character of the particular judgment, and your suggestion that the damned can still change their fundamental orientation after death.
I think there are several biblical reasons for understanding the particular judgment as definitive, although I wouldn’t claim that any single passage establishes the entire doctrine on its own. The case is cumulative.
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Hebrews 9:27 places judgment after death, without suggesting any further period of probation.
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2 Corinthians 5:10 teaches that we will be judged according to what we have done in the body, suggesting that our earthly lives are decisive in determining our eternal destiny. This wouldn’t be the case if we could change our fundamental orientation post-mortem.
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Luke 23:43 suggests that one’s personal destiny can be established immediately after death, before the general resurrection.
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Luke 16:19–31 is particularly important. The rich man and Lazarus are already experiencing different postmortem conditions while the rich man’s brothers are still alive. Moreover, Abraham describes a fixed, impassable chasm between them (v. 26). Of course, this is a parable, and I wouldn’t insist on interpreting every detail literally. Still, the impossibility of crossing that divide seems rather significant. Is it just a “temporary” impossibility? Where does the text suggest something like this?
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Matthew 25:46 contrasts eternal punishment with eternal life. Although this passage concerns the final judgment rather than the particular judgment, it reinforces the definitive character of the ultimate destinies described in Scripture.
Taken together, these passages seem to provide a substantial biblical basis for understanding death as the end of our earthly opportunity to determine our eternal destiny, with the particular judgment establishing a condition that the final judgment will confirm.
My main question would be this: if our fundamental orientation can still change after death, how should we understand the apparently irreversible separation described in Luke 16:26? The other verses are important as well, but I think Luke 16:26 offers an even greater difficulty.
Yes. The notions of reincarnation strike me as more compatible with Hindu or Buddhist conceptions of rebirth cycles. NDEs might marginally align better with dualist Christian ideas of souls.
- Are you willing to concede that one of the functions of purgatory is to facilitate “a change of attitude toward” the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit?
- Who, having been hopeful in their lifetime and at death, would change their mind and reject the Father and Jesus. Not likely, IMO.
- HOWEVER, … what’s the possibility that someone who rejects the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in this world and continues to reject them in the next? What would you do with a child who screams “No, and there’s nothing you can do about it?” Only one thing I can think of: annihilation.
- NDEs “seem” more common now-a-days because medical technology and practice have “improved” so much. But does that preclude the possibility of someone ever having an NDE in the history of humanity?
- Notice in Scripture that there were nine, (correct me if I’m wrong), nine “alleged deaths” and nine recoveries. The only one of those deaths that is “problematic”, IMO, was the death of Lazarus, in the New Testament.
- But “problematic” doesn’t necessarily translate to “impossible”. Especially when Jesus himself lingered rather that rushed to Lazarus’ bedside.
Yes, I would concede that Purgatory involves a genuine transformation of the soul, but only in a very qualified sense, because we need to be precise about what is being transformed and what Purgatory is actually intended to accomplish.
Purgatory doesn’t exist to convert someone who has fundamentally rejected God into someone who finally chooses to love Him, rather, it purifies those who have already died in God’s grace and friendship, it removes the remaining imperfections, disordered attachments, and temporal consequences of sin that prevent them from entering into the fullness of heavenly beatitude (“nothing impure may enter Heaven” -Revelation 21:27 and God simply covering our filth wouldn’t make us pure in the slightest, which is why Purgatory is necessary for those who die in God’s grace but have still some kind of disordered attachments. Purgatory isn’t necessarily required for every single person, though. Someone who dies in God’s grace and friendship, already perfectly purified through a profound love of God, would have no need for further purification after death).
The distinction is important because the salvation of the souls who are in the purgatorial state is already assured.
In other words, Purgatory perfects an already eternally and unchangeable -post-mortem- orientation toward God; it doesn’t reverse a fundamental rejection of Him.
Aquinas makes precisely this distinction in Summa contra Gentiles, IV, 94 and even the Catechism establishes that the souls in Purgatory are effectively counted among the saved, they will never lose their salvation.
But there’s another difficulty that I find particularly interesting.
The blessed retain their free will in Heaven, yet they cannot turn away from God and lose their salvation.
Now, if the continued possession of free will necessarily implied the ability to reverse one’s fundamental orientation, wouldn’t that possibility have to exist in Heaven as well?
You might respond that the blessed cannot fall because they enjoy the beatific vision, which definitively establishes their wills in the good.
That’s a reasonable distinction to propose. But what about the souls in Purgatory?
They don’t yet enjoy the beatific vision, and yet their salvation is already irrevocably assured. They retain their wills, they undergo genuine transformation, and they haven’t yet attained the full enjoyment of God.
Nevertheless, they cannot reverse their fundamental orientation and become damned.
This seems particularly significant because it establishes that:
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The continued possession of free will doesn’t necessarily entail the possibility of reversing one’s ultimate orientation.
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The absence of the beatific vision doesn’t necessarily entail that possibility either.
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Even genuine transformation after death can coexist with an irrevocably established eternal destiny.
My point is that the existence of purgatory, or better yet the existence of the purgatorial intermediate state, doesn’t establish the possibility of reversing one’s eternal destiny. If anything, it provides an example of postmortem transformation occurring without such a reversal. Neither the souls who are being cleansed nor the souls in Hell experience the beautific vision. Nevertheless, the souls in Purgatory absolutely cannot lose their salvation.
- The problem, from where I sit, is that Aquinas, the Catechism, and the humans in the Church were long on words, and short on … something.
- In November of 2000, my wife’s closest brother (2 years younger than her) was 48 years old, divorced against his will but because of his behaviorault, a father of two sons, 8 and 12 years old.
- When his wife left him, taking the boys with her, he threatened to kill himself, and she said: I’ll be back for your body.
- The boys, significantly influenced by their mother’s opinion, continued to be alloof and barely responsive increasingly during their separation and their mother’s divorce from their father.
- On November 3rd, I took a nap in the evening, after work, and had a dream in which my I met my brother-in-law on the street and he was pushing a shopping cart, … like a homeless person. But he was, in the dream, headed for his house, and I asked him (in my dream) where he was going, and he said to his house to drop off some things. I walked with him.
- We arrived at his house and entered; his younger brother was there, and turned to look at me. He was on the phone. I greeted him and asked what he was doing, and he answered: “Ben’s dead.” I laughed in my dream and said: “No he’s not, he’s stand right here, next to me.”
- I then looked at my brother-in-law next to me and he said to me, “He can’t see me now.” And it was the most marvelous dream because, in it, I was with both brothers, in one brother’s apartment, and I could see both and talk to both. And both could see me and talk to me. But one could see the other, but the other could not see the one AND said the one was dead.
- The next morning, my wife’s nephew (oldest son of her oldest brother) who lived near her brother who the other said was dead, called us and told my wife that he was worried because her brother was supposed to have gone over to the nephew’s home on Friday evening, but hadn’t. And the nephew said he had phoned repeatedly but his uncle had not answered.
- We hung up and we tried numerous times to call my wife’s brother, with no success. We became alarmed, and spoke with the nephew again, and we agreed that my wife would remain with her parents here in Los Angeles, and I would fly north to Oakland (near where the nephew and my brother-in-law lived) on Sunday November 5th.
- With that plan set, Esther went to tell her parents who were in their late 80s.
TBC
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First of all, I really wish to thank you for trusting me with such a personal story. I’m genuinely sorry for that. Really.
There’s something I’d like to clarify, though. You mentioned that Ben had threatened to take his own life, but if he did die by suicide, I hope you know that Catholic teaching does not automatically condemn people who take their own lives to Hell.
In fact, the explicitly teaches that we must not despair of the eternal salvation of people who take their own lives, since God can provide an opportunity for saving repentance through ways known to Him alone.
There’s also a beautiful passage in St Faustina Kowalska’s Diary, §1698, where she describes how God’s mercy can reach a soul even in the very last moments of life, bringing about genuine repentance without any outward indication of what is happening within that person.
We simply cannot know what may have happened between someone and God in those final moments.
Now, regarding your dream, I want to be very clear about something: I believe you. And honestly, from the way you describe it, it really does sound to me like a genuine spiritual experience.
Actually, we’ve had similar experiences in my own family.
One night, the 4 of June 2016, my aunt saw her son Andrea. He had come to say goodbye, telling her that he wanted to see her one last time. He reassured her that everything was all right and that she shouldn’t worry because he was happy and things would have gotten better and better.
Shortly afterward, the Carabinieri arrived at her home to inform her that Andrea had died. *
Something else happened to my father about eight years ago: he was at the hospital with his brother, who struggled with alcoholism. While my uncle was sleeping, my father saw their father (my grandfather, who had died decades earlier) standing there, looking at my sleeping uncle with an expression of profound sadness.
Both experiences left a deep impression on my family and were instrumental in changing them.
So i’m very much open to the possibility that God sometimes allows us to experience something beyond our ordinary understanding.
Let me go back to Ben, now. As I said, I don’t think your experience implies that someone can reverse their fundamental orientation toward God after death.
If Ben did take his own life, that certainly wouldn’t mean he was automatically damned, because someone who takes their own life may be suffering so profoundly that their personal culpability is greatly diminished.
An act can be objectively very serious without necessarily involving grave personal guilt, especially when there are significant mitigating circumstances. Nor can we simply assume that such an act amounts to a deliberate rejection of God.
And even where there are no mitigating circumstances, we cannot rule out the possibility that God’s grace reaches someone in their very last moments, bringing about a genuine change of heart that no one else can see.
This is why I tend to think that those who are ultimately lost are not simply people who committed particularly serious sins, but those who freely and knowingly persist in rejecting God’s grace to the very end.
And I think that’s an important distinction, especially when we’re talking about someone who may have been going through severe suffering.
In other words, your experience doesn’t establish that someone can reverse their fundamental orientation towards God after death, simply because i don’t think that there are good reasons to believe that he actually died in a state of radical separation from God.
But I’d genuinely like to understand what you think your experience tells us about that particular question. Perhaps I’m missing something in the connection you’re making, if I have misunderstood something let me know.
*It was a car accident.
I’d be very surprised and disappointed if it did.
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Well it doesn’t, not even remotely. There is a paragraph in the Catechism that talks precisely about people who take their own lives and how God’s grace can reach these people (there is also the issue of mitigating factors because like I said someone committing a grave act need not be entirely culpable if they have factors that diminish the guilt).
- (a) I haven’t finished my story.
- (b) Ben did in fact take his life … BUT did he?
- When my nephew picked me up at the airport, we went straight to Ben’s condominimum, although I did not have a key to his condo, and my wife’s nephew “pretended” not to have one either.
- We couldn’t get in and Ben’s condo was second floor unit, with a parking lot level entrance, but neither of us had a key.
- A grounds keeper approached and inquired what we were up to, since he had seen up attempting to do things to arouse the attention of someone inside, and my nephew had found a long ladder that would have reached from the street to the second floor patio. But the grounds keeper stopped us, and said we would have to call the police, describe our concern, and the police would have to decide whether or not to call the fire department who would use their ladders to enter the 2nd floor, if the police and the fire department agreed to proceed.
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- What is the fundamental orientation toward God of a person who told me the Monday before, on the phone, that he felt hopeless and helpless to reverse the tidal wave of negative actions by his ex-wive who was determined to make his pay for the crime of getting on “crack”, forcing her to divorce him, becoming a divorcee, ready to use his son’s against him, involved the court in monitoring his actions closely, and backing him against a wall so well, he couldn’t breath.
- And then there was the coup de gras…
- Tuesday, October 31 was Halloween.
- Ben called his sons to see if he could see them in their Halloween costumes.
- They both, eager to go trick or treating, rejected his request. Trick or treating was more important than time with their father.
- So Ben was forced to spend the evening with his nephew, his niece-in-law, and their two children (both about the same age as his sons.)
- On that same evening, Ben told the nephew that he had gone on a date with an internet date, and was profoundly disappointed to find that she had not been honest about her physical features.
- His conclusion: you can’t trust internet dates.
- Rejected by his sons, disappointed by a dishonest woman, harassed by his ex-wife and the court which sided with her, he was seriously despondent by November 1st.
- As if that wasn’t enough, he had a neighbor on the floor above him who had a dog, … her deceased blind husband’s seeing-eye German Shepherd, that had no where to urinate except on the neighbor’s porch, which created a urine river that poured of that porch and down onto Ben’s.
- On November 2nd, Ben called the grounds keeper to come and witness the urine rain onto his porch, and the groundskeeper witnessed the urine and promised to report the matter to the Condominium Complex management.
- Relieved that something might finally be done about the dog urine, Ben decided to go out Thursday, November 3rd, to see if he could find “a companion”.
- I know this only because the nephew learned about it on Friday and told me.
- So when Ben left the Condominium on Thursday night, in search of companionship, he drove out in to the streets, and found a potential companion.
- After striking a deal, the potential companion–an undercover cop–arrested him for solicitation. Ben, arrested, was taken to the police station and had to spend Thursday night in jail, which necessitated his calling a friend to bail him out on Friday morning.
- Having been arrested for solicitation, of course, was news that his ex-wife and the court would find out in a day or by Monday, at the latest, further threatening a renewed loss of unchaperoned visitations to his sons, as well as potential difficulties at work, since he was employed as an attorney for the University of California.
- Potential ramifications were mind-boggling.
- Released from jail on Friday morning, and fully expecting to be fired or at least suspended from work, he gathered up all his work-related cases at home a took them to his workplace to avoid, if possible, the need to allow anyone from work into his residence.
- With that done, he returned home, and I suspect brooded over the coming nightmare that he fully expected to overcome him.
- How long he brooded, I don’t know. I do know that his nephew expected him for dinner on Friday evening, the same evening that I had my first dream.
- In fact, I do not know. However, I believe that Ben decided to end the nightmare of his life on Friday afternoon or evening.
- First he wrote a final note, railing against the Oakland Police Department for arresting him, then leaving his estate to three of his sisters and appointing his nephew as executor, and rejecting any funeral ceremony.
- Evidence from the police, shared or shown to the nephew, suggests that he removed his clothing in the bathroom, filled the tub with water, and climbed into the tub, and the slit his brachial artery (beween his armpit and his elbow) lengthwise and laid back in the tub.
- Evidence further shows that he climbed out of the tub, but collapsed in a fetal position on the floor, where he died.
I see you aren’t typing anymore, so I assume you have finished. If you haven’t i apologize in advance.
I have to tell you, the more you tell me about Ben, the more it sounds as though every time he tried to get his life back on track, something else went wrong. And that arrest, given everything he was already dealing with, must have been a terrible blow.
I think there’s something worth keeping in mind here, though: nothing you’ve told me suggests that Ben had turned his back on God. What it tells me is that he was a man in pain, who was suffering and who probably couldn’t see a way out anymore.
I certainly wouldn’t presume to judge his relationship with God, much less his eternal destiny. But honestly, if I had to go by what you’ve told me so far, I see a man who was suffering terribly, not someone I have any reason to believe had knowingly and freely rejected God’s grace to the very end. He may have not been perfect, but if I’m being completely honest, based on the man you’ve described, I wouldn’t bet a penny on him being the kind of hardened sinner who died having definitively rejected God’s grace.
That’s heartbreaking. The fact that he got out of the bathtub particularly struck me. We can’t know what it meant, of course, but I can’t help wondering whether he had second thoughts.
What is very clear from the things you write, though, is that he was in really great pain. I really don’t see how a person in that situation would be fully guilty for their acts, honestly.