Heaven & Hell Mullen (1980)

Preconception Snowballs

The Jews of the OT To begin with, the Jews didn’t attach much significance to what happens after death. The believed in a misty underworld, known as SHEOL or HADES. The spirits of the departed lived a shadowy existence until they eventually faded away altogether.

But then they began to think about it… “1 Enoch [a book dating from 1BCE] develops the ideas of heavenly abodes for the righteous after death and of places where the wicked are held until the judgement and their punishment in Gehenna [hell].” “The abode of the righteous is known as Paradise, a Persian word for a park of garden.” “The opposite of Paradise is Gehenna, originally the vale of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem; at one time a place for burning the city’s rubbish…but now a symbol of horror and torture for the wicked.” BLACK

Heaven & Hell in the NT Mt 5:13 Mt 5:11-12 Mt 13:40-43 Mt 25:46 Mk 13:27 Lk 16:23 Rom 6:23 1Thes 4:16-17 Rev 20:14-15 Rev 21:1-4

A General Picture Over time, a general picture starts to emerge: Those who do what is right (accept Jesus Christ as saviour) will, after death, share eternal bliss with God in heaven; Those who have done wrong (rejected Jesus as saviour) will go to hell / ‘outer darkness’ Hell certainly appears to be a place of torment, out of God’s presence and beyond his love and care.

An appetite for heaven Human beings have appetites (e.g. hunger & thirst.) The means for the satisfaction of these appetites certainly exists in the objects of food & drink. Since we desire eternal life in the same way as we desire food, then eternal life must exist as the object by which that desire (or appetite) is actually satisfied. If there was no such thing as life after death, then we wouldn’t have an appetite for it.

3 Objections! It is based on a false premise; that all men desire eternal life, as they do food & drink. They don’t! Eternal life does not belong to our world of daily experience and so we can’t compare it to things that do. The fact that we wish/hope/desire anything does not mean that it exists.

The Evidence of Grief MacKinnon argues that the experience of grief when a loved one dies is such a deep and disturbing experience that it convinces us that human beings count for something. But others argue that it is just powerful in its ability to generate emotion.

Pascal’s Wager “I will stake everything on the belief that there is a life after death. If I’m right, then that’s all to the good because I shall have lived my life conscious of it’s reference to eternity and I shall awake after death to enjoy eternal bliss. If I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter, because I am not to live on after death, then I’ll never know I was wrong.”