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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: "He descended into Hell"
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I don't know where to start with the premises here and throughout, so I won't.
I completely understand.
Do you accept the premise that human civilization changes over time, that it passes through eras, and that these eras include spiritual peaks and valleys?
I think that this is the basic premise on which Jesus' descent into hell is based.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Interesting rhetorical technique mousethief. I don't disagree with layers of ancient and medieval thinking. I just can't do them. How could I? Neither can you of course. You have NEVER justified God the Killer whereas I have up until a moment ago.
Freddy. You old charmer you. You appear to run away with the fairies and then you throw me a faithful postmodern lifeline of progressive revelation, that includes the Bronze and Iron ages that Peter could only have known, given a kick in to transcendence by Jesus, that I can't not grab.
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Love wins
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
So now you're NOT asking me to repent?
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
If you're wedded to an even more twisted wooden misinterpretation of a text that is weird enough when correctly deconstructed in its own terms, for reasons of denominational tradition, be happy.
I realise with you I may be missing something (Brit. understatement), but what it is I haven't the faintest idea. Either you believe in the literal harrowing of hell, or you don't.
Hell is OUR narrative. We're in it. Now. Nowhere and nowhen else.
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Love wins
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I'm wedded to Josephine. I'm not wedded to any interpretations. And certainly I'm not wedded to the need to insult people who don't share my interpretations.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Ah go on. You love it. Look, you're a sensitive flower I can see. But you do NOT believe any of that stuff. How can you? You just can't mousethief. Not really. So what's this about?
I mean you cannot possibly believe that frail, feeble, fecklessly innocent human beings have been languishing in hell for the past million years. Or had been even for a mere couple of thousand. That Peter was speaking gospel truth, divine dogmatic doctrine, that like Marlon in the bath in The Missouri Breaks, isn't even there.
So what are we disagreeing over? So agreeably?
The fact that I'm so nasty and mocking about it? Is that your defense of a distortion of a metaphor oddly - to our post Enlightenment ear - used to make a point which I'm singularly failing to go with even though it's staring me in the face.
Which is all too human of us I realise. Never mind the blatantly, bleedin' obvious, starting eleven verses before, let's go off on some weird, wooden, positively nasty tangent predicated on a sick, fearful, bloody Bronze-Iron ages deity that a peasant fisherman from before the age of reason was rudely hypnopompically awakening from.
Do what it says eleven verses earlier will you mousethief? For me. I can't. I'm trapped in reacting to the reactionary.
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Love wins
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daronmedway
Shipmate
# 3012
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
And certainly I'm not wedded to the need to insult people who don't share my interpretations.
Sure, why limit yourself?
Posts: 6976 | From: Southampton | Registered: Jul 2002
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I mean you cannot possibly believe that frail, feeble, fecklessly innocent human beings have been languishing in hell for the past million years. Or had been even for a mere couple of thousand.
Well, if you put it that way, yes, who would believe it?
But that's not how it was.
I would say that the spiritual realm is a single, dynamic, changing environment. Its so-called division into heaven and hell is not absolute, but is rather a product of the way that similarities attract in that world. Heaven and hell are just the results of that attraction.
So it is not that the good were mistakenly sent to hell by a puzzled God. Rather, the environment deteriorated over long periods of time, due to the negative changes in this world. People increasingly entered the spiritual world with new and confusing false ideas.
Only Jesus was able to clear this up.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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daronmedway
Shipmate
# 3012
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Posted
Freddy + Martin: where winsomely wrong meets wrongly winsome. Honestly, reading you guys is like eavesdropping on conversation between Origen and Marcion.
Posts: 6976 | From: Southampton | Registered: Jul 2002
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
It's my fault, sorry.
Damn this is depressing.
80%+ of tens of billions of Christians believe that God was afflicting their ancestors for thousands of years? Based on the musings of an ignorant Iron Age fisherman still blinking in the light of three and a half years of revelation incarnate?
And we 'modernize' that by extending it to millions of years to fit in with the facts of evolution?
Whilst entirely ignoring the point?
This is SO depressing.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Freddy, please make your mind up. The dead hadn't been ... living ... in hell worse than their brief lives or they had? Hell was fine and then it got hellish until Jesus made it nice again? What?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Reading daronmedway and Zach82 is like eavesdropping on a conversation between Calvin and Beza ...
![[Snore]](graemlins/snore.gif)
Only nowhere near as interesting ...
![[Biased]](wink.gif)
Seriously, leave off the speculations, guys and enjoy the pictures.
I don't pretend to have the foggiest idea what those verses mean that are used as the basis for the idea of the Harrowing of Hell but I chuckle when I see the squashed demon in the Fra Angelico fresco and I rejoice when I see Adam and Eve and the others yanked out of the underworld by the Risen Christ in the Orthodox depictions.
They'll do for me.
That doesn't stop me getting all wound up and cerebral over other issues though.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.
http://philthebard.blogspot.com
Posts: 15997 | From: Cheshire, UK | Registered: Jul 2001
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
The problem as I see it, Martin, is that you are conflating a lot of different ideas into the word "Hell." The Hebrew "Sheol" does not refer to a place of everlasting torment; the Greek "Hades" doesn't either. Gahenna, the burning garbage dump, does, but we don't believe Christ harrowed the garbage dump, or Dante's Inferno, but the "grave," in Greek Hades. "O Death, where is thy victory? O Grave, where is thy sting?" This parallel couplet makes no sense if we treat "Grave" to mean "Place of eternal burning torment."
We Orthodoxen sing, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down Death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." Not upon those in eternal torment, but in the tombs. Death, not Dante's Inferno. Somebody upstream made this distinction, but it kinda got overlooked.
Thus it's error to read a flaming, Gahenna, Dante's Inferno meaning of Hades into the Harrowing of Hell. Very often if you try to map a definition from one system of thought onto the same word in a different system, you end up with something that neither side recognizes as the truth.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Thanks Gamaliel. I LOVE the iconography, the poetry, the symbolism, for all the right and wrong reasons: the gothic horror of it all, of our pathetic broken projection.
Jesus truly has descended down here to our hells and brought us up from those foul depths where we were lost.
Allelujah!
Jesus saves.
Praise God.
What's depressing, discouraging is that we justify projecting our diseased madness as God's benevolence, like the Greeks did the Erinyes as the Eumenides.
We proclaim that gospel.
But I DO love the unknown Russian artist. Dürer can do no wrong. And the Cezanne made me think of Pope Francis.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
mousethief. Eirene. Good night.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Net Spinster
Shipmate
# 16058
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
It's my fault, sorry.
Damn this is depressing.
80%+ of tens of billions of Christians believe that God was afflicting their ancestors for thousands of years? Based on the musings of an ignorant Iron Age fisherman still blinking in the light of three and a half years of revelation incarnate?
And we 'modernize' that by extending it to millions of years to fit in with the facts of evolution?
Whilst entirely ignoring the point?
This is SO depressing.
I don't think there have been tens of billions of Christians thinking this (i.e., I don't think there have been that many Christians who have reached the age of thinking about this yet). And most that have reached that age probably try not to think too hard (or become somewhat universalistic).
Admire the pictures and consider whether in your theology Jesus forgave Judas in Luke 23:34.
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spinner of webs
Posts: 1093 | From: San Francisco Bay area | Registered: Dec 2010
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by daronmedway:
Freddy + Martin: where winsomely wrong meets wrongly winsome. Honestly, reading you guys is like eavesdropping on conversation between Origen and Marcion.
I love it! ![[Killing me]](graemlins/killingme.gif)
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Freddy, please make your mind up. The dead hadn't been ... living ... in hell worse than their brief lives or they had? Hell was fine and then it got hellish until Jesus made it nice again? What?
Hell isn't a place. It is a state of mind. So it's not that anyone was cast into hell. Rather it is that the newcomers increasingly made life in parts of the spiritual world hellish.
Until the Incarnation.
Just like Lord of the Rings. This is what Tolkien had in mind, I believe.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Gamaliel (and you are a towering giant for me, I can barely see up to let alone past as you well know)
I ain't speculatin' nuthin. I'm not pretending to have the foggiest idea. I have a clear idea what those verses mean: What Peter meant by them (secondary) and why he used them (primary). Where he got the idea from IS intriguing, but that is tertiary - in importance. The primary importance is the context, which utterly trivializes Peter's use of verses that demon-strably minimally refer to God the Son preaching to fallen angels in prison leading up to the Flood that never happened. Take out all that weird, Cabbalistic, mythical, esoteric stuff and what are we left with? Something far simpler. Peter has previous on making stuff up to make a point. That's fine. They all did. Paul too. As did their Master. What's the point? Not of them doing that, but of what they were illustrating with these quaint stories.
mousethief.
Not a problem. I am completely conversant with all the hells thank you. You are missing one. The one Peter is referring to. Tartaroo. And GEhenna was not a burning garbage dump. There was no garbage. Apart from broken pottery. Whence archaeology. The first reference to fires in the Valley of Hinnom after the exceptions in the Old Testament and Josephus (for the same cause, war) is by the C12-13th rabbi David Kimhi. You've been watching too much Star Wars. GAhenna is a modified Confederacy of Independent Systems Lucrehulk-class core ship. I could not possibly confuse Hades with Gehenna and neither of them with Tartaroo (no, NOT Tatooine). Neither did Peter. Nor did I overlook anything anadromous.
I like what the Orthodoxen sing.
If you're saying it's all symbolic and the dead are oblivious and Jesus in His full humanity shared that, amen, hurrah!
Net Spinster
I agree, of the easily twenty billion Christians who have lived, hardly any have been able to give this any real thought. My theology has always included Jesus' forgiveness of Judas, thank you SO much.
Freddy
There are no conscious newcomers in Tartaroo or Hades. Gehenna is yet to come. Or we're in it.
[ 30. December 2013, 21:49: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]
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Love wins
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I like what the Orthodoxen sing.
You just don't believe it.
quote:
If you're saying it's all symbolic and the dead are oblivious and Jesus in His full humanity shared that, amen, hurrah!
Nope, that's not what we mean. We mean what the words mean when we use those words. More honest that way.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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daronmedway
Shipmate
# 3012
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Posted
MT, you know that argument won't work here on the Ship - the seat of relativistic subjectivism. It's pure fancy to think that certain words mean what they were meant to mean when they were written.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Wrong again mousethief. How can you be so wrong?
I believe those words exactly and as honestly and as fully and as deeply and as meaningfully as written, as its possible to do, at least as much as you do if not more. In fact more!
I certainly don't believe for one moment that dead human beings languished fully conscious for thousands and hundreds of thousands of years after their nasty, brutish and short lives until Jesus popped down to turn the fairy lights on and make the grave as pretty as the church (schism of course) yard across the road.
Neither do you. But you win I'm sure. You always do, whether you do or not. Be happy! You're right after all.
Iterate.
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Love wins
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
And daronmedway, please tell us do where we ALL go wrong except you.
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Love wins
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Jolly Jape
Shipmate
# 3296
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Posted
Martin, I can (usually) read you for understanding, but, as someone who largely agrees with you, on this one I'm not seeing why you are so opposed to, particularly, Mousethief's understanding of the HOH. Sure, for all sorts of very good reasons, you have a visceral dislike of the popular conception of "Hell"; it's a dislike I share. But it's not that understanding of which Peter is speaking. It's the grave, death, however you want to phrase it, which Jesus harrows. I have no idea of the precise mechanism of which Peter speaks, but I do believe that in the inseperable Paschal event, an event both inside and outside of time, temporal and eternal, Jesus broke forever the power of death, and the "harrowing" of the grave was and is the inevitable consequence. I do think Peter understood that.
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To those who have never seen the flow and ebb of God's grace in their lives, it means nothing. To those who have seen it, even fleetingly, even only once - it is life itself. (Adeodatus)
Posts: 3011 | From: A village of gardens | Registered: Sep 2002
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Jolly Jape. I'm wrong even when I'm right I know. And that's not me being facetious. My form eclipses my content. And I'm right. There is no way Peter is talking of Hades. He's talking of Tartaroo.
But let's make it so. Seriously. He's talking Hades. To make that work, which I will, in the interest of embracing all from the emergent metanarrative, then it IS entirely metaphorical.
mousethief is saying otherwise as far as I can see, that the dead are conscious in Hades. daronmedway almost certainly is.
I could be wrong.
But making it work as Hades and reconciling that with God not being the Czar of Siberia where the dead are exiled for aeons, then it is entirely symbolic.
The oblivious dead of a million years experienced no change in their non-experience. OR the death of Christ a million years in the future was applied as soon as they died and they all went to heaven in a little row boat. after a nominal dose of Hades-Purgatory AKA Judgement.
OK? So I've talked my way round. Happy ?
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Love wins
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Jolly Jape
Shipmate
# 3296
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Posted
Happy? You always "make my day", Martin ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
Seriously though, we know very little of what happens after death, and the Bible does not have any single voice here.
I think that the important part of the Petrine verses is not so much where people who have died are, but that those who, from our point of view, have died before the Christ event, were not free. This may be because they are "asleep", or because their sinful nature in some way still holds them. There is no suggestion in Peter that they are the subject of conscious torment, just that they were, in some way, unfree, and they are now free, as the inevitable consequence of the events of Easter. They were dead, and are now alive.
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To those who have never seen the flow and ebb of God's grace in their lives, it means nothing. To those who have seen it, even fleetingly, even only once - it is life itself. (Adeodatus)
Posts: 3011 | From: A village of gardens | Registered: Sep 2002
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daronmedway
Shipmate
# 3012
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
mousethief is saying otherwise as far as I can see, that the dead are conscious in Hades. daronmedway almost certainly is.
I could be wrong.
It is a distinct possibility. I'm not sure I've said anything on this thread about what I think the texts in question mean. I've been intentionally agnostic on the issue because I don't actually have a firm opinion on this one. However, I have asked a number of questions in order to help in my understanding of what others think, despite the inscrutable weirdness of some contributions.
[ 01. January 2014, 17:49: Message edited by: daronmedway ]
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Well, I descended to making this thread Hell that's for sure, particularly for mousethief and also daronmedway by an order of magnitude or so less, but still hellish. I hope you are as thick skinned as you appear daronmedway.
Been a bit of a road to Damascus this. Thank you. Every one.
It goes without saying, therefore must be said: I'm sorry. To everyone, the Hosts, the community.
As Kelly Alves said in another house, I've just been squabbling on the internet. 'Warrior' no more AT ALL.
I prayed for pruning. My prayers were answered through you all.
To the thread:
daronmedway: "...the Ship - the seat of relativistic subjectivism. It's pure fancy to think that certain words mean what they were meant to mean when they were written."
You were being ironic I know, which is fine, especially compared with my flesh-tearing. The Harrowing of Hell, to me, is, amongst other things, a non parsimonious interpretation of an insert in 1st Peter. To me my use of Young's Literal Translation is parsimonious, minimal. It brings no assumptions to the texts: the text that informed Peter in his. I'd appreciate a critique of my method. What's wrong with it? What's - dangerous territory but I'm asking - faithless about it in your - anyone's - faith. It's faithful in mine.
Jolly Jape, you complement the traditional Harrowing camp, or rather you are a complement to it, as I see. Extending, 'spiritualizing' its traditional, literal interpretation, as does Freddy and not necessarily denying the literal.
Which mousethief almost certainly does too.
For me there is no reason to extend it past its elastic limit at all in the first place. Appear to make it fit a preconceived idea, an ancient mistranslation.
Minimally for me it's about God the Son preaching to demons, which is intriguing enough, at the time of the building of the ark, not its voyage on a depopulated Earth, which is even more intriguing.
Where did this story, regardless of meaning, come from? Why did Peter use it in his first epistle? The style of which is typical of the day: nothing like ours. Like the nearly two thousand year old Jewish culture of two thousand years ago.
What do all these concentric narratives mean?
[ 03. January 2014, 17:32: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]
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Love wins
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
As for parsimony, it's not in the Bible or in the Creed. Really it seems to me part of the Protestant experiment of "What's the least we can believe in and still call ourselves Christians?" which results in, or is the result of, the attempt to toss overboard as much of the Church's tradition as possible to get back to some imagined bare-bones "biblical" Christianity, as if the New Testament existed in a churchless vacuum and the Church sprang from its temple like Venus from Zeus.
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
mousethief is saying otherwise as far as I can see, that the dead are conscious in Hades.
Actually it's not necessary to be conscious to be raised. Ask any parent of a 2-year-old. It may be that Christ woke up sleeping souls and then collected and rescued them from Hades. I'd want to balance this against the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration, however.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Where did this story, regardless of meaning, come from? Why did Peter use it in his first epistle?
Are you thinking that Peter is the only source for the idea that Christ descended into hell, preached to those there, and freed those who were bound there?
Didn't we show that there are several other passages about it, both in Old Testament prophecy and in the Epistles?
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
mousethief: As for parsimony, it's not in the Bible or in the Creed.
... Martin: It's in discourse. Therefore it is in both and it is in the metanarrative including the deconstruction of both.
mousethief: Really it seems to me part of the Protestant experiment of "What's the least we can believe in and still call ourselves Christians?" which results in, or is the result of, the attempt to toss overboard as much of the Church's tradition as possible to get back to some imagined bare-bones "biblical" Christianity, as if the New Testament existed in a churchless vacuum and the Church sprang from its temple like Venus from Zeus.
... Martin: I'm post-Protestant so it doesn't apply to me. I'm not trying to get back to some mythical golden age. I completely embrace all traditions. Talking of myths it was Minerva-Athena-Wisdom not Venus-Aphrodite-Love.
mousethief: Actually it's not necessary to be conscious to be raised. Ask any parent of a 2-year-old. It may be that Christ woke up sleeping souls and then collected and rescued them from Hades. I'd want to balance this against the appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration, however.
... Martin: I remember being two. I can't make that analogy work. It may be. It may be that the Transfiguration was an entirely symbolic theophany, a vision. The symbolism is obvious after all: the Law and the Prophets. I'm glad that in your after life beliefs the dead may not be conscious. It's a very complex if not problematic story nonetheless isn't it? It's not morally problematic if God is not the Jailer of the dead for hundreds of thousands of years, which is good.
Freddy: Are you thinking that Peter is the only source for the idea that Christ descended into hell, preached to those there, and freed those who were bound there?
... Martin: Yes.
Freddy: Didn't we show that there are several other passages about it, both in Old Testament prophecy and in the Epistles?
... Martin: No. Confirmation bias yes.
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Love wins
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Freddy: Are you thinking that Peter is the only source for the idea that Christ descended into hell, preached to those there, and freed those who were bound there?
... Martin: Yes.
Freddy: Didn't we show that there are several other passages about it, both in Old Testament prophecy and in the Epistles?
... Martin: No. Confirmation bias yes.
I can see that confirmation bias is almost always at play when looking at Old Testament prophecy. The passages I quoted about the Messiah liberating the captives are good examples. The same is true of the quote from Ezekiel:
quote:
Ezekiel 26.20 “When I cause you to go down with those going down to the pit, to the people of old, and I cause you to dwell in the land of the lower ones, in the desolations from of old, so that you do not dwell with those going down to the pit, I will give beauty in the land of the living.”
The New Testament is more specific, though. They take the Old Testament prophecies and read into them things about Christ. For example:
quote:
Acts 2.24 Jesus of Nazareth, whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it. 25 For David says concerning Him: “For You will not leave my soul in Hades, Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption” ( Psalm 16.10). …He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, 31 he, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption.
What is this saying? Maybe nothing more than that Christ would be raised up. But raised up from where? Is this saying that He initially went to Hades, or that He would not be allowed to go to Hades?
Other passages are even more direct in their interpretation of the prophecies:
quote:
Ephesians 4:8 Therefore He says:
“When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive (or led captives in His train)
And gave gifts to men.”(Psalms 68:18)
9 (Now this, “He ascended”—what does it mean but that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth? 10 He who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.)
What does it mean that "He also descended to the lower parts of the earth"? Is this speaking about the literal earth or about "Hades"? It sounds as though Christ descended after His crucifixion into these lower parts and freed people.
Peter is only reflecting these other passages when he writes:
quote:
I Peter 3.18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us[e] to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit, 19 by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison, 20 who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water.
The main point, shared by all of the passages, is that He went somewhere (the lower parts of the earth, Hades, to the captives) and did something (preached, set them free).
Peter reiterates the idea that the Gospel was preached to the dead, presumably in Hades, in the next chapter:
quote:
I Peter 4:5 They will give an account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. 6 For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
Is this confirmation bias? Surely confirming a pre-existing idea plays a role. Without a theory as to what the passage mean they mean nothing.
I don't think that the traditional conclusion is an unreasonable one.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Aye, He's talking only about demons.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Oh and He didn't free anybody at the time of the Flood.
He freed everyone when He was crucified.
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Love wins
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Oh and He didn't free anybody at the time of the Flood.
He freed everyone when He was crucified.
"Freeing" is a relative concept.
He freed Noah and his family at the time of the Flood, but their freedom was not as complete as the freedom Christ would provide. Nor is that freedom as complete as that offered in the Second Coming.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
Posts: 12845 | From: Bryn Athyn | Registered: Jun 2001
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Aye, He's talking only about demons.
So who was Jesus talking about in John 5:25? - quote:
Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
Posts: 4857 | From: the corridors of Pah! | Registered: May 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
v 24
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Love wins
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
And what has that got to do with a parsimonious interpretation of 1 Peter 3:18-20?
And if we accept it as literal, which virtually nothing Jesus said was, and/or 'straightforward', it opens up the same can of worms again about God the Jailer of a Million Years.
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Love wins
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
v 24
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
What do you mean v24?
Martin - parsimony is a tool to distinguish probability of truth between potential narratives. Its practical application requires the consideration of necessity. Untrammelled parsimony is another name for reductionism, a project that can only lead to monism and the destruction of meaning. If any of us are to engage with you on that, we need to know what entities you consider are done away with by your "parsimonious" explanation. And you will need to identify what you consider to be the constraints of necessity so we can be convinced you have not accidentally violated them and thereby the constraints that guard against the misuse of parsimony. I can't see any evidence you have mentioned them at all so it's not going to be possible even to engage with that aspect until what appears to be a private consideration is made more public. But let me know and I'll try to engage with it.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I have way upstream Ron. But I'll do it again.
And v 24 shows who the dead are. Jesus' audience. Or were. On receiving Him, accepting Him, they passed in to life. As it says.
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Love wins
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Or verse 28 says who the dead are. Verse 28 clearly looks back at the preceding verses, because it starts, "Do not be amazed at this, for..."
This is a complex passage and it is a little too facile to say that verse 25 must perforce be referring to the spiritually-dead-but-physically-alive because it comes after verse 24. The context is much larger than those 2 verses.
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This is the last sig I'll ever write for you...
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Or v 28 says that the physically dead will yet benefit just as the spiritually dead of v 24 did in v 25.
A facility born of context. Context is all for sure. And the context of the context. Especially Jesus' almost completely figurative way of speaking. A constraint of ancient Aramaic apparently.
If Jesus knew what the literal dead were up to literally, He never literally, unambiguously, unequivocally, progressively, dialectically, antithetically, abrogationally said.
It wasn't important to Him even if He knew (and how human was He?).
So for me there is no tradition I've lost or can go back or on to recapture. I value input from all traditions more than ever and want more. I've been freed to do so from the tradition of fundamentalism by neo-orthodoxy and inclusive postmodernism. All add to the richness. Including the tradition of the Harrowing of Hell.
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Love wins
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
But! I have difficulty, which I've laid at the foot of the Cross, with the implication of the Harrowing of Hell of God the Prison Governor, the Camp Commandant, the Punisher, the Damner, the Executioner, the Killer.
Even with the modern gloss that the dead are alive but comatose, unfeeling. They might as well be ... dead.
How linear of me!
And in focussing on the insert of Jesus descending unto Hell we also misdirect ourselves from the substance of what Peter was saying.
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Love wins
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A.Pilgrim
Shipmate
# 15044
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Posted
As ever, the demands of RL have prevented me from taking part in a discussion when it has been active. However, I’d still like to make the following observations.
I don’t think that there is any validity in linking together, as Freddy did, 1Peter 3:18-20 and 1Peter 4:5-6. In the first passage Christ is the one performing the action of proclamation, the gospel is not mentioned here, and the proclamation was to ‘imprisoned spirits’. Nowhere else in the Bible are the dead referred to as ‘imprisoned spirits’ (en phulakē pneumasin), so I think it is incorrect to do so here.
In the second passage, there is no mention of who is doing the preaching of the gospel – it could be human messengers, not Christ. The context is in view of future judgement ‘they will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead’ (v.5) – that is those who will, by the time of that judgement have died, but who had the gospel preached to them while they were still alive. To adopt this understanding here then harmonises with other biblical passages such as Hebrews 9:27-28 and Luke 16:19-31 that state or imply that after death comes judgement, and there is no opportunity then to hear the gospel and ‘live according to God in the spirit’ (v.6) as there had been before death.
The passage in Eph 4:8-10 talks about Jesus’s ascension, and comments that before he ascended, he had to descend to earth (at the incarnation). The phrase ‘katōtera merē tēs gēs' can be identified as a genitive of quality – ‘the earthly lower parts’ rather than ‘lower parts of the earth’, and this makes more sense in the context. Even if this second phrase is adopted as the translation (as in Freddy’s quotation) I’m not convinced by proposing a connection between any supposed ‘lower parts of the earth’ and the location of the ‘imprisoned spirits’ of 1Peter 3:18-20 in the gloomy dungeon of Tartarus (2Pet.2:4).
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There is still an outstanding subject that this thread has touched on – namely what did happen between Jesus’s death and resurrection? There appear to be two contradicting pieces of evidence. On one hand we have Jesus’s words to the dying thief: ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’ (Luke 23:43, ESV) and Matt.12:40 ‘... so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (ESV) So where was Jesus? In the earth, or in Paradise?
The most satisfactory explanation that I can come up with is as follows. For those three days Jesus was dead in the tomb – at least in his human nature – in accordance with Matt.12:40. What happened to his divine nature is, I guess, a mystery not revealed to us. And as I mentioned in a previous post, there is nothing in the text of Peter’s letters to indicate that the proclamation to the imprisoned spirits happened in between Jesus’s death and resurrection.
So what of the words to the dying thief? The way that I see those words is as telling the thief what he will experience from his own perception – that as far as he is aware, the time spent from his death to his re-awakening at the general resurrection of the dead, will pass without his knowing anything about it, and will appear to happen the same day. In the circumstances of being tortured to death on a cross, Jesus can, I think, be excused for giving assurance to the repentant thief while making a simplification of what will happen, rather than going into an extended theological exposition of the state of being of the dead in between death and resurrection.
With this understanding, all the human experiences of death and resurrection are the same – for Jesus (in his human nature), for the dying thief, and for all the rest of us. Death; imperceptible passage of time (which would fit in with the concept of Sheol as outlined by Jade Constable); for Jesus resurrection after three days as the firstfruits of the resurrection, for the rest of us resurrection at the general resurrection to judgement and the life of the world to come (as appropriate ).
Angus
[ 16. January 2014, 13:29: Message edited by: A.Pilgrim ]
Posts: 434 | From: UK | Registered: Aug 2009
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Freddy
Shipmate
# 365
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by A.Pilgrim:
I don’t think that there is any validity in linking together, as Freddy did, 1Peter 3:18-20 and 1Peter 4:5-6.
...I’m not convinced by proposing a connection between any supposed ‘lower parts of the earth’ and the location of the ‘imprisoned spirits’ of 1Peter 3:18-20 in the gloomy dungeon of Tartarus (2Pet.2:4).
Interesting comments. Let me think about them.
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"Consequently nothing is of greater importance to a person than knowing what the truth is." Swedenborg
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