The phrase war in Heaven is common enough, sometimes used to describe a rebellion of Lucifer and the demons against God, and a subsequent war among spiritual beings with Michael the Archangel leading the forces on God's side*.
Yet, if we really think about it, "war in Heaven" is nonsense, an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
Because - if there is war, then it isn't Heaven. And if there is a Heaven, then there cannot be war in it, nor even the possibility of war.
*(If the war of God and angels versus demonic rebels did indeed happen in the time before Christ; and I believe something of that sort did happen, albeit it was and still is probably continuous, rather than a finite war - then it was not a war in Heaven. It was/is a war in the First Creation which was not and cannot be Heaven - not a war in Jesus Christ's Second Creation.)
Heaven did not exist, and was not even claimed to exist, until Jesus Christ. It was Jesus that "made" Heaven, and made Heaven a possible destination for Men.
But the "trouble" was and still is, that Jesus made Heaven on the other side of death; Jesus insisted that Men must die (as did he) and be "born-again" in order to dwell in Heaven.
This has never been popular!
People do not want to wait until after death. They want Heaven here and now! - or as soon as possible. They want to dwell in Heaven as they are, and not as they become after death. They want Heaven on Earth.
Why then did Jesus insist that Men must die? Why not abolish death?
Well, if we assume Jesus was both good and competent; then we must assume that death was necessary for Heaven: necessary for Heaven to exist; necessary for Men to live-forever and go to Heaven; necessary in order that Heaven actually be Heaven.
And this can be understood by considering how war in Heaven is prevented.
While some kind of powerful government could suppress dissent, detect and punish rebels etc - this would not be Heaven. (Being a thwarted, or brainwashed, rebel is not a Heavenly state!)
War in Heaven can only be ruled-out eternally if not a single one of the denizens of Heaven ever want war - and this situation must be eternal.
In other words; the inhabitants of Heaven must - of their very nature, spontaneously, by their own fundamental desires and motivations - always and forever desire to live in love and harmony with God, and with each other.
The "problem" was how to arrive at this situation; given that Men (and all other Beings) just-are free agents?
The problem is: How can free agents become eternally good?
And my answer is that Men need to be able to make permanent their commitments, their choices, their deepest desires.
Here on earth we cannot stick to our commitments, cannot stick to our choices.
New Years resolutions get broken! The grandiose hopes of qualitative self-reform and betterment in a new Christian convert, never work-out. The "Old Adam" is ineradicable, as the Apostle Paul famously complained.
We may passionately want to do this or that, or to be good, loving persons; but always we get distracted, or sick or older; our motives or mood change; circumstances change - and over-and-again we want something different, and end by doing something else altogether.
Even/especially the greatest Saints are self-acknowledged to be great - almost continuous - sinners (by the truest standards of sin; sin as something-like deviation from the loving nature of divine creation).
For there to be a Heaven, Men need to be able to choose God, Divine Creation, Love and all that is Good - and to choose this-only and this-forever.
The way this happens is resurrection.
We can therefore consider resurrection to be the way that we are enabled to make our commitments permanent.
And resurrection first requires death.
Thus resurrected Beings can live forever in Heaven without war, resurrection includes a permanent choice, an eternally-binding commitment, by which Men are (thanks to Jesus Christ) now able to make for ourselves.
It will surely be asked: "But why can't we have resurrection without death?"
The only real answer is: because that is the nature of things. If we want resurrection, we must die.
It makes sense to me that resurrection can only be after death; because it entails a kind of permission to be re-made as eternal Beings; and although resurrection is a material process as well as spiritual, the process is essentially spiritual - because the material is a sub-set of the spiritual.
(i.e. Originally there were only spiritual Beings the material came later in creation. All materiality is also spiritual, but there can be and is spiritual being that is not material.)
I conceive of death as a kind of dissolution, or dissolving of my beingness from its current temporarily incarnated (embodied) level of creation, back towards a primal and immaterial (only-spiritual) simplicity that is a barely-conscious mere-existence.
I envisage resurrection as redirecting the death-process by which only-and-all of that which is Good in me is taken, retained, rebuilt into the resurrected me.
The resurrected me is still me because it is a transformation of my eternal Being; but it is only remade of that which is Good, which is Heaven-compatible and Heaven-sustaining.
The resurrected me will be eternal because this selective process retains only that which is harmonious and loving; and leaves-behind forever all that would have potential to generate dissent, rebellion or war against that-which-makes-Heaven-heavenly.
In other words all of my mortal self that leads to death (all evil, and all "entropy") is left-behind in the process of resurrection, therefore after resurrection creation is unopposed and life is everlasting.
How this selection process during resurrection actually happens, I guess to be the point at which the Christian imperative of "following Jesus Christ" comes-in. It may be as if we are continually-guided-through the process of resurrection (knowing what must be retained, what must be let-go and shed) by the very simple matter of Love.
The discernment of what to keep, what to discard; comes from that love which motivates anyone who permanently desires Heaven, and the outer direction of that love to Jesus Christ and what he offers us.
In different words; it is the loving and personal attention of Jesus Christ towards our souls during the process of dying, that enables resurrection; and which enables Heaven to exist...
And which enables Heaven to be heavenly, including that there can never be any desire for, or possibility of, "war in Heaven".
**
H/T - Francis Berger's comment that a possible motivation for those who insist on an Omni-God is that they fear that anything less than an Omni-God will not always and forever be able to defeat Beings that might strive to usurp creation. God therefore (supposedly) desires to retain an infinite and qualitative gulf between Himself and all created-Beings. (Or rather, this gulf just-is, and a consequence is that nobody and nothing can subvert creation.) Such a line of reasoning is, I think, just an extreme case of the much more general problem stated here: how can Heaven stay "heavenly" when its inhabitants are free agents. The above is my understanding of how this is so, and some the consequences. Once it is understood that the denizens of Heaven can, by free and irrevocable choice, permanently be fully in harmonious accord with God's creative purposes and methods - then there is no reason why Men cannot rise to a level of divinity on-a-par with God the primary creator; and join-with God as partners in the work of creation.
14 comments:
Very good! Jesus's conversation with Nicodemus concerning the necessity of being born again of water and spirit ties in well with this.
I see death and ressurection as liberation from the "necessity" to "free-will choose" (and all the problematic theology and philosophy tied up with that notion).
Once one has made the eternal commitment to follow Jesus into Heaven, he is no longer plagued by the "free" possibility of choosing evil. This may strike some as a form of unfreedom, but if that were true, then Jesus could be considered the most unfree Being in Creation, which is obviously wrong.
@Frank - The way I sometimes think of it is that we too often have a negative conceptualization of freedom - as if ultimate freedom meant never being constrained, or never being committed. But it seems to me that ultimate freedom must include the ability freely to choose our future - and choose to stick to it!
Another way I have of thinking about it is that the only truly ultimate value is love - and the highest love is a permanent commitment - which must include the ability to make a permanent commitment.
I understand this question is only tangentially related, but if there is no war in Heaven (makes sense to me) then is the fascination with warfare that nearly all men and boys seem to share (to one degree or another) a sin? If so it might be one of the most widespread and encouraged sins throughout history.
A "necessary evil" perhaps, but war is often a theme celebrated, directly or otherwise.
@Evan - This is one of those things in which it is necessary to distinguish Heaven from earth. There can be no war in Heaven, but on earth war is not necessarily the worst alternative (i.e. pacifism is not valid).
Perhaps the deepest way to analyse this is in terms of motivation - and remembering that the sin is in the motivation. In Heaven all is motivated by love, and love is mutual among all the denizens - in such a context there could be no motivation for war.
On earth, it seems to me that there are sometimes motivations to engage in war that are ethically superior to motivations not to war. This can be the case in a nation with genuinely spiritual group cohesion that believes itself threatened with cultural of physical annihilation.
So my answer is - in this mortal life "it all depends", and there is no moral answer that applies to "war" as a category.
this one made me think our disagreements are more linguistic than fundamental. great post.
Funny thing is, I already (basically) knew, of course "the rules are different" in Heaven. I just wanted you to articulate it, you have a way of making these sort of topics easily digestible.
@Laeth - Good news!
I am wondering what happened to St Dismas (The thief that just repented on the cross). Humanly speaking, I dont think just because someone undergo heavy physical punishment, does not change his natural traits.
Even if such person so-called repented of his sins, and like what as you said, the bad side of us will be so-called "amputated" during resurrection. Then, in such case, it seems like there will be nothing left for him (since almost his entire life was centered around sinful profession, so there is no memory worth preserving after death) as his entire life memory need to be "amputated" but his last moments. It is almost the same like aborted baby, perhaps.
@k - I've often talked about this matter, and I'm afraid I can't be bothered to cover the same ground yet again. I blog primarily from my own needs, secondarily as an interaction with commenters I have got to know, and not really to answer old questions from passing visitors. If you are strongly interested in understanding what I have concluded, you'll need to use the word search and look around at earlier stuff.
@k - To put it differently: your question contains at least four fundamental assumptions (about church, tradition, Bible and the nature of evidence) that I do not share; so there is no possible way I could answer it without a long and multi-referenced reply, which would take me a long time.
Ok, maybe just give me straight-forward answer: Do you think this guy:
1) In heaven
2) Not in heaven
3) You don't think that Biblical reference is credible (This guy may not exist)
Actually, I am fine if you think it is 2 or 3
@k - OK, leaving out the reasoning. It probably didn't happen (not included in IV Gospel, by eye witness. But traditions about Saint Dismas and the life of the thief I regard as completely invented).
I do think it is a lovely story, however, and "true" in the sense that if it had happened; then the thief would have been in Heaven, because Jesus said it. And that is a very important clue to the nature of salvation.
But salvation (going to Heaven) is one thing, spiritual status (how divine) when in Heaven is another; and spiritual stature cannot be computed from law-breaking.
A typical willing modern bureaucratic servant of global totalitarianism probably has a *Much* lower spiritual stature in Heaven (assuming he repents post-mortally and decides he wants resurrection) than a recidivist thief of Jesus's time
"...by which only-and-all of that which is Good in me is taken, retained, rebuilt into the resurrected me."
In Catholicism it's called Purgatory.
@ap - Well, no.
When there are two systems (i.e. the Roman Catholic, and what I believe) rooted in distinct fundamental (metaphysical) assumptions concerning the basic nature of reality - then apparent similarities in specifics are bound to be superficial merely.
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