09/25/19 The Penitent Thief

Walking today, I listened to the first few chapters of Genesis. This reminded me that I’ve been concerned at my lack of knowledge about the United Methodist position on the subject of Hell. Since I am now, along with my wife, members in good standing of that august body, I ought to know what they purport to believe about Biblical truths.

Perhaps, the Lord wants me to post on the subject of death and the afterlife. At any rate, that’s what I’m going to start doing. I’ll keep it up until He stops me. I plan to write it in several installments. I’ll look at the history of beliefs on death and the afterlife with an emphasis on the development of the orthodox Christian belief based in the Bible.

I begin with statements about the final place of the righteous dead or those whom evangelicals would deem to be “saved.”

Referring to the immediately dead, the official online presence of the United Methodist Church writes as follows.

Do they go directly to heaven or hell or do they go to a holding place until Christ returns to earth for the final judgment?

Throughout history, people have wondered what happens immediately after death. While we may want a clear-cut answer, United Methodists do not provide one in our doctrinal standards. This is because the scriptures themselves offer no one clear teaching on what happens to the dead between their death and the resurrection and judgment at the Last Day.

Instead, we are called simply to trust God that we are in Christ’s care and keeping.  It is that faith that calls us to trust that God holds answers that humanity cannot yet understand. We find in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” While the Protestant tradition teaches us certain aspects of the afterlife, there is still much that remains held in the mystery of God that requires simple faith.

Many Christians through the centuries have believed that when persons die, they remain dead (asleep) until the final judgment, at which time they are resurrected to life or punishment at Christ’s final judgment.

UM [United Methodist] Reporter interviewed Thomas G. Long, professor at Candler School of Theology, about his new book on funerals. To the question of how we should think about what’s happened to the dead, he said:

There are two images in the New Testament about what happens. First, the Resurrection Day, when the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised up incorruptible. If you only had that image, what we would imagine is that when people die, they lie in some intermediate state awaiting the great Resurrection Day.

The other image, however, is that death contains no victory over us at all. As soon as we die, we are with God. We get this in the Book of Revelation where John looks up and already the saints who have died are praising God around the throne. In terms of linear time, we can’t work this out. We’ve got these two competing images: You either wait until the general resurrection or you go immediately to be with God.

But the imposition of linear time on what is an eternal idea is what creates the contradiction. I don’t try to make a theologian out of Einstein, but he did show us that events that happen in sequence can also be events that happen simultaneously. If Einstein can imagine that in terms of physics, theologians can imagine it also in terms of the intrusion of eternity into linear time—that we are both immediately raised and raised together.

John Wesley believed in an intermediate state between death and the final judgment. So, as United Methodist theologian and historian Ted Campbell notes, “we reject the idea of purgatory but beyond that maintain silence on what lies between death and the last judgment.” (Methodist Doctrine: The Essentials, by Ted A. Campbell.)

I was thinking of Jesus’ statement from the cross to the penitent thief generally translated as, “Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (NIV) The ASV translates quite similarly. “And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” Note that both translations place a comma, not found in Greek manuscripts, after, “you,” making the word, “today” adverbially modify the verb, “be.” This renders, in paraphrase, “you will be with Me in Paradise today.”

Thomas Aquinas, quoting Luke 23:43, states:

The words of The Lord (This day … in paradise) must, therefore, be understood not of an earthly or corporeal paradise, but of that spiritual paradise in which all may be, said to be, who are in the enjoyment of the divine glory. Hence to place, the thief went up with Christ to heaven, that he might be with Christ, as it was said to him: “Thou shalt be with Me in Paradise”; but as to reward, he was in Paradise, for he there tasted and enjoyed the divinity of Christ, together with the other saints.

Prior to reading the grammatical point of this statement, I would have held that the statement clearly stated that the penitent thief would go immediately on the same day with Jesus to “Paradise.” Note that He uses “Paradise” and not “Heaven.” However, upon breathing their last, Jesus and the penitent thief, and the other thief for that matter, leave the space-time continuum and enter timeless eternity, the realm of God. Thus, “today” may or may not apply to a 24-hour time period as we know it.

In 2 Corinthians 5:1-8, the Apostle Paul utters a passage that is traditionally to be summarized as, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” The text states:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile, we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

Therefore, we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

Based, I believe, upon firm Biblical grounds, I can state confidently that the faithful dead are “immediately” and “bodily” in the presence of the Lord, whether this is in some temporary body in an intermediate state, as proposed by N.T. Wright in the “Intermediate State,” from “Rethinking the Tradition,” or in a place known as “Paradise” or perhaps, “Heaven” (but clearly not the “New Heaven” as that comes after the judgment.)

This statement does not rule out the concept of so-called “soul-sleep,” which might be otherwise thought of as stating that the time between their death and the final Resurrection is a spiritual irrelevancy, or as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:52, “in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”

So let it be written, so let it be done.

I’d appreciate hearing any comments.