EngineeredTheology

The other day my oldest daughter was asking my wife about death, and was sobbing saying that she didn’t want to die. There was nothing that she would accept from us to help her ease her mind about it. How to tell her that it is nothing she needs to be worrying herself about, but also not lie to her when she asks if we are all going to die?

It got us on the topic of what does happen after death. The typical christian answer is somewhere along the lines of “you go to be with Jesus in heaven.” This implies that heaven is somewhere else (often somewhere UP), and it constitutes some sort of Hotel California type of party where there is all the food you want, but you can never leave. I think people have a hard time answering questions about it because heaven doesn’t really sound like a whole lot of fun. Maybe that is why the pressure tactic is less on “going to heaven” but avoiding hell…

Unfortunately, the bible is nothing less than cryptic about what happens when you die – and even those few passages are more of a side note. I would believe that any heavy treatment of life after death would start to draw focus away on what is important – what is going on now in the world around you. I can imagine that describing anything serious and semi accurate would be difficult/impossible to do. What does seem plausible is there is some intermediate stage after death. Jesus mentions a parable where a rich and poor man are having a conversation in some sort of afterlife. I think in most traditional protestant views of heaven and hell, the poor man does not seem to be in heaven, and the rich man in hell, it seems more like a purgatory than anything else. While I draw issues with the idea of payment for sins in life in a purgatory type place, I do not with the idea of a cosmic holding pen. A place where people are kept (under the alter in The Revelation for the pre-millennial view) before the judgement. If we call this “with Jesus” or something else, is fine with me. What happens post judgement is something different all together.

This all of course if you assume a strict linearity of time. If time turns out to contain more than half a dimension, all that is out the window….

Now, how do you explain that to a 4 year old?