Sheol

This interesting article about the Biblical perspective on the "afterlife", although seemingly written by a secular scholar, has raised some very interesting questions for me. I came across it after reading a passage in Ecclesiastes 9 ("...in the grave [sheol], where you are going, there is neither working nor planning not knowledge nor wisdom.") that poses some sticky challenges to our Christian view of the afterlife. The idea that their is some kind of conscious, active life after death and that its quality will depend on whether the deceased is being rewarded or punished doesn't seem to have developed in the minds of God's people until a few hundred years before Jesus' time or later. Even the concept of resurrection from the dead - a belief absolutely central to our faith - doesn't really appear until very late.

There is a simple and glib answer: God revealed this to his worshipers slowly and over time.

But I am startled to realize that Moses, Abraham, David (who famously said "He will not return to me, but I will go to him" - to apparently prove that infants go "straight to heaven") and all the others considered the here and now the only real life they would ever experience. For them death was a kind of eternal, incorporeal sleep for the good and the evil alike.

I'm not sure exactly where I ought to go with this but I must admit I'm shaken by the vast ambiguity of scripture on so many points that we often take for granted.

Jesus Camp

This is probably old news to those of you in the States but for us out here in Oz this trailer is a very intriguing revelation.

Watch It.