I’m taking a course at the Biblical Studies Academy called Demons and Ghosts in the Bible, and a couple of interesting take-aways from this course is how little is really spelled out in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament about the “After Life” and its creatures, like demons and ghosts. And what’s even more surprising is that what little is discussed in the canon of scripture seems to refer back to other texts that are not part of the recognized canon of scripture, such as the First Book of Enoch. In terms of what is literally in the 66 books of the Protestant Bible, it really comes down to a handful of verses in the Old Testament and passing comments in the letters of Paul and the casting out of demons stories in the gospels (except that there are none in John’s gospel…). And none of them explain what’s going on or give a real origin story, leading many to believe that these passages were written with the assumption that we’d have these other texts to fill out the missing information. Oops. It is not at all a given about what the “after life” even means. 

As is illustrated in this Crash Course video, for the early Jews, living well in the Promised Land was all the “reward” they were going to get. And for the apocalyptic First Century Christians, Jesus was literally going to come back from Heaven, physically defeat the powers of evil, wake up all of the righteous dead and establish a literal physical kingdom for a thousand years from a giant cube city over Jerusalem. It wasn’t “repent, so that when you die you can go to heaven,” it was “repent, so that when Jesus comes back you can join him in his kingdom.” But then when believers started dying and Jesus hadn’t returned yet it was amended to, “repent, so that when Jesus comes back you’ll be reanimated so the you can join him in his kingdom.” There was no dying and waking up in “Heaven.” Until, of course, later writers started taking up the cause and writing all of the stories shared in this Crash Course video. 

If one is going to go strictly by what is explained in the Bible, it really isn’t very well explained the relationship between the different “dimensions” of existence. It’s a lot of extrapolation and expansion and interpretation. Personally, I really want to take some time and read these other texts, like Jubilees and 1 Enoch to see what some of the writers were pulling from when they wrote their stories. 

It is a very basic, at present, unanswerable question, what happens to “us” after we die. Given that we don’t yet understand the nature of consciousness or what makes us the “thinking beings” that we appear to be. And many doubt that it can all be explained through materialistic scientific biology. And so, religion and philosophy and literary creativity have been employed to address this question… What make our specific collection of atoms into thinking beings with some form of agency? It’s a good question, which is why one can’t just brush the “what happens after we die” questions aside without some contemplation. 

I really don’t know. But I look at religious literature, like the Bible, as human attempts to understand this question. I don’t know that, given our current state of understanding and evolution, that we can understand things beyond our four-dimensional concept of “reality.” Are there people “living” inside the Earth or floating in Heavenly realms, nah. Does the essence of what I am cease to exist when my biological functions cease? I don’t know. I don’t know the basis of why they’re working right now, much less once the machinery fails. It’s a good question though. JBB

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Tags: after life, biblical studies, Crash Course Religions, heaven and hell, video Wednesdays 

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