FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 639 8 July 15 PEOPLE OF PARADISE

WHO WILL BE THE DENIZENS OF PARADISE? WHAT WHEN BELIEVER KILLS BELIEVER? WHO WILL GAIN ULTIMATE BLISS?
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FATHER FRANK’S RANTS
Rant Number 639            8 July 15

PEOPLE OF PARADISE

A grim video by Jaysh al-Islam – meaning Islamic Army – shows a line of orange-suited Jihadis in Syria about to pump bullets into the heads of bound, hooded and kneeling prisoners. Fellow Islamists. ISIS chaps, in fact. Which lot will gain entry to Paradise, I wonder?

Facile question? But the Qur’an’s Surah of the Cow promises martyrs eternal life: ‘Say not of those slain in the way of Allah: “They are dead”. No, they are alive, though you don’t see it’ (2:154). The slain Caliphate boys conceived themselves that way. But so do their Jaysh al-Islam killers. Same Qur’an, same hadiths, same Sharia law, same cause. Logically, they should all merit paradise. Victims and executioners blissfully in the same heavenly mansions? Seems counterintuitive.

Easier when one side is heretical and so fair game. Sunni Jihadis are notoriously unkind to Shia Muslims. But…who is the heretic? The Shia’ boldly affirm their orthodoxy, indeed their higher credentials in the faith. Which party is right? Whose martyrs will win the blessed abodes above? Jennat or Jehannum…for whom?

A puzzle not for Muslims alone. The 1572 Night of St Bartholomew in Paris saw over six thousand Protestant Calvinists massacred by Catholic zealots. The latter considered Protestants foul heretics and hence themselves as doing God’s work. ‘We are the real Christians! We are not Papist idolaters! We believe in the Bible!’ Protestants fulminated back. Some Romanists were killed in revenge, naturally. Again, who’ll make it into Paradise?

‘God will know his true servants’, some argue. Indisputably true. However, when God has revealed exact, infallible Scriptures, sacred traditions and a body of teachers and interpreters of his Word, endowed with sure guidance to the truth…why do doubts still linger? Why the epistemological impasse?

It will not do to say, with a certain abbot who urged crusaders: ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’ He meant the Albigensian heretics who mingled with Catholics in the city of Beziers. Methinks at the Last Day the Creator will judge severely that pitiless man.

A radical solution is to maintain that all people eventually will be saved. The good as well as the bad, the murderers and their victims alike. Heaven is the destination of all. The Christian writer Origen drew the orthodox theologians’ wrath when he taught exactly that. In the end, he claimed, salvation will engulf everybody, even the embodiment of evil, the Devil himself. (Apocatastasis is the ungainly name of that remote doctrine.) Oddly, that makes Origen perhaps the most modern and trendy of all religious thinkers, because our mushy egalitarian Zeitgeist abhors the notion of universal, eternal damnation. Still, the idea of Shimr, the man who killed Husain, dwelling in beatitude next to the Imam will horrify most Shia’ folks. And what about Abu Lahab, the wicked uncle of the Prophet Muhammad? ‘Perish he!’ inveighs the Qur’an in Surah 111. Don’t figure Muslims will warm to the idea of Abu Lahab getting into the celestial Gardens.

The priest is not an Origenist but he still admits to being awed by the late Reverend Martin Israel. An Anglican priest and physician who was born an Orthodox Jew. I heard him say in a homily: ‘Even Hitler, if he is willing to do much service where he is now, at last will be saved.’ Coming from someone of Jewish origins, a very remarkable sentiment.

Anyway, universal salvation seems to contradict key passages in the New Testament. The parable of the sheep and the goats. As well as the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. Both narrated by Christ himself. The Book of Revelation also pulls no punches on the punishment of the wicked. You may recoil at the notion but that’s that.

Another, even more radical way-out would appeal to Professor Richard Dawkins and cultured despisers of religion like him. (Indeed, also to once fashionable existentialist theologians like Bultmann and Don Cupitt.) Ideas like Heaven and Hell are in essence mythological. Relics from obsolete or defunct thought forms. Left-overs from troglodyte cosmologies like a three tier universe, complete with demons, hellfire and similar laughable bogies. To cling on to that kind of pre-scientific imagery is childish, tantamount to believing in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. To inquire as to who will make it into Paradise is like asking whether Griffins will vanquish Dragons or vice versa. Quirky fantasies.

Be that as it may, bullets, bombs and beheadings are not imaginary. People fight, kill and are killed in the name of religion, in order to gain Paradise or escape Hell. That cannot be gainsaid. ‘That’s what’s wrong with religion!’ atheists and secularists cry. Maybe but World Wars I and II were not religious conflicts. And if the US and NATO will unleash WWIII against Russia, it won’t be in the name of God, that’s for sure. Lust for power is essentially a vice intrinsic to the human condition, religious or otherwise.

Most Western Christians are now so lukewarm that these once burning issues hardly stir anyone. Yet I recall an old joke. A Protestant dies and goes to Heaven. St Peter guides him around for a preview until they come to a very high wall, blocking the view. ‘What’s behind that wall?’ the fellow asks. ‘Shush!’ Peter intimates, ‘Not so loud. That is the place for Roman Catholics. They believe they are the only ones here.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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