We had a listener request to talk about the afterlife. So, to start off with: most cultures have some sort of idea that you somehow continue after your body dies. A lot of them, including that found in the Hebrew Bible, have everyone experiencing the same death after death. Micah gives an overview of some of general ideas that exist.
General American cultural ways of talking about the afterlife seem to be heavily influenced by Christianity, since that’s been the dominant religion. It tends to shake out as “good people go to Heaven, and bad people go to Hell.” Of course, most people would say “I’m a good person.” So really, we all go to Heaven, except those really bad people. Catholicism also has Purgatory, a place where you do your time if you’re not good enough for Heaven. It’s dead jail. Indulgences get a shortened stay. That’s where the Protestant Reformation comes in, basically.
Since early Quakers thought it was the end of the world, they didn’t bother with coming up with much afterlife theology. They weren’t expecting to be dead before Jesus comes back. They believed it was imminent. And at this point, we don’t have a unified theology on the afterlife. You could find a Quaker who believes ANY of the things we talked about in this episode. Mackenzie’s feeling is that what happens after you die doesn’t change what you’re supposed to do while alive.
We mention purgatorial universalism, a belief wherein Hell may exist but is empty.
On the other hand, lots of people think of Heaven and Hell as states we experience in this life. One of our friends pointed something out. The Kingdom is within you. The gates of Hell will not stand. So is the Kingdom breaking through (through us!) and overrunning Hell’s gates? Maybe that results in an empty Hell. This feels like a callback to the Lamb’s War. And then also: Hell has gates, maybe to keep people in. The new Jerusalem’s pearly gates are always open.
References
* Billy Joel “Only the Good Die Young“
* Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
* Scala Sancta (Holy Stairs)
* Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven“
* Venial sins
* CS Lewis
* Chronicles of Narnia
* The Great Divorce
Transcript
MacKenzie: Welcome to Quaker Faith and podcast where we will explore traditional Quaker beliefs and the variety of Quaker beliefs found today.
MacKenzie: Welcome back to Quaker Faith and Podcast with Mackenzie and Micah. We had a listener request to talk about the afterlife and so that is what we are going to talk about today.
Micah: And we’ve got all the answers.
MacKenzie: Sure, maybe you do. For starters, in popular conception, afterlife means heaven and hell or, if your Catholic, then maybe also purgatory.
Micah: Or limbo. They just got rid of limbo.
MacKenzie: Oh, right.
Micah: But there used to be a limbo.
MacKenzie: There’s this web comic that’s gone now, but they had an episode where there was wiki popes and the one pope says they go to limbo, next pope says, “No they don’t”, next one says, “Yes,
