I thought the first section was a good treatment of what he calls Christoplatonism. He begins by addressing the contention that of physical heaven would be less excellent than a purely spiritual heaven. It reminded me of C.S. Lewis' quote (from I don't know where)... "God likes matter. He invented it."
He also makes an interesting point about deriving our inferences not from the nature of God, but from the nature of humanity. The idea is that God (being almighty and all) could dwell just about anywhere. As humans, we aren't promised all of God's infinite attributes. Therefore, he reasons, we should think about the possibilities of heaven in the likely limitations of humans rather than the awesome capability of God. Interesting.
The thought from the second section that jumped out at me was this: "We should stop thinking of Heaven and Earth as opposites and instead view them as overlapping circles that share certain commonalities." While Earth is certainly under the curse, it's wrong to think of it as more like Hell than Heaven. God created Earth as a good dwelling for man. Despite the pains brought on by sin, it still bears much of its grand qualities. Similarly, though we are fallen we still bear the image of God.
I'll skip ahead to the section dealing with the rich man and Lazarus. While I think he ends up at a pretty balanced position, some of his argumentation is bothersome. Specifically, he supports his point by saying, "Jesus could easily have portrayed the rich man and Lazarus in other ways. He could have said..." To claim that your interpretation retains validity because Jesus didn't state things in a fashion that would have contradicted your interpretation isn't utterly convincing.
1 comment:
Mostly because I want to see MORE comments posted on this here "blog", I am going to 'defend' Randy. I didn't find that sentence about Lazarus to be his biggest argument. When dealing with figurative vs. literal, I found the list of major components (bottom 62) more helpful. I think he supported his point best in that. Also, I haven't read it yet, but apparently Appendix B will shed some more light on this. Either way, inferring is a tricky thing. I agree that the one statement alone doesn't validate his opinion. But I think he supports this view well.
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