Equality in Heaven?
Flipping through the channels the other day I came across “Bishop” Bob Jackson of the Acts Full Gospel Church and stopped to watch long enough to hear something I found most interesting. He was preaching about the Judgement and the importance of doing good works and even quoted James 3:26 “faith without works is dead,” while at the same time defending the standard Protestant belief in sola fide and the perseverance of the saints.
Perhaps I misunderstood him, but he seemed to reconcile the apparent contradiction here by saying that all the saved would of course go to Heaven, but once there they will be judged and rewarded according to their works, implying a hierarchy of rewards in heaven. I suppose this must be a fairly common idea since “seventh heaven” is a standard figure of speech and the various levels of heaven were described at least as far back as Dante’s Paradiso, but it’s not an idea I run across very often in contemporary circles, either Protestant or Catholic. I guess it just does not fit in with the reigning egalitarian spirit of our age.
This can’t be a distinctly Protestant idea given that it dates back to Dante, but it seems especially useful to them to solve the dilemma raised once you discard the doctrines of Purgatory and mortal sin, namely: what happens to someone who accepts Jesus as his savior and then relapses into a life of sin? He can’t go to Hell if you don’t believe in mortal sin, and he can’t go to Purgatory if you’ve rejected the whole concept of Purgatory, but surely justice demands some distinction between the reprobate and the pious, does it not? Hence: greater and lesser rewards in heaven. A tidy solution, I’ll grant him that much.
posted by The Jabberwock @ 10:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home