Lets have an open discussion on Heaven.

[The Liturgist]

Early in the Church the Chiliast view was close, in time, to John the Revelator.

Indeed, but as the Second Ecumenical Synod pointed out, “a thousand years” can basically mean “a very long time”, and the idea of Chiliasm also requires one to reject the idea of Christ presently being King, which I for one am not prepared to do. “For He shall reign forever and ever” - eternity extends into the past as well as the future, it should be noted.

I suspect the increase in Chiliasm in part resulted from the increased liberalism in the mainline Protestant denominations driving many people over to non-denominational churches and other churches that were influenced more by the premillenial dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby and by other figures outside of the mainstream of liturgical Christian thought. In the Methodist Church and several other mainline churches, an entire liturgical season used to exist, called Kingdomtide, which consisted of the second half of those Sundays following Pentecost (known as Whitsuntide or the season of Pentecost, the latter title being confusing, since historically the period between Pascha and Pentecost Sunday, also known as Whitsunday, was called the Pentecost), except for those Sundays following the Epiphany, which became Epiphanytide. I really like this division of the church year - indeed Methodist clergy would wear white vestments from Easter until Pentecost, red vestments from Pentecost until the start of Kingdomtide, and then switch to Green, then to violet for Advent, then to White until after the Epiphany, and then to green again until the violet of Lent.

Though this doesn't make the Jewish People "good" overall, I do see evidence that Israel has tried to act in a more civilized "Christian" way with respect to the Middle East conflicts. I think it likely that Israel will return as a "nation of God" at Christ's coming. But no matter....

That’s a separate issue; one can be amillenial and support the State of Israel or premillenial and oppose them. I myself am rejoicing in the recent peace plan having been accomplished and desire peace, and a safe land for the Jews, and also for the Christians in the Middle East.

However, I would note that a very large number of Jews from antiquity did convert to Christianity, so the idea that Israel did not convert is true only if we look at the entire Jewish population. Enough converted, including the vast majority of the Ethiopian Jews (the Beta Israel), with the minority of Jews having to flee the country for Israel following the martyrdom of Emperor Haile Selassie at the hands of the Derg Communist Regime, which then, like many Communist regimes, began an anti-Semitic pogrom to take attention away from its immediate failures to provide those things which it promised.

Additionally, most of the Jews of India, who settled there following the establishment of commerce between Greece and India via two routes, overland through Syria and Mesopotamia to Basra, overland via the Persian Empire and Pakistan, a more dangerous and slower route due to Greco-Persian and later Roman-Sassianian conflicts, and a southerly route from what is now Aqaba on the Red Sea or another Red Sea port down to Socotra in Yemen, which historically was home to a Christian population until they were martyred entirely in the 12th or 13th century AD in the genocide of Tamerlane, to Kerala, which in any case was the main center of Jewish and later Christian activity in India.

However, the Jewish population dwindled to the point where only one synagogue remains, and with most of the Kochin Jews of Kerala migrating to Israel (the most noted family of which were the Sassoons, of whom the hairstylist Vidal Sassoon was a scion), this synagogue is mainly a museum as there is seldom a minyan (the quorum of ten Jews who have completed the Bar Mitzvah required for orthodox Rabinnical Jewish congregational prayer).

In addition to the Indian church being comprised of both descendants of Jews (some of whom are endogamous descendants of a shipwreck in the fourth century, who have their own parishes, in order to maintain their own baptismal records and marriage records, but who are full members of the various Mar Thoma denominations in the Malabar Coast, such as the Syro Malabar Catholic Church and the Syriac Orthodox and Malankara Orthodox), a substantial number of Antiochian Orthodox, Alexandrian Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Melkite Greek Catholic, Chaldean Catholic and members of the Assyrian Church of the East are of Jewish descent - one will find Jewish last names and see ethnic features which connect this population with other groups descended from the Jews of antiquity, for example, the red-headed Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul, who I greatly admire. One will also see names which are derived from Jewish names, such as Zakka from Zacchaeus and Khoury, which means Kohen.

So while it is true that not all Jews converted, a great many did. And there are other Christians of partial Jewish descent in virtually all of the Orthodox churches and other churches of the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. Also even now, Jews convert to Christianity; one notable example being the British actor David Suchet, who became a devout Anglican, but who is descended from Jews from the Baltic region of Eastern Europe.

 

[The Liturgist]

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I look at the martyrs under the altar as metaphorical as far as the imagery but I extrapolate that there are probably quite a few martyrs in heaven anyway. So maybe just a teaching about the special place that the martyrs have in God’s heart?

Well obviously, all martyrs are saved by virtue of being martyred, but at the same time, that does not mean their body was taken up into heaven. In some cases it might well have been, but in most cases, we have relics of their body, many of which are partially incorrupt, for example, the head of St. John the Baptist, and the whole idea is that God will rise them up at the Resurrection. The fact that the Theotokos, St. Elias and St. Moses were taken up bodily into Heaven is an exception, for extraordinary reasons - in the case of St. Elias and St. Moses, it appears to be largely so that they could attest to the deity and Messianic identity of Christ our God at the Transfiguration, whereas in the case of the Theotokos, the Orthodox believe she was taken up bodily because she, by virtue of giving birth to God the Son, and being the means by which Christ became incarnate, putting on our human nature to restore and glorify it, was physically closer and had a more intimate relationship with God than anyone else, for surely the most intimate relationship a man can have is with his mother - and God the Son and Word, the second person of the Trinity, who is fully God, in becoming man took on a human mother. Thus we say she was taken up bodily for this reason.

But none of this should be regarded as in any respect deprecating the glorious martyrs, such as St. Stephen the Protomartyr, St. Ignatius of Antioch, and many thousands and indeed millions of others, who won their salvaiton by confessing Christ before men at the cost of their own lives. Indeed there were so many martyrs following the Diocletian persecution that the early church required that all new altars of all the new churches being built after Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, and became the state religion in Armenia, Edessa, Georgia and Ethiopia, contain the relics of martyrs or be built atop the grave of a martyr, a practice which continues in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, where the relics of a saint are always included in the Holy Table of the altar in a reliquary, and in the Eastern Orthodox church are sewn into the Antimension, the sacred altar cloth which is itself an altar and can be used to celebrate the liturgy even if a consecrated Holy Table is not available.

 

[RandyPNW]

Indeed, but as the Second Ecumenical Synod pointed out, “a thousand years” can basically mean “a very long time”, and the idea of Chiliasm also requires one to reject the idea of Christ presently being King, which I for one am not prepared to do.

Really? I've been a Premillennialist for a long time, and I've never heard that? Of course, you must be referring to the belief that Christ is ruling as "King" presently on the earth. No, Premillennialists do not believe that. Christ's Coming Kingdom is "near," but not yet "here." Perhaps we have some alignment in this regard?

“For He shall reign forever and ever” - eternity extends into the past as well as the future, it should be noted.

I suspect the increase in Chiliasm in part resulted from the increased liberalism in the mainline Protestant denominations driving many people over to non-denominational churches and other churches that were influenced more by the premillenial dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby and by other figures outside of the mainstream of liturgical Christian thought.

It really depends on what you mean by "Liberalism." If you're speaking of the fragmentation of Catholic Scholasticism and Dogmatism, I agree--there came to be not just random or occasional dissatisfied participants, but eventually this dissatisfaction became a "tide" of protest.

The Reformation did bring a change in eschatological outlook. For example, Ribera and Lacunza set the path for a Futurism that anticipated a future Antichrist, and not the Pope. And the Dispensationalists followed after with their unique brand of Futurism. This is perhaps what led to the revival of Chiliasm?

In the Methodist Church and several other mainline churches, an entire liturgical season used to exist, called Kingdomtide, which consisted of the second half of those Sundays following Pentecost (known as Whitsuntide or the season of Pentecost, the latter title being confusing, since historically the period between Pascha and Pentecost Sunday, also known as Whitsunday, was called the Pentecost), except for those Sundays following the Epiphany, which became Epiphanytide. I really like this division of the church year - indeed Methodist clergy would wear white vestments from Easter until Pentecost, red vestments from Pentecost until the start of Kingdomtide, and then switch to Green, then to violet for Advent, then to White until after the Epiphany, and then to green again until the violet of Lent.

I think I'd need the colors just to know what is what! But color-coding these festivals and observances I can see being valuable--in the past, particularly, because of the need for memory devices. But it can also serve the same kind of usefulness now, except that I see traditional Christianity appearing to "die out." It isn't the tradiiton that's the problem, but the compromise with the world, and the capitulation of Christian Civilization to the rest of the world and all of its religions.

Don't get me wrong. The organized denominations will continue to exist, and in large numbers. I just think that their vitality is dying out, turning the interest in Christ into an interest in religion and ethics.

That’s a separate issue; one can be amillenial and support the State of Israel or premillenial and oppose them. I myself am rejoicing in the recent peace plan having been accomplished and desire peace, and a safe land for the Jews, and also for the Christians in the Middle East.

Yes. However, I'm not so optimistic over the long haul. The Muslims outnumber the Jews by far, and the Christians in that part of the world. And Islam does not have the same kind of "good fruit" that Christianity has. I see the Middle East being a constant area of trouble from now until Kingdom Come.

However, I would note that a very large number of Jews from antiquity did convert to Christianity, so the idea that Israel did not convert is true only if we look at the entire Jewish population.

I agree. The Scriptures do indicate there will always be a remnant of Jewish believers.

So while it is true that not all Jews converted, a great many did. And there are other Christians of partial Jewish descent in virtually all of the Orthodox churches and other churches of the Mediterranean, and elsewhere. Also even now, Jews convert to Christianity; one notable example being the British actor David Suchet, who became a devout Anglican, but who is descended from Jews from the Baltic region of Eastern Europe.

Of course. The prophecy of Israel's restoration, however, concerns the gathering of Jewish People into a nation that ultimately converts, as a nation, to Christianity.

A lot of people have taken issue with this claim, but I don't see how they can fail to recognize how many nations in history have adopted Christianity as their state religion? Why not the Jews at the end of history? The "first shall be last, and the last first."

 

[Dan Perez]

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I look at the martyrs under the altar as metaphorical as far as the imagery but I extrapolate that there are probably quite a few martyrs in heaven anyway. So maybe just a teaching about the special place that the martyrs have in God’s heart?

And I see two groups Israel on earth and The Body of Christ in. HEAVEN !!



dan p

 

[The Liturgist]

Thanks for your thoughtful response. I look at the martyrs under the altar as metaphorical as far as the imagery but I extrapolate that there are probably quite a few martyrs in heaven anyway. So maybe just a teaching about the special place that the martyrs have in God’s heart?

I don’t think you understand - if a martyr is in Heaven, Heaven is not the final destination, so it doesn’t matter if their body is on Earth or not - since for most Christians, Heaven is a spiritual realm until the General Resurrection and the Last Judgement. Then, those of us who Christ Pantocrator numbers among the righteous will live in the presence of God in their resurrected bodies in the light and life of the World to Come, eternal life in glory.

So if I say that the body of a martyr is not in Heaven, that is not a commentary on their eschatological status - we can safely say the souls of all the Holy Martyrs and Confessors are in Heaven because of the promise Christ made for those who confess Him before men. Indeed in the Orthodox Church martyrs are instantly glorified as saints (with Confessors, people tortured for Christ, they are glorified after they repose, but the status of Confessor also applies to those who were tortured and later died as a result of that torture, examples would be St. John Chrysostom who was death marched in 406 AD for criticizing Empress Theodora for using her wealth to have a commode made of solid gold rather than giving that money to the poor of Constantinople, and St. Maximus the Confessor, who had his tongue cut out for refusing to retract his opposition to the Monothelite heresy (which was later anathematized by the Sixth Ecumenical Council). These saints are in Heaven, and will be reunited with their bodies according to Scripture on the Dread Day of Judgement, but they will be accounted among the righteous, for they confessed Christ before men, like the Holy Martyrs such as St. Stephen the Illustrious Protomartyr, St. James the Great, St. Peter the Apostle, St. Paul the Apostle, St. Mark the Evangelist, St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Peter of Alexandria, and many many others.

 

[The Liturgist]

except that I see traditional Christianity appearing to "die out."

The liberal mainline churches, perhaps, but the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, except for the Church of Greece and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, are growing so fast we are outpacing the Pentecostals at this point, due to a combination of high birthrates and record high conversion levels. In the US many Orthodox parishes are seeing 18% annual growth. The result is a severe shortage of clergy, since historically we only trained enough priests to meet the needs of what was expected to be a largely stable, largely ethnic population of Christians descended from those in the Old Country, but the mass popularity of Orthodoxy hoped for by many, such as Metropolitan Philip Saliba, memory eternal, and St. John Maximovitch and St. Tikhon of Moscow, is definitely happening. And we have the Western Rite also.

Likewise other traditional liturgical churches including Continuing Anglicans, the remaining traditional Latin Mass groups in the Roman Catholic Church that have not been suppressed due to Traditiones Custodes, and Confessional Lutherans are reporting very healthy growth figures.

So what you see appearing to happen is apparently a case of appearances seeming to be something other than what they are.

I think I'd need the colors just to know what is what! But color-coding these festivals and observances I can see being valuable--in the past, particularly, because of the need for memory devices

Liturgical colors add a great deal of beauty to the Christian church, although historically the church only used two of them - light vestments on feast days, and during the Liturgy, and dark vestments on the eves of feast, during fasts, and during Holy Week. This pattern is still strictly observed in the Coptic Orthodox Church and one can also see it in the Syriac Orthodox Church, albeit some Syriac Orthodox Churches follow a liturgical color scheme influenced by that used by many of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. However this is not required, so within the Syriac churcrh one will sometimes see different clergy wearing different vestments that are not the same color but which are color-coordinated, to a beautiful effect, which is visually stunning. If desired I can find a photo.

However, the emergence of liturgical color schemes, first in the Western Church around the year 700 I think, and later the spread to the Eastern Orthodox, largely through the Slavic churches (to this day the Greeks don’t care that much about liturgical colors, neither do the Antiochians, except in North America where they have been influenced by Slavic practices, although the Romanians cover both ends of the spectrum, as do the Georgians, so its not an exclusively Slavic thing), with different Western rites having differing liturgical colors - for example, the liturgical colors used in Milan are closer to those used by the Slavic Eastern Orthodox, whereas the colors historically used in York (red, yellow, black and white) were different from those used elsewhere, for example, in the South of England (the Sarum Use), or the color scheme used in Rome, which became the most influential. In the end it was the Roman color scheme that was inherited by the Protestant denominations most of whom, including the Lutheran and Anglicans, adopted modified versions of the Roman Rite liturgy.

 

[The Liturgist]

Don't get me wrong. The organized denominations will continue to exist, and in large numbers. I just think that their vitality is dying out, turning the interest in Christ into an interest in religion and ethics.

Well this is clearly the case for some, but for others, we see more vitality, since increasingly young people, particularly young male worshippers, drawn to the structure of liturgical worship - and the liturgies of the early church used by the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, traditional Catholics, traditional Anglicans, confessional Lutherans such as my friends @MarkRohfrietsch and @Ain't Zwinglian and the Assyrian Church of the East in many cases can be dated to the third century on the basis of manuscript evidence and in other cases have even older dates. Also the ancient liturgies are fundamentally scriptural - 93% of the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom consists of quotations of Scripture, not counting the scripture lessons appointed to be read at the particular liturgy, and this number is typical across most liturgical churches (so one will see a similar amount of scripture in the liturgies of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the Lutheran Service Book used by our friends Mark and Ain’t Zwinglian, the Roman Missal, the Oriental Orthodox liturgical books such as the Coptic Euchologion (with the exquisite Divine Liturgy of St. Cyril, among others, which has a second century provenance, and the Euchologion itself is descended from the fourth century Euchologion - book of blessings, basically, of St. Sarapaion of Thmuis, a bishop who served in the Alexandrian church during the Arian crises).

Also the average age of hymns in the ancient liturgies is over a thousand years. And these hymns are rich and doctrinally meaningful. The newest hymns one is likely to encounter in some of the tradiitonal Western churches are the very doctrinally rich chorales of Martin Luther and Charles Wesley and a few others (Arthur Sullivan comes to mind), but the primary hymns of the Western church, such as the Gloria, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei, Te Deum Laudamus, and others, are either extremely old or are simply translations of ancient Bible verses.

 

[The Liturgist]

The Reformation did bring a change in eschatological outlook. For example, Ribera and Lacunza set the path for a Futurism that anticipated a future Antichrist, and not the Pope. And the Dispensationalists followed after with their unique brand of Futurism. This is perhaps what led to the revival of Chiliasm?

I wouldn’t know, because the Eastern Orthodox were never subject to the Pope of Rome, nor were the Oriental Orthodox or the Church of the East, so any eschatology constructed around the Pope seems a bit off from our perspective. There exists a false Catholic vs. Protestant dichotomy that emerged in some of the Reformed churches (Calvinist, Zwinglian and Puritan) which doesn’t recognize us as distinct, even if John Calvin himself did - we are rather just regarded as being equally guilty of “shameless popery” and presumed to be servants of the Pope when this has not been the case since 1054 in the case of the Eastern Orthodox and 451 in the case of the Oriental Orthodox.

Indeed, until recent events such as Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church regarded the Eastern Orthodox as schismatic and the Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East as being heretical. Now members of all three are able to receive the sacraments in Roman Catholic parishes, and vice versa, provided the bishops allow (thus, practically, only the Assyrian Church of the East, for the requirements to partake of the Eucharist there are belief in the Nicene Creed and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist); some Oriental Orthodox will also give communion to Catholics and refer their members to Catholic churches if no Orthodox churches are accessible, notably the Syriac Orthodox.

 

[Hentenza]

I don’t think you understand - if a martyr is in Heaven, Heaven is not the final destination, so it doesn’t matter if their body is on Earth or not - since for most Christians, Heaven is a spiritual realm until the General Resurrection and the Last Judgement. Then, those of us who Christ Pantocrator numbers among the righteous will live in the presence of God in their resurrected bodies in the light and life of the World to Come, eternal life in glory.

My brother. I don’t see Heaven as a spiritual place only and I prefer a simpler reading of scripture. No reason of over complicating Heaven.

 

[MarkRohfrietsch]

My brother. I don’t see Heaven as a spiritual place only and I prefer a simpler reading of scripture. No reason of over complicating Heaven.

It seems that there is a lot going on in Heaven according to the Revelation of St. John.

 

[Hentenza]

It seems that there is a lot going on in Heaven according to the Revelation of St. John.

Totally agree. But the differences of interpretations make an already convoluted topic into a daunting one. That’s why I’m trying to stick to the simple reading of scripture.

I pray you and yours are doing well