There are a few things that must be taken "as read" if we are to continue. I know it would be nice to always have every aspect of every matter settled definitively, but as to this condition I will assert that this blog differs not substantially from any other attempt at understanding. Therefore, with my apologies, I will make the following assertions.
First, in the scriptural tradition and in the thought scheme espoused by Jesus, to "die" is to pass from one state to another, with the expectation that a sense of loss will apply to the removal from the first state, while yet the aspects of the second state are inchoate to the person undergoing the experience.
Second, the embracing of the new state (or of the prospect of the new state) is to be effected by the pursuit of hope, trust, and joy rather than despair, suspicion, and sadness. That "hope, trust, and joy" might seem unwarranted premises to the exacting philosopher, I will admit, but I will say as well that my short listing here of those "virtues" comprises the mindset I have needed to employ to square myself to anything--even to my most ardent materialist musings.
Third, we are presented in the scriptures with statements that are not comprehensive or explicitly defined--all the more so when the case is one of a described participant. When Eve says of the birth of Cain, "I have gotten a man from the Lord," we will never know precisely what she meant--nor what she understood about the process. Of course, in nearly the same reader's-moment we come to understand what tragedy that birth portends for her.
On the other hand, we come to understand that Abel's death, after his manner of life, places him in paradise--while yet his murderer Cain is afforded the opportunity for repentance. While yet on Earth, Cain is punished most horribly--or is he? Cain marrying, building a city, becoming a father--all the while protected from retribution by the hand of God? If indeed Cain died unrepentant and unreformed, might it not be said that the wrathful Old Testament God punished him too little rather than too much?
Indeed, a pattern seems to present itself. Just what kind of "punishments" are these handed out by God? Cain, sentenced to be a vagabond upon the earth, becomes nothing of the sort. Eve, of the greater pains in childbirth, exclaims how God has aided her through it. Adam, sentenced to hard and bitterly unfruitful labor, finds sustenance for centuries, and if the ancient patriarchy pattern held for him, he spent more of his life sweating over his bed than over his crops. And weren't they supposed to die, who ate of the tree?
Jesus provides an explanation for this, and it is inherent in Jesus' casual use of the concept "death." Within this framework, as I described it above, both the First Couple and their murderous first son died. They were each thrust from the moral scenario they knew into an apparently--and therefore emotionally--more challenging one. This is the punishment, but the lively and individualized nature of it does not sit well with Christianity, which is why the denominations have a morally pornographic view of the pre-Flood generations, when Jesus sees just . . . people.
The pre-Flood people, the widow with few coins of Jesus' telling, the Herod of John's murder--all of these exist within a moral landscape, and all of them might be confronted by the prospect or the reality of a still more forbidding landscape. All of them might be expected to resist demoralization as they experience death after death--loss after loss of the things to which they have attached themselves.
This at last is the landscape of the kingdom of God. Reality (whatever that might ultimately be) is (for want of a better expression) suspended upon dimensions that will ever escape us. Within this dimension-less and proportion-free realm, we can exert hope, trust, and joy in examining unsparingly whatever is before us--little we might know of it, this is the kingdom of God, where we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Alternatively, there are the horror-shadows toward which we stumble when we exude despair, suspicion, and sadness. We may think of ourselves as being bravely critical, but we never knew motivation at all except in lighter moments, and if we do not determine that hope will abide while despair diminishes, then we will ever drag into those shadows with us the corpses of our myriad necessary deaths.
In the more mundane stretches between those two alternatives, we live. Mixtures of hope and despair, trust and suspicion, joy and sadness, our lives--our-self created worlds--are collages of sensation and impression embedded in useful fantasies, just as our hopelessly overburdened nervous systems crudely fill in the edges of our visual fields, and our brains detect patterns that aren't there.
Eden wasn't perfect. Outside were an infinitude of other Edens, and we wander through them still. The kingdom of God, however, is always at hand.
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