Howdy folks and welcome to the show. I have three pieces of good news. The first piece of good news is that we have raised the money needed to go ahead and pursue the 2012 Transcript project, so the next 52 episodes of the podcast are going to be transcribed.
Something to be aware of is that, because of my schedule, I’m not able to record a podcast every single week. Even though we raised the money with the idea of it being a year of podcasts, it may actually stretch out a bit longer than that. But my commitment is that it’s going to be a full 52 episodes.
So the next 52 episodes of the podcast that I produce (this is just my podcast, not appearances on other people’s show because I’m not the rights holder for that) are going to be transcribed!
Here’s piece of information number 2. I have done a not great leap forward but a significant leap forward in that I am now producing the show a week ahead of time. What that will allow me to do is have the transcripts available the SAME day that the show is released.
You won’t have to wait a week after an episode comes out in order to be able to read the transcript or quote from it to someone on Facebook or by email. It’s going to be available right there, same day.
In the same blog post there’ll be a place where you can just click to read the transcript, and it’ll all be right there for you at the same time the podcast comes out.
That is something I wanted to do for people to make easier to use the transcripts, and that’s what’s going to happen–at least, most weeks. There may be an occasional time that I need to deal with something that is so time-sensitive that I can’t produce the episode a week in advance, in which case the transcript will be made available as soon as I can have it. But for ordinary episodes, it’s going to be same-day access.
The third piece of news I have is that, at the time of this recording, we haven’t raised quite the amount I’d hoped for in order to enable the transcription of all the back episodes–the first 32 episodes. But we’re so close that I’m able to go ahead and do it anyway.
So the third piece of good news is that we’re going to have all of the back episodes transcribed as well!
I want to thank everybody who participated, who was able to support financially, and even people who weren’t able to support financially, I appreciate you prayers, your concern, and your suggestions. It was a team effort and we’ve been able to do what we needed, so here come the transcripts!
And…here come the questions!
1. The Gates of Heaven & The Gates of Hell
“Hey Jimmy, this is Tom in Wisconsin calling. My high-school daughter had a question and that is, if the gates of heaven were opened on Easter Sunday or thereabouts, when was the gates of hell opened?
“Were they open from the beginning of time or were they opened from the time we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden or were they opened only on Easter Sunday at the same time the gates of heaven were opened? Thanks and have a great week.”
It’s interesting that both heaven and hell are depicted in Scripture as having ‘gates’. That’s kind of an interesting phenomenon.
We read explicitly about the gates of heaven in Revelation 21, where the eternal order for the blessed is depicted as residents of the city of New Jerusalem. Beginning with verse 12, we have a description of what the New Jerusalem is like, and John writes that
[12] It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed;
[13] on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.
[16] The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its breadth; and he [meaning the angel John is watching] measured the city with his rod, twelve thousand stadia; its length and breadth and height are equal.
[17] He also measured its wall, a hundred and forty-four cubits by a man’s measure, that is, an angels’ measure.
[21] And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, transparent as glass.
I’ve left out some details, and those are some highlights. It actually goes on quite a bit longer, with a lot more details about the city and how marvelous it is.
This is the passage from which, in English, we get the phrase “pearly gates.” That’s why we talk about the gates of heaven as “the pearly gates,” because in Revelation, John sees that each of the 12 gates of the New Jerusalem is made of a gigantic, single pearl.
That’s not meant to be taken literally. There’s not going to be some even more massive set of oysters out there producing pearls this big. But the imagery that John gives about the New Jerusalem is meant to convey the incomparable glory of the union of the blessed with God.
It pictures that union as a city. That city is located on the new earth, and in the eternal order of heaven and earth are depicted as being ‘one again’. The dwelling of God is with men.
An interesting thing about this city is that John says that it has a high wall, which is 144 cubits high. A cubit is the length of a man’s arm between his elbow and his little finger (or whatever), and it’s about 18 inches long. So 144 cubits, if you were to take that literally, would be about, a little over 200 feet tall.
That’s quite an impressive wall, especially for the ancient world, but it’s not meant to be taken literally. The number is a symbolic one. It’s 12 x 12, and we know the number twelve is extremely significant in terms of symbolism in the, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Another way we know that it’s not meant to be taken literally is that he says the height of the city is the same as its breadth and its width. He’s says that measure is 12,000 stadia. Now a stadium (and, incidentally, this is where we get our modern word “stadium”) in the ancient world was a measure of distance.
It could be different lengths, but it was 600 or 700 feet long, basically. If you do the math, you find out that 12,000 stadia are about 1,400 miles. 1,400 miles is an enormous distance, and it would very unusual to have a city that is a square 1,400 miles long and 1,400 miles wide. It would be even more unexpected to have it be 1,400 miles tall.
The impression that we’re given is that the New Jerusalem is a giant cube made out of gold. Incidentally, it also says that not just is the street made of gold that’s transparent like glass (which of course, regular gold isn’t), but the buildings of the city also appear to be made out of the same transparent gold.
It’s like a giant, glistening cube, which is 1,400 miles tall yet only has a wall that’s a little more than 200 feet tall. This strongly suggests that these numbers are not meant to be taken literally, that they are just meant to convey the impression of how grand and glorious this city is.
We have the eternal order; we have heaven depicted as if it’s a city, and like any city in John’s day, it has gates. We’ll get into why cities in John’s day had gates.
Hell is also depicted as having gates and we see that Matthew 16:18
[18] And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.
Now, you may not see exactly that phrase in your Bible. For example, in the revised, standard version, Catholic edition, it doesn’t say the gates of hell; it says the “powers of death”. That’s a paraphrase, literally what it is says, in Greek, is “the gates of hell”. We need to be careful about the particular word that is translated as hell; it is not the word that refers to the place where the damned are. There is a word for that that Jesus uses in the Gospels. The word for that is gehenna.
Another time we can talk about where the word gehenna comes from.
Normally, when you are reading in Scripture, most of the time, the word hell doesn’t refer to the place of the dammed specifically. Instead, it is a word that refers to the place of the dead in general.
This is something we’ve talked about on previous podcasts where we’ve talked about what it means when the Creed says that Jesus descended into hell. Doesn’t mean he went tot he place of the dammed, it does mean he went to the place of the dead, that’s the place word that’s being used here.
In Greek, the word is hades, which we get hades from in English. The Hebrew equivalent, which you may also be familiar with is the word sh’ol, you sometimes hear it pronounced SHEE-ol, but that’s not accurate. It’s sh’OL.
The Aramaic word is basically the same, it’s pronounced a little bit differently than the Hebrew word. This set of terms, is used just as a general reference to the place of the dead, both good and bad.
Why would Jesus depict this place as having gates? Today, what we think of gates as varies; there are some things that in the ancient world, they would never have dreamed of. Like the gates at an airport, but we tend of gates a little differently in other ways than they would have in the ancient world.
Today, if you are from the country, you might think of gates is a gate in a fence, that’s used to separate different fields from each other or the road. On my family’s ranch in east Texas, that’s the kind of gate you encounter, you get a lot of those.
If you’re a city dweller, you’re more likely to think of buildings as having gates such as government buildings where you have to pass through security checkpoints and there might be a gate there.
If not there, you may think of a building like a castle having a gate. But in the ancient world, they thought, certainly would have thought of fields as having gates, but they would think first of cities as having gates.
Any town of size, anything big enough to be called a city would have gates. The reason for that was defensive. In the ancient world, they had lots and lots of wars, tons of them, all the time, happening all the time, not as big as our wars today, but lots.
In fact, if you read in the Old Testament, there are references to the time of year when kings go off to war. That’s because of weather conditions. There were certain times of year that were not advisable to mount an attack, and there were other times that favorable for that.
We have that even today, you know when you know an attack is being planned by one country on another, they figure out when the weather is going to favor the attack. That was certainly true in the ancient world. The thing is that they had wars so often that it was a regular thing to refer to the time when kings go off to war. People would know when that was, because it happened so often.
In fact, warfare was one of the major duties of ancient duties of ancient kings because resources were scarce and you needed to obtain resources you needed to go beat up some other people and take their resources. Or you need to conquer territory or get tribute or whatever it was, there were lots of reasons but basically there was lots of warfare.
This is something fortunately; we are much freer of despite all the talk that you hear about the horrors of war today. Of course, war is horrible, in fact, as they say ‘war is hell’. We’re very fortunate today in that we don’t have nearly as many wars and the chances of dying in a war are vastly lower than they were in the past.
As the world economy has improved, as our technology has improved, as our social organization has improved, our condition has improved so that people are much less likely to want to go to war especially in the developed world. Due to the combination of factors, we are very blessed that we don’t have that any more on the same scale.
Now, one of the things that has happened in our day is that we have developed good-ranged weapons, so you don’t have to kill someone with a sword, there are lots of better to do it if you are in a war.
For example, if you wanted to take a city, you could use something like air power to drop bombs on it and once you have airpower like that, the kind of fortifications that they had in the ancient world, that they kept even much later in history, where you had walled cities, they don’t make sense anymore.
We don’t have walled cities today it’s not worth it given the decline in warfare overall, the amount of resources that would have to go into building walls and all the associated logistically issues that they would create. It’s not worth it for us to have walls around cities, but back then, given the frequency of warfare and the technology of warfare that they had, having walls made a lot of sense.
Walls were for protection, to keep the people in the cities safe. Of course, you need to be able to get in and out of the city, so you need gates. What would happen is that during the night the gates would be closed, people would be, hopefully, safe and snug inside the city, you’d have a few guys on the walls as watchmen, but even if an attack came at night, the gates would be closed and the attackers would be at a disadvantage.
If you saw an attack being mounted in the day, the solution would be the same, to close the gates, have everyone hole-up in the city and defend the city from the walls. There would be various measures opponents would use to try to get inside the walls, for example, one thing we’re all familiar with is the battering ram. A battering ram is a big, long pole, a big log usually, that attackers used to try and batter open the gates.
In Roman warfare, they actually had a metallic ram’s head that they put on the front of the battering ram, presumably to keep the log from splintering. This was, presumably, an imitation that actual rams batter each other in mating season and they start having dominance competitions for females, they’ll bash their heads against each other. The Romans saw that and said lets us that as a design to put on our battering ram. That’s where we get the term ‘battering ram’.
There’s an interesting passage in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, as he describing the Roman war against Israel, against the Jews. In the AD 60’s, that he was a participant and a witness of, where he’s talking about the use of the battering ram. He actually explained what it is and how it has this metal ram’s head on it and what the Romans used it for.
It’s somewhat interesting to know where that comes from. Gates were on cities for purposes of defense. In the case of the New Jerusalem gates that it had, what’s meant to be depicted here is the final glory-after all the accounts have been settled, all of the wicked have been dealt with, the righteous are dwelling with God forever in peace and tranquility with every tear wiped away and there’s no more sorrow or crying. Presumably, the reason we see gates on this city is because every city had gates.
In describing this ideal, celestial city, that’s what we get in this description. It’s just par for the course, it’s not as if you’d really, after the eternal order, have people attacking the heavenly city. The battles all ready been won at this point and the gates wouldn’t be needed from that perspective.
Presumably, they are part of the vision of Revelation simply because it’s a standard feature of cities at that time. In the case of Jesus’ reference to the gates of hell though, there does seem to be a conflict because what he says in Matthew 16:
[18] And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock, I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it.
So what he’s doing is depicting is a conflict (hell or hades, the place of the dead or death) as if it’s a city and he’s depicting a conflict between his church and this city. There is a question to ask at this point and that is; what’s the nature of this conflict or which side of the gate is the church on? Is the church outside the gates and attacking the city of death, or is the church inside the city and trying to get out?
You could have both, the church conceived of as being on the outside trying to batter open the gates in order to liberate the righteous dead that are inside the city. That may very well be what’s going on in this passage. In any event, you have some kind of conflict depictured between the church and the city of death. Which is why the Revised Standard Version (Catholic and other editions), has the ‘powers of death’ instead of ‘the gates of hades’.
At a minimum, the passage shows us that death will never conquer the church. It could mean more things than that. The church is never going to be conquered by death so the church is going to continue to exist until Christ returns. It may have ups and downs, but it’s still going to be there.
The gates of death will not prevail against it in that sense; it won’t ever swallow the church. It could also have additional layers of meaning about the victory of the church over the forces of death, both physical and spiritual.
What does it mean to say the gates of death are open? That’s our original question. Were the gates of death or hell opened at the beginning of time, at the time of the Fall, at Easter Sunday, when were they open?
This is, as we’ve noted, metaphorical, death is not a real city, it doesn’t have real city walls, it doesn’t have real gates, but this image can be used to communicate actual truths, which is why Jesus is using it in the first place.
If you want to talk about when the gates of hades were opened, then there are some options. It depends upon the way in which you are understanding or using the symbol of the gates of hell. If you are using it as a reference to people dying, so the image is of people entering the city hades (the way people ordinarily enter a city; when they open the doors in the morning so that people can come in and out and do their trade), in that sense, I suppose, you could say that the gates of hell were opened at the time of the fall.
That’s when human death entered the world. It would appear from the archeological record, the Paleontological record I should say, that there was death even before human death entered the world. Consequently, you could say that if you want to extend the concept of death to non-humans, then you could say then from the beginning of time or at least from life in the universe.
That doesn’t really seem to be what’s behind the Biblical image. When the Biblical writers talk about hades, they aren’t thinking of the place that all living things go. They’re thinking of the place that dead humans go. Since human death entered the world with the fall, one would say, ok, you could then conceive of that being the point at which the city of death was opened for business.
If you conceive of the opening of the gates differently for example, if you suppose that when we have the image of warfare between the church and the city of hades as being a war of liberation, you then have the forces of light breaking open the city gates in order to liberate those inside so they now could move to the heavenly city.
The gates of hell were opened Easter Sundayish, in conjunction with that same complex of events, where Christ has died for our sins, he goes to hell and preaches to the dead to announce the redemption is accomplished. That people can now go with him so they will have access to heavenly glory and will be able to enter the heavenly city at that point so that the gates of heaven are opened in our modern image.
Those are a couple of ways you could understand the opening of the gates of hell.
There are other possible ways you could understand too, anytime that hell would have a distinct advance in it’s program or death would have a distinct advance in it’s program, could be conceived of as an opening of the gates in that sense.
Anytime that hell or death has a distinct lose in its program would be a time that you could consider the gates as being opened in that liberational sense. So it seems to me that there are some options here. It depends on how you want to use the image.
The way Jesus uses the image in Matthew 16:18 is something that scholars have talked a lot about but he doesn’t engage the issue directly so it doesn’t establish a single, fixed way of conceiving how the gates operate.
That’s something that if you used the concept one-way, it’s going to point to one answer, if you use it another way, it’s going to point to a different answer.
2. Evangelizing Muslims
“Hi, I’m Sue from Buffalo. My daughter is attending a university and is dating a Muslim man right now. She’s devout Roman Catholic and he’s so-so in his faith but he’s searching, searching for the truth faith. He goes to Friday night prayers with his faith then he goes to Sunday mass with her. He has said to her not to take his faith lightly but if she could convince him that Catholism was the true faith, he would join. Could you point us in the direction, whether it’s books or videos or however we could show him that the Roman Catholic faith is the one to chose. Thanks very much.”
I sympathize with Sue’s situation; it’s one that can be confusing and difficult. Anytime there is dating outside your faith, even another Christian group, there is reason for concern and can be complex.
I’m glad to hear that the gentleman is open to having evidence for the Christian faith and the Catholic faith presented. I also recognize the difficulties of the situation in particular, unless he were to become Christian, I could not recommend that your daughter marry him.
There are several reasons that marriages between Christians and non-Christians are much more problematic than marriages between two Christians of different confessional affiliations. A Catholic-Protestant marriage is typically much easier than a Catholic marrying a non-Christian.
In the case of Islam, there are some particular concerns. I don’t know this gentleman or his background, he may be very Americanized, he could be from a secular Muslim family, although the fact that he goes to regular Friday prayers doesn’t suggest he’s secularized, it suggests that he has a degree of attachment to his faith that’s significant and could grow in the future.
That could be problematic for your daughter should marry him if he were not a Catholic, because the Muslim view of women in particular is quite different that the Christian view. It is something that could cause additional problems; it could also be significant problem with how the children are raised. I don’t know the personalities involved and I don’t know their specific backgrounds involved, there are definite reasons for caution here.
To deal with the present situation though, I can offer some thoughts. The first one is that the general strategy I would take in approaching the gentlemen is two-fold. I would educate myself about Islam so that I could understand the religion and the kinds of issues that come up and have basic ideas about how to interact with different questions that may arise. That’s prong number one of the approach is to educate yourself.
Prong number two is offer him evidence for the truth of the Christian faith and respond to questions he has as they come up (Beginning Apologetics 9: How to Answer Muslims (oversized booklet, http://www.Catholic.com). Because if he pursues this open-mindedly and starts to respond to some of the things he’s reading, that’s a normal part of the conversion process.
In offering him evidence, it is often good to do this in a way isn’t just conversational. Because when people are in direct conversational situations, they can feel somewhat threatened and defensive. As a result, the best evangelisation happens when you’re not having a one-on-one conversation.
Because when you’re in that situation, it’s too intense emotionally and the emotional factor starts to affect the dynamics of the situation. It can be more successful if someone is given something they can read, watch, or listen to and experience without you being there staring at them watching their every reaction. It takes some of the pressure off so they can consider things in a calmer way and take their time to review and formulate their thoughts.
I would suggest using materials in this way and keep having conversations especially offering to answer questions and so forth, but in terms of offering a basic presentation of the Christian faith, specifically the Catholic faith, as to why he should be Christian. That’s something I would make use of resources that he can read, watch, or listen to on his own.
What I’m going to do is offer a number of different resources that can be useful for educating yourself and your daughter, and for providing him with stuff to think about becoming Christian.
One thing I can recommend is a booklet produced by Catholic Answers that you can get at http://www.Catholic.com called Islam: A Catholic Perspective. As the title suggests, it’s a booklet that is primarily designed to be read by Catholics to help them understand both the basics of Islam and what the church teaches about it. It has some pointers about evangelizing Muslims, not primarily to be read by Muslims.
Another work that’s carried by Catholic Answers is a magazine-sized publication called Beginning Apologetics 9: How to Answer Muslims. This work is one that is more oriented towards ‘here’s evidence’ and as the title suggests, it’s primarily to be read by Catholics but provides how to answer Muslims. It provides the kind of information that one might find useful in discussions on particular points that may come up.
There are many other resources at Catholic.com that you should check out. If you type Islam in the search field, you’ll come up with a bunch of articles and radio shows that you can read or listen to free.
There are some other things I can recommend, one is a book called Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics by Daniel Ali and Robert Spencer, Ascension Press. Daniel Ali is a convert, he is of Kurdish origin, become Catholic and done a number of works with different people. This one is with Robert Spencer, a frequent writer about Islam.
Another book to check out is called The Bible and the Qur’an by Jacques Jomier, Ignatius Press.
There are a whole series of resources produced by Fr. Mitch Pacwa; Islam and Christianity, which you can obtain through his production house http://www.ignatiusproductions.com. He has CD’s and DVD’s that he’s produced in conjunction with Daniel Ali and I recommend anything Fr. Pacwa does, he is very, very good on this subject. He’s very much in touch with Middle Eastern and Muslim culture and very knowledgeable, very orthodox and I just can’t say enough in praise of him on this subject. So go for it.
I also mention a couple of resources that come from a non-Catholic perspective that you might want to look at. One is a book called Answering Islam by Norman Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, http://www.Answering-Islam.org. Norman Geisler is a Protestant Apologist, Abdul Saleeb is a convert from Islam to Protestantism, and they wrote a book that has some valuable information in it that you will need to use critical thinking as you approach the book.
There will be some points of difference because as Protestants they don’t share the Catholic Church’s understanding of Islam on all points. One point in particular to watch out for is the claim that Muslims worship a different God. I don’t recall what they say about it in their book, but one of the things that are very common in Protestant literature about Islam is an attempt to radically contrast ‘the God of Islam’ with the True God.
The Catholic Church has a more nuance understanding that while Muslims do not have a full understanding of God and their understanding of God is erroneous on some points, nevertheless, they do recognize and worship the Creator, although their understanding of him is distorted.
Another similar resource is a website http://www.Answering-Islam.org. It too comes from a Protestant prospective and so you’ll need to use critical thinking, which you should use all the time anyway but be on guard.
I definitely recommend you get some grounding on a Catholic perspective on Islam like the booklet Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics by Daniel Ali and Robert Spencer first so you can sort through any problematic material you encounter in non-Catholic resources, which can otherwise be helpful.
The resources I’ve mentioned up to now have all been ones that deal specifically with Islam, that’s not the kind of material I would actually present initially to the gentleman in question. Instead, rather than presenting him with something, by the way the vast majority of that information is designed for in-house use by Catholics or Protestants, it’s not designed to be handed directly to a Muslim.
What I would do instead is offer the gentleman one of a couple things, one of them is a book that came out a number of years ago called The Handbook of Catholic Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Fr. Ronald Tacelli, Ignatius Press. It’s very good, it has a lot of information in it and provides a basic argument for the Christian faith and that would be useful for the gentleman because that’s apparently what he has asked for; evidence why Christianity is true.
It doesn’t focus directly; it may mention it in passing, trying to tear Islam down. By offering him something like this, you get a chance for him to see and evaluate a positive case for Christianity without the defensive reaction of having your own faith directly attacked.
Eventually there has to be an evaluation on his part, of Islam’s’ merits in contrast to Christianity’s. But that evaluation may go better if he’s making it after he’s had a chance to see and feel the evidence for Christianity while not feeling under direct attack.
Often times a positive approach, in evangelization, where you say, ‘here’s why you should believe the truth of the Gospel’ rather than ‘here’s why your family and ancestors are wrong’, is going to produce results that are more positive.
I would suggest that as a positive resource that doesn’t focus on Islam in particular but does focus on presenting the evidence for the Catholic faith.
Another resource that is popular right now is a DVD set by Fr. Robert Barron called Catholicism. This is something you might want to get to enjoy for yourselves, once you’ve seen it, you might say, “hey we were watching this and it makes the case for Catholicism really well, why don’t we loan you the DVD’s”.
Then he can watch them, come back and tell you what he thought of them and he can ask questions, whether he’s read the book Catholic Apologetics or watched the DVD’s of Catholicism or some other resource. Then you can follow up with questions that came up: what did you think, is there anything you wondered about, is there anything you’d like to find out more about, were there things you found difficult, etc. You can then explore those different things.
In the course of time, he’ll either raise questions directly pertain to Islam that you can help him with or he may get to a point that he’d like to read something that deals with how a Catholic would specifically evaluate Islam. Then you could share with him some of the other resources.
My suspicion, at least if he’s like most folks, is that he’d respond more positively if you lead positive rather than negative and show him evidence for believing in the Gospel before you provide a critique of the faith system that he comes from.
In some cases, a critique is a necessary first step because if someone doesn’t realize that there may be problems and there may be an alternative that is better for them to believe in than what they currently do, then it may be necessary to point out some of the flaws in what they currently believe.
From you said, he’s not at that point. He’s already expressed interest in seeing evidence for Catholicism so that’s what I’d provide him. I’d give him that positive evidence and then deal with the evaluation of Islam after he’s had a chance to absorb and feel the impact of all the evidence for the truth of the Catholic faith, because it really is impressive.
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That’s going to do it for this week folks; I want to thank you very much for listening. I want to thank everyone very especially who helped to donate to support the show and help us produce the transcripts for the coming 52 episodes as well as all the previous ones.
All that information is going to be available now in a whole new format and make the show more useful so that it can bring more benefit to more people. I hope you’ll help me in leveraging that in sharing the transcripts or the audio versions of the show with other people so it can get out there and do more benefit for more people. That’s what it’s all about after all.
You can send me your question, you can email me at JimmyAkinPodcast@gmail.com, or better yet, you can call me on my question line, which is 512-222-3389. That number works anytime and I’m anxious to hear from you.
Until next time, stay well and I’ll talk to you soon.