Category: Apologetics

Yesterday we noted that there is more than one way that the word “eternal” is used.

For example, sometimes it is used to mean everlasting (being inside time  but having no end, beginning, or both), and sometimes it is used to mean atemporal (beyond or outside time).

We saw that God is eternal in the second sense. He is completely beyond time.

But what about us?

Specifically: What about us when we die? Do we journey beyond time to be with God in the eternal now outside of time?

You often hear the idea that we do.

This idea seems to be based on reasoning something like this:

1. God is outside of time.
2. God is in heaven.
3. When we die, we go into heaven.
4. Therefore, when we die, we go outside of time.

But we need to be careful here. That’s not a formally valid argument. Consider this parallel:

1. Bob is outside of Scranton.
2. Bob is in ecstasy.
3. When I think about God’s love, I go into ecstasy.
4. Therefore, when I think about God’s love, I go outside of Scranton.

That doesn’t follow at all. I might think about God’s love and go into ecstasy even though I am located in Scranton. (Note: People in Scranton might disagree. I’ll leave that up to them.)

This is also important because the Church does not understand heaven as a physical place up in the clouds where God literally has a throne but as a state of spiritual communion with God and the saints.

Thus John Paul II taught:

In the context of revelation, we know that the “heaven” or “happiness” in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity [General Audience of July 21, 1999].

And the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:

1024 This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity – this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed – is called “heaven.” Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.

1025 To live in heaven is “to be with Christ.” The elect live “in Christ,” but they retain, or rather find, their true identity, their own name.

For life is to be with Christ; where Christ is, there is life, there is the kingdom.

1026 By his death and Resurrection, Jesus Christ has “opened” heaven to us. The life of the blessed consists in the full and perfect possession of the fruits of the redemption accomplished by Christ. He makes partners in his heavenly glorification those who have believed in him and remained faithful to his will. Heaven is the blessed community of all who are perfectly incorporated into Christ.

So the Church understands heaven in terms of a relationship with the Holy Trinity and the community of the blessed incorporated into Christ rather than a physical place.

But if I can be the state of heaven by virtue of being definitively happy due to communion with God and his saints, without it implying that I am in a particular physical place then I could similarly be in that state without implying that I am inside time or outside of time.

In other words: Whether you are “in heaven” tells you about your spiritual state (definitively happy, in communion with God and the saints) but does not tell you about where or if you are located in space and time.

The argument above, thus, does not work–despite its superficial plausibility–just as being “in ecstasy” does not tell you anything about whether you are also “in Scranton.”

If this argument does not work, does Catholic theology have anything to say about whether we leave time upon our death?

It does.

Tune in tomorrow.

We often here that God is eternal, but the word “eternal” can mean more than one thing.

On the one hand, it can mean everlasting–that is, something that endures through successive moments of time with either no beginning, no end, or both.

On the other hand, it can also mean atemporal–beyond or outside of time.

Catholic teaching holds that God is eternal in the second sense, but where could you go to show that?

You could quote from Aquinas on this point, but while Aquinas is very respected, including by the Magisterium, he is not himself an agent of the Magisterium.

But here is a passage which, because it is from one of John Paul II’s general audiences, is an exercise of the Church’s Magisterium:

These facts of revelation also express the rational conviction to which one comes when one considers that God is the subsisting Being, and therefore necessary, and therefore eternal.

Because he cannot not be, he cannot have beginning or end nor a succession of moments in the only and infinite act of his existence.

Right reason and revelation wonderfully converge on this point.

Being God, absolute fullness of being, (ipsum Esse subsistens), his eternity “inscribed in the terminology of being” must be understood as the “indivisible, perfect, and simultaneous possession of an unending life,” and therefore as the attribute of being absolutely “beyond time” [General Audience of Sept. 4, 1985].

So: “his eternity . . . must be understood as . . . being absolutely ‘beyond time.'”

Also note that the definition of eternity offered here the “indivisible, perfect, and simultaneous possession of an unending life,” is the classical definition proposed by the Christian philosopher Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, around the year A.D. 524:

It is the common judgement, then, of all creatures that live by reason that God is eternal. So let us consider the nature of eternity, for this will make clear to us both the nature of God and his manner of knowing. Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time.

…for it is one thing to progress like the world in Plato’s theory through everlasting life, and another thing to have embraced the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present. (Boethius Consolation, V.VI.) [MORE.]

Our Protestant brethren are sometimes critical of the Catholic priesthood, pointing to passages in the New Testament that describe Christians in general as a “royal priesthood” or “a kingdom of priests.”

This leads to the concept frequently referred to in Protestant circles as “the priesthood of all believers.”

What is often unrecognized is that the relevant New Testament passages are quotations from Old Testament passages that refer to the Israelites in just the same way.

So if in the Old Testament there was a “priesthood of all Israelites” alongside a ministerial priesthood possessed by only some Israelites then in the New Testament there can be a “common priesthood” (to use a Catholic term for it) that exists alongside the ministerial priesthood exercised by Christ’s ordained ministers.

For it’s part, the Catholic Church acknowledges the universal priesthood of all Christians.

For example, in one of his general audiences, Pope John Paul II commented on one of the universal priesthood passages in the book of Revelation and remarked:

As [the Lamb] has been “slain”, he is able to “ransom” (ibid.) men and women coming from the most varied origins.

The Greek word used does not explicitly refer us to the history of the Exodus, where “ransoming” the Israelites is never spoken of; however, the continuation of the phrase makes a clear reference to the well-known promise made by God to the Israelites of Sinai: “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19: 6).

This promise has now become a reality: the Lamb has truly established for God “a kingdom and priests… who shall reign on earth” (cf. Rv 5: 10).

The door of this kingdom is open to all humanity, called to form the community of the children of God, as St Peter reminds us: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God”s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (I Pt 2: 9).

The Second Vatican Council explicitly refers to these texts of the First Letter of Peter and of the Book of Revelation when, referring to the “common priesthood” that belongs to all the faithful, it points out the components to enable them to carry it out.

“The faithful indeed, by virtue of their royal priesthood, participate in the offering of the Eucharist. They exercise that priesthood, too, by the reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving, the witness of a holy life, abnegation and active charity (Lumen Gentium, n. 10) [General Audience of Nov. 3, 2004].

So it isn’t a question of whether there is a common priesthood shared by all Christians.

There is.

The question is whether the existence of this priesthood excludes another, ministerial priesthood.

As shown by the parallel Old Testament priesthoods, it doesn’t.