Ah ... um ... I have said rather a lot on that. If you want more, be prepared to hear feet walking away and doors slamming shut ...
I'll give you my speculation in a nutshell – that the human is a being with a foot in two worlds, as it were, the spiritual and the material.
It's a common distinction, and many view it is either/or, whereas I tend to a view of and/and ... based on Biblical reasoning.
Take, for example, the miracle of Christ restoring sight to the blind. Some view it as just that – a man was blind, and now he can see.
Some view it as an analogy – we're talking 'spiritual blindness' and Jesus opened his 'inner eye' or what have you.
My take is that the man was born blind, and had his sight restored (as was the cripple healed, the woman with an issue of blood, etc.) All these were physical miracles, but they were not just gratuitous displays of power – that carried a spiritual dimension – but that does not invalidate the physical actuality.
As above, so below – but if a miracle only takes place in the spiritual realm, as it were, it has no effect 'here', although here might incidentally benefit.
I do not hold with the soul trapped, imprisoned, or in some other way 'stuck here', nor to the idea that something that God created is simply a waiting-room or school on the way to somewhere better.
In short, I believe in the world, and our place in the world, in the here-and-now, and that's where our efforts should be contemplated, not in some flight of 'the alone to the alone'.
I do accept the idea that reality is a matter of degree. Ultimately, only God is real. The spiritual domain is, in a sense, more real than the material, and the body is the form of the soul by which the soul is present in the world – without a body, the soul is ineffective here – so I don't see creation as the body kicking a ball against the wall while the soul gets its act together ...
The Incarnation is the actualisation of that Divine Principle, that of 'all-in-all' – that God is Lord of Everything.
... the certainty of eternal conscious torment prevented only by a strong belief that Jesus death on the cross will in some unclear fashion rescue you from that unimaginable fate. If and only if you believe it and believe a few other things. That there was no hope of being saved from that fate any other way. And that somehow people go to their fate right after they die. And there's no fix to it once they die. Being a "good person" or "law abiding" or "kind" or "loving" plays no role in your salvation.
A lot of questions!
I do not believe in an 'eternal hell' because I can't see any virtue of suffering for its own sake, nor the idea that Infinite Love cannot come up with a better solution than that.
(Hell, I speculate, is conditional, not eternal, and might very well be empty – but nevertheless a metaphysical reality – if we are indeed free, that that one ontological freedom is to reject God.)
But someone's sexual orientation can get in their way of salvation despite anything else.
A whole can of worms, and something patriarchal outfits spend far too much time dwelling on ...
www.jewishvoice.org
templeinstitute.org
