(January 3, 2019 at 3:42 am)Nihilist Virus Wrote: It's in the OP. At the bottom. I also quote the author of John and the author of Revelation.
Quote:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Right. Eternal life is a part of most Christian belief.
Quote:35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.
According to most Christian dogma, our current body must die. Then the soul we have now (the form of the body) is transferred into a different kind of matter. What this matter is is not clear -- something magical. This is in keeping with both Paul and Aquinas.
Quote:21 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”[a] for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
Interpretation of this varies among Christians. The newer type of uneducated believers take Revelation literally. More educated Christians have long known that John is writing in symbols from the Old Testament about the political struggles of the Christians in his own time. In that case, a new world could indicate a society that operates under Christian principles.
Even if you want to take it literally, interpretation varies. Some have theorized that all of the material world will be redeemed, or in the lingo, "made new." Others with a more gnostic bent think that matter is bad, and want a different type of world made of unfallen elements, as they say will happen with the body.
But I'm not sure yet whether this sentence in John refers to Christian after-death heaven, or just sky. The word in the original, οὐρανὸν, means both. Does anybody have solid philological evidence to read it one way or the other?
