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The same is true of the Sabbath as well.
I agree that this is not a good time to misuse these trends, but what an opportunity it might be to share something of these wonderful doctrines. If we shared them as a gift which we are intimately familiar with, I think we can do great good.
It seems that for years Adventist have argued the "state of the dead" but without doing much on what this means for how we understand life, salvation and how we care for others and our world. Instead we have borrowed the same shallow view of salvation—that it's all about "getting to heaven when we die" or at the "end"—that is assumed by most of Christianity.
We need to do better, to think deeper, to imagine and re-imagine—and theologians like NT Wright must challenge us to do that.
He is bright, can turn a great phrase and hsa a lively mind. He is said to be the most formidable Jesus scholar alive today, and it was he who coined the phrase 'The Third Quest'. Somewhere or other, in the back of my mind, I think I remember he has some rather unusual things to say about Paul as well. However, I still need to get there . . .
I was brought up believing that the dead know nothing and that all await a successful resurrection at the 2nd coming, or an unsuccessful one at Christs' third coming after the 1,000 years are over.
That was all very fine until I lost a friend 20 years ago who died of AIDS. He was not religious and may have been an atheist. He was the first friend or acquintance of mine that died of this dread disease. He died young, about 28.
For me at any rate, I couldn't accept the fact that he was in the ground hoping against hope to be resurrected at the second coming. It was healthier psychologically, at least for me, to think him in a positive afterlife where he was happy and conscious and free from the pain and disease that had killed him.
Lately, I've been focusing on those ambiguous texts that Paul drops casually, and not on dire and dismal texts from Ecclesiates about the dead not knowing anything.
Why anyone, no disprespect intended, would hunger for texts from what is otherwise a pretty dismal book, Ecclesiastes. Sorry Lord, but that is one pesimistic book to read and gain positive emotions from.
How much better to focus on this text, "... neither life nor death can separate me from the love of Christ."
We should be wary of protecting our feelings of loss rather than surrendering them to the Lord of all truth, who has promised to resurrect those who died in Him.
Bottom line is, the belief in the immortality of the soul has caused more confusion about the loving character of God than helped; besides negating the truth of the resurrection.
From the Greek, Luke 23:43: καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ ἀμήν σοι λέγω σήμερον μετ' ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ"
No punctuation in the Greek would lead to all kinds of possibilities in the English but Jesus' theology would have to come in play and he considered the dead to be sleeping, not in Paradise... anyway, that's yesterday's news...
It's also interesting to note that a Vatican greek MS of Luke 23:43 has a comma after the word TODAY since the 4th century!
The Curetonian Syriac (fifth century C.E.) renders Luke 23:43: "Amen, I say to thee to-day that with me thou shalt be in the Garden of
Eden.'"--F. C. Burkitt, "The Curetonian Version of the Four Gospels," Vol. I, Cambridge, 1904.
Death is an enemy (rev. 20:14), not a friend and it will be the last enemy to be destroyed. I can't imagine something that takes me to paradise to be "forever with the Lord" as an enemy.
This positive view of death has also given birth to a brand of Evolutionist Adventists, those who accept the untenable theory that death occurred for millions of years and was ultimately not a result of sin but rather God's chosen process to create.
to marty's point, ched myers does what i've found to be the most gracious and challenging work on the sabbath in his teaching of sabbath economics. without it the meaning of sabbath is lost on me--all about winning points with GOD & self-interest--but with it, sabbath becomes a most beautiful thing.
and andre, though i will never speak ill of you because we are kindred in our support for Obama, i don't know who evolutionist adventists are, but i might be one of them (if i deserve the right to be called adventist anymore). DEATH (the enemy), as in separation from GOD, is a sheer different thing than what we also refer to as death (decomposition) in the natural life cycle. and to reference john polkinghorne (a physicist and a priest) whom wright quotes in the time article, polkinghorne suggests (and for reasons, i won't go into here, that aren't easily dismissed out of hand)that perhaps GOD did a more clever thing in creating the world than traditional creationism might demand. perhaps that thing makes evolution not the anti-thesis of creation, but the explanation of creation's process. instead of creating a static world that just is (for eternity) exactly the way GOD made it or one that is deteriorating from a platonic "fall" from grace, polkinghorne suggests that perhaps GOD created a world clever enough to participate in continuing to create and recreating itself. given a chance, this would affirm the teachings of new testament quite nicely.