I understand the softness of categories, and I don’t mind that you would use the available data to not put me in the Christian box. Some things that you don’t see are that I engage in Catholic practices, like going to mass (which is precisely why I canned an earlier draft and I’m writing again now).
If I gave the impression that Jesus is an iteration in general improvement of morality, then I mischaracterized my belief and my community’s: we believe that Jesus is God—whatever that means. I have to add the “whatever that means” because it seems like a doctrine that deliberately confounds logic, like the bit about Buddha here, when paired with Christians’ transcendent notion of God. If we thought of gods as giants who lived on Mt. Olympus, then one of them becoming physical like Zeus-the-swan wouldn’t be a problem, but we go out of our way to describe God as being more like Plato’s Zeus, which is everything that a limited, embodied, human being isn’t. Catholics emphasize saints as evidence of continuing improvement, and the apostles are often portrayed as not understanding what was happening, but Jesus (and Mary) are untouchable.
On the other hand, I look at stories like Matthew 15:27, in which a Canaanite woman appears to teach Jesus about tolerance—at the beginning of the story, it seems like he didn’t know. Most people I talk to say that it was like Socratic questioning—he really did know—but maybe the divine part of him is that he caught on and accepted the correction? While God-as-hypostatic perfection can’t learn and improve (being outside of time), God-as-a-human being can and this is what it looks like? That sort of consideration is in the “whatever that means” phrase I used above.
Okay, now on the point about not mentioning heaven: not many people that I know do. Whereas I had to clarify that we follow the Jesus-is-God doctrine—quite heavily, it’s a frequent topic—I usually only hear about heaven at funerals. While I’m sure that the people around me believe in it as “consciousness does not extinguish at death,” the subject of heaven and hell come with a heavy dose of “this terminology/imagery is metaphorical.” They’d be quick to point out that heaven (and hell) is not a “place” and I think some popes have made comments about hell being a state and not a place. (In particular, I remember one from the 90′s, but that would be a few popes ago.)
You’re right that the 2 Thessalonians letter sounds like demons eating your guts, and anything in the canonical set of books is considered as writing inspired by God (with or without their authors’ understanding)—it doesn’t matter that the writer claims to be Paul and might have not been Paul. (Attributing works to your group’s founder seems to have been more common in the ancient world. I think it’s not controversial that there were three “Isaiahs.”)
Two things about that, though: Catholics don’t put equal weight on everything in the Bible—they’re all above a certain threshold of importance, but not equally important—and there’s no actual fire and brimstone imagery in it, mostly just about being “shut out,” the kind of imagery that Jesus used, for instance, in the wise and foolish virgins parable (Matthew 25). Meanwhile, a lot of material that didn’t make it into the Bible but was influential in the early church did have more viscerally imagined rewards and punishments after death. It was an idea that was in the air at the time in Judaism (except for the Sadducees), and only got a little bit into the canonical Bible.
So, clearly, Catholics would hold that there’s some kind of good and bad afterlife, and most of what I’ve heard has that you’ll either be “with God” or “not,” and not being with God is the bad thing in itself, irrespective of any gut-eating demons. Depictions of heaven and hell like C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce are popular. (Napoleon Bonaparte is all alone in a huge mansion, repeating to himself that it was everyone else’s fault...)
As for “No one comes to the Father except through me,” I had never connected that to the afterlife before; it has always seemed more like a general coming-to-Jesus saying (in life, for the sake of living, not specifically the afterlife).
It is the case (my impression, which would be interesting to verify with a survey because it’s an easy-to-ask question) that Catholics believe that there are non-Christians “with God” after death, i.e. in heaven. Even if they have to weasel out of some suggestively worded biblical passages (e.g. “good people who don’t acknowledge Christ are mystically going to the Father through Jesus”), or not even try to explain it (e.g. “God will figure it out/above my pay grade”), there’s a strong cultural current against making God look mean. Or a trickster, as you said in your original question.
Personally—maybe you’ll consider me even less of a Christian because of this—I don’t see an afterlife as something that happens to us as individuals. When there is talk about what heaven is like—hypostatic union, non-glass darkly—it doesn’t seem like much psychological continuity with one’s living ego. I’m not quite the person who inhabited this body 20 years ago, since my mind has changed a lot and what defines a person apart from their mind? So if we become outside-of-time, in-union-with-God, experiencing reality in a totally different way, how is that even me? Even following standard doctrine, the vision of heaven seems to have been exalted to such a degree that it’s no longer relevant: what I recognize of what I am will die when my body dies, and maybe something mystical that I don’t recognize goes off and does something else. But these are my own private musings (which I might change or maybe feel I have a better understanding of later) and not representative of Catholics or Christians in general.
I understand the softness of categories, and I don’t mind that you would use the available data to not put me in the Christian box. Some things that you don’t see are that I engage in Catholic practices, like going to mass (which is precisely why I canned an earlier draft and I’m writing again now).
If I gave the impression that Jesus is an iteration in general improvement of morality, then I mischaracterized my belief and my community’s: we believe that Jesus is God—whatever that means. I have to add the “whatever that means” because it seems like a doctrine that deliberately confounds logic, like the bit about Buddha here, when paired with Christians’ transcendent notion of God. If we thought of gods as giants who lived on Mt. Olympus, then one of them becoming physical like Zeus-the-swan wouldn’t be a problem, but we go out of our way to describe God as being more like Plato’s Zeus, which is everything that a limited, embodied, human being isn’t. Catholics emphasize saints as evidence of continuing improvement, and the apostles are often portrayed as not understanding what was happening, but Jesus (and Mary) are untouchable.
On the other hand, I look at stories like Matthew 15:27, in which a Canaanite woman appears to teach Jesus about tolerance—at the beginning of the story, it seems like he didn’t know. Most people I talk to say that it was like Socratic questioning—he really did know—but maybe the divine part of him is that he caught on and accepted the correction? While God-as-hypostatic perfection can’t learn and improve (being outside of time), God-as-a-human being can and this is what it looks like? That sort of consideration is in the “whatever that means” phrase I used above.
Okay, now on the point about not mentioning heaven: not many people that I know do. Whereas I had to clarify that we follow the Jesus-is-God doctrine—quite heavily, it’s a frequent topic—I usually only hear about heaven at funerals. While I’m sure that the people around me believe in it as “consciousness does not extinguish at death,” the subject of heaven and hell come with a heavy dose of “this terminology/imagery is metaphorical.” They’d be quick to point out that heaven (and hell) is not a “place” and I think some popes have made comments about hell being a state and not a place. (In particular, I remember one from the 90′s, but that would be a few popes ago.)
You’re right that the 2 Thessalonians letter sounds like demons eating your guts, and anything in the canonical set of books is considered as writing inspired by God (with or without their authors’ understanding)—it doesn’t matter that the writer claims to be Paul and might have not been Paul. (Attributing works to your group’s founder seems to have been more common in the ancient world. I think it’s not controversial that there were three “Isaiahs.”)
Two things about that, though: Catholics don’t put equal weight on everything in the Bible—they’re all above a certain threshold of importance, but not equally important—and there’s no actual fire and brimstone imagery in it, mostly just about being “shut out,” the kind of imagery that Jesus used, for instance, in the wise and foolish virgins parable (Matthew 25). Meanwhile, a lot of material that didn’t make it into the Bible but was influential in the early church did have more viscerally imagined rewards and punishments after death. It was an idea that was in the air at the time in Judaism (except for the Sadducees), and only got a little bit into the canonical Bible.
So, clearly, Catholics would hold that there’s some kind of good and bad afterlife, and most of what I’ve heard has that you’ll either be “with God” or “not,” and not being with God is the bad thing in itself, irrespective of any gut-eating demons. Depictions of heaven and hell like C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce are popular. (Napoleon Bonaparte is all alone in a huge mansion, repeating to himself that it was everyone else’s fault...)
As for “No one comes to the Father except through me,” I had never connected that to the afterlife before; it has always seemed more like a general coming-to-Jesus saying (in life, for the sake of living, not specifically the afterlife).
It is the case (my impression, which would be interesting to verify with a survey because it’s an easy-to-ask question) that Catholics believe that there are non-Christians “with God” after death, i.e. in heaven. Even if they have to weasel out of some suggestively worded biblical passages (e.g. “good people who don’t acknowledge Christ are mystically going to the Father through Jesus”), or not even try to explain it (e.g. “God will figure it out/above my pay grade”), there’s a strong cultural current against making God look mean. Or a trickster, as you said in your original question.
Personally—maybe you’ll consider me even less of a Christian because of this—I don’t see an afterlife as something that happens to us as individuals. When there is talk about what heaven is like—hypostatic union, non-glass darkly—it doesn’t seem like much psychological continuity with one’s living ego. I’m not quite the person who inhabited this body 20 years ago, since my mind has changed a lot and what defines a person apart from their mind? So if we become outside-of-time, in-union-with-God, experiencing reality in a totally different way, how is that even me? Even following standard doctrine, the vision of heaven seems to have been exalted to such a degree that it’s no longer relevant: what I recognize of what I am will die when my body dies, and maybe something mystical that I don’t recognize goes off and does something else. But these are my own private musings (which I might change or maybe feel I have a better understanding of later) and not representative of Catholics or Christians in general.