Could be, but there are many who tend to believe the 70 ad thing. As much as you want to dis it.
You can believe anything you want, and there will be many who take your side, but at the end of the day, the camps will be divided by what people believe is true. The evidence of what happened at 70 AD is overwhelming to those who do real research.
Indeed… even Wright in his partial prêterism states that IF Paul had been around at the fall of Jerusalem he would have fully claimed with regards to Jesus’ and his own warnings… “this is that” — that’s the pesher principle in play.
Well, perhaps you won’t… but everyone else will. So you have no assurance that having once departed in death you will then be with the Saviour… abandoned however to hades — and for you to die is gain?
I assume you will also likely claim to… “have been united together in the likeness of His death” and yet you also claim… there is no postmortem existence UNTIL a future resurrection. So just to be sure… DO you in fact claim unity in the likeness of Christ’s death? IF you do then according to your doctrine Christ also Himselfdid not exist?
Given that by the very nature of things… resurrection follows death: IF THEN in the likeness of His death one claims to have been, THEN at least no less than 3 days hence one could expect to be with the one who actually said… “I am with you always!”
Mind you, and knowing your previously stated positions… the likes of “the souls of those who had been slain who cried out under the alter” were perhaps, too, just a mere falsity, fantasy and cruel hoax as well?
Wright’s right that Paul would see AD70 validating Jesus’ prophetic warnings. That he’d say it was 1Cor 15’s future resurrection is less clear. Indeed, I see that chapter more as a promise than a “warning.”
That is the question everyone wants to point out.
I’ll put it like this and others can add or subtract.
The evangelical view of heaven is a utopian state where all fear and all worry and all consideration for the things that we strive for everyday in our earthly lives is somehow taken away. God sits on a throne with voluptuous virgins feeding him grapes as all the heavenly persona bask in the glow of a God that because they did so and so is going to see to it that their lives will be forever worry, fear, problem free.
I would say that please everyone, just look at the alternatives. Most of the flack about the 70AD position is purely driven by preconceived views as opposed to actual facts, but you each can form your own opinions.
For everyone’s benefit. I’m sure Chad and Davo, will dispute their view. Here’s the Got Questions take on 70 A.D.
Especially these last paragraphs:
In terms of historical evidence, there is little to make a definitive case one way or the other. The events of AD 70 can be made to fit certain prophetic claims, depending on one’s perspective. Of course, if one is willing to apply a high enough degree of symbolic interpretation, any prophecy can be made to conform to almost any event. It should be noted, however, that most non-dispensational interpretations require the book of Revelation to have been written prior to AD 70, something that general scholarship does not support.
The most serious difficulties in claiming all the prophecies were fulfilled in AD 70 are theological. In particular, preterism requires scriptural passages to be interpreted with a chaotic blend of extremely literal and extremely figurative language. One would have to interpret words, verses, and phrases that appear in the same discourse, or even the same paragraph, with a different literal-figurative assumption.
The most reasonable interpretation is that the genocide and destruction of the temple were prophecies fulfilled in AD 70, and that the other events described in Daniel, Matthew, and Revelation are yet to occur. They are truly end-times predictions.
It’s internal. It starts by living, in the here and now. RC Father Richard Rohr, calls it non-Dual consciousness - in his newsletters at CAC. Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholics, call it Theosis. It’s living in the here and now, as you also find in movements like Sufism, Yoga (1, 2); Zen. Heaven starts with a changed state of consciousness - in Christ (whether we know him or not).
I guess my view of heaven - is as radical - as the 70 AD aftermath model. I’m not sure what view of heaven, the zombies of Z-Hell (1, 2, 3) have. I’ll probably ask them, when I meet them!
Eph 4:8Therefore He says: “When He ascended on high,He led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men.”
Don’t forget… it also pays to realise that sometimes the Psalmist’ use poetic license, i.e., descriptive language such as to describe the hopelessness of the grave, where for example one was said to have had no voice, etc.
“Hades” is but the grave. People in the grave are not conscious. Yes, from my point of view, the next thing I know after death will be in the presence of the Saviour. To me it will seem instantaneous, even though it may be thousands of years in the future. So yes, “to die is gain.”
I recall the first time I had prostate surgery. I was on a bed waiting to be rendered unconscious. I looked at the clock. It was 1:10. Then I thought I heard a sort of tinkling sound. I glanced at the clock again and it said 3:15! Unknown to me a drug had been going into my blood which made me unconscious. The surgery had been performed! I said aloud, “This is amazing!” The nurses passing by ignored me; they thought I was babbling because I had just come out of the anesthetic. So from my point of view, no time at all had passed. So that’s how it will be when we die.
When you have been raised from death, you will likely tell me: "See Don! I was right! We went immediately to be with the Saviour at the time of death. For from your viewpoint, it will seem that that is what will have happened.
That’s always the presumption. But how could I believe in soul sleep when I don’t believe in souls? (in the sense of an immaterial entity that can exist apart from a person’s body)
Paidion… in accord with your very CLEAR statement above; please provide the biblical evidence supporting your dogma that claims… after death BUT before resurrectionJesus Christ did NOT exist?
James Finley, one of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s core faculty members, was a spiritual directee of Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Drawing from this experience and his own insights as a student of the mystics and a clinical psychologist, Finley helps us get a glimpse of heaven.
When Merton told me that “one thing for sure about heaven is that there is not going to be much of you there,” he was, I think, referring to the mystery that even now we are in God’s kingdom. And that even now we can begin to realize it if we but die to egocentric self-seeking and seek God’s will with a pure heart.
Because God is everywhere God is likewise no-where, meaning there is no “where” in which we can see God “out there.” Closer to us than we are to ourselves, God is too close to see. God is the heart of our heart, the hope of our hopes, the love of our love, the ground of our being.
Where must we go to see God? Nowhere! What can we do to have God? Nothing! All we can do, at least for a moment (an eternal moment) is to abandon all doing and be who we are in God and open ourselves to God’s life within us. It is then that we will at once see God and ourselves in a unity of divine love.
In fidelity to silent prayer there is unveiled the possibility of infinite growth in union with God. We can be so transformed through this unveiling that we existentially realize within us that “for me to live is Christ” [Philippians 1:21]. We realize obscurely in our being , that our simple, concrete acts are open to a transformation through which they are “not only Godlike, but they become God’s own acts.” [1]
There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. God is upon and within us. In the midst of our humble duties, our poor, weak selves, our simple being who we are, we can say with Jacob with overwhelming gratitude: “Truly this is the house of God and the gate of heaven and I knew it not” [see Genesis 28:16-17]. [2]
Let me also quote, from an “unofficial” source - on Eastern Orthodox esoteric-ism
The abbot of a monastery with roots in Mount Athos once said to me: “If the Greek Church knew what the fathers of the Holy Mountain really believe, they would send the army onto the Holy Mountain and take them all away.” That is why their beliefs such as the ultimate salvation of all beings and the divinity of the Virgin Mary are kept strictly quiet.
One Pentecost in a Coptic monastery I was visiting the abbot gave a sermon in which he told the people quite openly that if they wanted to go to heaven after death they would be disappointed: that God had only one goal for man: total union with the Uncreated Light and assimilation (not dissolution) into the Godhead. And that was the real meaning of Pentecost.