BEN: Let’s talk for a minute about what I will call the spiritual universe as opposed to the material universe. If I’m understanding your first chapter in the new book aright, you are suggesting that there are created beings in the spiritual universe or realm, as well as in the material realm. Indeed, the only uncreated being seems to be God, though we could debate with the church fathers about what ‘only begotten Son’ (monogenes) actually means. A related matter is that heaven, as we call it, is technically the dwelling place of God, and since God always existed, we would assume he always had a place to dwell. Are you then suggesting that some things and some beings in the spiritual realm did not always exist (but what about the heavenly council in Genesis), and indeed some places in the spiritual realm, namely what came to be called Hell, didn’t exist before at least there were rebellious spiritual beings? Can you clarify on some of these points?
MICHAEL: This is an old problem that derives from our necessarily limited vocabulary (and that of the biblical writers as well). Put in the form of simple questions: Is the spiritual universe made of something? If so, wouldn’t that be a material universe? Are spiritual beings (other than God) in that spiritual universe made of something? If so, are they in some sense material? All the vocabulary we use, and which is given to us in Scripture, is deficient for aligning what the writers are trying to communicate with the material world we know (and will discover) from science. Since I don’t believe for a minute God chose people in antiquity for the purpose of communicating precise science that would satisfy a 21st century audience someday, I don’t worry about this – my question (and yours) extends beyond the data. The same problem would exist 1000 years from now (or maybe 100!) if God chose someone living today with a PhD in theoretical physics to write Scripture. Science will always change and expand. Vocabulary available to a writer at any given point in time is what it is. To say a word in 100 BC that has to do with creation “really meant” to include quantum physics is to impose a meaning on that word that wasn’t in the mind of the person God chose. It’s hermeneutical cheating (and naïve). My take is that the biblical writers were tasked by God with describing “places” that have no latitude and longitude and beings that were un-embodied spirits using the vocabulary of spatiality and embodiment. Good luck with that. So what I think we need to realize is that these questions aren’t answerable from data. Instead, we should be asking what the writers were trying to convey about where God “lives” or where disembodied spirits are. They are trying to communicate otherness in the extreme. This is why God / the gods make their homes in places humans cannot – the heavens, the sea, under the earth, etc. It’s the best the writers can do to communicate otherness. Likewise for the afterlife – how to we describe beings who don’t have bodies—they’d be invisible. Again, good luck with describing the posture, behavior, expressions, form, etc. of invisible beings. And so what do the writers do? The only thing they can do – they use words that include the element of physicality to describe that which isn’t part of their physical world. This is also why I don’t think the Underworld was “invented later” – when humans die they leave the world humans know. What other world would they go to? The biblical writers can only conceive of one answer – they go to the “place” where humans aren’t by nature – the place where God / the gods are. In that place, the unrighteous needed (always, not at some point in our chronological time) to be distanced from a holy God. That teaching point could be achieved either by non-existence or, if the dead go to the only other place available, the “spiritual world,” we need to still distance them from God. But the only way to do that is to use the language of spatiality, height, depth, length, width – again, good luck with that.
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